Conferência com Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Good afternoon everybody. It's an honor for me to be here mediating this last table, which is the conference with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. And, like you all probably know, you must have seen during these days, here at SESC Ipiranga, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a great photographer, who also ventured himself a little through anthropology. I won't say anything else, because you know the rest. And for the ones who still couldn't admire enough the photos taken from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, I have some good news. The exhibition was extended until 17th of January, 2016. Firsthand information.

I give then, the floor to Eduardo. Thank you, Veronica. Well, I said I was dead. Actually, I'm alive. I'll come back just like the character from the movie from... I used a Pentax, too, also studied art of photography, and now I'm coming back. I was wondering what the honored should talk besides deeply thanking to all of you that came, to the speakers, to many, at least four of them, crossed Ecuador, two crossed the Atlantic, many crossed the hinterlands to get to Sao Paulo, and to Veronica and Eduardo for that initiative and to SESC for hosting

it. Well, I didn't know exactly what to write, I'm going to read a text, but this text is not reviewed, it's not ready, it's not finished. It had a title, but this title was taken last-minute from the pocket, that was "The three sources of resistance to perspectivism", that I named after Lévi-Strauss, a famous text called "The three sources of resistance to development". But I guess I won't talk much about this, maybe I do a little. I'll start, actually, I'm a modernist, an auto modernist, I'm crazy about quotes, I gather quotes, I collect them, and I'll

start with many, two of them are for me. The first one, I don't know how to translate, it's in French, but I tried translating into Portuguese, I couldn't get the exact translation, but everybody will understand, it's a quoting from Élie Reclus, who's Élisée Reclus' brother, a great geographer, anarchist, his brother was also an anarchist and his partner, and the quoting, it's some kind of... I'm a little breathless, I had some snuff, I'm sorry. The quoting, I'll transform into an ex-libris to put on my books, and it's simple as that: “Garde-toi de réussir”, 54 00:03:22,242 -->

00:03:24,644 I don't know how to translate it exactly, but everybody get the meaning in Portuguese, something like, "Beware of success" "Take care with...", anyway, I think he spoke of Paris Commune, I'm not sure. The second quote, which is also for me, but it's a bit... the answer I would like to give to, everyone that asks what the heck is my job, the perspectivism, all these things. There's a quote from Bob Dylan that, whenever he's asked what's the meaning of his songs and those lyrics, amazing, enormous, huge, he answers: "I just wanted to rhyme, man". "I

just wanted to rhyme, man". Anyway, these are two epigraphs that I say to myself, the other three, there are many epigraphs, one of them, to me, is a, unavoidably, we all have to quote Clarice, I'll quote her too, it's a quote that, to me, sums up, in a certain way, how the perspectivism is a, how can I say? It's a thinking virtuality that some nations and some people could express in a way that's particularly sharp, particularly eloquent. The quote is taken from "The Passion According to G.H.", it's a pasting of two segments, she says: "Everything

looks at everything, and lives the other, "in this desert, the things know things. "I don't know what a cockroach see, but we looked at each other, and I also don't know what a woman see". "Would it be me, perhaps, that's not a woman?", like Medátia would say. I continue: "On the primary world where I'm entering, beings exist for the others like ways of seeing themselves. There are many ways that means 'see'. One looks to the other without seeing, one owns the other, one eats the other, one just be on his corner and the other is

there too. All of that means 'see'. The cockroach didn't see me with the eyes, but with the body." I finish the quote. I believe that resumes a portion of things that we were discussing here. The other quotes are, to me, quotes that define the anthropology. One of them defines the ethnography, its work, that is, after all, my job. It's a passage from Lewis Carroll, from "Through the Looking Glass". "Through the Looking Glass, "and What Alice Found There", which is, when she crosses the looking glass, the passage says, she crossed the looking glass, she was in

the room, crossed the looking glass, naturally, the looking glass mirrored the room which she was in, so, she started looking around, since she entered the room through the looking glass, and noted that everything that could be seen from the other room was very common and ordinary, but everything else was completely different, then she told herself: "They don't tidy this room as good as the other over there". I guess that's what the anthropologist feels when entering, the first thing that's seen is the same thing that he sees at this side, but the rest is completely different

and, naturally, not as tidy as here. And the last one is a quote that I think defines more the anthropology than ethnography, and yet the perspectival anthropology, that comes from Poincaré, a notorious mathematician, that says: "Math is the art of giving the same name to different things". This, to me, is exactly what we are discussing here, the art of giving the same name to different things. Well, now I begin, unfortunately, with my own words. There are no more quotes, only a couple, in the middle. Well, I'd like to start putting things on the due perspective,

in the ordinary meaning of the term, the value of my job. I'm not an anthropologist, not a philosopher not a photographer, even that Eduardo and Veronica had turned me into one. I'm not also any sort of developer of new expressive forms, even that Winsik had defined me as a writer, which got me flattered, because I always thought I was, but nobody ever said, at last someone said. I am, doubtlessly, a worker of the sign, like everybody else here, but a disqualified worker, on his way to retirement. I am not heavily committed to the conceptual "ostinato

rigore", I am a bricoleur Like the people we study, the anthropologists study, for the same method these people use to create their own world. There's a quote from Kroeber, the anthropologist, Ursula le Guin's father, that says that the anthropologist is the one who has the right, “free license to intellectual Pouting”. He has the license to... "Pouting" is the "braconniere", "braconnage", in French, it's the stealth hunter, the one who gets in and grabs, steals stuff from the other's lands, the one who lurks and grab stuff and whatnot. The anthropologist is the one with license to steal

everywhere, a little bit of each thing. in a nutshell, it's a "braconniere" in this way. I'm, besides that, besides all I already spoke about, I'll carry on with my unflatter, I am hasty, careless, impatient, a phrase reader, like you saw, and also a phrasist, you might have realized, who systematically decontextualizes, I am totally repulsive to the notion of context, who decontextualizes, who sketches, who drafts, throw it in the air, if someone catches, even better and, if someone chases me down to get me, even worse. I'm an intuitive worker and someone who's always walking on a

tightrope saying more than I know, writing on the edge between my knowledge and ignorance, like some philosopher said, throwing arrows around, but that sometimes hit the target, or at least fall somewhere where another thinker might catch them and throw them even further, like another certain philosopher said. As an anthropologist, I studied very hard, doubtlessly, dedicating myself at some point of my career to very intense and technical readings about kinship, Tupi ethnology and, you know, the mythological ones, all these stuff. As an ethnologist, way under the average, from my point of view, I only have a

good observation capacity and a particular talent to summary and a weak spot for terse forms, unfortunately. Well, my working method was always a little bit similar to, in a certain way, like Levi-Strauss defines himself to the mythical or analogical imagination, like he calls when he says that the myth is the regimen of "it's like", "it's like", he says, the myth solves a problem saying: "This problem is like... another problem", you merely detach... The way of solving a problem is showing that this problem is similar to other problems, and by that you solve the problem instead

of giving it any nomo ethics. Another thing, and more important than this, is that I'm very good, I think in having ideas after other's ideas. And then there's this quote from... quoted by Donna Haraway, that I like a lot, that says: "It does matter a lot to know which ideas we use to think the other's ideas". With which ideas we use, which ideas we use to think other ideas? I mean, to see in these other's ideas, the aspects that are most weird or radical and radicalize them even more. In any case, I never guessed, and

I say that with all honesty, that I deserved that much attention. It's effortless to record, anyway, that was in the present context, strictly speaking, non-academic, that, at least in Brazil, one has made this single honor to my work. Be that recorded. Reasons for that, let's say, are works, perhaps, to all academicians here, from the point of view of a intellectual field sociology, three dots. And now, besides that, I never though I'd deserve that much attention, this international visibility, that makes me as honored as astonished, above all, when it turns me into a privileged target for

all the critics. I'm not, in any way, one of the great or one of the greatest, like I sometimes read in social media, I guess, or when, or this, I don't hear it, on the compliment from yesterday by Patrice Maniglier, with that Galic abundant exaggeration, not immune from a friendly irony, I was almost saying "provocatively loving", but, well, I'm not, both the qualitative, one of the great, or quantitative. The so called "great", generally, produce way more than me, I'm erratic, undisciplined and, above all, lazy. And even less on the qualitative way. The dimension of advance

and depth, of the reflection of anthropologists like, Wagner, Latour, doesn't compare to my thin contribution to the subject. What is of, let's say, unquestionable importance, even for me, only in the strictly limits of Brazilian ethnology. And, if I'm able to draw the attention to the Brazilian ethnology, in both senses of the word, I mean, done in Brazil, about Brazilian people, Then, I didn't do, in this case, more than humbly following Levi-Strauss' steps, who took the conceptual imagination of the Amerindian ghetto in which it's settled in Since Montaigne, or the steps of Clastres, who took the

