P. 93 "The problem is particularly acute when it passes through the mouth: “A shaman in Iglulik once told Birket-Smith: ‘Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man’s food consists entirely of souls’” (Bodenhorn 1988: 1). This is not, then, the contemporary fear that our food is composed of ‘transgenic organisms’, but a fear of the latency of quite other hybrids, transontological intentionalities, nonorganic lives that are just as, or even more, dangerous, inducers of corporal metamorphoses and abductors of souls. The theme is fairly well known: cannibalism is, for the native peoples of America, an inevitable component of every act of manducation, because everything is human, in the sense of capable of being human: this cosmic background humanity is less a predicate of all beings than a constitutive uncertainty concerning the predicates of any being."
P. 93-94 "In sum, these are worlds where humanity is immanent, as R. Wagner (1981) puts it; that is, worlds where the primordial takes human form; which does not make it in any sense comforting, much the opposite: there where all things are human, the human is something else entirely. And there were all things are human, nobody can be certain of being unconditionally human, because nobody is— including ourselves. In fact, humans have to ‘decondition’ their humanity in certain precise conditions, since the influx of the non-human and becoming-otherthan-human are obligatory ‘moments’ of transition for humans. The world of immanent humanity is also a world of the immanence of the enemy."
P. 95 " Each species is thus ‘in’ culture, occupying the position that humans (that is, the humans’ humans) see themselves as occupying in relation to the rest of the cosmos. Hence, it is not just a question of each species identifying itself as a culturally defined humanity: perspectivism also means that each species possesses a particular way of perceiving alterity, a ‘consensual hallucination’5 device which makes it see the world in a characteristic way. "
P. 96 "Perspectivism does not state the existence of a multiplicity of points of view, but the existence of the point of view as a multiplicity."
P. 100 " In an earlier work, I argued that the constitutive problem of Western modernity, namely, solipsism—the supposition that the Other is merely a body, that it does not harbour a soul like that of the Self: an absence of communication—had as its Amazonian equivalent the (positive or negative) obsession with cannibalism and the affirmation of the latent transformability of bodies—a total impregnation of the cosmos by subjecthood, a supposition-fear that what we eat are always, in the final analysis, souls: an excess of communication. Here I wish to suggest that the true equivalent of the indigenous experience of the supernatural are not our extraordinary or paranormal experiences (alien abductions, ESP, mediumship, etc.), but the quotidian experience, perfectly terrifying in its very normality, of existing under a State."
