From the Enemy's Point of View by Eduardo Viveiros De Castro

From the Enemy's Point of View by Eduardo Viveiros De Castro

The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious life of the Araweté—a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia—focuses on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity. Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of divinity—consumption—showing how its cannibalistic expression differs radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies. He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic ways they imitate. From the Enemy's Point of View argues that current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other Amazonian societies.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Peter Skafish is Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Anthropology Department at McGill University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226858029
ISBN 10	0226858022
Title	From the Enemy's Point of View
Author	Eduardo Viveiros De Castro
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	1992-07-15
Number of pages	428
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable