Philosophy Today

Volume 65, Issue 2 (Spring 2021): 1–233

DOI: 10.5840/philtoday2021412394

For a Strategic Primitivism

A Dialogue between Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
and Yuk Hui
EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO AND YUK HUI

Abstract: In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro discusses
his work on the Amerindian perspectivism, multinaturalism; the relation between
nature, culture and technics in his ethnographic studies; as well as the necessity of a
non-anthropocentric definition of technology. He also discusses a haunting futurism
of ecological crisis and automation of the Anthropocene, and explores a “strategic
primitivism” as survival tool.

Keywords: anthropocene, multiculturalism, multinaturalism, perspectivism, ethnog-

raphy, futurism, non-human

Yuk Hui: Your work has been very inspiring for me, especially your notion of
multinaturalism, and your effort to escape relativism and constructivism. I take
it generally as a strategy to question and destabilize the categories that we have
inherited from modern European thought, which were universalized through
the modernized and standardized education system. It is precisely the question
of category and translation that seems to me crucial and urgent to take up again,
which I believe anthropologists have been working on for decades, something
that philosophers have yet to appreciate and learn from. Western philosophy
is fundamentally the pursuit of the universal through different means, and it
is always in tension with the other systems of categories; and to justify its own
existence, it is obliged to resolve this problem by formulating a historical progress
of the spirit, which as you have noted, was the precursor of “culture.” This also
appeared in the writings of the philosophers turned anthropologists. Your notion
of multinaturalism also introduces a certain achronicity to this discourse, and
your latest work with your wife Deborah Danowski, The Ends of the World, has

© Philosophy Today ISSN 0031-8256

2 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui

also challenged a Christian monotheist time presupposed in Quentin Meillas-

soux’s thesis on contingency. I think this opening is very significant for us to be
able to rethink many categories and the relations between them.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: I am not sure if I fully understand your point,

to wit, that the notion of multinaturalism introduces a certain achronicity into
Western (post-Christian) philosophical discourse. Anyway, I am always surprised
by the practically unanimous convergence among modern Western philosophers
regarding the metaphysical superiority of time over space—a superiority not
exempt from a strong anthropocentric component. Although the “work” done by
the concept of time in different philosophies is of course different (Kant, Hegel,
Bergson, Heidegger, Benjamin, and others), the association of spatiality with the
pagan, primitive or archaic “other” suggests that the obsession with temporality
is one of the deepest and most obvious marks of Jewish and Christian messian-
ism on modern and (precisely!) “post-” modern philosophical discourse. The
long-drawn-out crisis of the idea of progress—or rather, the (temporal) mismatch
between the glaring failure of the philosophical idea and its stubborn persistence
in geopolitical practice (“globalization”)—and the ongoing ecological (spatial)
catastrophe suggest that the time of “time” may be about to pass, and that the
present calls for a renewed philosophical attention to space, place, or as you
call it, locality. The massive physical displacement of human and non-human
populations due to climatic changes, as well as the technical fantasies of planetary
“deterritorialization” of the species and colonization of the solar system are some
of the indications of this need.

YH: Indeed, that is also why we will come back to the question of place later,
which I prefer to call locality, though it might sound reactionary at first glance.
But concerning what you said about globalization, which we can also call a
“technological universalization,” I would like to start with a fundamental ques-
tion, which has been on my mind for a while, and which I think maybe you can
help to clarify, that is: what is the role of technology in your concept of “nature”?
And where is the position of technology in perspectivism, or what exactly is the
relation between technics and cosmos in your ethnographic studies?

EVC: Globalization as technological universalization should include “Lebens-

form” or “Weltbild” universalization, although perhaps you understand the
first as driving the latter, or, as you remark further down, as a synecdoche of
these notions, so my remark would be redundant. But to address your ques-
tion: I don’t know if it can be said that I, insofar as I am doing anthropology,
possess and defend an ontological concept of “nature.” As implied in your next
question (which is partly answered here), the notions of “perspectivism” and
“multinaturalism” were experimental attempts to translate into a philosophically
For a Strategic Primitivism 3

