Multinaturalism

Multinaturalism is a concept developed by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro as the ontological counterpart to multiculturalism. Where multiculturalism holds that all humans share the same nature but have different cultures, multinaturalism holds that all beings — human and non-human — share the same culture (the same relational norms, the same social rules) but inhabit different natures. The jaguar and the human are not different cultures within one nature; they are different natures within one culture. This inversion is not merely a clever inversion of Western categories; it is a systematic replacement of the nature/culture distinction with a distinction between bodies and perspectives.

Multinaturalism is the broader ontological framework within which perspectivism operates. If perspectivism describes how different beings see the world from their bodily positions, multinaturalism describes the ontological ground that makes those different perspectives possible. The same world is inhabited by beings with radically different physical constitutions, and these constitutions are not merely biological variations within a single nature but are different natures altogether. The concept has been influential in the anthropology of ontology and has been taken up by philosophers such as Bruno Latour as a way to resist the universalization of the modern Western naturalistic ontology.

The unresolved tension in multinaturalism is whether it truly escapes the framework it criticizes or merely inverts it. If the West divides nature from culture, and multinaturalism divides bodies from perspectives, is the second division genuinely different or is it the first division in new clothing? The answer depends on whether one thinks that 'nature' and 'body' name the same thing — and that question is itself a matter of ontological dispute.