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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) sees translation as something that does not happen between cultures, but rather, within a unitary continuum of culture. That continuum of culture includes, however, contrary to what common sense might dictate, what we would normally understand as nature and culture. Even more at odds with common sense, the difference that is customarily located at the border between culture and nature, between words and things, between speakers and non-speakers, that translation might be thought to overcome, is resituated in Viveiros de Castro’s thought within things themselves—not, though, as a hard distinction, but as a transformative and generative border between what was and what is to come. This is an extremely condensed version of Viveiros de Castro’s thought, so it needs some explanatory unpacking.

Viveiros de Castro begins his symmetrical anthropology by rejecting the anthropological paradigm of different cultures against a background of singular nature, replacing it instead by a paradigm of a single culture looking at different natures. ‘[V]irtually all the peoples of the New World,’ he notes (2014: 55), ‘share a conception of the world as composes as a multiplicity of points of view. Every existent is a centre of intentionality apprehending other existents according to their respective characteristics and powers’ (ibid: 55). What unites these different species is that they all perceive themselves as persons: ‘animals and spirits regard themselves (their own species) as human; they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their houses or villages, and apprehend their behavior and characteristics through a cultural form’ (ibid: 57). Vivieros de Castro summarizes, ‘Personhood and perspectiveness—the capacity to occupy a point of view—’ [and, one might add, the faculty of language, if signification, following Peirce and Lévi-Strauss, is principally a matter of international addressivity] ‘is a question of degree, context and position rather than a property distinct to a specific species’ (ibid: 57-8).

In the paradigm explored in chapter 2 above, that of the European ethnological gaze, the anthropologist is a translator between cultures, recasting the obscure customs and worldview of cultures close to nature in the language of those further away from it. (Indeed, as Kohn’s case appeared to show in the previous chapter, the closer these anthropologies come to peoples close to nature, the more such anthropologies appear to need distance from nature itself.) The same referent at the level of nature is represented by different terms at the level of culture, between which it is the anthropologist-translator’s task to mediate. (This translative mediation creates a useful buffer-zone that in turn keeps nature at bay.)

In Viveiros de Castro’s alternative paradigm, common terms shared not only by different cultures even by different species refer to objects that are in themselves fundamentally multiple. What happens to this translational operation in the world when, for instance, a jaguar is a person no less than the hunter, but the objects of their desire may change (when a hunter sees blood, a jaguar sees beer) (ibid: 57)? Both the hunter and the jaguar are intentional persons, predators, gazers, and both communicate: ‘all beings see (“represent”) the world in the same way; what changes is what they see’ (ibid: 71). (Under these conditions, the notion of cannibalism, as a specific cognate of predation, no longer operates as a marker distinguishing civilization and savagery, culture and less-than-culture, because at the end of the day, we are all predators, and thus we are all, more or less, cannibals, eating co-persons.)

The act of translation then, is not primarily between cultures, because in fact, all cultures, whether those of the anthropologist, Amazonian hunter, or the jaguar, are fundamentally similar. All three actants belong to the category of persons, and all three, as persons, have a predilection for beer. The beer they have a taste for it itself, however, is multiple: ‘all beings see (“represent”) the world in the same way; what changes is what they see’ (ibid: 71). What they see thus demands constant translation—or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that it is constantly in a process of translation. Every object is this a ‘contact zone’ with its own ongoing translative character:

What exists in multinature are not such self-identical entities differently perceived but immediately relational multiplicities of the type blood/beer. There exists, if you will, only the limit between blood and beer, the border by which these two ‘affinal’ substances communicate and diverge. (ibid: 73)

Translation itself is thus a border-straddling operation, partly inhabiting the thing itself and partly inhabiting the representation of things by different intentional perceiving persons. ‘Therefore,’ remarks Viveiros de Castro,

the aim of perspectivist translation—translation being one of shamanism’s principal tasks, as we know …—is not that of finding a ‘synonym’ (a co-referential representation) in our human conceptual language for the representations that other species of subject use to speak about one and the same thing. Rather, the aim is to avoid losing sight of the difference concealed within equivocal ‘homonyms’ between our language and that of other species, since we and they are never talking about the same things. (Viveiros de Castro 2004b: 7)

The synonym, where two words mean the same thing, cedes to the homonym, where a merely accidental, even peripheral coincidence of sound conceals radical differences of meaning.

The shamanic translator, attuned to the vibrant liveliness that may be concealed within things, and only accessible to someone capable of making out their multiple, transformative identities within different ‘multinatures’, deals with metonymies, not with metaphors. Viveiros de Castro operates here a subtle but significant shift from the realm of identity between words (i.e., the domain of metaphor) to the realm of metonymy: what is concealed ‘within’ the word, or ‘behind’ it is not a cohesive identity, it is rather an irreducible multiplicity and heterogeneity which belongs in the realm of metonymy (the word conceals a referent which abuts upon another referent which abuts upon another referent, and so on …). Things are multiple in themselves because they belong to different natural universes (not different cultures), because they have different natures, and this is the core of their translation within nature, or of nature as translation. Translation is not a metaphorical process of substitution in a ‘multicultural’ world, but is instead a process of metonymic neighbourliness within a ‘multinatural’ cosmos.

