Losing sight

Abstract This paper examines the role of translation within Amerindian perspectivism. Drawing on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s claim for an indigenous alter-anthropology informed by perspectivism, multinaturalism, and cannibal alterity, it explores the relationship between anthropology, anthropophagy, and translation. The first part critically revisits the modernist concept of anthropophagy in Brazil; the second part analyzes translation in Amerindian perspectivism, distinguishing it from shamanism; the third part develops a poetics and ethics of translation in light of perspectival thought. The paper asks how an ethics of translation shaped by perspectivism might be conceived and what an epistemology of alterity in translation might entail. By intertwining perspectivism, anthropophagy, and translation, it conceptualizes the encounters with alterity as a process of mutual metamorphosis between self and Other and proposes an ethics of translation rooted in relationality and difference that transcends boundaries between humans and nonhumans.