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Amerindian anthropology and cultural psychology: Crossing boundaries and


meeting otherness' worlds
Danilo Silva Guimares
Culture Psychology 2011 17: 139
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X11398309
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Article

Amerindian anthropology
and cultural psychology:
Crossing boundaries
and meeting
otherness worlds

Culture & Psychology


17(2) 139157
! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X11398309
cap.sagepub.com

Danilo Silva Guimaraes


Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract
Addressing integrative possibilities between psychology and anthropology, this paper
aims to design conceptual linkages between semiotic-cultural constructivist psychology
and the anthropological theory of Amerindian perspectivism. From the psychological
view, it is the interdependence between the structural and processual dimensions of the
personal culture that makes parallels with Amerindian perspectivism fruitful. This
anthropological frame proposes an experiment with native conceptions, which I
argue similar to what Baldwin (1906) called sembling. Hence, it can be considered an
active imitation of otherness viewpoint in order to approach indigenous worlds. It is
supposed that this procedure leads to the emergence of new symbolic elements
configuring the cultural action field of each agency in interaction. It is proposed that
making-believe the Amerindian is convergent with the dialogic-hermeneutic approach
of semiotic-cultural constructivism. As a result of the present integrative effort, is
designed a meta-model that multiplies the genetic process of concrete symbolic objects.
Keywords
Amerindian perspectivism, dialogism, otherness, semiotic-cultural constructivism,
symbolic resources
The present work addresses an interdisciplinary dialogue between semiotic-cultural
constructivist psychology and the theory of Amerindian perspectivism, a contemporary approach in the eld of Americanist anthropology.
Semiotic-cultural constructivism, on one hand, focuses especially on the process of individual development, in which Iother interactions unfolding from, as

Corresponding author:
Danilo Silva Guimaraes, Instituto de Psicologia da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Av. Prof. Mello Moraes, 1721
Bloco F, Sala F-32 05508-030, Cidade Universitaria, Sao Paulo, SP, Brasil
Email: danilosg@usp.br

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Culture & Psychology 17(2)

well as forming, the cultural space have a prime role (Simao, 2003). In this process, the interlocutors quest for mutual understanding and sharing of their experiential meanings brings about a movement of decentration, from which some
novelties can emerge in their comprehension. Comprehension is here understood
in its two intertwined aspects: comprehension of the subject of the ongoing conversation, as well as of the relative position of each interlocutor in the conversation.
Amerindian perspectivism, on the other hand, is a label given to a contemporary
anthropological approach that has emerged in the core of a challenge faced by the
americanist ethnography, that is, the failure in comprehension brought forth by
cross-cultural comparisons among tribal groups in America, Africa, Asia, and
Oceania (cf. Overing Kaplan, 1977). Aiming to understand the American ethnic
groups in their distinctive particularities, Amerindian perspectivism proposes to
carry out an experiment with natives conceptions (cf. Viveiros de Castro, 2002).
It is proposed to the researcher thinking as if he or she was someone belonging to
the studied group, implying not just taking into account the native as subject, but
thinking what a subject can be according to natives points of view. As a consequence, a set of interrelated autochthonous ideas and practices relating to
Amerindians world views could be made intelligible.
Bringing anthropology to the core of theoretical and methodological debate in
cultural psychology is pertinent since the latter conceives that human development
occurs in an interwoven semiotic-cultural fabric, which constitutes an action eld
from the interaction between people and their environment. This emic-phenomenological approach concerns the immanent cultural experience (cf. Simao, 2008) in
which distinct conceptions of subjectivity and objectivity can be confronted, leading to the emergence of novelties.
The meanings of culture open possible ways for an interdisciplinary integrative
synthesis around the notion of perspective, involving anthropological and psychological theoretical frames. Integration of cultural and psychological discourses has
had a place in the history of psychology since the end of the 19th century (e.g.,
Wundt, Steinthal, & Lazarus version of Volkerpsychologie), and with the debate
on the cultural nature of personality during the 20th century (cf. Valsiner, 2004).
Valsiner argues that the rst two eorts failed to produce a new synthetic science.
Nevertheless, an experiment is currently being attempted in order to further an
interdisciplinary synthesis, looking particularly for approximations with anthropology and ethnology. Eorts are being made to avoid past failures, now focusing,
among other aspects, on the boundaries between individuals and society and novelties emergence in the so-called cultural eld (cf. Boesch, 1991, 1997, 2001;
Valsiner, 1999, 2001b, 2007a). Some of these ideas will be developed here.

