Amanda Viana

Philosopher at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, collaborator of Alain Daniélou Foundation Research and Intellectual Dialogue

A PERSPECTIVIST APPROACH TO THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMAZONIAN FOREST

This is a slightly modified version of Amanda Viana’s talk at Alain Daniélou Foundation Forum “Transcultural Encounters 2019” on the subject of Physis and Antiphysis in Religion. It is also representative of Alain Daniélou Foundation’s approach to the problem of “ecology”, not reduced to finding or creating new measures to extend the damage to the environment, but encompassing another attitude to life to be learned from cultures that have been neglected, persecuted and destroyed for centuries.

Nukun Mana (Bari, Ushre, Bixe, Niwe, Hane, Shaba, Aiman) I Bubu
I Bubu bu Ta
Eskawa Ta Kayawe eee
Kayawe ke ke
Nukun Xina (Daue, Kana, Dauan, Nixi, Shuru, Deushku, Epakushipa) I Bubu
I Bubu bu Ta
Eskawa Ta Kayawe eee
Kayawe ke ke1

This is a healing song of the Huni Kuins, one of the many indigenous peoples of the Amazonian forest. It is a prayer addressed to the forces of Nature, used in sacred ceremonies for participants to be cured and made capable of receiving their teachings. In this song, the Huni Kuins invoke the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, the water, the day, the night and all beings within the cosmic setting. They also invoke the thoughts, the medicines, the signs, the songs, the tea of the forest (Nixi Pae, the living school), the tobacco of the Pajés (spiritual leaders), rapé [snuff-tobacco] and the Great Spirit).2
This song is one tiny example of a whole context, but it shows clearly enough the role of Nature in the religious experience of these Amazonian forest people. The purpose of my essay is to open a discussion about some anthropological models that sought to understand and make accessible to us the indigenous peoples’ relationship with Nature, including the religious sphere which has lately become so attractive to Europeans. For this purpose I shall focus especially on one model, which is that of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. This essay is divided into four parts: ¹. The value of Nature in the religions of the city and in the religions of nature. ². The relationship of primitive societies with Nature according to mainstream anthropological theories. ³. The perspectivistic view of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian forest, and ⁴. Davi Kopenawa: the voice of the Xapiris.
It should be borne in mind that when I speak of “primitive” societies or cultures, the word “primitive” always appears in inverted commas to indicate the point of view of anthropologists who believed in the superiority of Western modern culture (complex and developed) over local forms of tradition (simple and underdeveloped) and my radical distance from that point of view.

The Value of Nature in the Religions of the City and in the Religions of Nature

From a philosophical point of view, we could say that the basis of all religious experience is a human attempt to reconnect with the source of Life. This aspect is evident in polytheistic and monotheistic religions. A very pertinent question is whether, in the context of a religious experience, Nature is considered the source of Life (religion of immanence) or whether Nature appears as the product of the source of Life or God (religion of transcendence). Alain Daniélou expressed an interesting point of view on this subject in his book Shiva and Dionysus:³ while religions of nature define human beings as part of a whole (the whole of Nature), religions of the city place human beings in a position of dominance over Nature.³ The example of the Jewish-Christian tradition is not the only one, but it is quite clear: homo imago Dei. Religions of Nature are based on an immediate relationship with Nature and constitute a network of interactions with plants, animals, mountains, rivers, etc. in which Nature is regarded as something that is ultimately a mystery and with which humans have an essential connexion with life itself. Religions of the city established an unbridgeable distance from Nature.⁴ For Alain Daniélou there is a very close connexion between religions of the city and monotheism. For the religions of the city, Nature is excluded from the sphere of the sacred, since the way to God (as a radically transcendent being) must surpass the determinations of time and space (and therefore the fact of imperfection and mortality) that constitute the sphere of nature as such. In religions of Nature, the role of ritual with its manipulation of natural elements and forces is decisive; because of its sacred status, Nature cannot be reduced to a mere instrument and cannot be objectified in any way. In the religions of the city, the sphere of the sacred is transferred to books, institutions and moral prescriptions with metaphysical value. Humans are considered superior to all other natural beings, establishing a clear pattern of dominance over Nature itself. We can see the consequences of this position in the anthropocentric conception that dominates the Western world (and a large part of the globe) today. Daniélou’s position towards the religions of the city is radically negative: they are for him an abstract human projection and therefore a source of alienation.⁶ In Shiva and Dionysus, he takes a clear stand for the religions of Nature and makes a plea for their revival in the modern Western world, since (according to him) a concrete relationship with Nature is the basis for all religious experience. In what sense is this relationship plausible?

