The Scientific Construction of the Other
摘要
This chapter follows the changing anthropological gaze on the Others and their knowledge. Being an heir of the stigmatised image of the Other as either a noble or a barbarian savage, anthropology had a hard time to transcend this magic mirror of Eurocentrism and start seeing other cultures in their own right, and not just as the grimace of our own desires and fears. It took a long while until anthropologists stopped asking why They are so different, and instead started to question what makes Us think We are “modern”? Following anthropologists like Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “animistic” or “perspectivist” worldviews have been reconceptualised in terms of different ontologies and/or worlds, rather than worldviews. More recently, this turn towards ontology has grown into political ontology or cosmopolitics, with Indigenous groups and intellectual activists, like Arturo Escobar, Catherine Walsh, Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, fighting against the modern/colonial One-World World (John Law) and for the preservation of their worlds within a pluriverse of many coexisting worlds.