Approaching an Amerindian cosmology: The case


of savage pigs
In 1996 the anthropologist Tania Stolze Lima published a paper where she proposed the theory of perspectivism in order to understand Amerindian cosmologies

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and practices. Her paper presents theoretical unfoldings on indigenous thinking


from exhaustive ethnological eld experiences with Juruna people between the
years of 1984 and 1990. Her propositions, in association with a paper of
Viveiros de Castro on the same issue, are considered pioneering in the eld of
the anthropological theory of Amerindian perspectivism. Lima (1996) proposed
that according to Juruna people, animals consider themselves as humans
(p. 26). The following excerpt of a Juruna myth gives a concrete notion of what
is implicated in this kind of armation:
There was a shaman who received in the settlement, during the vigil, the visitation of a
shaman-pig, with whom he smokes, drinks cauim and dances. The visitor arrived in
the company of all his folks, and, of course, just the shaman could see them. When
someone asked him to bring pigs [the hunter asking the Jurunas shaman], he used to
invite the shaman-pig to drink cauim and arrange the hunting. After entering in
trance, the hunter had to ask again: Bring pigs for me! Tame them for me!.
That is OK!, agreed the shaman. In these moments, respect or deference using
language were conditions for pigs reclaim. But, while all wise hunters armed,
My prey will be tamed!, a man nicknamed Kingsher-head lost his mind and
said: My prey will pull my pending testicle. The others advised him about the
necessity of taking care, because it is not a good idea to play with language at a
moment like that. Next day, they recommended Kingsher-head to stay at home in
order to avoid the pigs seeing him. He was cheeky and didnt follow the recommendations. At the end of hunting, his colleagues found him almost dead, with wrested
testicles and body pierced by the furious pigs tooth. He almost could not tell how he
was attacked. His soul departed with the survived pigs in the direction of the
Amazonas river. Many groups of pigs allied with them along the trip and
Kingsher-head looked very agreeable to his new companions, entertaining them all
the time. The shaman saw them during a dream and, according to the ancient people,
he narrated:
They went laughing.
Pigs are like humans,
They asked him:
Say the name of things for us!
What is it?
It is it.
They founded the vagina-honey.
Which is this honey?
It is vagina-honey.
They founded the swallow-honey.
Which is this honey?
That is the penis-honey.
And the pigs laughed,
So, is it honeyed?

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Penis is honeyed!
And the pigs laughed, ha ha ha.
And he departed with the pigs laughing
They asked him the name of animals, of honeys. . .
He answered,
They laughed,
So, is it honeyed?
Therefore, when a shaman is dreaming with pigs,
Or when he is inebriate,
We say: Dont tell bullshit! (Lima, 1996, pp. 2325).

What is a myth? From Amerindian understandings


to cultural psychology
According to Levi-Strauss and Eribon (1990), if we asked an Amerindian what is
a myth, the answer probably would be that it is [A] story of a moment
when humans and animals were not distinguished yet (p. 178, cf. also Viveiros
de Castro, 2006). Nevertheless, the mythological narrative does not concerns the
searching for historical correspondences in terms of chronological description of
events. For instance, shamans experiences, as dreams and inebriation, allow them
to access the original kind of experience characterized by the undistinguished
nature of animals and humans. This means that concomitant with the apparent
discontinuity of animals and humans, the mythical ow conceives a possibility of
non-dierentiation among types of beings. Hence, a myth is a narrative that talks
about a moment that is neither past nor future, but expresses a relational conguration among beings in the cosmos. Amerindian mythology proposes a way for
understanding the formation of meaningful structured social realities, which presents an intelligible distinction and classes of existential elements from the perspective of a group.
Myths are constantly rearmed in social meetings of each community. They are
told from generation to generation, leading to the production of inevitable variations. Levi-Strauss (1971) pointed out that each expression of a specic myth is
always a variation of a previous structure, implying that each community develops
itself in contact with a set of myth-stories, historically produced, forbidden or
transformed along successive variations. The dierential mythological set allows
the perception of cultural distinction among peoples, their beliefs, and their ways of
acting; however, it cannot be totally clear in many cases.
The symbolic action theory of the cultural psychologist Ernst Boesch
approaches and distances itself from the structural conception of myth as presented
by Levi-Strauss. They are close, because for both myth expresses cultural ways of
dwelling in the environment; however, they diverge in the sense that Boesch focuses
on personal and selective internalization of myths as the cornerstone of their transformation. For Boesch (1991, Lonner & Hayes, 2007), myths have a personal

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importance constraining possibilities of meaningful understanding of experiences.


