Perspectivism is the epistemological principle that perception of and knowledge of something are always bound to the interpretive perspectives of those observing it. While perspectivism does not regard all perspectives and interpretations as being of equal truth or value, it holds that no one has access to an absolute view of the world cut off from perspective. Instead, all such viewing occurs from some point of view which in turn affects how things are perceived. Rather than attempt to determine truth by correspondence to things outside any perspective, perspectivism thus generally seeks to determine truth by comparing and evaluating perspectives among themselves. Perspectivism may be regarded as an early form of epistemological pluralism, though in some accounts includes treatment of value theory, moral psychology, and realist metaphysics.
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests, and also among dozens of other indigenous groups in Colombia in the Caribbean Coast, as well as others living in the Pacific Coast, Llanos Orientales, and in the Andean and inter-Andean regions (Muisca) as well as in other areas of Colombia, and he also did research on campesino societies. For nearly six decades he advanced ethnographic and anthropological studies, as well as archeological research, and as a scholar was a prolific writer and public figure renowned as a staunch defender of indigenous peoples. Reichel-Dolmatoff has worked with other archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Ana María Groot, Gonzalo Correal Urrego and others. He died 17 May 1994 in Colombia.
The Achuar are an Amazonian community of some 18,500 individuals along either side of the border in between Ecuador and Peru. As of the early 1970s, the Achuar were one of the last of the Jivaroan groups still generally unaffected by outside contact.
Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. An anarchist seeking an alternative to the hierarchized Western societies, he mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.
José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo.
The Machiguenga are an indigenous people who live in the high jungle, ormontaña, area on the eastern slopes of the Andes and in the Amazon Basin jungle regions of southeastern Peru. Their population in 2020 amounted to about 18,000. Formerly they were hunter-gatherer but today the majority are sedentary swidden cultivators. The main crops grown are manioc, maiz, and bananas, but today commercial crops such as coffee and cacao are increasingly important. Their main source of protein used to be peccary and monkeys but today fish has become more important as game animals have become increasingly scarce as a consequence of the encroachment from highland immigrants to the area and the exploitation of the Camisea gas finds. The Machiguenga people have a preference for self-sufficiency when it comes to cultivating essential crops, made possible by their generous land allocation per capita, and the lack of conflict in their area.
Cunhambebe was an Indigenous Brazilian chieftain of the Tupinambá tribe, which dominated the region between present-day Cabo Frio and Bertioga. He lived in a village in Iperoig.
A caboclo is a person of mixed Indigenous Brazilian and European ancestry, or, less commonly, a culturally assimilated or detribalized person of full Amerindian descent. In Brazil, a caboclo generally refers to this specific type of mestiço.
The Urarina are an indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Basin (Loreto) who inhabit the valleys of the Chambira, Urituyacu, and Corrientes Rivers. According to both archaeological and historical sources, they have resided in the Chambira Basin of contemporary northeastern Peru for centuries. The Urarina refer to themselves as Kachá, while ethnologists know them by the ethnonym Urarina.
Darrell Addison Posey was an American anthropologist and biologist who vitalized the study of traditional knowledge of indigenous and folk populations in Brazil and other countries. He called his approach ethnobiology and combined research with respect for other cultures, especially indigenous intellectual property rights.
Willem Leo Marie (Leo) Wetzels is a full professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Directeur de recherche at Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (LPP), CNRS/Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris. He is Editor-in-Chief of Probus International, the Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics.
The Araweté are an indigenous people of Brazil. They are swidden horticulturalists native to the state of Pará.
Peter G. Rivière is a British social anthropologist, Emeritus Professor of Oxford University and, with Audrey Butt Colson, a pioneer in the study and teaching of Amazonian peoples in England. In 1957-8 he took part in the Oxford and Cambridge Expedition to South America.
Audrey Joan Butt Colson, is a social anthropologist with a particular interest in the Amerindian peoples of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela. She was, together with Peter Rivière, one of the pioneers of Amazonian anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Eduardo Kohn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and winner of the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize. He is best known for the book, How Forests Think.
Joanna Overing is an American anthropologist based in Scotland. She has conducted research on egalitarianism, indigenous cosmology, philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, the ludic and linguistics through fieldwork in Amazonia. She has extensively studied indigenous Piaroa people in the Orinoco basin of Venezuela.
Manoel Jacintho Coelho was a Brazilian writer and the founder of the religious cult Rational Culture.
The ontological turn is an increased interest in ontology within a number of philosophical and academic disciplines during the early 2000s. The ontological turn in anthropology is not concerned with anthropological notions of culture, epistemology, nor world views. Instead, the ontological turn generates interest in being in the world and accepts that different world views are not simply different representations of the same world. More specifically, the ontological turn refers to a change in theoretical orientation according to which differences are understood not in terms of a difference in world views, but a differences in worlds and all of these worlds are of equal validity.
Nurit Bird-David is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. She is best known for her study of the Nayaka hunter-gatherers in South India, upon which she based much of her writings on animism, relational epistemology, and indigenous small-scale communities, and which later inspired additional fieldwork and insights on home-making in contemporary industrial societies, and the theoretical concept of scale in anthropology and other social sciences.
The Fort of Taurege, also known as Fort of Taurege River, Fort of Torrego, Fort of Tourege, Fort of Torrejo, and Fort of Maracapuru, was a colonial era Amazonian fort located in the confluence of the Taurege River and the Amazon Delta, possibly in the Island of Tucujus.