The relationship of “primitive peoples” with Nature in the light of Anthropology

One of the ways of considering the relationship with Nature in the religious sphere is to look at the testimonies of anthropology and ethnology of religion in the West. In this sense, the work of authors like Edward Burnett Tylor⁷, James George Frazer⁸, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl9, David Émile Durkheim¹⁰, Claude Lévi-Strauss¹¹, Philippe Descola¹² and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro¹³ are worthy of attention and consideration. From the perspective of the history of ideas, these authors provide models to explain the relationship between nature and religion in what were long termed “primitive cultures”. I shall summarize their results using the following categories – some of which are well known: animism, totemism and perspectivism.

Indigenous thought is based on a science of Nature and postulates a unity of soul and a diversity of bodies between humans and non-humans

Early researches on the religions of Nature in indigenous societies were based on an evolutionist model, of which Tylor and Frazer are the main representatives. On the basis of missionary and colonial documents as well as voyage reports, these authors defined indigenous peoples as primitive people because they were regarded as the first stage in the development of the human spirit. Their animistic view of Nature was taken as evidence for such an affirmation. Animism, as the word indicates, was, in the eyes of these anthropologists, the belief in Nature as souled or animated, and the related attitude was explained as human perception of a threatening power of Nature that forces human beings to different magical practices to channel and control that power. In this sense, magic was considered an anticipation of science, and the main difference between them was the degree of abstraction. In his book Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor considers monotheism (the belief in one god) the highest stage in the development of religion, whereas Frazer, in his monumental treatise The Golden Bough (1890), classifies magic among the most underdeveloped social practices – the highest one being science.¹⁴ Science is also presented as the best possible human relationship with Nature, since humans enter the sphere of “truth” with regard to the environment that they seek to know. For Tylor and Frazer, the concrete relationship of “primitive cultures” with Nature is evidence of their lack of development, among other things because the animistic and magic view is radically opposed to logical thought. In other words: “primitives” are like children, they have not reached the point at which logical thought can be exercised and they are therefore incapable of it.

