Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro

In the mid-sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries working in what is now Brazil were struck by what they called the inconstancy of the people they met, the indigenous Tupi-speaking tribes of the Atlantic coast. Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries' lessons and "revert" to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives' incapacity to believe in anything durably. In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries' accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-century Brazil

The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul

This volume is the first major collection of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro s best yet hitherto scattered essays and lectures, including his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Included are new English translations of essays from the original Portuguese and previously unpublished material. A force to be reckoned with, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro s "ouevre" has gained immense popularity in anthropology over the past two decades, most notably through his elucidation of Amazonian perspectivism a major influence on discipline s recent ontological turn. Here is Viveiros de Castro at his finest philosopher and anthropologist, ethnographer and ethnologist, superbly engaging with classic topics such as kinship yet subverting nature/culture ideologies, and taking us into the theoretical depths of magic, cosmology, ontology, and history. "

Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro

About

Books

Join the club