Perspectivist studies stand out because of their heterogeneity and - it is worth the redundancy - because of the diversity of perspectives and interpretations of what a perspectivist approach to anthropological analysis is or can be. I will start with the trajectory of its main representative, who is at the same time the founder of perspectivism in anthropology: the Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro. He is a specialist of the Araweté, to whom he dedicated his first ethnographic works. They are a people of hunters and farmers of the Amazonian forest of northern Brazil and are part of the Amerindian societies of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family, which includes more than 50 different languages, spoken in groups settled in several South American countries, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, French Guyana, Peru and Venezuela. It should be noted that the Araweté are a small people: at the time Viveiros de Castro "ethnographed" them, he carried out population censuses that indicate that between 1981 and 1992 their numbers ranged between 130 and 168 people; in the last census carried out by the funai In 2023 its demography was estimated at 293 people.

In his studies on the araweté, Viveiros de Castro has noted that, from a relational approach between subject and object, every perception of the world implies the existence of a point of view. This relationship between the subject and the world can be illustrated with the following example: what for a human is a container of blood appears as a jar of beer to a jaguar, which also means that whoever perceives a jar of beer assumes a human perspective, while whoever sees a container of blood assumes that of a jaguar (Viveiros de Castro, 1992). The Amazonian model of "multinaturalism" coined by Viveiros de Castro entails the paradigmatic Amazonian exchange of perspectives, in which an exchange of substances is almost always implied. In order to distance himself from relativism and the notion of representation that it implies, Viveiros de Castro proposes that one perceives from the body.

Although it is common for anthropologists to study small groups in order to construct our more general theoretical interpretations, it is worth remembering these aspects of the work of the inventor of perspectivism, at least to leave the door open to reflections and questions about the universal scope that the myths, rituals and cosmology of this people may have. As Viveiros de Castro plans, a perspectivist metaphysics characterizes not only the Amerindian peoples of the Amazon, but extends to the entire continent and far beyond, in such a way that perspectivism elevates one of the various ways of thinking about the world found in a small Amazonian village to an anthropological theory of universal scope.

Faced with such a grandiose proposal, one may wonder how this Brazilian anthropologist came to formulate such generalizations and from what kind of intellectual formation and currents of thought this universalist approach may come from. It is worth remembering in this respect that the teaching of anthropology in Brazil - as Viveiros de Castro himself attests - is clearly inscribed - as in Mexico, incidentally - within North American culturalism and the legacy of Franz Boas as the founder of North American anthropology as a discipline. à part entière. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who taught anthropology in Brazil during the 1930s, was in turn heir to the North American and Boasian culturalist current. For Viveiros de Castro, Lévi-Strauss managed to establish bridges of thought between French sociological anthropology (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss...) and North American cultural anthropology. He rescued from him the idea of savage thought and the study of Amerindian cosmologies through myths, the search for logics of thought alien to ours, the analysis of indigenous classification systems (taxonomies), with particular attention to language and the variety of its expressive modalities according to the contexts.

Perspectivism in anthropology is heir to both Lévistraussian structuralism and poststructuralism in philosophy. On the one hand, perspectivism implies that the relation between a subject and an object is more relevant than the definition of each term; here we see a clear inheritance of the Lévistraussian structuralist method of analysis. The work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, entitled The anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and schizophrenia (1985 [1972]), also serves Viveiros de Castro as an inspiration, especially to create the formula of the anti-Narcissist (Viveiros de Castro, 2010:11-81), as a critique of classical anthropology with its ethnocentric and egocentric point of view.

I consider then that, without detracting from its original character and like many other anthropological theories, perspectivism is the result of a synthesis of several previous theories, of which I have only mentioned a few.

For the last twenty years, perspectivism has been discussed and questioned through various critical approaches, thus opening spaces for reflection, debate and reformulation. I will try to synthesize the main criticisms that have been addressed to perspectivism in order to answer the question, highlighting both the aspects that I consider questionable and the main contributions of this current of anthropological thought. I think it is important to emphasize that, although I agree with several of these criticisms, I consider that a positive aspect of these debates is that they have stimulated interesting and novel reflections not only for anthropology, but also for other sciences, from a theoretical, methodological and even ethical point of view.

Returning to the trajectory of its founder, from his first ethnographic works, Viveiros de Castro sought to broaden his horizons and began to develop comparative studies at the regional level. This initiative undoubtedly reveals in filigree the transformational analysis method of Lévi-Strauss. The next level of analysis consists in the search for universals of human thought in order to reach a level of anthropological reflection, following the hierarchy established by Lévi-Strauss between ethnography, ethnology and anthropology. This epistemological scheme, which is characterized by establishing a hierarchy between different levels of anthropological knowledge, deserves to be questioned for being too mechanical and discriminating. However, this hierarchical scheme continues to be in force in the studies of many colleagues, which is why, it seems to me, it has not been sufficiently criticized to produce a complete epistemological rupture.

