WE DON’T WANT TO BE STARS (BUT PARTS OF CONSTELLATIONS)
CALENDAR
EQUIVOCAL TRANSLATION
"To translate is to situate oneself in the space of the equivocation and to dwell there." Eduardo Viveiros de Castro accentuates that it is fundamental to allow “alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator’s conceptual toolbox so that the intentio of the original language can be expressed within the new one.” To translate, he states “is to communicate by differences, instead of silencing the Other by presuming a univocality.” He narrates the myth of a human lost deep in the forest encountering a jaguar folk. The jaguars invite the human to drink a refreshing manioc beer. When the human happily accepts, it turns out to be “a gourd brimming with human blood.” The jaguars and the human refer with their words to the same thing in different realities, however an “equivocation (...) is not an error nor an illusion (...) instead, the equivocation is the limiting condition of every social relation.” Viveiros de Castro further exemplifies by saying that “blood is to humans as manioc beer is to jaguars, in exactly the same way as a sister to me is a wife to my brother-in-law.”





Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití 2, no. 1 (2004): 3–22.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (Chicago, IL: Hau Books, 2015), 62 - 72.