South of South: Cannibal Metaphysics (Reading Discussion)

Discussion of a selection from Eduardo Vivieros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics. Please contact workshop coordinator Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo (nse [at] stanford.edu (nse[at]stanford[dot]edu)) for access to the readings.
 
South of South is a new DLCL Research Group. We aim to gather a community to examine and build upon concepts emerging in “the South of the South”, the hinterlands of the “Global South” that have traditionally remained outside of humanistic inquiry. The Brazilian philosopher-anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has written on Amazonian metaphysics as a full-fledged philosophical intervention, and we take this move as paradigmatic. For us, other forms of knowing, such as Yoruba conceptions of personhood, Andean earth-kinship, and fractal subjectivity in Papua-New Guinea are examples of powerful ideas that can affect and perhaps shape the Humanities as a whole. That they have tended to remain isolated within the social sciences as objects of study rather than frameworks for advanced humanistic thought is something we hope to address.