Indeed, a crucial problem with this scheme is that it recognizes in it a nineteenth-century trace of the great armchair anthropologists which has often led to generalizations based on a specific ethnographic case. Suffice it to mention the examples of the shaman, the mana and the taboo, among other specific indigenous concepts that have been applied to societies of all latitudes and temporalities. In this respect I agree with the critical reflections developed by Pierre Déléage in his book L'Autre-mental. Figures of the anthropologist in science fiction writing. (2020), who recognizes affinities between Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's thought on the "primitive soul".

Following this order of ideas, Viveiros de Castro developed in his first ethnographic works comparative reflections that covered more societies in the region, with themes such as shamanism, cannibalism, kinship and Amazonian ritual systems. In broadening his horizons, Viveiros de Castro's theoretical and methodological stance also dialogues with the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988) and Roy Wagner (1981 [1975]) on some societies of Oceania, which seeks to show that every individual - or, rather, subject - is immersed in a series of relational networks that determine his or her position and identity in the world. According to this approach, it is through these relational networks that the subject can be defined. In this sense, it is not only the relationship established between the subject and the world that is determinant, but also the relationships that the different subjects maintain among themselves. From there, we seek to develop a dialogic or "symmetrical" ethnographic method (Latour, 1991) and focus our interest on examining the concepts used by this other, who is our interlocutor in an anthropological study.

What we are talking about then in perspectivist works is the conception of the other in its deep nature, what Viveiros de Castro and other contemporary authors call "ontology". This philosophical concept was formulated long ago by Aristotle, who defined it as the study of being as such (from Greek onto- being, present participle of the verb "to be"). Since then, the application of philosophical notions, such as ontology, to ways of being and of thinking about the relationship of the human being with the world that are different and foreign to these notions, are inherited from a long Western tradition that has not ceased to redefine and reformulate them over the centuries. A notion so distorted in Western thought was adapted to anthropology by Viveiros de Castro.

Curiously, when the works on Amazonian perspectivism and multinaturalism became known in Mexico, what Mexican anthropologists who were interested in this current (Saúl Millán, Johannes Neurath, among others) rescued most was this concept of ontology (Hernández Dávila, "The concept of ontology", "The concept of ontology", "The concept of ontology", "The concept of ontology", "The concept of ontology" and "The concept of ontology"). et al., 2018: 71-196), which, in my view, is the most problematic for several reasons. One of them is that there are ethnographic realities that escape from this scheme of thought, to which numerous studies, both in Mexico and in the world, attest . . Another is due to a problem of simple logic or coherence in terms of its critical discourse on classical anthropology: if what is sought is to understand the perspective of the other in order to encompass the multiple ways of living in and conceiving the world, why use as a reference criterion a classical philosophical conception of western culture whose metaphysical definition of being as an entity in its essence is hardly malleable when confronted with other ways of thinking about the world? Indeed, it is worth asking whether the dichotomies implicit in studies on perspectivism and ontologies, such as subject/object or human/non-human, are valid for the cosmologies we study.

There is an abundance of anthropological work, both in Amerindian societies of Mexico and other peoples of America and various latitudes, as well as from the approaches of Alfred Gell (2016 [1998]) on art as agency, in which it has been shown that an object can become a social subject in certain contexts, thus questioning the dichotomy between subject and object. In the case of many societies that have been included in the Mesoamerican area (here I will not enter into this debate), numerous studies by Mexican anthropologists (among others, those of Jacques Galinier, Danièle Dehouve, Gutiérrez and many others) have concluded that we are faced with a system where not only the distinction between culture and nature is not relevant, but also the distinction between humans and non-humans, given the anthropomorphized conceptions of both nature and deified entities.

And yet, in a certain Mexican anthropology, the term "ontology" came to substitute in discourses and essays the concept of "cosmovision" and to be used practically as a synonym of another term that was commonly used in Mexican anthropology influenced by the works of Alfredo López-Austin, Johanna Broda and others (2001: 47-65), focused on the search for the "hard core" of Mesoamerican thought.This is how a fashionable effect took place in Mexico about 20 years ago, inspired by themes that in other places (mainly Brazil, United States and Europe) had already been formulated and discussed since the 1990s. This response of Mexican anthropology, also of culturalist tradition, echoes the discussions started since 2008 on whether the concept of ontology should not be understood "just as another word to refer to culture" (Carrithers et al., 2010: 152-200).