recognizable vocabulary certain practical-cognitive attitudes and poetic-meta-

physical conceptions of indigenous peoples of the Americas (and elsewhere).
The concept of “multinaturalism”—where the root /-naturalism/ refers to other
semantic components than in the case of the modern concept of naturalism—is
the metaphysical (or “mytophysical”) version of the concepts of “perspectivism”
and “animism,” which were more directly derived from ethnographic materials.
Thus, if there is a concept of nature in my work, it is a meta-concept, which
is part of an ethnographic theory about certain—certainly not all—ontological
presuppositions of the cosmopraxis of certain—“extramodern”—peoples. For vari-
ous epistemo-political reasons, I align myself with the object of my meta-concept,
that cosmological object I have subsumed under the concept of “multinaturalism.”
Firstly, because it testifies to the originality and resilience of a form of life whose
violent exclusion was one of the fundamental conditions for the authoritarian
imposition of modern Western metaphysics (or “Reason”). Secondly, because
it challenges the colonialist cosmology of “mononaturalism” and its associated
hypocritical tolerance of “multiculturalism.” Thirdly, because it is one of the actual
and virtual alternatives to the universalist, monotheistic and anthropocentric
substratum of practically all Western philosophy—a recursively “local” alternative,
because in addition to being local and heterogeneous in relation to homogeniz-
ing and hegemonizing globalization, multinaturalism proposes a “localization”
or radical dispersion of cosmic agency. Finally, and very importantly, because it
suggests a more adequate cosmopolitical standpoint—perhaps we could define
my position here as “strategic primitivism”—to the art of living in a damaged
planet, as Anna Tsing would say. “Multinaturalism’s” horizon of concrete political
implication is the Anthropocene.
I am afraid I do not have much to say about the relationship between technics
and cosmos in Amerindian cultures. This is a serious gap in my work. As far as I
am concerned—as opposed to what concerns the peoples I have read and written
about—I have many reservations about the idea, which I sometimes perceive in
some philosophical-anthropological discourses, that technology would be the dia-
critical trait that separates (and elevates) humans from other living beings. I cannot
help wondering if we would not be here but for a “last refuge of a transcendental
humanism,” as Lévi-Strauss said of the philosophy of history. “Technics” would
then be functioning as a synecdoche of “culture,” and this in turn as the heir to
the human soul. I see no reason to argue for a fundamental discontinuity between
the human species and other living beings from the point of view of technics—a
toto cælo difference between “technology” and “ethology,” as it were. Of course, it
is possible to talk about human technics and then about non-human technics; but
a less anthropocentric definition of technology is needed. (Here I feel very close
to the spirit of the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond,” where Montaigne chastises
the technical arrogance of our species, and also of Samuel Butler’s idea in Life and
4 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui

Habit of technology as inchoate instinct). Here is also where I part company with
Bruno Latour’s magnificent book, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, where he
proposes the TEC “mode of existence” as clearly something exclusive to humans.
The Darwinian concept of evolution, by the way, seems to me to determine
precisely the technical dimension as a general attribute of life, perhaps even its
distinctive property—but then we should be prepared to receive so-called “artifi-
cial” life into the fold of Darwinian theory. I am fine with it.
On the other hand, as you say, every technics is a cosmotechnics. To which I
would add that every cosmology is a technics.
I said I would have nothing to say about the relation between technics and
cosmos in my ethnographic studies. Well, a widespread feature of Amerindian
mythologies about the origin of human technology (what Lévi-Strauss called “the
passage from nature to culture”) is the absence of emphasis on notions of invention
or creativity, highly valued in modernity. In these mythologies, the origin of cultural
technics (implements, processes, institutions, etc.) is canonically explained as a
borrowing, a transfer (violent or friendly, by stealing or by learning, as a trophy
or as a gift) of prototypes of these implements or processes such as already pos-
sessed by animals, spirits or not-quite-human enemies. Technics is not immanent
to humans; it always comes from outside. The essence of culture is acculturation,
and at the origin of all tekhnē there is mētis, cunning.
To the extent that the apperceptive form of many species (in fact, of an es-
sentially indeterminate number of types of beings) is identical to the apperceptive
form of human beings, and that the environment of each species is “furnished”
in a manner analogous to ours, various features of the landscape that we humans
(i.e., them, Amerindian peoples) see as “natural” are perceived by different spe-
cies as cultural, artefactual—as in the example I always give, of the jaguar that
experiences the blood of prey as beer, or in the botanical nomenclature that
identifies “wild” species as varieties of indigenous crops cultivated by spirits or
animals. Thus, what for some is nature or raw material, may well be the cultural
and technical artefact of others.

