Women’s ‘exchange’ in Western and Amerindian societies: a feminist critique of perspectival anthropology

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has developed the concept of ‘perspectival anthropology’ to think philosophically with and through Amerindian cosmology. In this article, I argue that the epistemological roundness of this concept is, in actuality, a by-product of philosophical reification of Amerindian cosmological dynamics. This reification stems from distortive abstractions of specific societal structures, which rely on the silencing of two key phenomena: the fact that the central or unmarked perspective assumed in ‘perspectivism’ is that of men, and the fact that the valorisation of men’s perspective is enabled by the exchange and accumulation of women. By unearthing this exchange system that lies behind the cyclical valuation of males’ gaze, I do not seek to denounce the role of actual women in Amerindian societies. My central aim is to demonstrate that both perspectival anthropology’s depiction of Amerindian cosmology and what Viveiros de Castro calls ‘Western objectivist epistemology’ are made possible by the erasure of women’s capacity for transcendence.