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ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i'm fucking dazzled. this is one of the funnest books i've read in a very long time! eduardo viveiros de castro imagines a purely fugitive nay monstrous nay cthonic disequalibriated structural agency and i totally ate it up. somehow he probes and suggests the possibility of an alternative presence beyond or outside of both presence and absence without going through the hegel/heidegger/derrida trifecta of recognition/presence impasse. i've been deeply jilted and guilted by my preoccupation with anthropology and it is in an invaginative (counter-)hegelian move in and through anthropology that castro finds something entirely newly and full of vitality. or at least right now i really really think it is! to be honest the deleuzians i seem to be stuck reading have been driving me batty, and i seem to keep coming back to the same set of ideas regarding a molar and distributed generalized subjectivity; but this is the closest to an inkling outside human recognition. or other kinds of humans that are not. or something! there could be so much more built on these amerindian and tupe and arawete modes of alternate recognitions, demonic representations outside representation. i really hope i'm not delusional. definitely pride of place in the library yo
nathansnook's review against another edition
3.0
READING VLOG
For those coming into this pre-athropology 101, it requires a lot of pre-reading to get the most out of the text (from Levi-Strauss, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), although I feel it would be much better to digest through a seminar than anything else (which, apparently, it was in its original French).
From what I gathered as a casual, usually literary-fiction reader, it's about decolonizing the current viewpoint in how we look at indigenous people and thought. We need to look at myth in a new way. Let's call this "perspectivism," where we should see the world as human, not as us as humans existing in the world. This means that we should re-link with the world not with us human beings essentially, but to the core of the world, a single humanity. For example, instead of seeing the wolf as animal (something lesser and savage) we should see it how it sees us, as another species interacting with the world. Another example, the wolf, when it kills, does not drink blood from another animal in the literary sense that it is a vicious and animalistic beast, but it is drinking the blood as if it is beer, a luxurious elixir, a gift from the earth itself.
One thing I also found interesting was the notion from an indigenous group, where they saw people as a point of view versus seeing a person having a point of view. With this, people as a collective are like a singular gem, with many sides, reflections and refractions interacting with a simple bounce of light.
Zooming out of the anthropological field, I think this work is important in how we should be interacting with one another, as a general public. We like to complain that the world is incredibly divided. Okay, so what? What part are you going to play in being able to wipe the slate clean so that we can come back together, as whole? In the ways the book explores these different ways in destablizing the apparatus, we do not simply put ourselves in each other's shoes. Because to think everyone even has shoes or can afford shoes already comes with the thick lenses of privelege (status of wealth/social), and so we should begin with the sole and learn how to get to the soul within each other. Because when the first man stepped out of Aristotle's cave, his foot touched light, bare, cold and full of splendor.
p/s: The foreword written by Peter Skafish was tedious, filled with useless, performative jargon that only bogs the reader down with so much disinterest that I can't even think how students of his must feel (if he ever teaches, which, I hope, he never does) at UC Berkeley. No tea, no shade, just hire an editor to look over your work.
For those coming into this pre-athropology 101, it requires a lot of pre-reading to get the most out of the text (from Levi-Strauss, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), although I feel it would be much better to digest through a seminar than anything else (which, apparently, it was in its original French).
From what I gathered as a casual, usually literary-fiction reader, it's about decolonizing the current viewpoint in how we look at indigenous people and thought. We need to look at myth in a new way. Let's call this "perspectivism," where we should see the world as human, not as us as humans existing in the world. This means that we should re-link with the world not with us human beings essentially, but to the core of the world, a single humanity. For example, instead of seeing the wolf as animal (something lesser and savage) we should see it how it sees us, as another species interacting with the world. Another example, the wolf, when it kills, does not drink blood from another animal in the literary sense that it is a vicious and animalistic beast, but it is drinking the blood as if it is beer, a luxurious elixir, a gift from the earth itself.
One thing I also found interesting was the notion from an indigenous group, where they saw people as a point of view versus seeing a person having a point of view. With this, people as a collective are like a singular gem, with many sides, reflections and refractions interacting with a simple bounce of light.