They articulate existential themes, giving sense for human life without the necessity
of rational proof to be accepted. On the contrary, the epistemic subjectivity structures the meanings of what is experienced in relation to the pool of symbolic
resources oered by the myths. In this sense, dierent cultures channel the manners
of subjective formation, addressing dierent existential perspectives (cf. Valsiner,
1998, 2001a; Simao, 2005).
Semiotic-cultural constructivist psychology focuses on the processual dynamic
of personal selection. Selective internalization is subjectively organized as an openended system that Boesch (1991, 1997, 2001) named fantasm. Personal fantasm, as
an epistemic-meaningful internalization of myths, allows the subject to create conscious or unconscious projects and to anticipate the future in face of specic
environmental congurations. This constrains someones action potential, closing
some paths and enabling others, in order to achieve personal aims. From this
approach, the hunting of savage pigs presented above entails a setting of ritualized
actions in the Juruna cultural eld, aiming to avoid the souls of the hunters being
led towards the same destiny as Kingsher-head, that is, to avoid their capture by
the pigs. The cross-evaluation of the virtual possibilities of acting (project) and the
results of a specic action allows the subject to recongure its own action potential,
leading to changes in the personal fantasms and selection and modication of
dierent aspects from the current myth.

Cross-cultural criticism
The cultural psychologies of both Boesch and Valsiner criticize aspects of crosscultural research. Valsiner (2007a) pointed out that the cross-cultural presupposition of qualitative homogeneity and temporal stability does not t with the
processual nature of groups and persons. On the other hand, Boesch (2007)
remarks on seven aws of cross-cultural approach, six of them concerning theoretical and methodological presuppositions and the last one strongly ethical,
concerning the fact that the psychological study of other peoples should not be
carried out as if the subjects were simply a source of data for a supposedly wellintentioned investigation. Consequently, the interactive activity of the researcher
deals with scientic and ethical questions that concern the outcomes of knowledge construction. As the psychological elds of investigation are entangled with
Iother relations, the ethical dimension takes place as an exercise of managing
dierent perspectives inherent to the space of human relationships. In spite of
the fact that researchers are privileged constructors of psychological knowledge,
they are always culturally situated, making use of cultural elements for knowledge production (Boesch, 2001, 2007; Simao, 1989; Valsiner, 1994, 1995, 2001a).
Therefore, researcher and research objects (or subjects) are linked in such a way
that it becomes impossible to assert a universal point of view. The search for a
general knowledge construction, however, is a goal that demands the inclusion
of researchers personal perspectivestheir theoretical-methodological options,

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beliefs, values, ethical concerns, etc.as empirical evidence of the produced


knowledge.
The question of the researcher positioning is especially relevant to interethnic
and interdisciplinary studies concerning cultural psychology, specially if it
assumes the absence of a consensual criteria which allows the construction of
hierarchies and comparisons among dierent cultural mythologies and cosmologies. In this sense, Viveiros de Castro (2002) remarks that a counterpart of
social anthropology is the conceptions that the subjects of study have about
who the anthropologist is, the meanings they construct about the researchers.
Conceptions and meanings that the natives construct about the anthropologist
constrain their relations and, consequently, the process of data collection:
Ive discovered that many of collected information in interviews, before I attend to the
ritual, were contradicted by the performance (when everything started to t).
The same can be said about other eld experiences. More than once I listened to
the elders claim: Why she wants to know this if she is not going to live here? or
Why wants to know? Does not understand! (Lagrou, 2007, p. 310).

Therefore it is impossible to escape from a point of view, since each subject is


positioned in its own environment. Besides knowledge construction cannot be
neutral if we disregard the idea of a transcendental being. As each being has a
perspective on reality, its denition is the proper eld of divergences that cannot
nd, necessarily, a common ground that allows objective equivalence. As a
consequence, the relation with otherness, i.e., from dierent social elds or
heterogeneous places within a social eld leads to transformative and unpredictable outcomes for the participants of the relation.

