Ethnographic Complexity Is Us: Viveiros de Castro’s Perspectivism and the Critique of Deconstruction in Israeli Academe

In this article I argue that anthropologists do not merely describe other worlds, let alone interpret those worlds in order to give them meaning. Rather, anthropologists produce conceptual worlds as they write up ethnographic encounters. Rather than purporting to grant moral legitimacy to other ways of being, ethnographic representation must primarily constitute novel intellectual and emotional content for those who consume it as knowledge. I develop this argument through a detailed summary of Viveiros de Castro’s The Relative Native (2013 [2002]). In the second part of the article I integrate these methodological principles into my personal intellectual autobiography and use this to criticize the dominance of postcolonial deconstructionism in the contemporary Israeli academia. I call for the generation of a local perspectival anthropology that goes beyond the politically-oriented analysis of inequality, power, exclusion and subalnternity