Mapu Huni Kuin, a young healer and politically engaged representative of the Huni Kuin tribe in Amazonas.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl opposed that view¹⁵. In his book La mentalité primitive (1922), he affirms that “primitive” peoples are not underdeveloped with regard to logic, since their thought is pre-logic¹⁶, which means that it is not made of abstract definitions and concepts, but of a primordial affectiveness elaborating on collective experiences¹⁷ and also of a mystical participation¹⁸. Lévy-Bruhl considers that pre-logic thought is fundamentally synthetic, that is, oriented towards the unity of a whole. This synthetic thought integrates all kinds of contradictions and oppositions, for which reason “primitive” peoples can participate in natural and supernatural settings (as rites and myths clearly show) without any difficulty, and this is part of their daily life.
In the context of the early anthropology of religion, Émile Durkheim’s book Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) appears as a valuable contribution to an understanding of the relationship between religion and nature in primitive cultures. Durkheim’s purpose is to reach the ground-level of (social) religious life by isolating its elementary form. For the first time in the history of the anthropology of religion, a systematic categorization is put forward for discussion. The result of his enterprise is twofold: a functionalistic view of religion (religion is not a way of explaining the world, as Frazer thought, but a social function), and the conviction that totemism, that is, the religion of a clan worshipping a totem, is the most elementary form of religion. We must not forget that his research was based on ethnographic material about the Aranda, an indigenous clan-system of central Australia.
Durkheim’s starting point is religion as a social structure, that is, religion as an institution mediating the collective representations of a society. That religion has a mediating function means, in Durkheim’s view, that it contributes to an internalization of collective representations in the mind and body of each member of that society. Not only are beliefs and rites relevant for his theory of religion, but also the distinction between the sacred and the profane, since sacred things are the object of religion, that is, things set apart and forbidden.¹⁹
Durkheim affirms, against other theoreticians of religion such as Edward Tylor and Friedrich Max Müller, that neither animism (as the belief in a souled Nature) nor naturism (as the belief in supernatural powers of Nature) is the most elementary form of religion, since such models do not account for religion as a system of convictions and practices. It is the clan-organisation that provides clear elements accounting for a social structure²⁰. The totem (associated with an animal or a plant) is the link between individuals and a social system, and can therefore be said to constitute a social group²¹. As stated above, jumping from concrete observations of clan-organization to a universal structure in dealing with religion cannot be taken for granted in Durkheim’s theory.
One of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s great contributions to the ethnology of religion can be found in his book La pensée sauvage (1962). His starting point is that indigenous societies have “savage thought”, meaning a type of thinking oriented towards a whole with the help of complementary dichotomies²². “Savage thought” is therefore a kind of bricolage where rationality and irrationality are combined and everything (nature and culture) is considered part of an overall totality²³. For Lévi-Strauss, totemism can work as a model for understanding the relationship between nature and religion in indigenous societies; however, it is neither an autonomous institution nor a relationship between a clan and a totem. It is rather a combination of two units, a natural and a social, which in turn carry differences in themselves ²⁴. The most important aspect of totemism is the structuring or bridging over of discontinuities²⁵.
With the ontological turn in French anthropology towards the end of the XX century, research on what had been called “primitive cultures” went through a decisive transformation. Philippe Descola is perhaps the most important representative of this movement. After dealing with former theories of anthropology and carrying out ethnographical work among the indigenous tribe of the Achuar in Ecuador, he developed a model of four ontologies with a re-interpretation of several classical terms in previous ethnological theories: 1. Animism, 2. Totemism, 3. Analogism and 4. Naturalism. Descola defines each of these ontologies in terms of a central problem: how humans think and experience the continuities and discontinuities between themselves and other beings. In this sense, he defines animism as the ontology of Amazonian tribes, an ontology that postulates a continuity of interiority between human and non-human beings²⁶. Whatever belongs to nature, especially plants and animals, has an interiority of its own, just like human beings. This means that nature in the form we know it does not exist, and that culture (as a complex activity of the spirit) includes the domain of the non-human, thus forming a kind of (spiritual) continuum. Discontinuities are to be found in physicality. If we look closer into Descola’s exposition of animism, we realize that it is the exact opposite of the ontology he associates with modern Western thought: naturalism. Or in other words: naturalism is, in Descola’s conception, a historical inversion of animism, since it postulates a discontinuity between humans and non-humans as to interiority (neither plants nor animals have soul or spirit) and a continuity as to physicality (human beings are also part of nature, as their bodies show)²⁷. With this characterization, it becomes clear that naturalist ontology is convinced of a superiority of human beings over other species, since no natural species shows the complexity of human interiority (ego-consciousness, cognitive faculties, scientific-technical knowledge and cultural development).²⁸ Totemism, for its part, differs from Durkheim’s and Lévi-Strauss’ classifications. According to Descola, humans and nature are defined as an organic whole in Australian totemistic systems, but the key issue is the relationship between entity (or individual) and class (or group associated to a specific totem), which is established by means of common aspects ultimately related to the totem itself. Or even more precisely: The totem is defined by means of the feature and not vice versa, which means that a continuity of features is established joining humans and non-humans according to a specific criterion. ²⁹
While animism and naturalism can be regarded as a dichotomic polarity in their dealing with continuities and discontinuities, totemism points to a symmetric scheme constituted by a continuity of physicality and interiority (if a clan is related to a serpent, the serpent won’t be seen as alien to the humans associated with it, in either their external or internal aspects!). An oppositional-complementary scheme to totemism should therefore be a world configuration in which the aspects of radically different entities (from the point of view of both physicality and interiority) can be brought together, which is precisely analogism³⁰. The analogical ontology is an inventory of correspondences (and oppositions) among totally different entities without observable physical or spiritual determination for the establishment of such correspondences (and oppositions).
Descola’s proposal of four different ontologies seeks to do justice to natural life and cultural diversity (one could also indistinctly say, if we take his pluralism seriously, “cultural life” and “natural diversity”) beyond received opinions and ideas, focusing reflection on how continuities and discontinuities between humans and non-humans in different contexts of life-configuration are dealt with³¹.