Transformative implications of a dialogue with otherness


The way as autochthonous people from America construct knowledge about themselves, about otherness and about the environment has been an object of questioning since the beginning of colonization, when Europeans and Americans rst met
each other (16th century). When Europeans started to deal with Amerindians, they
were not sure about the indigenous subjective condition. The main question for the
Europeans was whether the indigenous people hador did not havea soul. From
their side, Amerindians tried to verify the supernaturality of white people through a
long-term observation of whether their bodies would decompose after death, as
Levi-Strauss described:
In the Greater Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the Spaniards
were sending out commissions of investigation to discover whether or not the natives
had a soul, the latter spent their time drowning white prisoners in order to ascertain,
by long observation, whether or not their bodies would decompose (Levi-Strauss,
1952, p. 12).

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Viveiros de Castro (2006) makes reference to this anecdote to show a dierent


aspect than the one emphasized by Levi-Strauss. For the Frenchman it evinces that
the Indians are human beings, since they make the distinction between nature
and culture and their cultures are ethnocentric as all human cultures. On the
other hand, Viveiros de Castro asserts that Amerindians do not oppose nature
and culture in the way that Europeans do. So, despite both people were ignorant
about the other and both considered themselves humans, each group created
dierent hypothesis from which they developed dierent procedures for knowledge
construction about the other.
From the semiotic-cultural constructivist perspective, the anecdote can also
express human potentialities for apprehending reality, either giving objectivity or
subjectivity to elements perceived in the environment (Boesch, 1991). These potentialities are expressed in the excerpt which evinces that while the whites took
the objectivity of otherness as given, questioning whether they possessed subjectivity
or not, Amerindians took subjectivity as given (Viveiros de Castro, 2002), and were
concerned about the characteristics of the body: corporeality was the distinct characteristic that could guarantee the humanity of otherness as similar to themselves.
The objective correlative (cf. Viveiros de Castro, 2004) for the notion of
humanity was dierent for the two peoples at that moment: for the whites, to be
human was to have a soul, for the Amerindians, to be human was to have an
appropriated body.
Amerindian perspectivism remarks a general ethnographic evidence that according
to native comprehensions the world is inhabited by many species of beings endowed
with conscience and culture; the way that human beings see them is radically dierent
from the way these beings see the humans and themselves (cf. Ingold, 2000; Lagrou,
2007; Lima, 1996, 2005; Pissolato, 2007; Stutzman, 2005; Vilaca, 2006; Viveiros de
Castro, 1998, 2002, 2006, etc.). So the possibility of occupying a perspective can be
conferred to beings that are from dierent species from a western point of view, that is,
for them, being human is a quality related to the situation of things in the world as
they are seen from a certain perspective. Some non-humans can actualize the potential
of being humans in ways that make their humanity more evident than wehomo
sapienscould do. It means that some supposed non-humans can take the place of
being a person in a better way than a common person could.
Levi-Straussian analysis on the logic of sensible categories, developed in four
volumes of the Mythologiques series (Levi-Strauss, 1983, 2004a, 2004b, 2006),
shows not just the central role of the bodies and material ows to the
Amerindian understanding of their surroundings, but also the process of constant
modulation and reconguration of the myths. Besides, changes in the Amerindian
discourse continue to occur as a politic-cultural process of creative adaptation in
order to produce a eld of interethnic negotiation. In this process the active role of
discursive selection and formulation takes place:
The cultural intertextuality of the contact is fed by the discursive ethnopolitics on the
rhetoric shapes (negatives or positives) from which the white people construct the

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indigenous. Nevertheless, it is not limited to the reciprocal images of indigenous


and whites. The self denition of each protagonist is fed not just of the representation
that one constructs about the other but also of the representation that the other makes
about the previous: the self-representation of the interethnical actors is constructed in
the fabric of the image they had of the others and their own image mirrored on the
other (Albert, 2002, p. 241).

The interchange of dierences attributed to otherness and the identications


personally attributed leads to the emergence of a meta-level of evaluations concerning life problems emerging in the course of social relations and possible
solutions.

