The nonanimistic worldview of Fritz Krause

Abstract

In the acknowledgments to the English translation of “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism,” Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (1998: 484) cryptically states that “After this article has reached its present form, I read an essay by Fritz Krause … which advances ideas strikingly similar to some developed here.” In this introduction to the first English translation of Krause’s “Mask and ancestral figure: The motif of the skin and the principle of form,” I sketch what some of these ideas may be and trace how they were addressed in Viveiros de Castro’s later writings. I conclude with a brief survey of some other engagements with Krause’s work in Amazonian ethnology and suggest why this article has remained largely ignored in the discipline.