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# Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism

## Details

**Authors** Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

**Year** 1998

**Publisher** Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Anthropology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157) 
10.2307/3034157

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To synthesize Amazonian ethnographic material into an explicit account of the indigenous cosmological principle later called "perspectivism," and to use it to re-examine the nature/culture distinction.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

A comparative ethnographic corpus drawn from multiple lowland South American (Amazonian) indigenous societies.

### How they did it (methods)

Comparative ethnographic and theoretical synthesis identifying a recurring cosmological structure across Amazonian belief systems.

### What they found (results)

Amazonian ethnographic sources consistently describe non-human beings, such as jaguars and vultures, as perceiving themselves as human while perceiving the same referents differently according to species: jaguars are said to see blood as manioc beer, and vultures to see maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish.

## Commentary

### In short

The finding turns on Perspectives: what a shared referent is taken to be depends entirely on the bodily and species vantage point of the observer, so the same object carries a different identity purely as a function of who is perceiving it.

**Patterns it shows** P

**Added** 2026-09-26

**How to cite this** Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.