Sharing the quest for sharing: Semiotic culturalconstructivism and the dialogical methodology
The issue of intersubjective sharing and dierences are discussed in the framework of semiotic-cultural constructivism from an hermeneutic viewpoint (Simao,
2005). First, in Iother communication, the search for sharing experiential meanings demands an eort to adjust dierent perspectives in order to t dierent
positions in the dialogue (who is who in the dialogue) as well as dierent positions on the subject matter they are talking about (what, why, when, where we
are talking about). Rommetveit (1992) proposed the notion of tuning to refer to
this process. Second, each person entering into a dialogue will unavoidably enter
into it with his/her presuppositions (cf. Taylor, 2002); the issue, then, is not to get
rid of our own presuppositions, but to take into account that the other will have
his/her own, which will probably enter into some disagreement with ours. Third,
as a consequence of the second process, entering into a dialogue with the aim of
conversation and argumentation, instead of exclusively persuading the other,
requires being open to the others voice (perspectives) and letting them talk,
even if this voice will be a counter-voice concerning our preconceptions (cf.
Gadamer, 1985). Fourth, in this process, some preconceptions of each participant
can be transformed, and some co-constructed conceptions about the subject can
emerge; in brief, this is the process that Gadamer (1985) calls fusion of horizons.
Converging with the hermeneutic approach, the present articulation between
psychology and anthropology adopted the dialogical methodology of research,
consisting, precisely, in taking into consideration that the subject and object of
research come to exist together (cf. Markova, 1997, 2006) as the relation between
gure and ground, in such a way that a tensional boundary is composed between
both (Herbst, 1995; Simao, 2004). This leads to a transformation of the object of
investigation, through semiotic/symbolic mediation, as a way of reducing the tension that emerges through the relation.
In the present case, dialogic methodology was used to understand all designated levels of analysis and its consequences to the production or modication of
symbolic resources around the selected frameworks. The notion of symbolic

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resource (SR) was dened by Zittoun, Duveen, Gillespie, Invision, & Psaltis
(2003) as the symbolic element used by an agent in order to achieve something
in a particular social, cultural and temporal context [. . .] it enables the agent to
make a transition from one socio-cultural formation to another (p. 416, cf. also
Zittoun, 2006). In order to facilitate the presentation of the web of oppositions
designed for this research I constructed a schematic graphic, as shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1 illustrates the levels of analysis that was designed for the present
interdisciplinary research and which symbolic resources are the focus of transformation in each moment of relevant interaction. It is structured with two axes
that include the researcher, as a human being existentially positionedthat is, as
an I with its intrasubjective and intersubjective relations and its symbolic elements, which can be used as symbolic resources in order to ll gaps emerging
from divergences in these axes. The intersubjective line is oriented to the reign of
perception, in which the researcher deals with the impact of the contact with the
authors of the selected theories of analysis. This refers to what Boesch (1991)
calls is value, that is, the objective construction of others/the world as separated from the I. Crossing this is the intrasubjective line, oriented to the reign of
imagination, that is, as Sartre (1996) pointed out, an act of the conscience in
order to make the thought object, the desired thing, appear in such a way that we
can apprehend it (p. 165). Imagination and perception are usually divergent, and
sometimes the imaginative level can be congured by a subject as a should
value in terms of Boesch. This means that through human action upon the
world, someone can transform it or transform its personal expectancies. In
both cases he or she can reach some symbolic convergence, reducing tensional
gaps between the lines.
The same contrast depicted in the graphic is remarked upon in Valsiners
(2007b) proposition on the subjectively lived duality as-IS and as-IF, which
address human actions to a desired future. Using these notions to understand the
activity of research, Figure 1 shows that acting in the world, the researcher can
produce a project (SR 1) in order to develop, for instance, a thesis (could be a paper
or communications in scientic conferences and seminariesSR 2), which puts
into relation objects of questioning. The relation between theoretical constructions
on the eld of semiotic cultural-constructivism (SR 3) and theoretical constructions
on the eld of Amerindian perspectivism (SR 5) is possible thanks to the role the
relations between psychology and anthropology have in the background of human
sciences, history, and philosophy (SR 4), as I already have remarked in the introduction. These relations are a source of tensions.

