The article reviews a series of confrontations between what we could dub 'perspectivist' and 'naturalist' perceptions of the world: the process of Christianization of the medieval west, the decline of European sorcery, the apogee and crisis of witch-hunting at the dawn of the Modern Age and the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' Dom Quixote. Each case deals with themes characteristic of the grand narrative of the triumph of reason and the contrast between rational thinking and its opposites which, when examined in detail, actually reveal the co-existence of modes of thinking, as well as the immediate and reversible character of their transformations. The notion of perspectivism thus enables a more nuanced and versatile historical description of these epistemic reforms and the de-substantialization of anthropological notions of the rational and the irrational. The text concludes by suggesting some ways to study the encounter between Amerindian shamanisms (the universe from which the notion of perspectivism as it appears in the article is taken) and their recent re-elaborations.
Perspectivism; Literature; Cervantes; Western culture; Cosmology