Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

A social anthropologist and ethnologist, Viveiros de Castro is internationally recognised for his contributions to the study of Amazonian cultures. Currently a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, he previously taught at universities in Cambridge, Chicago, at Paris X, and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his contributions, he has developed throughout his work the notion of Amerindian perspectivism which refers to the relational nature of beings and the composition of the world, and also explores the essential differences between Indigenous and western epistemologies. He is the author of Cannibal Metaphysics (Univocal Publishing 2014 – in Spanish, Metafísicas caníbales, Katz, 2010), a defence of the decolonial mission of anthropology; The Relative Native (Hau, 2016), which brings together his most influential essays, including “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere” (Cambridge University Lectures, 1998); and La mirada del jaguar (The Jaguar’s Gaze, Tinta Limón, 2017), with which he introduces Amerindian perspectivism to the general public. With Déborah Danowski, he is coauthor of The Ends of the World (Polity, 2016 – in Spanish, ¿Hay un mundo por venir? Ensayo sobre los miedos y los fines, Caja negra, 2019), in which they explore narratives about the end of the world in western philosophy and cultural production, and in Amerindian cosmologies. He received an honorary doctorate from the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense for his contribution to the shaping of contemporary critical thought.