Event overview
Part of the Department of Anthropology virtual seminar series autumn 2020/2021
Theory will not save you: Amerindian perspectivism and the limits of anthropological liberalism
In the 1990s, in response to a political economic turn in Brazilian anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro introduced Amerindian perspectivism – a way to critique the over-determining narratives of capital and the liberal state and offer a way into seeing differently, by foregrounding the mytho-historical experiences and thought of peoples from Amazonia. Following a period at Cambridge – where he established personal and intellectual relations that would eventually create the ‘ontological turn’ – and the translation of a few of his key texts from Portuguese to English, his theoretical contributions brought him international acclaim. This paper – developed over two years of friendship and offered as a draft, a dialogic performance, and a series of visual interruptions – examines the northward trajectory of Viveiros de Castro’s concept of Amerindian perspectivism, to critique North Atlantic anthropology’s desire for and impulse towards binaried engagements with experience and thought, on the one hand, and political economy on the other, and to point out the pernicious influence this has in various worlds of representation. This binary, we argue, reinforces what has recently been described as anthropology’s enduring romance with liberal humanism, a “sentimental register” which tends towards essentializing relativism (Jobson, 2019), and a thirst for ‘culture’ without the people from whom it emerged. We use the phrase ‘theory will not save you’ as a reminder of the danger in engaging with thought as separable from the conditions that give it life and threaten its existence. But, more importantly, ‘theory will not save you’ is a critique of the desire to reduce relations to ideas in ways that lean toward fixes and diversions and away from the legacies of colonialism and empire, whilst leaving no room for the entanglements of grief, joy, and the liminality of hope.
Guest Speaker: Julia Sauma (Goldsmiths), Gabriel Dattratreyan (Goldsmiths)
Convenors: Robert Deakin, Henrike Neuhaus and Caterina Sartori
Taking place on Zoom 4pm-6pm Wednesday 9 December 2020.
Anthropology Seminar Series page
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 9 Dec 2020 | 4:00pm - 6:00pm |
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