@article{THESIS,
      recid = {7047},
      author = {Breuhan, Alexander},
      title = {Putting Perspectivism in Perspective: An Assessment of the  Commitment of Cosmological Perspectivism and  Multinaturalism to the Decolonization of Anthropology},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2023-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7047},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7047},
}