Amerindian political thought from the element of powerlessness, the neediness, the archaism or of a decaying manifestation of a culture of poverty aroused by the post-Columbian genocide. In a certain way, though, my trajectory was, somehow the opposite to Levi-Strauss' one, all unproportional, with due proportion. Levi-Strauss started with the human thinking, generally speaking, the savage thinking, to end up with a book that talks about the bipartite ideology of Amerindian people and of moral philosophical sources of the Amerindian duality, he started with the human nature and ended up talking about the indigenous thinking, something that he did, the

same way, with the contrast between nature/culture. But I didn't start from the natives to a theory of general thinking, this was never my intention, neither proposing any revisionary metaphysics or a new profound ontology, a new vision of reality that's actually existent. Like it's used to be said in socialism, actually existent, as we know, never existed, perhaps the actually existent reality has this very property. What I did was to take epistemological conclusions and provocative politics from a counter-anthropology, or, for now, a certain idea of anthropology that's modified and subverted for the native anthropologies, presenting an "Amerindian

thinking", in quotes, debugged, generalized and simplified so it can be contentiously confronted with ours. The idea of a compared metaphysics, a reformed metaphysics, or even revolutionized by the anthropology, is actually a crucial idea from Patrice Maniglier, who's, here, the master, doubtlessly, in this subject. But the idea of an ethnographical or geophilosophical projection, or even cosmopolitician, if you want, a deforming projection or our intellectual and ruling tradition, this one, without question, is something that came to me way before I came into the field, the idea of doing a deforming intellectual projection, based on indigenous worlds, about

our intellectual tradition. This is something that came to me way before I came into the field, into the field work like it's used in the subject, of doing ethnographical work. I mean, actually, my involvement on the big counter-cultural movement from the 60's and 70's, like it's refracted in Brazil, through the concrete-tropicalist retake from Oswald de Andrade of the anthropophagy as a bid simultaneously esthetic, political, anthropological and metaphysical, and, in fact, there's a certain intention that was also Oswald's, of doing without doing an insurrectionary irruption in the metropolitan speech from the periphery. This context was brilliantly

described yesterday, by Fred Coelho. I get very surprised and touched with the stimulant effect that my work has outside the anthropology, art, philosophy, literary theory, and so on, opposing to the always controversy environment and also of antagonism that my work, as a general rule, arouse inside the subject. And there's an entire analysis to be done, that I won't do here, that I'd call Nietzschean Psychology, an "afetos vis" psychology, aroused in the foreigner academies and in their native servants through the extra metropolitan origins of the perspectivism concept. It seems to me that only the colonialism that's

declared in a certain degree, let's say, we can't say bad things about indigenous people. Of course there are fundamental exceptions to this antipathy aroused by the concept, by the work, exceptions that are totally crucial to me, like Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, Martin Holbraad, and there is, clearly this extension, continuation, expansion, actually, of my work by Brazilian colleagues outside of the subject, like Alexandre Nodari, Marco Valetim, Marilia Librandi and others. And still talking about this effect, or actually, this effect that my work has this root in that pre-anthropological experience of mine, it would be better to

leave it in indecisiveness, this relation between effect and cause of my work in relation to this pre-anthropological ground, disciplinarily speaking, that is an individual myth of the anthropologist, my individual myth, my commitment to the 70's fights, around the counter-culture that's unnationalistic and internationalist versus the popular national leftism, it's in the source of my commitment, of my option for an counter-anthropological approach to anthropology, a sociocultural counter-anthropology, which is a countercultural anthropology in the same way that this word had in the exhibit from Fred Coelho, who's also, from a point of view that's directly political, an option

for anthropology counter-state, with a hyphen, I mean, against the State thinking, against the state of thinking in thinking. So, to develop this individual myth of the anthropologist which I think it is, it's necessary to narrate the mythical-individual origin of the Amerindian perspectivism, a perspectivism from the "me" point of view. This is essential to understand the perspectivism from your enemy's point of view, which is the title of a book I'm willing to write, which is a variation of the title of my book, from the enemy's point of view. Now the perspectivism from your enemies' point of

view, that has to be written, because, after all, the point of view of the enemy is what really matters. So, I'd start this anamnesis saying that everything, actually, started, my work begin, in a certain way, this work, through the interpretation of the tupinambi anthropophagic ritual, through the Arawete war songs, that were quoted here for many times, in my ethnography done in 1984 that validated the Oswaldian motto, those songs, or maybe Tardian, from Gabriel de Tarde, converge there, the famous motto "it only interest what's not mine" or "what's not me", interpretation such that defined the perspectivism

essentially as a pronominal operation, a certain economy of person, that consisted in assuming the enemy's point of view. The anthropophagy as an other-evolution, in a few words, then you have Deleuze and all that was so important to me. from the enemy's point of view, actually, like I said, was the title of the translation in 1992 of my monograph entitled "Arawete", the perspectivism was already there, somehow. The perspectivism was born like that, from war, from war songs, from the war machine, not directly from shamanism, like it's normally associated, even though both, shamanism and war, are hard

to dissociate in the Arawete religion let's conveniently call it religion, where the gods are enemies and at the same time ideals of ego, from which the communication is acquired through shamanism. So, war and shamanism are not strictly separable. The perspectivism was funded, or funded, a metaphysical position that I called a symbolic economy of otherness, the precedence of "me" as "other", mention Latour, a concept that Latour has been developing, "be" as "other", the precedence of "me" "as other" as a deducted one, the "me" as "other", in other words, the precedence of "me" as "other", I mean,

the position of "me", the subject, as a deducted one from the initial position of the "other". This, among other things, deconstructed that idea, the ethnocentric explanations about the so-called primal or indigenous ethnocentrism, in which the natives get the point of view of "me" and see the rest as degradation of this point of view, progressively as it drifts away from them, they're becoming less and less humans. This is what causes a stir, This idea of the precedence of "me", of "other", about "me" as a privileged point of view over one's self, it was a way of

contest this assumed indigenous ethnocentrism, the meta-ethnocentrism that's assigned to the natives. There was, after that, like everybody know, the meeting of this perspectivist metaphysics of predation with its Yudji version, exposed in the notable ethnography from Tania Stolze Lima, that... I believe it was her that opened the first table, where, once again, it was about, first, the war, from the pig's point of view, even though it was about hunting, from the human point of view. Everybody will recall the pressing matter of pig hunting, or hunting, generally speaking, to the Yudji, specifically, the timetable that prowls the

human hunter to let himself be carried, literally, by the pig's point of view about themselves. This inclusion of the pigs in this story, the pigs in the bodies, so to speak, this inclusion of the pigs allowed an opening of the perspectivism, like I was conceived still in intra-human terms, in the common sense of the word "human", and this will become an everlasting issue, it speaks of the common sense, in another meaning of this word, this inclusion of the pigs allowed an opening of the perspectivism, so to speak, intra-human, to trans-specific dimensions, or cosmological, properly, of

this perspectivism of mine, that was still excessively anthropological or social metaphysical in my previous work. This opening led me, led us, Tania and me, and, after that, many others, to a vast screening of the Americanist literature about the non-human statute, which I prefer to call "extra-human", in an Amerindian thinking. This led me, also, above all, to accept the challenge of doing a brutal simplification, a dichotomous planning of the relations between the Amerindian thinking and the anthropological occidental metaphysical vulgate, an operation that consisted in generalizing, from an extensive material, species in ethnographical registry very widely worded

and molded, propositions with slogan value, like "animals are people". When what could be extracted from the material were way more complex propositions, like "animals were people", "animals think they're people", "animals have a supernatural representative owner that is a person", "animals have an invisible side", or "animals are people in their own department", and so on. all the propositions, varyingly changed and very different from each other, varying, actually, that I shortly resumed in this statement "animals are people", which objective is, actually, purely one: To show that the relationship between humans and extra-humans was essentially problematic, from the

