Perspectives on Perspectivism

The latest issue of Anthropology Today features a guest editorial by Bruno Latour on the recent debate between Descola and Viveiros de Castro in Paris on their opposing ideas of perspectivism. My first question on reading this was: What the hell is perspectivism!?

Well, basically perspectivism is an idea existing predominantly in Amazonian or Amerindian anthropology. It comes from the Neitzschian philosophy that there are many ways of viewing the truth and so can be no one way of seeing the world or in other words ones way of viewing the world depends on ones position in it. This has had huge implications in the nature/culture debate amongst many others.

Descola focuses on animism and naturalism, basically the opposing ideas of whether all beings have the same nature and different cultures (western thought) or the same culture and different natures (Amerindian thought). For him this meant that rather than using nature as a base to detect cultural variation, the idea of nature itself has become part of the debate. The problem with this for Viveiros was not so much the idea of perspectivism itself but rather how it is being used. He argues that rather than Amerindian perspectives being used to blow our own way of thinking out of the water (as he would like) but that Descola is making the switch too easy, just fading it in and ultimately forgetting it. I don't want to go in to all of their differences here, because it is much better explained in the original article.

So whilst I now thought that I had (at least a tenuous) grasp on perspectivism, my second question was: Is this really an important enough idea to merit the attention it has been given in this journal issue?

Well, to be honest my mind still isn't made up. Whilst the general idea of perspectivism is essential to how we practice anthropology (ie, that until we accept that our way of seeing things may not be the only right way), its theoretical application is actually very small. Nonetheless as Latour suggests, eradicating the divide between nature and culture, makes anthropology open to a huge new area of research. Further than this it could also help to bridge the divide between social and biological anthropology. In fact once one starts to really consider it, the possibilities seem endless, perhaps perspectivism really could be the bomb that Viveiros wants.

A full report of the debate can be found in Anthropology Today, 25: page 1 and is definitely worth reading, even if you're not interested in perspectivism it provides a really interesting insight in to the disagreements between professional anthropologists.

Steph