Reanimating Animism: An Interview with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Abstract

This interview seeks to elucidate Viveiros de Castro’s understanding of animism as an alternative to both deterministic utilitarianism and modern universals that disregard non-Western ontologies. In his answers to my questions, he clarifies the ‘ontological turn’ and the animistic ontology that is his field of expertise, and brings to light the ways this animist ontology develops a multinatural anthropomorphism instead of a multicultural anthropocentrism. By means of the ‘ontological turn’, philosophical anthropology can thus reinvent metaphysics, a ‘meta or trans-metaphysics’, in order to think alterity and escape from what Viveiros de Castro calls our ‘narcissistic intellectual tradition’. We can therefore use his work to open up interdisciplinary strategies to reinvent the environmental humanities today and incarnate a new philosophy of nature, or ‘geophilosophy’, as Viveiros de Castro calls it, that may be able to respond to the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene Age in new and productive ways.