
































In the Gilded Realm of Ideas 

Review by George Mentore

Cannibal Metaphysics 

by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Univocal Publishing, 2014

We live in the normative realm of ideas. For those who have mastered the specialized craft of gilding

ordinary thoughts, the luster of the regime thinly empowers. It perhaps even additionally offers some

form of pleasure from the aesthetics of the high status it confers. But to those for whom its vermeil or

ormolu provides no promise of power or granted joy, such mastered ideas either do not exist or they

press  down hard  with  constrictive  tyranny.  In  our  gilded  realm  of  the  anthropological,  Cannibal

Metaphysics exemplifies the glittering mastery of modernist thought. But, if I might be permitted to

add,  it  also presents  to  those  who live,  in  the  now,  beneath  the  gold-leafed  forests  of  indigenous

Amazonia, yet another example of a completely unrecognizable dominion of thought.

I  have long been gratified by the contributions of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to our small

parish of Amazonian scholarship. His intellectual successes beyond our select community have truly

brought us great joy. Yet because they initially hail from our own municipality of specialists, his works

tend to be read by us with a somewhat different appreciation. Informed by our shared ethnographic

experiences,  we  read  with  far  more  preemptive  suppositions.  We  have  traveled  the  same  Lévi-

Straussian pathways from Boas and Durkheim. We have depended upon the legacy of the spilt between

self and other which calls into play the moral base of society and its dominate principle of exchange.

And  we  too,  in  our  own interpretations  of  Amerindian  socialities,  have  similarly  encountered  the

ubiquity of the predatory feline. Hence many of us have not been surprised by the content of Cannibal

Metaphysics, not because it repeats earlier works in a more expansive rendering, but rather because it

familiarly advocates the disputed primacy of at least one side of Amerindian thought long considered



foundational to an understanding of indigenous sociality.  In this  work,  affinity  as predation stands

triumphant over all metaphors of uterine conviviality. Nonetheless, the clear success of the theory of

Amerindian  perspectivism has  been its  broad appeal  to  the  wider  non-Amazonian  anthropological

community.

Of course Cannibal Metaphysics contains many other worthy ideas and intriguing interrogations

beyond that of indigenous perspectivism, each deserving of equal mention. In so brief a commentary as

mine, it would be impossible to do them any justice. The depth and breathe of the scholarship simply

defeats  any frail  attempt  at  review.  I  would,  however,  like to  draw your attention to  one  obvious

consistent theme which I consider to be the principle explanation for the broader appeal of the work.

Throughout  the  entire  argument  there  is  an  overall  –  and  for  us  trained  intellectuals  –  satisfying

privileging of thought itself: a lavished gilding of ideas into concepts.

A rigor of rationalist thought moves elegantly throughout Cannibal Metaphysics. It deploys its

own intellectual operators as it describes those of Amerindian thought. It uses its own algorithms of

thinking to break the intellectual codes of the other. The rigor of procedure depends completely upon

binary units, the use of relationality, the process of comparison, and the feature of transformation. The

added ingenuity to this familiar (and thus unthreatening thoroughness of) thought appears to be the

creative use of inversion whenever the predictability of thinking leads one in a particular direction. This

strategy of inversion can only logically function and be seemingly innovative within the confines of our

legacy of dualistic thinking. The binary forces we modernists invent for ourselves serve not only to

make  the  world  meaningful,  but  also  to  provide  us  with  our  sense  of  superiority  within  it.  Our

ontological existence appears predicated upon the warring oppositions we create for ourselves and, it

seems, carryover to indigenous alterity through our comparisons. There is no negative judgment here

on my part to these skillful moves. Indeed they exhibit the artistry of the Euro-American deployment of

modernist thinking. For as  Cannibal Metaphysics constantly reminds us, we too have culture. In this

regard, one could argue, we scholars make claim not so much to the pomposity of being divine, but

quite simply to being human as well.

