Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics Reviewed

A review of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's book 'Les métaphysiques cannibales' appears in artpress issue 428 (December 2015, pp. 59-63). The text argues that anthropology as a discipline and the term itself are in crisis, historically driven by the need to define the essence of humanity and its distinction from other animals and beings. This has produced commonplaces such as the opposition between nature and culture. Viveiros de Castro's work proposes a 'cannibal metaphysics' that challenges Western ontological assumptions by drawing on Amerindian perspectivism, where the world is composed of different points of view rather than a single nature. The review discusses how this approach reconfigures the relationship between self and other, subject and object, and offers a radical critique of anthropological universalism.