native's point of view, I mean, this is the question of the native point of view about the notion of point of view, or meta-perspectivism, non-relativistic or non-multiculturalist. And this is not to mention, among things like "animals are people", is a rough simplifying, "animal" and "people" is already a rough simplifying, the predictive coupling doesn't help to enhance the simplifying of these two concepts, concepts of himself, heir of traditions, weird to indigenous thinking. This statement of the problematic statute of the difference between humans and extra-humans had the objective of discussing, as a synecdoche, that this difference between

humans and animals, or humans and extra-humans, generally speaking, had, it had a synecdoche function to problematize itself, actually, the pair nature and culture, that are two immovable pillars, practically, until not so long ago, in the metaphysics vulgate of our subject and in the metaphysics generally speaking. This way, this statement and this simplifying had a rhetorical function of invalidating the anthropology using an indigenous counter-anthropology. The intention was, actually, to kick the anthropological machine, to give the anthropological machine a go, in both senses available for the word "anthropological machine". First, and that aren't completely different, one, in

one side, of my subject, anthropological machine, a rattletrap that was in idle for years, when I started working, turning around, with the engine turning around a rightist or leftist structural functionalism, because what is called Marxism in anthropology is basically the structural functionalism painted in pink, or an interactionist calculator strategism like the ones boasted by the Manchester school and its avatars. The introduction of the counter- anthropological statute of the extra-humans allowed the retake of the issue that has already been widely advanced in Levi-Strauss' mythologicals and take, in a certain way, against the grain of this issue

like it was advanced there, and connect it, connect this issue with the issue of the animalis evolution and other philosophy concepts of "Thousand Plateaus" and to see if this rattletrap, that was our subject machine, would be able to go a little further. What caused the attempt to quickly go backwards, as soon as the machine started working. In the second place, the word... The attempt, also, of kicking the anthropological machine, in the meaning of the word, the Agambenian meaning or even the Heideggerian meaning, in a few words, this machine built on top of the transcendental distinction

between human and extra-human. But let's go to the three sources of resistance to perspectivism, that actually, are four or five. Just to remember, this text from Levi-Strauss was written in a general context, it's something he wrote to Unesco, in 1961, and one of the segments called "The Three Sources of Resistance to Development". This "resistance to development" is not a negative expression, like "these guys are resisting, "they should be developing themselves", because these guys resist, maybe with an "x", "(r)exist", with an "x", to development. the three sources are, basically, what they call "desire for unity", in

other words, the denial, the unsplitting between this society and an instance that transcendentally unifies it. In other words, this desire is here, preceding, actually, the Clastrian position, this "desire for unity"... And then it remembers the soccer matches in Papua New Guinea, in which the soccer matches of the Gahuku-Gama, a New Guinean people that played soccer, many matches until it ended up in a tie. The goal was to end up in a tie. So, this is exactly the idea of... This desire for unity is the idea that there's no voting in an indigenous society and that

every decision is unanimous. People discuss and discuss and discuss until they come to a unanimous decision. And, if it's not unanimous, who's not in agreement vote with their feet, starts a new village. In a few words, there's no police, there's no State, so you can start your home somewhere else. The other, the second, the second source of resistance to development from Levi-Strauss regards the nature, an interesting expression. This is interesting because it is... Note that Levi-Strauss was known for his nature and culture and to tell that the indigenous thinking is structured around the opposition nature

and culture, and the indigenous mythology is a great drama around the humanization of the passage from the nature to the culture. However, when he mentions as one of the sources of resistance to development, the respect to the nature, he does the following observation: "The conception that many primitive societies has "of the relation between nature and culture "can also explain these certain resistance to development, because this imply acknowledging full priority of the culture above the nature, something that almost never seen, outside the occidental civilization area. The discontinuity between two reigns is universally known, doubtlessly, and there's

no society, as humble as it gets, that doesn't embed a considerable value to the civilization arts, for which discover and using the humanity distinguish itself from the animality". Let's remember that in the myths the humanity could these arts all from the animals. But well... "However," says Levi-Strauss, "Among the so called 'primitive' people", in quotes, "The notion of nature always present an ambiguous element. "The nature is pre-culture, "but it's also... it's also a subculture, but is, above all, "the place in which the man can expect to get in touch "with the ancestors, the spirits and the

Gods. "This is so that there is in the notion of nature "a supernatural component, and this supernaturalism is "so unquestionably above the culture "as nature itself is below it." This considerably complicates the classic reading that one can do of Levi-Strauss, in first place because he introduces this component, we don't have two, but three elements, this is a classic Levi-Strauss, always that he opposes two things, one of these things are two, actually. And here he opposes nature and culture and then says that the nature, actually, in the nature, there's a super and a sub nature in

relation to culture. And that it's exactly the presence of this supernatural element, in this strict meaning, that turns, that makes it impossible what he calls the absolute priority of the culture over the nature. Evidently, the lessons from it to nowadays are obvious to whoever's watching, to whoever watched Debora's speech and is watching what's happening around us, below, above, around, south and north from us. Well, make your own conclusions to the concept of Gaia in this passage. Debora and I, in a certain way, didn't want to make this conclusion on our book and Marco Valentim made

many others on the tremendous intervention he did yesterday. But what I have in mind when paraphrasing Levi-Strauss' title are the other sources of resistance, because it's not the development, but is the perspectivism, but if you think better, they're kind of alike, actually. But they're others. The first of them is, actually, a tensioning that comes from the association of the ethnology, that, let's say, endorsed the concept of an indigenous perspectivism, of a multinaturalism, of another ontology, Amerindian, to the identification of this ethnology to the structuralism, association such that provokes tensionings of reaction that are essentially from

what I call "Estate anthropoindigenism", of progressist and evolutionist kind, unilateralist, that favors the protection of indigenous people in a way to de-indianize them “doucement”. To me, contrary to that, before we can think the natives in our world, which is always the first concern of the Estate anthropoindigenism, to think the natives inside our world... “O Índio e o Mundo dos Brancos” was the title of a notorious book From Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, that I read yet during graduation, before I could think the natives inside our world, I mean, as dominated and defeated ethnicity or ethnicities, that

the anthropologists would be obliged to defend and, who knows, even help freeing, that have often came from the inclusion of the anthropologists in the Estate, if not in loco, at least in theory, and from the social inclusion of the natives into modernity, be it in the utopic-soviet version, be it in the Eco modernist version. I always said, before that, before I could think the natives inside our world, it was needed, in first place, to think the indigenous thinking and the world that is their element, inside of which our world is a quantitatively huge part, but

qualitatively grotesque. A small part of our world, of its own populous teratology, to use Marco's expression. So, it was about thinking, before thinking and acting about the natives, to think and act with the natives. That was the question that was put from the theoretical and political point of view, to me, against, actually, the sentimental gloom, like Salles says, that the natives are ending or against the suffering and complaint ethnography, that worn the anthropology's clothes for many times. The second source of resistance... So, the first source is this association, actually, of the perspectivists with this damned

school that is the structuralism, which most of the time consisted in showing that the structuralism was year ahead of itself and that there was an entire other side that was called post-structuralism and that, actually, was the continuation of the structuralism by including new issues that it hadn't considered previously. The second source is the association of my work and of the perspectivist thesis or this cluster of concepts summarized in this very complicated word, the word "perspectivism", the association of this word, this cluster of ideas, to philosophy, to the notion of philosophy. It's a word that make

the anthropologists shiver, for reasons that should be better explained one day. Accusations that involved the notion of this being an association that involved the exotification of the natives, from one side, like if... I come from a time where being different was good. So, exotification, to me, was... What's the opposite of that? Is the opposite a good thing? So, is endotifying a good thing? I always thought that exotifying was what we should really have to do. Strategic exotification, of course. Like we say, strategical essentialism, there's a strategic exotification. The refuse from the anthropologists... the refuse of

philosophy from the anthropologists is, naturally, philosophical, whether they want it or not. The accusation of importing the occidental philosophical languages to translate the indigenous speech, generally speaking, is done by people that disagree, actually, with the philosophy that's been mobilized to translate this speech, because they have their own preferred philosophies themselves. Phenomenology, Marxism, analytical philosophy... Each one has their own philosophy, their own translating machine, their preferred Google Translator. What they didn't like was the machine I used. This go without mentioning the fact that, actually, "anthropology" is a philosophical word, Greek, twice, the myth is a philosophical