But, of course, there are all kinds of humans, even in our modern rationalist domain. There are

those who have to  fit  into the objectified categories prescribed for them, and there are those who

conjure  up  the  categories  for  others  to  fit  into.  There  are  those  whose  thoughts  manifest  in  the

magnificent products shaping our current world and, as such, function as recognizable achievements of

empowerment, even as pleasing aesthetics furthering ideas about self superiority. Yet there are those

who must learn to live under the tyranny of these others’ materialized thoughts, in other words, within

an  alien  aesthetic.  In  all  such  epistemological  effects  –  so  reminiscent  of  the  modern  power  of



govermentality which not only reflects the sensibilities of the elite, but also the positive exercise of

power by subordinates – the tradition of anthropology follows suit.

In the training and practice of our specialist thoughts and the epistemological foundations we

have inherited, we are as much the handmaidens of political power as any other agents and institutions

of the modern state. Like other forms of Euro-American modernity, anthropology appears to be just as

equally driven by desires for a world where unpredictable contingencies must be anticipated and where

our knowledge serves to protect us, if  not from the anxieties of being exposed to the unknown or

unknowable, then at least from the presumed chaos that will descend upon us if our ordered intellectual

procedures do not triumph.

The  individual  humans  for  whom  anthropological  thought  continues  to  construct  social

categories have little if any access to its scholarly regimes. The algorithms of thinking we invent for

them and into which we place them (even when sympathetically compared to our own and given the

new status of a “reverse anthropology”), remain to them a foreign land. With perspectivism (as with

Structuralism  and  all  the  other  theories  we  have  invented  for  ourselves,  even  in  the  act  of

problematizing thought as an experiment of the Anti-Narcissus), the effort to reach Amerindian worlds

by way of their thoughts remains an attempt to discover an absence we alone perceive: to presence, if

you like, presumed hidden worlds.

This very attempt to deploy the metaphors of discovery seems to be but yet another anxious

move of a discipline seeking to protect the vulnerable subjectivities of its own practitioners. Knowing

as it does that it has no way to traverse the interval between self and other but by that of thought itself,

anthropology shields  its  practicing  subjectivities  both  from the  impossibility  of  ever  obtaining  the

means to being the reality of the lives lived by those it seeks to represent, as well as from any of the

consequences of exposure to those lives.

The very questions such thinking raises for itself and for which it seeks to address secrete within the

folds of its own thought. Its binary procedures encode then decode that which it encrypted in the first

place  merely  to  claim  discovery  of  the  answers  produced  by  its  very  own  definitive  questions.

Provocatively, one question stands out most prominently in Cannibal Metaphysics.

Beguiled by its own luster, Cannibal Metaphysics addresses many questions crafted by us and

for us, already knowing beforehand the possible range of answers available. Poignant, therefore, that it

should interrogate the one issue most haunting academic anthropology in current times – the very fact

of its own relevance. But through the intellectual move of an inversion, it places the burden of response

not upon western rational knowledge but on Amerindian epistemology.



The  same  question  Cannibal  Metaphysics raises  about  Amerindian  epistemology  it  does  also  of

anthropology:  how  to  take  indigenous  thought  seriously.  Yet  despite  the  best  of  intentions,  this

privileged  glittering  of  thought  that  is  about  thought,  has  the  unfortunate  effect  of  subordinating

indigenous  thinking to  its  own.  However  unintentionally,  in  the  gilded  realm of  ideas,  the  master

thinker reigns supreme. It is, nonetheless, a virtual sovereignty. It is after all mostly about thinking

about thought and not about lived experiences. Clearly it is not indigenous thought which we should be

seeking to take seriously but rather that which makes the indigenous obviously human. The manifest

humanity of indigenous others has less to do with how and what they think and more to do with how

and what  they  experience.  Even without  having to  betray  its  treasured  rationalist  legacies  and its

warlike metaphors of opposition, conflict, and conquest, an anthropology that opens its thinking to the

embodied lived realities of others still can and should regain its very own relevance.

George Mentore teaches anthropology at the University of Virginia. He has published variously on

topics ranging from aesthetics, abandonment, compassion, madness, silence, and shamanic breath. He

specializes  in  the  ethnography  of  indigenous  Amazonia  and  is  currently  working  on  theories  of

Amerindian subjectivity, empathy, and the anthropology of cruelty.

© 2015 George Mentore


