Amazonian Perspectivism

Amazonian perspectivism is a cosmological framework documented by the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among numerous Amazonian indigenous peoples, in which all beings — humans, animals, spirits — share a universal culture (point of view, intentionality, social life) while differing in body (the material substrate that produces a particular perspective). The jaguar sees itself as human, living in a longhouse, drinking manioc beer; what it calls beer is what humans call blood. Species difference is not a difference in interiority but in exteriority.

This inverts the standard Western framework in which humans uniquely have culture and all other beings have only nature. In Amerindian perspectivism, culture is the universal ground and bodies are the variables — a structure Viveiros de Castro calls multinaturalism as opposed to Multiculturalism. The framework challenges the hard problem of consciousness from an unexpected angle: if subjectivity is universal and bodies are what vary, then the question is not how matter generates experience but how a particular body produces its particular perspective. See also Anthropology of Ontology and Conceptual Scheme.