The perspectivistic view of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian forest

At this point I come to an author I would like to focus on: Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Viveiros de Castro developed a philosophical model of the cosmovision of the indigenous peoples of the Amazonian forest, called “perspectivism”. His starting point is the following: indigenous thought is based on a science of Nature and postulates a unity of soul and a diversity of bodies between humans and non-humans.³² Here the scholarly voice of ethnology recognizes an instance of knowledge independent of the rational (instrumental or conceptual) elaboration of humans as a challenge to understand forms of interaction alien to what the Western mind deems objective and universal.

As opposed to Western theories, which transform things into objects in order to gain knowledge, the operation of forest shamans is a radical process of subjectivation.

Viveiros de Castro is convinced that, for indigenous people, everything belonging to Nature is potentially perspectivistic. Plants, animals, spirits, etc. have the same kind of soul, or in other words: humans and non-humans have the same kind of socio-cultural relationships.³³ But the way in which we (humans) see non-humans is totally different from the way in which non-humans perceive us. Non-humans see humans as non-humans and see themselves as fundamentally human, that is, capable of producing a culture of their own. A jaguar, for example, sees a human being as an animal, that is, as prey or predator. ³⁴ What we (humans) see as Nature is culture for non-humans. Viveiros de Castro operates thus with a double inversion: he transforms nature into culture and at the same time inserts the perspective of non-humans as a specificity of this culture. He does not even hesitate to give examples like: what for us is blood, for jaguars is beer.³⁵ Viveiros de Castro explains that non-humans see themselves as human because humans perceive themselves as human, whereas they regard plants and animals as non-human.³⁶ This should ultimately make it clear that perspectivism de-centralizes the human factor, but the apparent extreme of anthropomorphic inversion is not a mere provocation. It aims at showing the complexity of a view renouncing anthropocentric reductionism.
What is the meaning of “being human”? Being human in the thought of Viveiros de Castro is having intentionality, and intentionality has ontological potential. Intentionality is essentially related to the position of humans as prey or predator –which gives rise to many perspectives.³⁷ Quite unlike the modern Western standpoint, which creates objects out of perspectives, the perspectives of indigenous cultures create subjects that are never fixed or self-evident.³⁸ Perspectives are, for indigenous peoples, related to situations and crystallize themselves as relationships between different subjects.³⁹ Perspective has in this sense nothing to do with representation, nor can it be defined as a mere concept.⁴⁰ It is a standpoint that belongs to the body. It is related to the power of the soul (as continuum between humans and non-humans), but it multiplies because of the diversities of bodies (among and between humans and non-humans). ⁴¹
That is also why Shamanism plays a decisive role among indigenous peoples. As opposed to Western theories, which transform things into objects in order to gain knowledge, the operation of forest shamans is a radical process of subjectivation. The shaman must adopt the perspective of the other and transform himself into the other in order to gain knowledge.⁴² Only shamans can see non-humans in their intrinsic human perspective, which is the condition of possibility of shamanic communication. The shaman can know that an animal is a man that has undergone a specific transformation; but in order to pierce the human-form of the animal, the shaman must be able to transform himself into an animal. Still further: since forest shamans can adopt many perspectives, they can steer relationships between humans and non-humans and extract teachings for their communities from what they have learned through other perspectives. ⁴³
To sum up, perspectivism can be defined as follows⁴⁴: 1. What unites humans and non-humans is subjectivity. 2. Non-humans see themselves as human and therefore possess subjective intentionality, the result of which is culture. 3. Non-humans see humans as non-human. 4. The phenomenological body of non-humans is a transformation concealing their true nature (a jaguar strips himself of his jaguar-clothes when he is among his peers)⁴⁵. 5. This transformation is not only a mythic narration, but part of the ordinary life of indigenous peoples (a shaman must adopt different perspectives if he wants to heal people). 6. Although indigenous people are convinced of the unity of souls and the diversity of bodies, there is (within their perspectivistic view) no fundamental dichotomy between them, which means that for them transcendence and immanence are part of the same reality. 7. Body transformation is a synonym of “perspective”⁴⁶.

