The Relative Native – Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds

This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in a one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, "Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere."

Rounded out with new English translations of a number of previously unpublished works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought-philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a new afterword by Roy Wagner elucidating Viveiros de Castro's work, influence, and legacy, The Relative Native will be required reading, further cementing Viveiros de Castro's position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.

“"Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has emerged as a leading thinker on human-nonhuman relationships, and, through that, human-human ones. He is most famous for explaining the idea of perspectivism, an Indigenous Amazonian view which he concisely defines on pp. 229-230: "the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view." ... this book will challenge all your preconceptions, whatever those are, and also teach you a great deal about eastern Amazonian concepts of the world.... if you want to see how far contemporary anthropological theory can go into speculative and critical realms, this is your book."”

"Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has emerged as a leading thinker on human-nonhuman relationships, and, through that, human-human ones. He is most famous for explaining the idea of perspectivism, an Indigenous Amazonian view which he concisely defines on pp. 229-230: "the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view."

... this book will challenge all your preconceptions, whatever those are, and also teach you a great deal about eastern Amazonian concepts of the world.... if you want to see how far contemporary anthropological theory can go into speculative and critical realms, this is your book."

--Eugene N. Anderson "Ethnobiology Letters"

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is professor of social anthropology at the National Museum, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janerio and the author of many books.

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