Dwelling on a boundary: Between psychology


and anthropology
Anthropology and psychology are elds of study with dierent histories, presuppositions, and aims. While the anthropologist is someone who describes and

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Figure 1. I-I and I-Other relationship in the field of dialogic interactions between SemioticCultural Constructivism in psychology and Amerindian Perspectivism in anthropology.

develops theories about general questions of specic cultures (Viveiros de Castro,


2002), psychological studies focus on subjective diversity in the context of specic
cultures (Valsiner, 1997, 2001a, 2007a, 2007b; Valsiner & Sato, 2006). The specicity of the psychological frame orients the investigative search for an understanding of the heterogeneity among the members of a social group. Despite the
dierences and specicities of each approach, studies in contemporary cultural
psychology recognize their points of contact and tension, which are potentially
fruitful for understanding the subjectivityculture inter-relation (cf. Bathia &
Stam, 2005; Boesch, 2008; Cornejo, 2007; Christopher & Bickhard, 2007; Gone,
2008; Josephs, 2002; Ratner, 2008; Toomela, 2008). The individual heterogeneity in
specic cultural elds is also a question to some anthropologists. Discussing the

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Amerindian pan-cosmology, Viveiros de Castro (1987) stresses the importance of


shamans and leaders discursive formulations that from a common structural
base of all Guarani cultures, receive a considerable individual speculative elaboration from specialists (p. xxxi). The specialists in this case are the individuals who
express the cosmological speech:
Guarani cosmology descriptions, by Nimuendaju as Schaden as Cadogan, were made
from an intense and focused relation with inuent individuals, informants who were
philosophers and theologists. Therefore, their works do not leave to evoke (in special
Cadogan works) famous conversations of Marcel Griaule with Ogotommeteli, the
blind wise Dogon; they have the same enchantment and leave the same questions:
What is fantastic report and individual elaboration, what is collective tradition?
Which are the space and function of cosmological creation in one given culture?
Many other questions [. . .] (Viveiros de Castro, 1987, p. xxxi).

The ethnographic method is usually concerned with an operation of totalization


(Baslanger & Dodier, 2004), which involves the depiction of the whole culture
through an integration of dierent collected data. The integrative work on dierent
observational sequences in order to construct a global framework on a culture
demands idiosyncratic interpretation of the researcher, who makes use of techniques of discursive elaboration to ll those gaps provoked by the otherness of
the other culture on the pathway of exploration. Nevertheless, understanding the
other and its culture also implies apprehending how this specic other depicts
the others and others cultures from its own point of view.
Since the native and the anthropologist are both agents, the interactive process
of data collectionand data publicationis always mediated and can be submitted to re-signication from both sides. This makes explicit another point of intersection between psychological and anthropological approaches: both deal with the
relational nature of identity and alterity constructions and the possibilities of emergence of a ground of intelligibility in the boundary of the interactions between the
participants of a specic meeting, each participant with his or her own cultivated
perspective.

Making-believe Amerindians
Amerindian perspectivism proposes the realization of a controlled exercise of imagination, taking the indigenous ideas as concepts and extracting consequences from
them (Viveiros de Castro, 2002). I argue that this can be understood as an exercise
of sembling the native. The notion of sembling was developed by Baldwin (cf. 1906,
p. 123) as a ctional, experiential, and selective procedure on the genesis of reection. Valsiner (2008) contemporarily explores the notion of sembling emphasizing
a never-ending forward oriented construction cycle where established schemas
lead to new created roles for new objects of exploration, while the latter lead to

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establishment of ever new schemas (p. 61). The controlled imagination addresses
knowledge construction to the reduction of tension on the crossing of ctional
creative freedom and the eort of tting the object, making viable the emergence
of new potentials for further explorations. In this sense, the anthropological theory
is concerned with a type of work that is not:
a study of primitive mentality (supposing that this notion still have any sense), neither an analysis of indigenous cognitive process (supposing that it can be accessible,
in the actual state of psychological and ethnographic knowledge). My object is less the
indigenous way of thinking than the objects of this thinking, the possible world projected by their concepts. The idea is not to reduce anthropology to a collection of
essays about world-views. First, because there is not a conclusive world to be seen, a
world before the vision or before the division into visible (thinkable) and invisible
(presupposed) that demarcates a thinking horizon. Second, because taking the ideas as
concepts refuses its explanation in terms of the transcendent notion of context (ecological, economic, politic, etc.), in favor of the immanent notion of problem, of a
problematic eld where those ideas are implied. Finally, it is not an interpretative
proposition of Amerindian thinking but an experiment with it, and, hence, with our
thinking (Viveiros de Castro, 2002, p. 124).