If “Nature” is not heard, the heavens will fall down, that is, “Nature” will disappear. If “Nature” disappears, the only source of life (and therefore of religion) will be lost.

Davi Kopenawa: the voice of Xapiri.

In his book In welcher Welt leben? (2019)⁴⁷, Viveiros de Castro quotes a passage⁴⁸ from La chute du ciel, a book based on a long conversation between French ethnologist Albert Bruce and the well-known shaman from the Amazonian tribe of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa: “dreams of white men do not reach so far as ours; white men sleep a lot, but they don’t dream of anything but themselves”⁴⁹. From a certain perspective, this sentence not only translates the perspectivistic view of the Amazonian people but also formulates a critique of the Western perspective. White men (who for Viveiros de Castro epitomise the alienation of capitalist culture) can only dream of themselves because they are locked up in their own perspective. Either they don’t want to or cannot know other modalities of life. Or perhaps, still worse: they are fully convinced that their perspective is best because it is true, and therefore they must persuade or force others to adopt it. For Davi Kopenawa, the Yanomamis can dream of plants, animals and other beings because they are not locked up in themselves, which means that their thinking is not restricted to objectifying Nature.
Davi Kopenawa wanted to participate in a book-project with an ethnologist so that white people can open themselves to the perspective of the forest and hear the Xapiris: “I would like them to hear the voice of the xapiris, who tirelessly play, dancing on their resplendent mirrors”⁵⁰. In order to hear the Xapiris, one must adopt the perspective of “Nature”: one must attend the school of the forest. For the Yanomami-Shamans, yakoani-hi, an entheogen powder, is one of the main teachers of the forest, an intelligent plant that can make the voice of the Xapiri perceptible, since it is their food. Through yakoani-hi, shamans can enter the world of dreams and open themselves to the perspective of the other.⁵¹ In this way, they can heal and teach their fellow tribe-members how to live. If “Nature” is not heard, the heavens will fall down, that is, “Nature” will disappear. If “Nature” disappears, the only source of life (and therefore of religion) will be lost. What I called at the beginning of this essay the “religious” relationship of indigenous people with “Nature” is nothing other than the perspective of “Nature” itself. The role of religious experience in the lives of these indigenous peoples is essentially linked to the human possibilities of perceiving, adopting and opening themselves to the perspective of “Nature”.

The sacred fire, a natural element of great importance in Shamanic ceremonies related to purification, visionary insight and passage to other dimensions.

