Putting Perspectivism in Perspective: An Assessment of the Commitment of Cosmological Perspectivism and Multinaturalism to the Decolonization of Anthropology

The legacies of colonialism in anthropology have yet to be scrubbed from the discipline, even after decades of calls to actualize a "decolonized" anthropology. Why is this? The ontological turn theorists posit that decolonial anthropologists have heretofore not dug deep enough—what if Western ontological assumptions of what is and what can be are hindering anthropologists from fully understanding their ontologically-other informants? Cosmological perspectivism and multinaturalism are two interlocking approaches developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. They describe human/nonhuman relationalities in Amerindian communities that consistently evade capture by our conceptual frameworks like the nature/culture divide and cultural relativism. For perspectivists, it is not enough to classify these communities as belonging to a different culture—rather anthropologists must begin to think in terms of different ontologies or worlds. In this thesis, I outline the elements of perspectivism and multinaturalism and discuss the merits of perspectivism's usage in decolonizing anthropology such as its radical reflexivity and imaginary potential, and I also discuss where perspectivism falls short in this goal such as its negligence in solving structural inequalities within academic anthropology and its failure to account for material and political forces which shape ontologies. I look at Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, an ethnography of the Runa and more-than-humans of Ecuador's Upper Napo, as a case study of perspectivist anthropology in practice. I close with a discussion of political ontology, an approach within the ontological turn with a greater focus on accounting for cross-ontological conflict. I conclude that whatever merits perspectivism otherwise has, the requirements for full decolonization transcend what perspectivism on its own is capable of.