The proposed imaginary experiment addresses ethical and dialogical implications of the investigation, aiming to give voice to the native discourse.
In the realm of ethnographic experiences, dialogism appears (cf. Lagrou, 2007)
as a way of conceiving not just cultural changes, but also anthropological
knowledge, acquired from intense interaction with people of selected groups.
Therefore, Amerindian perspectivism criticizes the traditional anthropology
that creates a hierarchically valued dierence between the meaning that the
native gives to their own discourse and the meaning that the anthropologist
gives to it:
the problem is not to see the native as object and the solution is not addressed to
simply consider him as subject. There is no doubt that the native is a subject; but what
can be a subject, that is precisely what the native forces the anthropologist to set as a
question (Viveiros de Castro, 2002, pp. 118119).

For the Amerindians, all beings that are in a subjective position in the
cosmos own the same concepts for aectively and cognitively understanding
reality; nevertheless, the objective correlatives of similar concepts do not
coincide. A never-ending forward oriented construction cycle is inevitable because
Iother interaction is a source of mistakes, evinced by Amerindian myths thematizing interspecic perspectivism, for instance, those that express that
the human protagonist becomes lost deep in the forest and arrives at a strange village;
there the inhabitants invite him to drink a refreshing gourd of manioc beer, which

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he accepts enthusiasticallyand, to his horried surprise, his hosts place in front of


him a gourd brimming with human blood. Both the anecdote and the myth turn on a
type of communicative disjuncture where the interlocutors are not talking about the
same thing, and do not know this (Viveiros de Castro, 2004).

For Amerindians, the belief in a singular objective shared universe where beings
are situated is not reliable. Each community or person lives in a world objectively
constructed from a struggle of conviviality with partners. Possibilities of sharing
specic existential grounds are supposed among groups of people who live
together, but this cannot be possible between two specic distinct groups or
even persons. At the very moment that more than one point of view interacts,
dierent orientation systems that congure the universe of each being take
place. It is not only the gap between subjective elds of orientation, but the
world itself, the denition of what is real, that is confronted in the interaction of
perspectives. Therefore, the meaning of each thing is in constant negotiation with
the meaning attributed to it by others. It is always modied in interchanges of
dierent agencies. In some sense, making-believe otherness is a method of controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro, 2004), which can be dened as a kind
of comparison which takes into account that each interpretation of otherness
symbolic action is, per se, an action distinguished from the interpreted one that
transforms it.

Final considerations: Meeting otherness worlds


and multiplying objects
I would like to bring back the Juruna myth presented at the beginning of the
article, articulating it with the dialogic methodology scheme (Figure 1). Juruna
people consider the relation with savage pigs as a relation with beings that conceive
themselves as humans. If there is no transcendental positioning, neither hierarchy
or denial of pigs humanity, both would be considered humans in their respective
perspectives. Nevertheless, the Jurunas understand that the common sociality of
humans and animals depends on a primary discontinuity which is evident through
body dierences. The supposed animism of the autochthonous people from
America, as a postulate that the social relation is built on the basis of the
Iworld interaction, does not mean ineptitude in distinguishing the psychical
from the physical world1 (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Perspective, here, implies a
conception that a world only can exist for someone.
As we have seen, for Amerindian perspectivism, many things in the world are
able to dwell on a perspective: it is a situational condition instead of a property of
something. Hence, each thing can be apprehended as a subject; the social relation is
in the core of the Iworld relation. Otherness is conceived as an agentive being that
constitutes with its partners a common symbolic ground. Every element in the
environment (animals, plants, stones, natural and spiritual things) is thought to
belong to an owner, who is a third participant in any Iworld relation (Gallois,

