ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE MYERS LECTURE
The 2026 Myers Lecture will be given by Professor Aparecida Vilaca, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Wednesday 30 September 2025, 5.00-6.00 pm BST
Location: Kings College London, Rooms To Be Advised
In-Person registration: CLICK HERE TO REGISTER YOUR ATTENDANCE
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception and is preceded by the RAI AGM, 3-5pm (AGM page)
Conflicting perspectives on other-than-human beings: Amazonian predatory animism encounters the ‘Rights of Nature’
Although the animist ontologies of Amazonian indigenous peoples are today ethnographically well-documented, over the last few decades a kind of ‘purification’ of their predatory aspects has led to their supplantion by the idea of a benign and collaborative animism between humans and other-than-humans.
These idealized relationships are seen as compatible with the holistic biological models informing many contemporary environmental movements, especially ‘Rights of Nature’ initiatives, which attribute the status of legal persons to ‘environmental features’ such as forests and rivers.
My intention is to discuss the importance of predatory relationships for understanding the indigenous relational world and the equivocations generated by their eclipsing in the interaction with environmental agents and lawmakers.
Biography: Professor Aparecida Vilaca
Aparecida Vilaça is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She has held the Simón Bolívar Professorship at the University of Cambridge and visiting professorships at Stanford, Princeton, Bergen, UNAM (Mexico), and the EHESS (Paris). Since 1986, she has conducted long-term ethnographic research among the Wari’ Indigenous people of southwestern Amazonia. Her work explores Amazonian notions of kinship, embodiment, and personhood, as well as the cultural transformations associated with conversion to Christianity and the experience of formal schooling. She is the author of Strange Enemies (2010), Praying and Preying (2016), and Paletó and Me (2021), and co-author, with Geoffrey Lloyd, of Of Jaguars and Butterflies (2023) and Bodies, Gods and Other Imponderables (2026).