concept, that the anthropologists use without restraint. However, it is an entirely philosophical concept, polemically used by the philosophy, to rhetorically demolish their enemies, and this, apparently, cause them no stir. Nonetheless, the word "philosophy" inserts an issue. Well, what I did, actually, seems to me, this is the relation of my work with the philosophy, was to simply assume philosophy as our mythology, and analyze the relations of structural transformation in the most Levi-Straussean way, that links this mythology of ours to the native mythologies. It wasn't about assuming the extra-moderns as philosophers, but the philosophies as structural variations,

the modern philosophies, as structural variations of the same general mythopoethical imagination. And, when I say general, is human and extra-human. The transformations that link the teaching, a philosophical glimpse, to the other, to any other, are, for me, like the transformations that allows us to go from a myth to another, just like from the mythema to philosophema, or from the figure to the concept, to use a notorious Deleuzian distinction. It's not only Bergson that thinks like the Ojibwa, like Levi-Strauss said to mock from Bergson, or from the Ojibwa, I'm not sure. Is every philosophical system and

it should be seen as a state of a group of transformations that crosses the entire thinking. The concept, and there I disagree with Deleuze, is a kind of figure, because everything is figure. The goal, then, of turning the myth comparable to philosophy is to turn the philosophy comparable to the myth, not to demote it to a myth or vice-versa. I remember here that there's a note from this text, that I took from somewhere, which is an interesting thing. I was reading, I picked it up, opened in the middle, because I always open a book by

the middle, because why starting it from the beginning? I opened the book in the middle, a book from Renée Bouveresse about Leibniz, in which he did a distinction, he insisted in a distinction of what he called a naive panpsychism, or puerile-primitive, that he called critical panpsychism and scientific-rationalist of Leibniz and Spinoza. So... Leibniz... They're panpsyhcists, but not like the natives, after all. When my issue was exactly to say: "If we remove that, all that's left is the panpsychism. Let's remain here and see what happens." Actually, this is the same thing, like... Bertrand just quoted, when

he speaks about the superior anthropomorphism, opposing to what, I guess, would be the inferior anthropomorphism from the peasants, the natives, the street people, that thinks that things, actually that everything is people and whatnot. Or the children, etc. This idea of a superior and inferior modes of, actually, philosophemes, that are, in a certain way, transcultural, seems to me exactly like something that should be abandoned. There are other ways of using the distinction between superior and inferior, without passing through the distinction between the native and the modern. So, like I said, it wasn't about... The goal of

turning the myth comparable to philosophy wasn't to turn the philosophy... was to turn it comparable to the myth, the metaphysics comparable to the myth. Not to demote the myth or vice-versa, but to point, without prejudicing any specificity that was possible and widely concluded by the Helenistics historiography, the sociopolitical history of the philosophy, that explained the genesis of the philosophy in the polis, the democracy and all that stuff that we read about, but to show the strict dependency of the philosophy for its pre-philosophical soil. Pre-philosophical in a philosophical way, not a historical-chronological term. Or even better,

its non-philosophical soil, from where emerge, always incompletely, this emerging is never complete, the themes and concepts of the occidental metaphysics. The soil, in a few words, mythical. The same soil in which the sociocultural anthropology, as an academic subject, never... from which the sociocultural anthropology, as an academic subject, never stopped being firmly rooted. In a few words, and following now a bit, the rhetoric... something from the levi-straussean polemic rhetoric, but without the disdainful bias in which he imprints this rhetoric, got me to deem the philosophy as a modern transformation of the myth, not only the classic

music, as he wants, or the modern romance, or the classic music as guarding the structure of the myth, the romance as degeneration of the myth in a mere rhapsody, in a feuilleton. He forgets that the first book, the first occidental romance turned into a myth, which is "Don Quixote". In a small tale from Borges, he says that nobody would ever imagine that Don Quixote would turn into a myth. That romance, "Don Quixote", turned into a mythical character. In other words, I took the philosophy, then, as a modern transformation of the myth, but without this derogatory

way from Levi-Strauss, in everything, actually, went south after the native thinking lost its crystalline structure. But then, as the transformation, a modern or mythological way, or, if you want, like an internal mutation to the mythical regime, characteristic to the Mediterranean cultural area, Greece, Middle East, etc. Simply taking the philosophy as a transformation, an internal transformation, a typical mythology from a certain part of the world, that happened to be the region that turned into the spectator of the dominant cultural tradition of the planet nowadays. In this way, a mythology in the way of a mythology science,

like Levi-Strauss used to call, called his work, a real global mythology has to include philosophy as one of their variations, an especially complex variant not by its tricky conceptuality, but it's the mythology of our own subject, of our own anthropology. Yet, it's still a variant. It's about, in a few words, in this case, to me, accepting the challenge of the metaphysics as a comparative enterprise. Once again, I refer to the work of Maniglier and Marco Valentim. and accepting to play in its field, at the same time that it's brought to our field, I mean, to

the field of a counter-anthropology, counter ontological, that implies, to begin, a certain metaphysical position, that I bear no decency in assuming, to note, it's of a radical ontological anarchism, as methodological position of principle and practice of the anthropology as, quoting one of my lapidarian formulas, of which I always regret, as a principle of the practice of the anthropology as a practice of permanent decolonization of the thinking and as a company, of, another formula, determination of the conditions of ontological self-determination of Amerindian people. Geophilosophy, if you want, to use the celebrated expression in the book from

Deleuze and Guattari, but now in the dual meaning of the expression geophilosophy, in the way it has in the Anthropocene moment and the sense it has in the moment of this occasion, that is Davi Kopenawa's book, in which it's the other's geophilosophy, let's say, also the other's geophilosophy. So, this geophilosophy, to me, is nowadays stained not only by the Deleuzian idea of the concept of figure, but by this double meaning that puts us, in one side, the Earth, the Anthropocene, ourselves, actually, "we", I say, the occidental civilization, that created the Anthropocene, and on the other

side, the counter-anthropology, the counter geophilosophy, presented for the first time by an indigenous thinker under an understandable form, in the sense of it's being properly translated and properly commented by a pactician, someone who made a pact, ethnographical, like we say, with his Yanomami interlocutor. I'd say that, actually... I don't know the reason for that expression, but, well, there are two ways, and Levi-Strauss always had this problem, the problem of getting rid of the philosophy, his big question was always getting rid of the philosophy. But I think there are two ways of getting rid of it.

One of them, the one that works, to start getting rid of philosophy that works as a presumptionary soil of the anthropology as a subject. There's a way, a la Levi-Strauss, that aimed to avoid philosophy through an anthropological science that would be able to say much more about the human spirit than the philosophical speculation of his time, according to him, he ends up, often, saying that the anthropology... He says more about the myths than about the thousand years of philosophical speculation about the myths, their mythologies taught more in the sense of the myths than two thousand

years of philosophical speculation about the myths, with the exception of Plutarco, he says. I don't know why, but, well... This way, it wouldn't stop saying, is one way of assuming the philosophical position by the negative, but without avoiding it, somehow. Getting rid of philosophy through science, in a certain way, it getting rid of philosophy inside itself. We know that it is, like the philosophy relate itself in a complicated way, slavish, generally speaking, with the science. And the other way, the one I humbly try to carry out, is throwing the philosophy in a field, in the

interior, literally throw it in a neutral and homogeneous field, populated by discussions, knowledge and practices, that are external to the philosophy, but that are linked by structural transformations and that lives in the same level of immanency, that level that Maniglier called "The level of misconception", as a key element of the being, actually, or substitute, that substitutes the being as our horizon. The third source, it seems to me, comes from, well, naturalism rooted into the anthropology, a manifesto, above all, in the cognitivist naturalistic branch that opposes the cognitivist to a conceptography, let's say, that favors a

cognitivism, to put in a few words, some sort of natural science of understanding that will substitute Kant's transcendental philosophy and, finally, will give an empirical basis to the categories of understanding. In the other hand, what always interested me the most... Sometimes I think that, to make a difference in my work with the work that Levi-Strauss did, if it's even possible to compare these two characters, but well, is that Levi-Strauss always focused on the esthetic and on the transcendental analytical, on the logic of sensitive and, in the second place, on the categories of understanding. And he

