The agency of non-human entity in the recent anthropology of the Indigenous Lowland South America
Anuac June 28, 2015 A. Mancuso
Over the past two decades, the concept of agency has become a key term in anthropological studies of Indigenous peoples in Lowland South America, intersecting with renewed interest in animism, Viveiros de Castro's 'Amerindian perspectivism,' and the broader ontological turn. This paper examines how different notions of agency are applied to shamanism, the ontological status of artifacts, and other non-human beings, while also exploring consonances and dissonances between socio-cultural anthropology and anthropological linguistics. The encounter between agency and Lowland South American ethnography has led to the deconstruction of the concept itself.