Endless narratives

Perspectivism and narrative form in the indigenous literature of the Amazon

Abstract

This article focuses on three native Amazonian narratives: two Pemon stories first published in German by Theodor Koch-Grünberg in the volume Vom Roroima zum Orinoco (1917), and one story published by the Desana Umussin Pãrõkumu and Tõrãmu Kehíri in Antes o Mundo não Existia (1980). All three stories describe the marriage between a proto-human or a human-like man and a bride from another species; and all three end with the development or importing of a new plant. These stories illustrate with great precision Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theories about Amazonian Amerindian perspectivism. The purpose of the article is thus to take Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism back, so to speak, to the kinds of stories that inspired it, in order to consider its narrative implications. The hypothesis that moves my analysis is simple: if Amazonian Amerindian thought is based on another ontology – an ontology that promotes the idea that all animals are (or have been) potentially human, and which privileges difference rather than identity – wouldn’t the Amazonian way of telling stories, (their narrative form), be necessarily different as well?