The agency of non-human entity in the recent anthropology of the Indigenous Lowland South America

Abstract

In the last twenty years, agency has entered the field of anthropological studies of Lowland South America Indigenous Peoples as a term and a topic of concern. Ethnographical and theoretical treatment of this notion has intertwined here with the revisiting of the concept of animism, Viveiros de Castro’s statements about “amerindian perspectivism” and a broader “ontological turn” in research orientation. In the paper I discuss this trend, focusing on how different notions of agency are used to talk about topics as shamanism and ontological status of artifacts as well as, more generally, of other non-human categories of beings. I pay attention too to dissonances and consonances in this field of study between approaches closer to socio-cultural anthropology and anthropological linguistics. Finally, I show how this meeting of the notion of agency with ethnography of Lowland South America has precipitated its deconstruction.