always put the transcendental dialectic aside or the ideas of indigenous reason. I had to say, precisely, this missing part that was to understand a bit the speculative dimension of the indigenous thinking. I think that there's an interesting opposition to be made. It occurred to me, this morning, while writing this, that I think that the... I... I always imagine, above all, after reading Davi Kopenawa's book, I came up with this idea that the indigenous thinking is, essentially, a speculative onirism. From his phrase, to me, totally bombastic and fundamental, that is the idea, when he says: "White

men sleep too much, but they only dream about themselves". In my opinion, this is the best anthropological definition. He gives two anthropological definitions of white men, both summarize entire treaties. He completely summarizes Freud, the entire "Traumdeutung", in this phrase, actually paying Freud in the same currency, that he used to pay the Amerindian animists that projected their dreams about the world, he says exactly the opposite: "White men sleeps too much", like we, actually, they, natives, "but when they dream, they do it only about themselves". This, to me, it's an excellent freud-marxist theory. I say Marxist because

the second definition is the name, the actual name that Kopenawa give to the white people, which is simply the merchant people. It's the ethnonym of white people, the merchant people. This is the entire "Capital" in a single ethnonym. So, Freud, entirely in one phrase and "The Capital", entire in another, good enough, in terms of speculation and philosophy. This is what I call the "Amerindian speculative onirism", like defining this conceptual character, let's say, in the Deleuzian way, that's necessary to build, which is the shaman, in an intimate opposition to the philosopher. I'd even say that there's

a... It would be possible to imagine the idea that the extra modern thinking, or the Amerindian thinking, particularly, a thinking in which this speculative onirism, in addition to what I'd call panpsychism or pan experientialism, like a base intuitive ontology, a basis intuitive mode to learn about the world, prevails, this speculative onirism plus this panpsychism, prevails on that L�vi-Strauss called "The science of the concrete". While in our universe, opposing to that, it's the science of the real, that is not only the concrete anymore, but the science of the real, that prevails on the speculative introspection, that

is our world... Instead of dreaming, we introspect, we don't dream about the others, we dream about ourselves, so, speculative introspection or conceptual analysis, language philosophy, modern philosophy, to summarize. From one side, the introspection and from the other, the linguistic analysis. So, the world in which the speculative onirism and the panpsychism prevails on the science of the concrete, without getting rid of it, actually the other way around, that subordinates this science of the concrete to this speculative onirism and, on the other hand, what we see in the trajectory of modernity that the subordination of the classic

speculative introspection, and even of the conceptual analysis, the science of the real, the science as an ideal of knowledge, as a privileged way of accessing the actual existing reality. This distinction seems important to me. In this way, the indigenous thinking is much more philosophical than ours, in the way that it favors speculation over the science of the concrete, while we favor the science over our variant of speculation. The fourth source of resistance, I said it was a text, I said it was four, has to do, actually, with the implications and the epistemological and political intentions

of the perspectivism and this appreciation, from the extra modern point of view, in the present context, in the double present context, actually. From one side, Brazil, a country that's currently dominated by, well, obsessed by a pathetical mimicry of the way of life, civilizational ways and economical and social ways that came since the caravels from which we never could get rid of. Besides, another implication of the relationship of this appreciation of the indigenous thinking with Brazil has to do with what was discussed here, it was exposed here by many speakers. Jose Miguel, for instance, Alexandre as

well, more people spoke about it, Marilia, which is the relation of this thinking in Brazil with the thinking of Brazilian thinkers, citizenly speaking. I'm thinking, evidently, the three greatest philosophers in the XX century, Oswald de Andrade, Guimaraes Rosa and Clarice Lispector. And the idea of literature as speculative anthropology seems perfectly consistent and happy to me, to define this philosophical character, this philosophical function that the fiction, the literature, has in a country where the philosophy still is, essentially, an import philosophy, contrary to the exporting art that Oswald said, I don't remember what... Poetry, import poetry. I

tried to do the same, an export anthropology, in a certain way, strictly in an Oswaldian way. The second context is, evidently, the global context in which Brazil is inserted over their heads, to a certain extent, against its will, that is the present world context in which the task to dissolve the notion of Anthropos is crucial, such as it has been working in the anthropological machine, I mean, as a transcendence machine, as a constitution machine of the human, as a real state of ontological exception. The human is the state of ontological exception, and just by that,

it produces this state of exception as its political form. Now, I’d like to make two specific notes, before concluding. Already in, let's say keeping myself in the field of anthropology, because, well, it's my home turf. The first one is about the proposal of the excellent communication of Marco Valentim, that has been contributing to enrich my brutalist simplifications of the indigenous thinking. Much of the discussion, I believe, that he does, and correct me if I'm wrong, revolves around the unceasing sliding of the concept, or better, the word "human" in my speech. And that derives, to me,

to a certain extent, from the instability of this concept inside the Amerindian thinking. This "maybe it is not a man" is exactly the core of the discussion. Maybe it is not human, but then, there is a concept of human that maybe he is not. So, there is the sliding of this concept, and I think that this evince the excessive symmetry that I gave to the opposition of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, partially to defend the natives, let's say, defend the native's flag, against the classic accusation that they were anthropomorfists, primitive narcissists, because, well, projected men in the

world, etc. And I opposed many texts, the classic kantianistic anthropocentrism, for example, in which men is the core, but nothing looks like him. Actually, the human is absolutely different in essential, from the transcendental and from everything else. While the anthropomorphism would contrarily preach, a certain Franciscan humility to, well, to evoke the Pope and so on, regarding the human condition, because if everything is human, we're not that special. So, the human condition, like I said many times, it not a substance, it's just a vicarious position, the place of the dead, maybe, a vicarious position that circles

contingently, culturally contingent, contextually contingent, historically contingent, through the entire extension of the cosmos, be it alive or not. This is another question, the extra-human issue that includes, the animals, plants, rocks, minerals, the agates, the form of the rocks, all of that, well, what's the name of it? Povinelli's geo-ontology. So, the extra-human, to me, is is more than just "animals are people". The mountains think, according to the ancient people... Not according. The Andean people says: "The mountains speak, the mountains think". Well... So, there are more things in heaven and earth than just... Well, it's necessary to

think what Deleuze called the non-organic life and think beyond our conception that is excessively, perhaps, anthropocentrical, of life, like something that we share with the existing, but there are other existents, and these ones, you can lay down the hammer on them that nothing will happen. I remember a conversation that I had with a Tukuya thinker, to remember another Tukuya that Tania mentioned, who's Higino Tukuya, in which he... He asks me something, saying: "Professor, "there is a mountain back in our land "that's filled with gold. "The prospectors are entering and taking out the gold out. "We

don't know if we let it happen or not. "The problem is, this mountain has an owner." I mean, a spirit owns the mountain, lives in the mountain, a master of the animals and the mountain and whatnot. "And if we keep messing up with this mountain, "something bad will happen". Then he says: "Do you think, then, the natives can be capitalists?" He asked me. He asked me this: "Do you think the natives can be capitalists?" I said: "It's a good question. "I don't know the answer. You decide." I personally think they can't, but well... So, I

think that's... But well, returning, a good share of the question orbiting the anthropomorphism revolves around this unceasing sliding, this kind of function, the word and concept, sometimes it's a word, sometimes a concept, sometimes it's a word that actually, doesn't have a corresponding term in the indigenous language, that I know. Because it's not distinctive, it's of person or people, and people and human is not the same thing, it is, but at the same time it isn't. There is a certain instability of this concept, that, to me, is extremely positive. Not an instability by deficiency, but a

constructive instability of this thinking. Namely, the human is, the constitution of the human concept is the problem of this thinking. The second observation, I say, I'm keeping myself inside anthropology, is about that proposition apparently anti-perspectivist that Tania remembered, the noted thesis of a Tukan anthropologist, that is: "Fish is not people". I won't comment the many interesting aspects, of this thesis, because I believe it would be very useful, it would be an interesting anthropologic exercise to do a structural comparison between the book from Davi Kopenawa and from Bruce Albert and the thesis written by an indigenous

anthropologist as a white mentor, isn't it? In other words, we have two cases, to opposing ethnical figures, and confronting it to see what... This can result in many, many lessons. But I restrict myself in only asking. This statement "fish is not people" made me, immediately think the second question. This simply attributive proposition, or simply negative, "fish is not people", is a simple, Aristotelian, predicative proposition, it is synonymic, "salva veritate", as the philosophers say, of the same proposition, would it be announced by an ichthyologist from INPA, for example, that would immediately say that fish is not