YH: I actually also said that all cosmologies are cosmotechnics. Just a brief
interruption, again we may want to reflect on the use of the philosophical cat-
egories and vocabularies that we have “inherited” from Western philosophy to
understand non-European natures, for example phusis-dikē, tekhnē-mētis. You
used the term ontology, and Philippe Descola also speaks about four ontologies:
animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. The term ontology means primar-
ily a first philosophy which has being as its subject of study. I would also be very
curious to know if it is legitimate to use the term “ontology” when we describe
the Ameridian way of “being,” a question indirectly provoked by Francois Jul-
lien, who claimed that the Chinese don’t have ontology? Jullien was not the first
For a Strategic Primitivism 5

one who suggested this: for example, the Kyoto School, notably Kitaro Nishida,
who claimed that Eastern philosophy has nothing as its primary subject but not
being, but Jullien went further by proposing a de-ontologization.

EVC: Many colleagues have objected to the use of “the proud name of ontology”
in my rendering of Amerindian cosmologies, mythologies, ideas (or whatever
term is considered more acceptable by the social anthropological establishment—
please note that all these alternative words are just as Greek and “philosophical”
as “ontology”). I use it in pretty much the same sense as physicists talk of the
ontology of a physical theory, or information scientists talk of the ontology of a
domain of knowledge. It is a shorthand for “the entities and processes that are
posited as existing by a particular language-culture-society,” or for “the array of
modes of existence officially acknowledged by a particular language-culture-
society.” I do not think Amerindian modes of thought place great store in
“transcendentals” such as Being. I certainly do not use “ontology” in a Heideg-
gerian sense and do not attribute such sense to the peoples I have written about.
Descola’s way of using the word “ontology” does not coincide exactly with mine,
by the way. I explained why I tried to acclimatize the word to social anthropo-
logical discourse—it had already been used by many others, notably by Irving
Hallowell in a famous article (1976),1 without creating any scandal within the
discipline—in two lectures.2 But to repeat: my foremost objective in resorting to
“ontology” was to block the tendency in my discipline to reduce other people’s
cosmopraxis to so many “worldviews” where the “view” trumped the “world”
(they have their “views,” we take care of the world). The point was all the more
worth doing as the ontological furniture of the indigenous worlds I was writing
about consisted precisely in a multiplicity of divergently embodied “points of
view”—what I called cosmological perspectivism.
And as a final remark on “ontology,” let me recall that the book I published
in 2009 is called Cannibal Metaphysics, not Cannibal Ontologies.3

YH: You have said twice to me, once during our encounter in Rio, and another
time by email, that you didn’t mean to say that multinaturalism is a better solu-
tion, but rather a different way of formulating and tackling the problem. I agree
completely that there is no single possible solution to get out of the problem of
modernization that we have today. My hypothesis has been that in order to move
away from this mode of modernization, which we call globalization and which is
in fact a process of universalization of particular epistemologies and knowledge,
it is necessary to think from the perspective of locality. It is true as you said that
“‘Technics’ would then be functioning as a synecdoche of ‘culture,’” and it is
probably even more true today than in the past, and this is also why I insist on
clarifying the question of technology, and that a pluralism of nature implies a
pluralism of technics. A specific kind of technology and rationality is turning
6 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui

the earth into an artificial earth, which is the manifestation of a monotechnolo-

gism. The seeming integration of cultural and geographical differences in fact
disguises a process of disintegration, which Lévi-Strauss might call entropology,
and which we are experiencing more and more intensively in recent years. How
do you imagine this reopening of ‘nature’ contributes to a new politics in and of
the Anthropocene and to “negotiating” with this technological force?

EVC: Assuming that technics—material, political and metaphysical—will emerge

to seriously modify the material (natural) basis of the current technical-political
assemblage, that is, assuming that we are really capable of stopping the acceler-
ated anthropic entropization of the Earth, these technics cannot fail to be, at least
in part, a “resurgence,” or, as you say, a “reopening” of nature—of the concept
of nature, of the relationship (internal to nature) between technics and nature,
and a radical dissociation between the concepts of freedom and infinity, in other
words, the practical and political recognition that the species is not immortal
and that there is no hidden plan of nature tailor-made for us, that there is no
progressive realization of the Spirit, and that “luxury communism” is not a likely
happy ending for the present capitalistic hell.
I like the notion of “monotechnologism,” which exposes the truth behind the
hypocritical notion of multiculturalism. Insofar as technology can be conceived as
an expression of a fundamental cultural orientation, it is quite clear that Western
mononaturalism is replicated by technological monoculturalism (or vice-versa).
So, your suggestion of a multiple cosmotechnics seems very apposite.
Peter Frase begins his recent book, Four Futures, with another variation on the
[Communist] Manifesto’s opening statement: “Two specters are haunting Earth in
the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation.”4
What interests me in this formulation, more than the combinatory that Frase
deduces from the historical-futurological overlap of these two dynamics, is how
these “specters” define two distinct intellectual tendencies or temperaments:
one sees ecological catastrophe as metaphysically subordinating technology (the
latter conceived as the material expression of the victory of spirit over matter);
the other sees technology as a self-transcending, irreversible historico-material
process tending asymptotically towards a “dematerialization” of the species, thus
making ecological catastrophe unnecessary (in the two senses of the adjective),
that is, mitigable, controllable, and therefore metaphysically secondary. Here, once
again, I confess my inclination for the first trend, because I discern in the second
the marks of pre-Anthropocenic techno-triumphalist demiurgery.

