6 - Inhabiting a Perspectivist World

Summary

An example of another way of working with perspectivism is developed in Chapter 6, in which specific principles from the theory are adapted to specific problems based on geo-ethnographic affinity with current native ontologies. How far can one go with an interpretation of the archaeological record from that starting point? Two more examples are presented. First are the relationships between people and material culture in central Argentina’s pre-colonial societies (ca. 1200–1500 CE). In a characteristically perspectivist fashion, the use of referential fields on different media highlights a way of being in the world that was experienced as inherently unstable. The second example focuses on the relationship between people and landscape in the initial peopling of the same region at the beginning of the Holocene. What would the relationship with the landscape have been for a perspectivist people populating a space absent of humans but with other entities that had the capacity to be subjects? The relationship turns out to have been more social than ecological, established prior to any given interaction, which comes into conflict with the conventional idea of archaeological landscape as empty space.