people? I don't think so. So, I believe that a Tukan saying "fish is not people" after consulting his father is different from the proposition "fish is not people" said, like "savoir de soi" of an ichthyologist, in the act of frying his pilchards. Seems to me that this distinction is important, as important as the distinction between... Important and interesting. I said that there are two characters in each book. There is the white anthropologist and an indigenous interlocutor. On the other, there is an indigenous anthropologist and another anthropologist, well, a white advisor. But actually, there are three

characters, because behind the two indigenous interlocutors there is a third character, a second native, that, for Joao Paulo, the Tukan anthropologist, is his father. for Davi, is his father-in-law, that introduced him to the shamanism. Actually, the difference between one asking his father and the other, his father-in-law, it's not less significant from the Amazonic sociology point of view. This is a question, well, this is for an anthropologist. But it seems to me that this phrase, in the case of the Tukan thesis, has a dimension that goes beyond the acknowledgement, there is a certain dimension that I'll

call fundamentally performative or desiderative. It's already known to people that read the ethnology of the Rio Negro people, fishes are angry at humans, because they didn't turn into people in the passage of the pre- cosmological to cosmological era. A long time ago, there was that state that I described on "Floresta de Cristal", my article that applies to the world in a "muta mutandis" way, to the world of the Tukan thinking too, in which, well, the fishes are called people-fish. The name of... Specially because people is the word they use as a collective to any kind

of species, be it... Caiapo is one kind of people, fish is another kind, jaguar is another kind of people... People, there, is a concept that indicate, in a certain way, a political collective. This is a very important point. All kinds of indigenous collective are thought lesser as a species, like Levi-Strauss insisted so much, but much more in the form of political collective, from where the pan-political character of this universe, where the expression "everything is political" has a much more drastic meaning than when it's said by an activist, the rookie from the city, who says everything

is political... No. To the natives, everything is really political. Including the rocks, the plants and the animals. There aren't productive forces. Just production relationships. To use another language. So, like you know, who's aware of the literature, fishes are angry because they didn't turn into people, people such that didn't turn into human people, properly saying, on that passage, the cosmological big bang. On the first era, that they called "the dawn era" or "the awake era", something like that, the fish-people were undistinguishable the peopleness and fishness, let's say, they were in an intense state of overlapping, that

then distributed into an extensive state of opposition in which people eat fish, but fish doesn't eat people. on the other hand, jaguars eat people and people doesn't eat jaguar. Well... I mean, there's always a shadow of the human in this non-gentleness of the current fishes. A shadow that us, occidental ones, try, but, actually, neither can exorcize, as proven by this whole issue with killing, breeding, proletarianizing the animals and turning them into a protein factory and whatnot, this shadow of humanity, in a certain way, or connection with the human remains, and as we know, a great

extent of the Amazonian shamanistic work consists in granting that what you are eating is not people. It's necessary to grant it, it's necessary to extirpate the potential "people" aspect, not to say human, and also the potential "actuable" aspect of these beings, to avoid payback, for the fact that us, actually, are in war against them. The distinction between war and hunt is complicated. If everything that you're killing, thinks, even though it erroneously thinks its people, it thinks, erroneously thinking is a way of thinking, and this puts an issue in front of the shaman. The work of

the shaman consists essentially in splitting what is human from what's not, in that crucial moment, which is the moment that the natives take much more seriously than us, maybe, which is the one they have full awareness that it's is only possible to live by killing something, which is that the human life depends on the death of others, somehow. We are not plants, nor animals. And even the plants, I guess, I don't know if they think they don't prey something. So, I think that's my observation regarding the statute that's possible to give to a proposition simplistic

as well, regarding the formulation, formulaic, "fish is not people", which is the same as "fish is people", to a certain extent. It has to be decomposed, stripped and compared to other propositions that would be synonyms, but, told by another person in another context, they would have a totally different meaning, an ichthyologist and a Tukan. It's not the same "fish is not people" said by one or another. To wrap up, the question remains, the one asked by Debora at the end, not at the end at the beginning. And, as the title of her speech is the

"So what?", her "So what?" is the "So what?" of this all, this entire work, what does it have to do with our current lives, with our daily life? There's a phrase that I hold a tremendous sulking, in the "Anti-Oedipus", I guess, yes, in the "Anti-Oedipus", where Deleuze and Guattari ask each other, in the middle of the way: "But why discussing the primitive ones, if this is all about our life?" After all, why discussing the natives, the savages, at the moment they are discussing? "Why discussing the primitive ones if this is all about our life?" And

I comment somewhere that, actually, this sentence is badly punctuated. It should have been written like: "Why discussing the primitive ones? "Because this is all about our life." This should be the actual punctuation of the sentence. we have to re-punctuate it. And the question is exactly this one. Why discussing the primitive ones? Because this is all about our life. And then the question... But I'll go further. I think... Now I remember the... Who said that the earth screamed? There's the outcry from Earth, the Pope... So, it was Bertrand that once spoke about the mother nature's voice

and whatnot. And Gaia's outcry. But my question goes a little bit sharper than this one. It's not about what usefulness we can take or we have to take, what connections, what alliances we have to establish with this extra modern thinking, but what really do, what practical consequences we can take from my work, or from the work done from my work and the ideas that were used to think my ideas and the ideas that I used to think those ideas. It's simply about a question of enriching the thinking, but in a way that, actually it ends

up not modifying our political and existential practice, essentially. It's all about a way to keep writing our vanguard texts, publishing our productions, filling out the Curriculum Lattes, asking for that FAPESP and CNPq scholarships, that won't come, having your post-doc abroad, teaching in the universities, living our life as nothing had changed and changing in the world. What to do, for example, after reading "The Falling Sky"? Just sympathize with the Yanomami? What to do, after the banging, as I think already happened, of the sinking that the world is changing? It's not the natives that are changing. It's

the world that's changing. What happens, what are we going to do now that the world is changing? Will we start a NGO? Discuss how to put together the official political life? Start a political party? Run to the hills? Creating a Brancaleone's army, without Brancaleone, of course? How to do, actually, this is the question that I leave you with, penetrating all those ideas into the everyday tissue and entering together with them inside their meaning? This is my final question. Thank you. Do the honored answer to questions or he just keeps an attitude... Well. It's a good

question. There's one here, already. There's one and I confess there's a crucial word which I can't understand. I think it's fear, but it doesn't make sense. But we'll see. But, just to remember... It's up to you. -Do you want to keep the attitude? -No, no no. Well then, let's answer. Whoever wants to ask... Maybe I'm not human. Whoever wants to ask something, please, write it down and handle it to one of our stage assistants. I loved this expression. So, let's go. I'll try to figure out what's the word. So, it's a question from Mateus Toledo,

who says: "It seems to me, that in your speech about the Amerindian perspectivism, the suggestion of an entrenchment to the classic categories of the occidental thinking. Well, my question is: Is the perspectivism, to a certain extent, "like", he underlined the "like"... -Like, "my question..." -Like. Like, yeah, like. So, "My question is: Is the perspectivism, "to a certain extent, like Wittgenstein's second philosophy? "I think, of course, about Professor Luis Henrique's formula: "perspectivism without relativism equals, as I understand, "he states, among other things, "that each form of..." Here's where I don't understand. Of fear makes no sense.