YH: It seems to me that both specters are still very much based on the dichotomy
between technology and nature, and in a way that they express an un-resolved
dialectics. The first one suggests the unconquerable contingency of nature, and
the second one the necessary triumph of technology over nature. Are we not still
For a Strategic Primitivism 7

haunted by a “naturalism” which, we may say, had already started at the time of
Athenian metaphysics? Apart from the strategic primitivism you proposed, can
we think of other beginnings, for example perspectivism, which is not based on
such dichotomy? When I say other beginnings instead of returning to “indigenous
ontologies,” it is because I think the global condition makes it difficult if not im-
possible to do so. Maybe these other beginnings will allow us to transform our
imagination of the future development of “technology”? Otherwise, I think we
will wait to see more catastrophes coming out of the blind “disruptive innovation”
and its economy. Of course, this is a huge question, which is probably beyond
any individual’s capacity, and it implies an imperative to rethink thoroughly the
meaning of pluralism. My strategy was to re-discover, or, to some extent, to re-
invent the concept of technics, and I believe that there are many things we can
draw from anthropology.

EVC: “Indigenous ontologies” are not something we could or should return to,
not only because they are not something from an archaic, immemorial past, but
because what you call global conditions are not the same everywhere—monotech-
nologism produced the “patchy Anthropocene.”5 The sundry spatially localized,
ecologically situated indigenous cosmotechnic—the indigenous ways of living in
“reciprocal presupposition” with the Amazonian biome, for example, where na-
ture and culture are ontologically indiscernible—however, are something which
we must very much “return to,” given the absurd destruction of tropical forests
by “modern” agrobusiness. Technology, after all, is more than some assemblage
of metal, fossil organisms, and electromagnetic radiation.
My “strategic primitivism” is a rhetorical appeal to the achronic value of per-
spectivism, a “dialectical leap in the open air of history,” a way to “brush history
against the grain,” as Walter Benjamin famously said.
Let me say—in passing—that I wonder how seriously or consequentially the
current philosophies of technics are able to take the ecological catastrophe, i.e.,
as something that has already happened, in the sense that many of the ongoing
changes in the geobiophysical parameters of the planet are likely irreversible, at
least in the short to medium run. This is not about the contingency of nature, but
about the necessity of causality. The only technology capable of radically control-
ling the current trajectory of geobiochemical planetary processes would be a time
machine. The development of automation (as in Frase’s book) seems to be thought
of more in connection with the prospect of the end of human labour—either as a
blessing (luxury communism, singularitarianism) or as a bane (unemployment,
exterminism, etc.)—than as something that is both variously constrained by the
ecological catastrophe and urgently required as a way of dealing with it. Cos-
motechnics are ecopolitics, too.
8 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui

YH: To put our question more concretely, and this may be quite speculative: you
once compared Descartes’ animal machine with the Turing machine, and you
recognized the significant difference between them, which could be considered
as the difference between object and subject, body and mind, and that for the
Amazonian Indians, a computer could be recognized as a subject like animals. I
am wondering if this new status of machines constitutes a future of Amerindian
perspectivism, or does it have a role at all in the future of Amerindian cosmology?

