Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro addresses the prejudices against “binary thought” associated with structural ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Viveiros de Castro, the key to deconstructing this—for him, wrongly discredited—scheme lies in the axis of a community: “Our problem is to determine conceptually the nature of the internal meridian line that separates the two moieties.” This notebook relocates the meridian line again and again, arguing that for Lévi-Strauss, the binary system was anything but a simplifying “modus operandi.” Lévi-Strauss had already expounded the problem of dualism during his lifetime and had used dual structures to think about notions of incommensurability, chromaticism, and dynamics.

 

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (*1951) is a Brazilian anthropologist and Professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

 

Language: German/English