Each form of life. Of life! There you are. Thank you! "Each form of life..." So, one more time. "As I understand, he states..." It's "he states", then. "Among other things, that each form of life, "as far as it engenders a form of symbolization, "segregates an ontology. "Therefore, multinaturalism... "Therefore, multinaturalism. "Even though there, the culture isn't a fixed thing, "of course." I'll even handle it to you... so you keep it as a gift. I have to read that. You're right. I was decoding it. "I think, of course, in Professor Luis Henrique's formula..." Oh, right. Perspectivism without

relativism. Yes, yes yes. I know the formula. If this is "like Wittgenstein's second philosophy..." It is like a lot of things. This is precisely the point. It's the "like". You need to search for the "like". The "like" doesn't mean it's equal. This is it, it's you... You solve a problem... This is a good formula to define the indigenous thinking, the perspectivism without relativism. Well, Bento Prado Junior has already done a famous text, comparing Wittgenstein's second with Deleuze, trying to merge the immanency dimension with the Weltbild, etc. And, to a certain extent, it makes sense and

I don't see why not. I prefer Wittgenstein's second to Habermas, do you understand? To simplify it, to cut the chase. I think it's better, more interesting to compare the perspectivism according to Wittgenstein, to Deleuze or, well, than to Habermas or Kant, like Levi-Strauss did many times. Or, well, to Merleau-Ponty, like others did, or Heidegger, like many others do. To me, this is, to a certain point of view, a question that depends on the way you're heading. It's like a myth, after all. It's like a myth. You can go from one myth to another using different

trajectories. And, after all, each one chooses the trajectory that seems to them, the referential myth, like Levi-Strauss say, that seems more convenient to them. my bird-scatterer myth is the perspectivism, so to speak. And with it I keep chasing what happens in these Mediterranean mythologies and others, hyperborean, in the case of Wittgenstein, hyperborean, "the hyperborean mists, according to Deleuze, that feared Wittgenstein, that came to spoil Russel, who was a genius, and then came Wittgenstein, who ruined his entire life. But I agree. I think it is. This formula, purely as a formula, like these apparently simple ones,

"this is that", or "perspectivism without relativism", are formulas that work well, but that can't be taken too as... So, good, That's it. We're done. I agree that, doubtlessly, each form... I thing that form of life is a concept that I'm very fond of, actually. I think it's a concept that could be better worked, anthropologically, than it was. It's much more interesting than the society or culture, but it should be taken, in the anthropological subject meaning. When I say anthropology, I always... Anthropology, to me, is the sociocultural anthropology, invented by Tylor, by Frazer and Morgan. Not

the one from Kant. Even though this entire invented anthropology from Tylor, Frazer and Morgan has both feet sunk into Kant's anthropology. But it has all its specificities that had to do with the fact that Kant saw the aliens but never saw a native in his life. But the aliens, as we know, he wrote a lot about them. But yes, I'd agree. I'd agree that each form of life engenders a specific, segregate, as you say, an ontology. And in this way, that I call myself, how do we say, without decency, an ontological anarchist. And I had,

recently, a heated discussion with a colleague, who's an important political anarchist, an anthropologist, David Graeber, because, well, I blamed him, in a malicious but true way, that he was an ontological anarchist, but that remained an ontological monarchist, because, well, anarchy doesn't get in politics. Chomsky, the same, a little bit. Political anarchism, but an ontological anarchism, because there is just one actual existent reality, and we know which one it is. And there's that, even though I'm not aware of everything, we know more, we are richer in terms of world than the savages, as we know, we

all are riches in terms of world, the men, the human, is a world configurator, so, but some configure more worlds than the others, some have more money saved than the others, have more ontological capital than the others. But yes, yes, yes. I do think that each form of life segregates an ontology, from where my ontological anarchism, which is a methodological position, not an ontological position, to the extent of... I'm not a, what's the name of... ontology distributor. I think this is a methodological principle from which the anthropologist begin, basically. Any other question? Seize that opportunity.

Oh, here comes one. Oh, no, I walk too. Thank you. Let's go, then. From Sofia. -Sofia? -Sofia. "If the perspectivism puts the body in the center, how does the metaphysics puts itself in relation to the transcendence and the immanency?" This question is too philosophical for me. It's not that the perspectivism puts the body in the center. What happened was, there was a... The entire work that I did, and I didn't do it alone, as someone remembered, it goes back to an article that I wrote still as a student.. As a student? Yes, as a student,

with my mentor, Anthony Seeger and Roberto DaMatta, which was a text about the construction of the person in indigenous societies, in which this idea was inserted, that the concept of body was a central concept, the corporeality, the corporeal dimension, was the main concept, so to speak, was the main analytical tool to allow the thinking of the indigenous cosmologies. And this, we already said back in that time, this, actually, is already with Levi-Strauss. The "Mythologicals" are a wide excursion about this semiotics, those corporeal flows, the material semiotics, the corporeal semiotics, that crosses the myths and radically

contrasts with our legal-theological language to think about the society. The indigenous sociology is a corporeality, it's a somatology in which the language used by the natives to think the human society is a language which is somatic-semiotic, it's a "semi somatic", and not, like it's for us, spiritual essentialism, etc. This is so true that i say, it's a corporeal mannerism, a corporeal mannerism build entire on top of manners or forms of life, instead of spiritual essences, which is, actually, the relativism. The relativism is an spiritual essentialism. Each culture, like each person, has an essence, a spirit,

precisely, the "zeitgeist", the cultural spirit, the spirit of time, the spirit of culture, the collective unconsciousness and so on, that distinguishes it. And we had suggested that, actually, the indigenous thinking puts ahead, let's say, the corporeal dimension as the dimension where effectively the meaning, through which the meaning was produced. The place of the meaning was in the body, to a certain extent. This doesn't mean putting the body in the center, it means putting the body, to a certain extent, ahead, ahead of the spirit, that, actually, is the position that it has, to the native. So,

it hides this other side. The body has a visible side and an invisible one in certain conditions, which is what we call, badly call spirit, that is, actually, only... There's a Nambiquara definition given in a colleague's ethnography Joana Miller, of a Nambiquara that says: "The soul is that one part of the body that we don't see", which I believe it's brilliant, because it's a part of the body. It's not another thing. The soul is that one part of the body that we don't see. So, well, it's the other side of the body, to a certain

extent. So, that was the meaning of putting the body in focus. And there was still, now, I realized only later, a certain, like we say, provocative consequence. Like you know, the concept of animalism was brought back in transit, in part with my complacency, by my colleague Philippe Descola, as being a part of one of the four basal ontologies, one of the four possible ones, the only four possible basal ontologies of human thinking. What he calls animism is what I called, sort of corresponded to what I called perspectivism, although later on he did a... of a...

what's the name of it? He played dumb and put the perspectivism as a subtype of animism, when I think that, actually, the perspectivism is not a subtype of something, it's a specific functioning way of this relation between the body and this other side of the body. But the provocative connotation has to, actually, what he calls animism should be called somatism, and not animism, because what is, actually, as a main element of this, let's say, dynamic element, differential and differentiator element of the Amerindian ontology is the corporeality, and not this invisible dimension, that, even though it

may be different according to species, in terms of many things, or can be essentially considered as equal, it is essentially a dimension that allows communication, a dangerous our favorable communication between humans and extra-humans. While the body, contrary to that, precisely what you need to do, compose a body, create a human body, all this indigenous question is, precisely, how to compose a human body, and not, as it is for us, the indigenous <i>Bildung</i> doesn't go through, well, the soul, through the education of the spirit, but goes, on the other hand, through the composing of a body

which is properly human. This is the essence of the Amerindian ritual work, to a certain extent, the work of unceasing constitution of a body which is properly human, a thing that's always risky, that can go wrong, the metamorphosis is one thing that's not, in any way, a "cool" process. It's a thing that's the other way around, it's a potentiality, a virtuality, that constantly rounds the stability of the common life, the routinary life, and something that can only, to summarize, it's something... it's a controlled substance, it's not something you can take as much as you want.

So, yes. The body... Oh, yes. Immanence and transcendence. I don't know how to answer. I think that, actually, this distinction doesn't apply. It's just like... Yes, maybe this is it. This distinction has no expiry in the indigenous thinking, in the indigenous metaphysics. I guess that one of the characteristic of the indigenous thinking is precisely the break of the division between immanence and transcendence. 1786 01:26:08,359 --> 01:26:08,092 Such collapse, evidently, can only happen in the immanence. But this is another question. Another question from Ricardo da Mata: "How do you see the role of museums "in the

process of decolonization of the thinking?" -Of the museums? -Yes, I guess so. Or I'm reading it wrong. Museums, isn't it? -Because it's from Museu Paulista. -That's true. I thought it could be. I work at a museum, but by accident. I work at the national museum because the Anthropology Department... -Is there. -of URJ is there. Exactly. But the relation of the department with the museum is a relationship relatively contingent and that could be better explored. I don't have a really concrete opinion about this, about the museums. Sincerely, I don't have much to say. Certainly, well... Each

one hunts the trophies as possible. Each one is a headhunter on his own way. So, maybe the museums are our variant of the trophy collection that the native people do. I don't know. Another question from Renata Volpato, actress. She asks, it's quite simple: "Could you better explain how the shaman separates the human from non-human to eat animals?" Well, this is something that only the shaman knows. If only I knew. But essentially, it's a process that involves ritualistic actions in which he... There are many ways. There's a notorious description that Joanna Overing, an anthropologist, does in

