The In-Law Versus Narcissus and the Indian Twins: Introduction to Cannibal Metaphysics
Eliran Arazi wrote an introduction to the Hebrew translation of Viveiros de Castro’s writings – two chapters from his masterpiece Cannibalistic Metaphysics, in which he places VDK within the genealogy of anthropology – from participant observation, through Levi-Straussian structuralism, bypassing the crisis of representation and up to the ontological turn. He demonstrates how the image of the enemy was cast from the brother-in-law – the sister’s husband – as a stranger who is brought into the family and has a relationship of difference and assimilation of otherness with the siblings that underlies social relations in the Amazon. He explores radical otherness in this paradigm while emphasizing its empirical limitations, and in doing so, recounts several surprising stories from the Andoque tradition.
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