Article published In: Translating Knowledge in, by and for Indigenous Communities: Practices of epistemic defiance
Edited by Christina Korak, Edson Krenak and Rafael Y. Schögler
[Translation in Society 5:1] 2026
► pp. 40–64

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Losing sight

Amerindian cosmovisions in translation

ORCiD logo with link | University of Vienna
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Vienna.

Published online: 5 May 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tris.25002.str
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Seeing otherwise
  • 2.Afterlives of anthropophagy
  • 3.Translations of alterity
  • 4.Towards a Poetics of Perspectivism
  • Notes
  • References
References (75)
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