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1985). A particular perspective can be shared by persons who live together (Lagrou,
2007) and people in this condition have the same owner, acquire a similar body,
and start to share a similar reality. Hence, Amerindian perspectivism theory has
implications not just for the understanding of structural and institutional patterns
of a culture, but also reecting the processual dynamic of interaction between its
participants as active constructors. It demarcates an extended net among highly
dierent beings in the cosmos, which interaction results in knowledge transformations and incremental potentials for action.
The possibility of grasping the experience of otherness demands an eort of living
as them, sharing and exchanging substantial aects, food, and corporal uids
through convivialitythis means, in anthropology, a process of becoming consubstantial. Besides this process, someone can imagine how reality is structured by someone else, and the imagination leads to a constructive equivocation. As knowledge
construction implies interaction, its outcome is always unknown: each participant of
the interaction constructs its symbolic resources articulating the perceptive intersubjective and the imagined intrasubjective experiences, avoiding being totally absorbed
by the point of view of the other and losing the possibility of asserting its previous
perspective. Kingsher-head is an instance of someone who died and lost his perspective as a Juruna; he followed the perspective of savage pigs.
Finally, my point here is to explore a general model for Iotherness interaction
that can emerge from the interspecic perspectivism, focusing the process of knowledge construction which is developed as an outcome of deepening study and reection about the intentionality of what is known, determining it as a subject (Lima,
1996; Viveiros de Castro, 2006). Considering that the other in its alterity escapes
from the apprehension of the I (cf. Levinas, 1980; 1993; 2004), then some tension
can emerge from the relation, leading to disquieting feelings (cf. Simao, 2003) and
to symbolic eorts in order to reduce the emergent tension.
Figure 2 was developed as a schematic model to systematize the process of
symbolic resource emergence in the midst of the relation with dierent perspectives.
This duplicates Figure 1, establishing a link between the duplicated planes through
an immanent background of originally unknown/non-dierentiated aective tendencies, i.e., also related to the mythological ow previously referred. The picture
indicates the real and virtual existence of I and otherness personal perspectives
mutually aecting each other. Lima (1996) indicates that Amerindian perspectivism
multiplies the duality of real and virtual, addressing it to other beings and avoiding
its reduction (as discussed before, rejecting the idea of a non-perspectival reality or
a transcendental being). From a semiotic-cultural point of view, I argue that the
multiplication of real and virtual can be understood as a dialogic multiplication, in
which the I and the other (for instance, a person, a culture, an idea, or a framework) have relative independent paths of developmentmutually interdicted for
dierent grounds of socializationin the core of a proper immanent mythological/
structural background. Some symbolic elaboration can be developed in order to
solve, or give sense, to disquieting and unknown urges that can emerge from the
immanent relational plan of mutual aective interchange.

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Figure 2. Plans of dialogic injunction and perspective disjunction leading to the emergence of
symbolic resources in the lifeworld.

Life experiences happen in a continuous and unpredictable ow in which each


subject actualizes its possibilities of action in an open and dynamic situation.
In this sense, knowledge emerges as personal active constructions of someone
about the happenings lived with others, creating problems for integration between
intrasubjective and intersubjective plans of human being experience, as represented
in Figure 1 and 2 (cf. also Guimaraes & Simao, 2007). In the process of Iotherness
relation, an imaginative activity takes place in order to ll disquieting gaps which
produced some non-adjustments, in desirable and less tensional directions. Besides,
because individual actions change the world, it demands an eort of continuous
constructive re-structuration to give intelligibility to the lifeworld phenomenon at
the core of specic cultural settings.
The multiplication of symbolic objects at the core of cultural interchanges,
rather than searching for a relational equivalence, is an important semiotic-cultural
problem that Amerindian perspectivism poses for psychology. Consequently, the
eort of dealing with Amerindian cosmology, elaborating an inclusive conceptual
understanding, is important in the path of grasping a meta-position where dierent
viewpoints are articulated.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor L via Mathias Simao (Psychology, IP-USP)
for collaborating in discussion and suggestions linked to this text and to Professor Marta
Rosa Amoroso (Social Anthropology, FFLCH-USP) for the classes on Amerindian perspectivism. The preparation of this work was supported by The State of Sao Paulo Research
Foundation fellowship.

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Note
1. Discussions on animism are abundant in psychology and anthropology from Piaget
(1929) and Mead (1936) to nowadays (cf. Descola, 2005; Quintanilla & Sarria, 2003).

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Author Biography
Danilo Silva Guimaraes, PhD is professor at the University of Sao Paulo. He has
been working with analysis of Iother interactions on the topic of intersubjective
divergences. His main interests is the investigation on the process of construction of
alterity and identity in the field of cultural psychology.

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