Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (2015)

21 June 2019, dusan

“This volume is the first to collect the most influential essays and lectures of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.”

Rounded out with new English translations of previous works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought—philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a characteristic afterword by Roy Wagner, elucidating Viveiros de Castro’s influence and engaging with his arguments, The Relative Native further cements Viveiros de Castro’s position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.”

Afterword by Roy Wagner
Publisher HAU Books, Chicago, 2015
Open access
ISBN 9780990505037, 0990505030
vi+355 pages

Review: Eugene N. Anderson (Ethnobiology Letters, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli: Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016)

1 January 2018, dusan

“In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2016
ISBN 9780822362111, 0822362112
xii+218 pages

Interview with author: Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff (Theory, Culture & Society, 2017).

Reviews: Shela Sheikh (Avery Review, 2017), Robin Wright (Society+Space, 2017), Eve Vincent (Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2017), Timothy Neale (Australian Journal of Anthropology, 2017), Andrea Muehlebach (Anthropological Quarterly, 2018), Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Critical Inquiry, 2018), Elizabeth R Johnson, Garnet Kindervater, Zoe Todd, Kathryn Yusoff, Keith Woodward (with author’s response, EPC: Politics and Space, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Anselm Franke, Sabine Folie (eds.): Animismus: Moderne hinter den Spiegeln / Animism: Modernity through the Looking Glass (2011) [DE/EN]

15 December 2016, dusan

Animism. Modernity through the Looking Glass takes its cue from the ethnological concept of animism that emerged in the nineteenth century in the context of colonialism in search of a “primal” religion. The term was applied to cultures that view nature and objects as having a soul and a life of their own. This concept borrowed from ethnology also plays a key role in psychoanalysis, where it denotes a mental state in which the inner and outer worlds are not distinct from each other.

The catalogue brings together artworks, documents, and artifacts to create an essayistic visual space that points to the need for a decolonialization and revision of this traditional understanding of animism. The show juxtaposes historical materials such as early attempts to animate technologically reproduced images with contemporary works addressing the line between life and non-life.”

With essays by Sabine Folie, Anselm Franke, Isabelle Stengers, and conversation with Elisabeth von Samsonow by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato.

Publisher Generali Foundation, Vienna, and Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2011
ISBN 9783863350703
229 pages
via cblip

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)