The Relative Native

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 Included are new English translations of essays from the original Portuguese and previously unpublished material.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.