AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
6. Viveiros de Castro: A Brazilian anthropologist, Viveiros de Castro is noted for his work on Amerindian perspectivism, a form of animism that emphasizes the perspectival nature of beings in Amazonian cultures. His book "Cannibal Metaphysics" (2014) delves into these ideas.
@Gyrus I have recently been trying to get into the agency debate between Graeber and Viveiros de Castro, I think I recall you posting about it somewhere, I don't suppose you have any reading suggestions or handy posts I have missed on your website that go into that? Thanks!
Did Alan Watts anticipate Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism? From 'The Joker' seminar: '... as I said, every creature feels like it’s a human being. Because, after all, that’s “I.” So fish, when they’ve eaten up something, and that thing has become them. You know? And then the fish looks around and says, “Gee, that was a good dinner.” And it feels human. And the fish looks around and it sees things that aren’t fish, and they look like cows. And human beings wandering around there, they look like predatory monsters of some kind; awful looking things, ghastly teeth and weird inhumane arms and legs on them. Not nice, orderly fins and tails, and beautiful scales on the side like a really good person should look.' [The Joker - Alan Watts) Of course it's not really 'theorised'. And maybe there's traces of it in ethnographies that were around in Watts' day? The best I can find though is mention of the idea in ethnographies from Viveiros de Castro's students in the late '90s: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0083.xml