About Indigenous Perspectivism, Indigenous Sonorism and the Audible Stance. Approach to a Symmetrical Auditory Anthropology1

Abstract

The present contribution aims to reveal some ideas about methods and theories in ethnomusicology on the basis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castros’s (EVC) concepts in cultural anthropology. In the first part the focus is on EVC’s “metaphysics of predation” and its three subdivisions of interspecific perspectivism, multinaturalism and cannibal alterity, whereby a particular focus is on “perspectivism” and the different forms of critical receptions and/or equivocations of that concept2. In the second part it will be demonstrated how, at a first glance, EVC’s non fitting anthropological theory to sound, nevertheless serves for an understanding of sound phenomena when counter-interpreting some of his theoretical and methodological concepts and applying them a symmetrical auditory anthropology. Therefore, trans-specific communications between human and non-humans will be discussed when analyzing first EVC’s data on Araweté war and shaman songs and later, my own data on Pemón songs and magic formulas. This analysis aims to reveal how sound in its formalized mode of song defines the interaction between humans and non-humans by transcending the mythical and non-mythical worlds. In the third and last part it will be shown how the performance of Pemón magic formulas counteracts the idea of Indigenous perspectivism by proposing the concept of Indigenous sonorism at the very end.