which the Piaroa, who happens to eat meat, like all natives, are actually vegans, because, every time they eat some meat, the shaman transubstantiate it into vegetable. Something that I'd suggest the vegans here could adopt, after all, the transubstantiation... I don't know who said it to me, I don't know who said it, someone said it, but somebody said: "The only pressing metaphysical issue in the occidental philosophy is the transubstantiation". I don't remember who said that. I thought it was Leibniz, but it's not Leibniz, but, well... I don't remember if Leibniz said it, but someone told me

this was a statement... And I think it's an interesting one. The transubstantiation is the only pressing metaphysical issue. And that is the problem of the shamans, the doing of the substantiation. For example, transubstantiate the soul into body. It's a little inside out, somehow. And splitting, not putting together, in the flesh, the body and blood, this is my body and this is my blood, it's the other way around. This is not human, this here is not people. Please, don't get it wrong. Go away. It's sort of an exorcism in which you take from the dead animal

its retaliative potencies, its counter-people potencies, that, in general, harm everybody that eats people. This came from the other side. -Comes from... The other side? -From the other side. From Marx. -From Karl. -Oh, Karl Marx? In flesh and bones. It's in English so we'll translate. -Wow. -"Does the perspectivism has anything to say about the economy and health?" No, "and wealth?", "economy and wealth?" Oh, economy and wealth. Well, I just spoke about the mountain of gold that had a supernatural owner and that couldn't be explored by the prospectors, or better, the natives couldn't turn into prospectors, because

they would risk going against a supernatural owner that would lay down vengeance upon them. So, well... Yes, this, for example. I don't know what else I can say about the relation of the Marxist thinking with... Certainly, if there's something I think it is, let's call it this way, with which I do not agree, to summarize things up, is that Marx shares the great theology, the occidental onto theology, which is the idea of a linear progression of socioeconomic forms that take place and that the natives are in the past, and that, well, the primitive communities, the

pre-capitalist forms, they are pre-capitalists, I mean, clearly, they are defined according to the capitalism, the pre-capitalists forms of production. I think what turned this conception upside down was precisely the Anthropocene, the idea that the natives are the past and we are the future. When we don't have more future, to a certain extent, the future changed its meaning, rather I would say, the future and the past went different directions, and it's Chakrabarty who says that. The Anthropocene, actually split the past from the future, in a way that makes the future unthinkable. To think the future, it's

required that we move away from the future to think, because it's going to be a future without us, which make, create a pragmatic contradiction that makes, well, this idea of future, complex and, therefore, somehow, invalidate, to a certain extent, invalidate the whole philosophy of the history, which is not only from Marx, which is the philosophy of the history that follows us, since Saint Augustine, or something like that. And, in this meaning, what we have to say to Marx is... Folks, we are in the XXI century. "Marx, what would you say today, in the XXI century,

"about all this?" Because Marx is the one who has to answer this question. What would he say if he was... If Marx was in the XXI century, how would he see things? He would keep saying what he said in the Manifesto from 1948, that the only way to get out from the capitalism is forcing it until it... overdrive the machine... the only way to get out from the capitalism is from the inside. And more, praise the capitalism as he does, he praises the capitalism, let's not forget that, the capitalism is, well... Not only that, the

capitalism includes all the previous forms into it. He has that phrase that I believe it's one of the weirdest ones I've ever heard, which is: "The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey." You all remember the phrase. The feudalism explained by the capitalism, because the previous forms are explained by the subsequent ones, just like the anatomy of the man explains the one of the monkey. I never understood why the anatomy of the man explains the anatomy of the monkey. Well, I can't understand what he wanted to say by that.

I do know he wanted to say with the capitalism explains the feudalism, in a way, to a certain extent, he's a little bit like Telos, the end of a certain inexorable march... How did he call it? I only know it in English. "Species-being". I don't know the name of it in German. The being of the species. The inexorable march of the being of the species to become the universal animal, which is an idea that is in the manuscripts from 44, where it says that the man is the one who's capable of producing according the standard

of all other species, while each species... every species produces, but only the man produces according the standard of all other species, besides his own. I never understood, also, the meaning of it. I only understood that it means something like the man is an universal animal. Which is an interesting way to think the anthropomorphism, backwards, somehow, well. But... I belong to the 1st IWA. Let's go. Another one. This is anonymous. Question: "How to think acting the native evolution to this moment of the Anthropocene?" Okay. Well My answer is in another... A possible answer in in a

slogan... I told you I'm a phrasist, I lose the friend but not the joke. It's a sentence that I say, in a watchword, which is a transformation of the watchword that was in the flag, the notorious flag from Helio Oiticica, with a body of a dead bandit, saying: "Be marginal. Be a hero." I say that nowadays we should make a flag like this one, with the face of a native... Alive, resisting, and write: "Don't be poor. Be a native." In the way that the entire process of constitution of the Brazilian society was the transformation of

natives into poor. Natives and blacks, of course. Natives into poor. And that the process is vital to the capitalism, the capitalism needs poor people, it needs to produce poor people, to help them out, to protect them, giving them benefits and everything else. But the poor are absolutely essential, like everybody knows, Since Carlos... Because the poor are, actually, raw material to the capitalism. And the natives are precisely the rock on the shoe of this transformation process, that's not complete, and that's the big problem. Today, yesterday, the House accepted the PEC 215. For the ones that didn't

know, or didn't remember, or didn't hear, it's a constitutional measure that aims to remove from the Union the duty of setting the boundaries of native lands and delivering them to the estates of the Federation, which means delivering them to the regional oligarchies and which means, in a later analysis, it could mean, also, the reversion of certain plotting and homologations that were done already in previous governments. Because this one didn't do anything. And the natives are the rock on the shoes of this model, because we need more poor people. Also, so they can stop being poor.

It's necessary, first, to turn them into poor so we can take them out from poverty, then. But removing from the poverty only what's necessary, evidently, so he can buy with loans his Chinese plasma TV, his motorcycle, so he can be a courier out there. But... Contrary to that, the natives offer a drastic option to this process, which is the process of coming back to earth. Back to earth, the double earth, like Flavia said. The earth with a capital "T", and the one with a normal "t". The natives are the ones who, actually, own something that

the Constitution from 88 calls "Original Rights", which is an absolutely fundamental notion. They are rights that precede the Law itself. The Constitution recognize rights that comes before its own Constitution. In this way, these original rights that are in... That are the target, nowadays, of the offense of the Three Powers of the Republic, to complete the process, from one side, privatizing the public lands, including the natives´ ones, and from the other side, the process of impoverishing of the population that insists in having a way of living that's different from the way of living that is pushed

against us by, well... by the ideological tools of the State. So, I guess my answer would be... The left side has to choose between who's the... who's an ally, who's its other, who's the object. What about the poor or the native? I believe the choice is fundamental, because the poor is the one who's just like you, but less. The poor is essentially a fellow person, but shrunk. And the goal is to bring him to you, make him be like you. So, in every process, the poor is someone who, first, you take from him what he

has, then you make him desire what he doesn't have, because you took it from him. Make him desire what he cannot have and you, little by little, elevates, educates, well, enhance it, the enhancement, isn't it? While the natives are the ones who just, they don't care, they don't give a damn, they don't want... So, I don't know. There's an answer that a native gave I believe it's an anecdote. An American, North-American, a well-intentioned American asks a native: "What can we do for you? What can we do to help you fight?" And he says: "It's easy.

Go back. Go away. Go away. "Go home." Of course it's impossible. But this is it, like the young ones say. What's up? So we'll have one last question and then we're good. It's a question that Monica writes here, it's a very deep question. She says: "What can you tell us "about the quoting of Michel Tel” "that Veronica put on 'Onde a Onça Bebe Água': 'Oh, if I catch you', thought the jaguar, licking its lips. 'Delicious. This way you gonna kill me', exclaimed Joaci"? I think it's great. It's brilliant. It's a brilliant invention from Veronica, you

know? Imagine that. Brilliant, of course. I think the quote is cool. Just because this is actually it. "Oh, if I catch you" is an issue, actually... It's an issue the natives face every day, when they go out in the wild. "Oh, if I catch you". Spoken from one side to the other, do you understand? That's the problem. And "delicious" is, in fact, one of the possibilities. It's not the only one. Well, then, thank you Eduardo. Thank you everyone. So, we are finished here.