Indeed, it seems that, in spite of describing interspecies and intercultural relations in all their fluidity and dynamics, the concept of ontology seems to be a return to an essentialist and static vision of beings, which can be seen as an atavism of the culturalist tradition. Descola, in his book Beyond nature and culture (2012 [2005]), argues that there are four ontologies in the world: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism, in which all the societies of the planet are distributed. To pigeonhole all the societies of the world into four major categories, it seems to me, denotes a disproportionate ambition that borders on speculation. Universalist and generalizing speculations that had been questioned by Boas and Lévi-Strauss in their criticisms of evolutionists who, it should be remembered, formulated the first theories on animism and totemism, names of two of the ontologies established by Descola. In the face of the criticisms that have been directed at this totalizing scheme, this author has more recently conceded that in certain cases and specific contexts several ontologies could be combined with each other. However, in doing our work as anthropologists, we continue to encounter subjects and things in the world - "existents", Latour (2012) would say - and other cosmologies that escape or go beyond these theoretical-methodological constructions based on observations made in Amazonian and Oceanian societies mainly.

Of course, both Viveiros de Castro and Descola and other representatives of perspectivism in anthropology have been responding to the criticisms that their colleagues have addressed to their initial proposals, dialoguing and finding new grounds for fruitful discussions (Viveiros de Castro, 2014: 161-181; Descola and Ingold, 2014). As a result of these critical exchanges around perspectivism and multinaturalism, debates and reflections on novel issues such as multispecies, multiverses, the anthropocene or cosmopolitics have now been developed, thus exceeding the limits of the anthropological discipline and putting it into dialogue with other areas of knowledge. Questions have also been developed and expanded around the distinction between human and non-human, recognizing the existence of hybrid beings that do not fall into any of these categories (Latour, 1991; Houdart and Olivier, 2011). In relation to the above, contemporary phenomena such as "technological non-humans", transhumanism or artificial intelligence technologies are also being reflected upon in order to rethink the limits of the human and anthropocentrism, from different disciplines. From the approaches of Viveiros de Castro, Descola and Latour, it can be said that a multitude of new anthropological and interdisciplinary proposals have appeared that question our contemporary human condition. New paradigms of thought about the world around us have emerged that have profoundly transformed anthropology and other sciences and even cultural, political or social movements in the last decade.

When I studied Anthropology in Paris in the late 1990s, the perspectivist current and the ontological turn were predominant, especially at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences).ehess), in which she was enrolled to write a report of dea under the direction of Philippe Descola. This is when I began to familiarize myself with the work and academic discussions of various researchers who followed this line of thought, many of them invited by Descola in courses and seminars. Among these guests I remember, for example, listening to Viveiros de Castro, Carlos Fausto, Stephen Hugue Jones and Els Lagrou. Both the work of the guest researchers I have just mentioned, as well as that of French researchers working on related topics, such as Anne-Christine Taylor, Dimitri Karadimas or Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, to mention only a few for lack of space, were enriching sources of learning, allowing us to learn about and explore topics such as Amerindian cosmologies, native thought systems, indigenous taxonomies, kinship systems, shamanic chants, anthropology of the senses, social role of ritual objects such as masks, etc.

On the other hand, as I developed my ethnographic reflections and research, I realized that in many cases it was difficult to apply the theories and methods proposed by perspectivism in Amazonia to Mexican contexts. As an example, I will mention some reflections that led me to an analysis of the figure of Kauyumari among the Wixaritari (Huichol), because there are mythological and ritual figures that are "good to think about" because they escape precisely to any ontological circumscription: we have a character of the type tricksterambiguous, contradictory, paradoxical, imperfect, who does not even know himself if he really exists, since his name literally means "the one who does not know himself". In other words, he is a being and a non-being at the same time (Kindl, 2019: 134). How to make use in these cases of the concept of ontology? This example interrogates both the concept of ontology formulated by Viveiros de Castro and Descola's (2006) concept of ontological figuration.

Certainly, the contributions of perspectivist studies have had an impact on my work, as well as on anthropology in general, to think about the possibility of a decolonizing theory and practice within the social sciences. A radical questioning of the "coloniality of knowledge" applied to ethnographic practice in which the discourse and worldview of the native (Viveiros de Castro, 2016 [2002]: 29-69), i.e., our interlocutors in the field, are "taken seriously" (Viveiros de Castro, 2016 [2002]: 29-69). Viveiros de Castro's approaches invite us to reflect on whether cultural anthropology should not be an intercultural and perspectivist anthropology, that is, a truly intercultural anthropology and not simply a cultural anthropology that reflects on interculturality. This part is, in my opinion, the most salvageable part of perspectivism. However, from my Mexicanist point of view, there is still much to discuss, question and rethink about the question of ontologies and dichotomies between subject and object, human and non-human.