The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained
their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of
European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social
cosmology and ritual order. His analysis of the social and religious
life of the Araweté --a Tupi-Guarani people of Eastern Amazonia--focuses
on their concepts of personhood, death, and divinity.
Building upon ethnographic description and interpretation, Viveiros de
Castro addresses the central aspect of the Arawete's concept of
divinity--consumption--showing how its cannibalistic expression differs
radically from traditional representations of other Amazonian societies.
He situates the Araweté in contemporary anthropology as a people whose
vision of the world is complex, tragic, and dynamic, and whose society
commands our attention for its extraordinary openness to exteriority and
transformation. For the Araweté the person is always in transition, an
outlook expressed in the mythology of their gods, whose cannibalistic
ways they imitate. "From the Enemy's Point of View" argues that current
concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity which maintains a
difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in
this and in many other Amazonian societies.