Cannibal Metaphysics Quotes

“Sabemos da popularidade que desfruta, em certos círculos, a tese segundo a qual a antropologia, congenitamente exotista e primitivista, não passa de um teatro perverso, no qual o "outro" é sempre "representado" ou "iventado" segundo os interesses sórdidos do Ocidente. Nenhuma história, nenhuma sociologia consegue disfarçar o paternalismo complacente dessa tese, que reduz os assim chamados "outros" a ficções da imaginação ocidental sem qualquer voz no capítulo. Duplicar tal fantasmagoria subjetiva por um apelo à dialética da produção objetiva do Outro pelo sistema colonial é simplesmente acrescentar um insulto a uma injúria; supor que todo discurso "europeu" sobre os povos de tradição não europeia só serve para iluminar nossas "representações do outro" é fazer de um certo pós-colonialismo teórico a manifestação mais perversa do etnocentrismo.”
― Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics

“Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowl­edge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemol­ogy encouraged by Western modernity. The latter's telos is pro­vided by the category of the object: to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject, which has been inevitably and illegitimately projected onto the object. To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects). Subjects, just like objects, are regarded as the results of a process
of objectification: the subject constitutes or recognizes itself in the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself "from the outside" as a thing. Our epistemologi­cal game, then, is objectification; what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal. The form of the Other is the thing.
Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to "personify," to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known. The key is to know, in Guimaraes Rosa's phrase, "the who of things," with­ out which there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of "why." The form of the Other is the person.”
― Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics