Perspectivism as an anthropological theory on a par with academic theories is the subject of Chapter 2. The implications for archaeologyn are developed through a type of ‘thought experiment’, conceived as the thoughtful access to the experience of others. This thought experiment starts from a different way of encountering things: objects, after all, may be subjects, according to perspectivism. The consequences of such an experiment for understanding and interpreting the archaeological record are played through.

The chapter provides an overview of the manifestation of perspectivism in areas beyond the Amazon and archaeological cases from various times and places of the world, which exemplify how research has used perspectivism – from understanding it as a native ontology to using only some of its principles to understand the archaeological record or applying it as an anthropological theory to interpret the past from a locally situated approach. Two methodological issues become apparent in the chapter, how to translate other ontologies into our terms and how such a thought experiment can be put into practice when interpreting the archaeological record, whether perspectivist, animist, totemic or other.

As long as their actions are lawful, administratorsought to reinforce the democratic values in their systems of representative government.The reason why is that doing so helps to legitimate policy work as a form of representation: policy work is done on behalf of citizens, and recognizing this integrates policy workers and the state, which itself is born from representation.Institutional designers must not advocate structural choices that compromise the legitimating that representation has for policy work, and they can only craft structures capable of producing democracy administered from values that complement those of the representative governments toward which they direct their proposals.One structure thus cannot fit all political jurisdictions because their representative governments make different trade-offs inaccountability and process values.But attending to value complementarity helps to facilitate representation, to legitimate the state, to address the fundamental problem of public administration and to nurture democracy administered.

Shakespeare’s thought experiment in the play Julius Caesar is focused on the power of context and the continuation of individual behavior through the influence of context. The readiness of the springboard to dictatorship meant that the conditions were ready for Julius Caesar or another potential dictator to spring to power. The conspirators correctly judged Julius Caesar to be a potential dictator who would bring an end to the Roman Republic. Brutus and the other conspirators made the mistake of assuming that by killing Caesar they had saved the republic and avoided dictatorship. But in terms of personality characteristics, Caesar was only one of a number of potential dictators who could take advantage of the springboard to dictatorship. Eliminating Caesar without changing the context simply created space and new opportunities for other potential dictators to spring to power. The civil war that followed the assassination of Caesar bled into the collapse of the republic; context shaped the kind of leadership that rose to govern Rome.