1. 1 Cf. also the following youtube video:
   https://youtu.be/j8ObcKIh_hk
2. Cf. the explanation of this healing prayer by Mapu, a young healer of the Huni Kuin people: https://youtu.be/1Nt13RMRT2Q.
3. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysius, transl. by K. Hurry, New York 1992.
4. Cf. Ibid., pp. 13-14: “Since the beginning of urban civilization, religious phenomena among sedentary peoples have been manifested and established in two opposed or contradictory forms. The first is tied to the world of nature, the second to the organization of communal city life. […]Dharma is a word which means ‘natural law’. To conform to what one is by birth, by nature, by one’s natural disposition. Each must play, as best he can, his assigned role in the great theatre of creation. […]The other form of religion is the religion of the city, the society of mankind, which claims to impose divine sanctions on social conventions. It exalts human laws as sacred enactments. It serves as an excuse for the ambitions of men who seek dominion over the natural world and make use of it, claming for themselves a unique position to the detriment of other species”.
5. Cf. Ibid., pp. 14-15: “Due to a strange and evil perversion of values […]man has renounced his role in the universal order embracing all forms of being or life. […]The danger of monotheism is that it succeeds in reducing the divine to the image of man, an appropriation of God to the service of the ‘chosen’ race. This is contrary to true religion, since it serves as an excuse for subjecting the divine work to man’s ambition”.
6. Cf. Ibid., pp. 16: “[Religion of Nature]does not involve simply a recognition of world harmony, but also an active participation in an experience which surpasses and upsets the order of material life. […]Communion with Nature and with the gods thus becomes possible, whilst the calculations and frustrations imposed by city religions isolate the world of men from the rest of creation”.
7. Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, London 1871.
8. George Frazer, The Golden Bough, New York/London 1890 (first edition in 2 volumes), 1900 (second edition in 6 volumes), 1907–1915 (third edition in 12 volumes).
9.  Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive, Paris 1922; L’âme primitive, Paris 1927; L’Expérience Mystique et les Symboles chez les Primitifs, Paris 1938.
10.  Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Paris 1912.
11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Paris 1962; Le Totémisme aujourd’ hui, Paris 1962 (all works of Lévi-Strauss in this essay are quoted after the Pléiade edition: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Œuvres, Paris 2008).
12.  Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris 2007 (first edition 2005); La composition des mondes. Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier, Paris 2014. Cf. his introduction to Les Natures en question. (Colloque Annuel du Collège de France), ed. by Philippe Descola, Paris 2018, pp. 8-16 as well as his contribution to the same volume entitled “De la Nature universelle aux natures singulières: quelles leçons pour l’analyse des cultures?” (Ibid., pp. 121-136). Cf. also the very didactic summary of ontological pluralism and its ecological potential in: Philippe Descola, Une écologie des relations, Paris 2019.
13. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Encontros, Rio de Janeiro 2008; Cannibal Metaphysics. For a post-structural anthropology, translated and edited by Peter Skafish, Minneapolis 2014; The relative native. Essays on indigenous conceptual worlds, Chicago 2015.
14. Cf. Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought, New York 1981, pp. 136-138 and p. 141. Cf. Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Chicago/London 2017, p. 144–145.
15. Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive, pp. 76 and 80.
16. Lévy-Bruhl, Ibid., pp. 120-121 and 172.
17. Lévy-Bruhl, Ibid., p. 121. Cf. the following reflection that summarizes Lévy-Bruhl’s position: “The general notion of experience [in Western culture]is mainly cognitive. It cannot be applied to the experience of primitives, which is mainly affective” (L’expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs, p. 5).
18. Cf. Lévy-Bruhl, Ibid., pp. 84, 86-87 and 88.
19.  Cf. Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, pp. 51 and 55.
20. Cf. Durkheim, Ibid., p. 125.
21. Cf. Durkheim, Ibid., p. 142 and 223.
22. Cf. Lévi- Strauss, La pensée sauvage, in: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Œuvres, pp. 568-569 and 571,
23. Cf. Lévi-Strauss, Ibid., pp. 576 and 578.
24. Cf. Lévi-Strauss, Ibid., pp. 642-643.
25. Cf. Lévi-Strauss, Ibid., pp.680-681.
26. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, p.183.
27. Cf. Descola, Ibid., p. 241
28. Cf. Descola, Ibid., p. 243.
29. Cf. Descola, Ibid., p. 222.
30. Cf. Descola, Ibid., p. 280.
31. Descola, Une écologie des relations, pp. 46-47.
32. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, p. 51 and 52.
33. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 56.
34. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 56.
35. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 57. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, The relative native, p. 251.
36. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, p. 69.
37. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 58. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, The relative native, p. 244.
38. Viveiros de Castro, The relative native, pp. 244 and 245.
39. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 204.
40. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 225
41. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., pp. 256 and 268. See also Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, p. 52.
42.  Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, p. 60.
43. Cf. Ibid., p. 60. Cf. also Viveiros de Castro, The relative native, pp. 209 and 291.
44. Cf. Viveiros de Castro, Ibid., p. 229.
45. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, p. 57.
46.  Viveiros de Castro, The relative native, p. 268.
47.  Déborah Danowski/ Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In welcher Welt leben? (Há um mundo por vir?: Ensaio sobre os medos e os fins). Berlin 2019.
48. Cf. Ibid., p. 93.
49. Cf. Davi Kopenawa : “Les Blancs, eux, ne rêvent pas aussi loin que nous. Ils dorment beaucoup mais ne rêvent que d’eux-mêmes” (Davi Kopenawa/ Bruce Albert. La chute du ciel. Paroles d’un chaman Yanomami. Paris 2010, p. 518).
50. Kopenawa/Albert, Ibid., p. 43: “je voudrais leur faire écouter la voix des xapiri qui y jouent sans relâche en dansant sur leur miroirs resplendissants”.
51. Cf. Kopenawa/Albert, Ibid., p. 72.