There are several important points to be made about Viveiros de Castro’s ‘animist perspectivism’.

First, what we are confronted with here is a much more capacious community of speakers. Viveiros de Castro (2004a: 466) remarks,

Western popular evolutionism, for instance, is thoroughly anthropocentric but not particularly anthropomorphic. On the other hand, animism may be characterized as anthropomorphic but definitely not as anthropocentric: if sundry other beings besides humans are ‘human’, then we humans are not a special lot (so much for ‘primitive narcissism’).

Within this broad but extremely heterogeneous commons, translation is no longer about the business of overcoming almost insurmountable semantic gaps for the simple reason that all the speakers, whether human or animal or vegetable, whether Amerindian or European, speak what is basically a differentiated but interrelated language. They are linked by what Francis Nyamnjoh (2017) has called ‘conviviality’. This world is never absolutely open. In such theories of animism, there are of course actants who are excluded from the community of persons and speakers. The Achuar people with whom Philippe Descola (2005: 25) worked do not acknowledge the personhood, the sociability and the intersubjectivity of most insects, fish, grasses or mosses, pebbles or rivers. But these pariahs may be an integral part of the social body in a neighbouring community, thus reflecting a sort of division of labour in different ethnic zones: curatorship of non-human persons is distributed according to a pattern of overlaps that ensures that in the larger view of hings, no one gets left out (ibid: 27-8). Such exclusions are thus local variations on a basic notion of a world populated by ‘figures of the continuous’ (figures du continu) (ibid: 19-57). The world seen here is not structured by mega-binaries such as nature vs. culture, human vs. non-human, but rather by a plethora of smaller differentiations that work less to cement distinctions than to generate creativity: ‘Against the Great Dividers, a minor anthropology would make small multiplicities proliferate—not the narcissism of small differences but the anti-narcissism of continuous variation’ (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 44).

Second, in this theory, translation shifts from a process of semantic transformation at the level of the terms to a process of ontological transformation at the level of the referents. This is not fundamentally a question of linguistics, but one of material ontology. Viveiros de Castro observes that ‘[w]hen everything is human, the human becomes a wholly other thing’ (2014: 63). The same could be said of language. Things are in themselves not singular because they are inert, but multiple because they are dynamic. The referent may have a seemingly singular label, but the label refers to a thing less than a process—an idea we will encounter again below in Ingold’s notion of animism. This, as we shall see, installs a form of dynamism, in effect, a translational process, into the word itself.

If there is such a thing as translation in this theory—this is the work of the shaman—it is only partly at the level of interlingual exchange, and only partly something done by humans. It is largely an activity carried on by the referents themselves in the very multiplicity of their natures. Things are translating all the time, because they are dynamic, and because they are changing—in short, because they are alive. Viveiros de Castro’s notion of translation thus comes very close to what I call in this book a ‘quantum’ theory of translation, to which I turn in chapter 5 below. This ‘animist’, ‘object-oriented’ (Harman 2018) theory of translation is not completely separated from interlinguistic translation. Rather, translation in the interlinguistic contact zone is lodged, in the first instance, like all entities in a ‘multinature’, as an intralinguistic contact zone at the interior of languages. Intralingual translation then devolves its translative dynamism to interlingual translation. This internal difference within the language should be understood not primarily as a shifting of meaning that destabilizes meaning, as in the difference that Derrida (1972a: 3-29) detects between one contextualized instantiation of a word and another, and the traces of past and future contextual meanings that every word bears in itself. Rather, this internal difference is far more the manifestation of the inherent creativity of language—not just of the humans who use language, or of the social or historical contexts that change the valency of a give word.

A language is an overflowing storehouse of linguistic potential that never ceases to generate new language. It is language that generates thought, and writing that generates ideas—as I am discovering, constantly, as I type these sentences and compose this chapter, unceasingly amazed at the way the writing process itself gives rise to hitherto unformulated turns of phrase and hitherto unthought thoughts. In other words, the generativity of nature itself, which also infuses language as part of the natural world, spills over into localized, ‘provincial’ languages and contaminates their interfaces with other languages. Interlingual translation is not the core of translation activity, as the purists would have it. On the contrary, it is the jubilant periphery, or one of the frayed edges of the particoloured fabric of the cosmos where it begins to transform into something else, where a larger creativity is manifesting itself in one specific modality. The creativity of translation, which Berman (1995; 2009) instantiates in his study of the repeated re-translation of John Donne into French, is a manifestation of this exuberant creativity of language itself, which in turn is a spill-over from the creativity of the cosmos.