Zooming out of the anthropological field, I think this work is important in how we should be interacting with one another, as a general public. We like to complain that the world is incredibly divided. Okay, so what? What part are you going to play in being able to wipe the slate clean so that we can come back together, as whole? In the ways the book explores these different ways in destablizing the apparatus, we do not simply put ourselves in each other's shoes. Because to think everyone even has shoes or can afford shoes already comes with the thick lenses of privelege (status of wealth/social), and so we should begin with the sole and learn how to get to the soul within each other. Because when the first man stepped out of Aristotle's cave, his foot touched light, bare, cold and full of splendor.
p/s: The foreword written by Peter Skafish was tedious, filled with useless, performative jargon that only bogs the reader down with so much disinterest that I can't even think how students of his must feel (if he ever teaches, which, I hope, he never does) at UC Berkeley. No tea, no shade, just hire an editor to look over your work.
nathansnook's review
3.0
For those coming into this pre-athropology 101, it requires a lot of pre-reading to get the most out of the text (from Levi-Strauss, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), although I feel it would be much better to digest through a seminar than anything else (which, apparently, it was in its original French).
From what I gathered as a casual, usually literary-fiction reader, it's about decolonizing the current viewpoint in how we look at indigenous people and thought. We need to look at myth in a new way. Let's call this "perspectivism," where we should see the world as human, not as us as humans existing in the world. This means that we should re-link with the world not with us human beings essentially, but to the core of the world, a single humanity. For example, instead of seeing the wolf as animal (something lesser and savage) we should see it how it sees us, as another species interacting with the world. Another example, the wolf, when it kills, does not drink blood from another animal in the literary sense that it is a vicious and animalistic beast, but it is drinking the blood as if it is beer, a luxurious elixir, a gift from the earth itself.
One thing I also found interesting was the notion from an indigenous group, where they saw people as a point of view versus seeing a person having a point of view. With this, people as a collective are like a singular gem, with many sides, reflections and refractions interacting with a simple bounce of light.
Zooming out of the anthropological field, I think this work is important in how we should be interacting with one another, as a general public. We like to complain that the world is incredibly divided. Okay, so what? What part are you going to play in being able to wipe the slate clean so that we can come back together, as whole? In the ways the book explores these different ways in destablizing the apparatus, we do not simply put ourselves in each other's shoes. Because to think everyone even has shoes or can afford shoes already comes with the thick lenses of privelege (status of wealth/social), and so we should begin with the sole and learn how to get to the soul within each other. Because when the first man stepped out of Aristotle's cave, his foot touched light, bare, cold and full of splendor.
p/s: The foreword written by Peter Skafish was tedious, filled with useless, performative jargon that only bogs the reader down with so much disinterest that I can't even think how students of his must feel (if he ever teaches, which, I hope, he never does) at UC Berkeley. No tea, no shade, just hire an editor to look over your work.
From what I gathered as a casual, usually literary-fiction reader, it's about decolonizing the current viewpoint in how we look at indigenous people and thought. We need to look at myth in a new way. Let's call this "perspectivism," where we should see the world as human, not as us as humans existing in the world. This means that we should re-link with the world not with us human beings essentially, but to the core of the world, a single humanity. For example, instead of seeing the wolf as animal (something lesser and savage) we should see it how it sees us, as another species interacting with the world. Another example, the wolf, when it kills, does not drink blood from another animal in the literary sense that it is a vicious and animalistic beast, but it is drinking the blood as if it is beer, a luxurious elixir, a gift from the earth itself.
One thing I also found interesting was the notion from an indigenous group, where they saw people as a point of view versus seeing a person having a point of view. With this, people as a collective are like a singular gem, with many sides, reflections and refractions interacting with a simple bounce of light.
Zooming out of the anthropological field, I think this work is important in how we should be interacting with one another, as a general public. We like to complain that the world is incredibly divided. Okay, so what? What part are you going to play in being able to wipe the slate clean so that we can come back together, as whole? In the ways the book explores these different ways in destablizing the apparatus, we do not simply put ourselves in each other's shoes. Because to think everyone even has shoes or can afford shoes already comes with the thick lenses of privelege (status of wealth/social), and so we should begin with the sole and learn how to get to the soul within each other. Because when the first man stepped out of Aristotle's cave, his foot touched light, bare, cold and full of splendor.
p/s: The foreword written by Peter Skafish was tedious, filled with useless, performative jargon that only bogs the reader down with so much disinterest that I can't even think how students of his must feel (if he ever teaches, which, I hope, he never does) at UC Berkeley. No tea, no shade, just hire an editor to look over your work.
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