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Cannibal Metaphysics
The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its \"ontological turn,\" offers a vision of anthropology as \"the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.\" After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours-in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own-he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such \"other\" metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound,Cannibal Metaphysicsis one of the chief works marking anthropology's current return to the theoretical center stage.
eBook
We are all cannibals and other essays
On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. \"Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism,\" said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context.
These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between \"complex\" and \"primitive\" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.
eBook
From empire to encounter: The evolution of American anthropological writing in Morocco
This article traces the transformation of modern American anthropology through its Moroccan field, examining the discipline’s passage from colonial representation to dialogical encounter. Emerging from anthropology’s postwar crisis of conscience, the interpretive and literary turns displaced claims to objectivity with reflexivity and recast fieldwork as a moral and relational practice. Rather than presenting this shift as a linear disciplinary advance, the article situates it within enduring structures of coloniality, where epistemic authority, voice, and representation remained deeply contested. While Clifford Geertz and Paul Rabinow provided key theoretical frameworks for this reorientation, the analysis centers on six American ethnographers whose Moroccan works most vividly enacted it in practice: Dale F. Eickelman, Vincent Crapanzano, Kevin Dwyer, Henry Munson, Daisy Hilse Dwyer, and Deborah A. Kapchan. Their ethnographies—ranging from social biography and psychological portraiture to oral history, dialogical exchange, and gendered performance—redefined fieldwork as an art of listening, negotiation, and co-creation. Through close textual and theoretical reading of these works, the article treats their monographs as both ethnographic experiments and disciplinary interventions, situating them within the broader epistemological debates that reshaped twentieth-century American anthropology. By reading Morocco as both an ethnographic site and a crucible of theoretical renewal, the article shows how encounter itself became a mode of interpretation. At the same time, it argues that dialogical and ethical anthropology did not mark a clean rupture from colonial epistemologies, but rather a critical reworking of their legacies within new textual, ethical, and institutional frameworks. Collectively, these case studies reveal how anthropology’s moral and narrative reconfiguration unfolded from empire to encounter, culminating in an ethics of voice that reshaped what it means to write—and to know—the Other.
Journal Article
The rituals and customs of the Spring Festival and the thinking structure of ancient Chinese people
On December 4, 2024, the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) was officially inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, signifying international recognition of its cultural value. As the most grand, important, and ceremonious traditional festival in China, the Spring Festival embodies the values, ethics, thinking patterns, behavioral norms, and aesthetic tastes of the Chinese nation, serving as a vital carrier of its culture. This study employs structural analysis to interpret how the conceptual origins of “Yuandan” (Chinese New Year’s Day, now celebrated as the Spring Festival), the series of related folk activities, and the symbolic meanings of traditional Chinese New Year foods together demonstrate the dualistic and dynamic thinking structure centered on “the harmony of Yin and Yang.” Furthermore, by examining sacrificial customs during the Spring Festival such as ancestor worship, deity veneration, and the welcoming of the Wulu Shen (Five-Road Wealth Deities), this study reveals the triadic (Sancai) and pentadic (Wuxing) thinking patterns in ancient Chinese thought. The author posits that these underlying cognitive frameworks and core concepts are manifested across diverse cultural phenomena, including Spring Festival rituals and customs. Therefore, a profound understanding of traditional Chinese culture requires grasping these foundational cognitive frameworks and conceptual cores, which in turn enables a more comprehensive interpretation of the culture and its people.
Journal Article
A way out of the predicament of social sciences in the 20th century: a dialogue with Clifford Geertz’s essay “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture”(Part II)
Clifford Geertz’s essay, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” comprehensively explored the basic problems encountered in the theoretical efforts of 20th century social sciences. As a response to his reflection, this paper tries to reveal the methodological roots of the predicament of interpretive anthropology and all social sciences, through an epistemological analysis of social science. In addition, with the Theory of Belief as an analytical tool, it also tries to offer a solution to one of the classic predicaments in social sciences: “what is ethnography”.
Journal Article
Tim Ingold and Object-Oriented Anthropology
Tim Ingold, while extending the radical undertaking of vitalism, with its Nietzschean matrix, puts the decentering undertaken by this philosophical tradition on a more solid foundation, opening up a new space of interobjective relations. Instead of an epistemic plunge into human categories, the goal is to move towards a broader ontological space, including other sites of meaning, such as chairs, spirits, animals, baskets, and many others. Unlike more classical anthropology, with its well-delimited
Anthropos
as an inevitable transcendental horizon, Ingold suggests a world where humans are not protagonists, but rather provisional negotiators within a large mesh of subjectless experiences. The model proposed in this essay distances itself from the plane of (neo)-Kantian speculation, converting its contours into something less orthodox by making room for a possible Object-Oriented Anthropology (O.O.A).
Journal Article