EVC: Yes, well, the Cartesian animal-machine, i.e., the animal as machine, is the
very opposite of the Turing machine, which is, in a sense, the idea of the machine
as human. The cosmotechnical triangle “human, animal, machine” seems to be
unstable, since it tends to collapse into one of three dualities: either {human}
versus {animal + machine} which is Cartesian anthropocentrism, or {human
+ animal} versus {machine}, which would be biocentric phenomenology, or
{human + machine} versus {animal}, which can be associated with functional-
ist theories of mind and a lot of AI philosophy. I am not so sure today whether
Amerindian traditional cosmologies would automatically (as it were) see Turing
machines as intentional subjects on the same footing as many “natural” kinds
(some of which are considered as inanimate in our own ontological vulgate).
Some artefacts—pots, canoes, baskets etc.—are conceived by some Amerindian
mythologies and shamanism as animate and/or as having a prosopomorphic
prototype, a humanoid spiritual master etc., so I see no impassable obstacle for
those cosmologies to grant subjecthood to computers or some other embodied AI
devices (embodied in the sense of being a token of our “middle-sized dry goods”).
That said, computers are non-indigenous, and their diffusion in Amerindian
contemporary societies is very likely being accompanied by Western ontologi-
cal assumptions which for the moment do not recognize computers as persons.
YH: Indeed, the use of modern computational apparatus immediately implies
“ontological conflicts,” and this is why I was curious to what extent other “ontolo-
gies” can participate in transforming these “ontological presuppositions” already
embedded in technologies. But let’s move to the question of politics or political
economy, which you are also interested in, for example with Deborah you have
been talking about an inevitable degrowth. I am aware that recently you are go-
ing back to some readings on and of Marx, and you were particularly intrigued
by the work of the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani. Karatani tries to suggest
a new economy through a “performative” reading of Mauss’s gift economy, a bit
more realistic than Georges Bataille’s general economy, since Karatani has his
|“ethnography” of anarchist communities, and this runs through almost all his
work. I am also curious to know if this can be connected to any possible “exit”
from the Anthropocene.
For a Strategic Primitivism 9

EVC: I have just begun to read Karatani (2014) and am not in a position to give
an informed opinion about his work. I was quite intrigued, however, by his
decision to focus on “modes of exchange” rather than “modes of production”
in his version of historic materialism. This of course brings him much closer to
Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins, Strathern et al., than traditional anthropological
Marxism (and Deleuze and Guattari, by the by) has ever dreamed of. Actually,
a standard Marxist criticism of Mauss & Co. was precisely the wrongheaded,
nay, bourgeois focus on exchange at the expense of the hard material realities of
production. Karatani has decisively outdated this criticism. At the same time, his
typology of modes of exchange may give anthropologists (it gives me, at least)
a feeling of déjà vu which I am striving to dispel, because I am absolutely sure I
have yet to grasp all the subtlety of his theory. It is already clear to me, however,
that his arguments on the relation between capital and the nation-state are very
innovative—and revolutionary.
It goes without saying that am reading his work with the intention of flesh-
ing out my “strategic primitivism” conceit; Karatani’s6 Mode D, his reclaiming
of the Kingdom of Ends, has to my mind to welcome the whole of living beings
(and their “non-living” conditions of existence), in other words to do away with
the absurd anthropocentrism of Kant’s distinction between persons and things,
ends and means, humans and other living beings. The Kingdom of Ends is not
monarchic but anarchic.

YH: I remember Karatani has defended the possibility of a “consumer movement”

and he was actively experimenting with “Local Exchange Trading Systems” in
the 1990s. In a way I guess the shift from production to exchange is also an ad-
mission of the disappearance of the workers as revolutionary subjects, which is
probably true today. The other motive that I think is relevant to our discussion is
that he sees the limit of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, since nation-states are crucial
to the development of capitalism, a recognition that was undermined in Hardt
and Negri’s thesis.7 Karatani wants to overcome the nation-state-capital trinity.
And for our discussion, I think it is inevitable to confront the relation between
locality and nation-state, since the former could be easily transformed as into
a form of nationalism or fascism, like in the discourse of the Front National in
France or AfD in Germany among others. In many countries, we see that the
discourse on locality is actually no more than nationalism and what it does is
to contribute to mononaturalism by participating in global economic competi-
tion and military expansion (this means the continuation of a mononaturalism,
ecological catastrophes, and will to “progress” since the eighteenth century). How
do you see this as a “challenge” to strategic primitivism?

EVC: Well, to go quickly here, I would say that the locality concept is antipodal
to nationalism—which is just exclusionary universalism, or universalism com-
10 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui

pacted. The “local” is not the subnational either. It is rather the idea that there
are other locals. To invert a famous definition, the local is an image of the world
as a circle in which the circumference is everywhere and the center nowhere.
Eduardo Viverois de Castro, Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro
Yuk Hui, City University of Hong Kong

Notes
1. Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View.”
2. Viveiros de Castro, “And: After-Dinner Speech Given at Anthropology and Science”;
Viveiros de Castro, “Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf?”
3. Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics.
4. Frase, Four Futures.
5. Tsing, Mathews, and Bubandt, “Patchy Anthropocene.”
6. Karatani, The Structure of World History.
7. Hardt and Negri, Empire.

References
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Chicago Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Karatani, Kojin. 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes
of Exchange, trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822376682
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt. 2019. “Patchy
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Comments on a Current Debate,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33(1): 2–17.
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