Amerindian perspectivism
Explanation
Amerindian perspectivism is the name that the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has given to a philosophical feature common to many cosmologies of Amerindian peoples (especially Amazonian, but also Andean, Mesoamerican and others). His article "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism" (1998) and his book Cannibal Metaphysics have revolutionised contemporary anthropology, triggering what is called the "ontological turn".
Perspectivism inverts modern Western cosmology. For Western thought: there is one nature (objective, described by science) and many cultures (subjective, described by anthropology). This is mononaturalism and multiculturalism. For Amerindian thought the opposite is the case: there are many natures (bodies, different perspectives) but one culture (all beings are persons, have soul, have sociability). This is multinaturalism and monoculturalism.
Each species of beings sees itself as human (with culture, language, kinship, rituals), and sees other species as non-human or as different humans. For jaguars, jaguars are humans who hunt; humans are tapirs that walk on two legs; the blood they drink is chicha (beer). For peccaries, peccaries are humans in their village; humans are monstrous predators. "Reality" depends on the perspective of the body that inhabits it.
This has important consequences for consciousness: consciousness or subjectivity is not a property exclusive to humans but a universal property of beings. What differentiates classes of beings is not consciousness but the body (sensory capacities, abilities, life habits). The shaman is precisely the one who can move between perspectives, see the world from the point of view of animals, plants and spirits.
This deeply questions the nature/culture dichotomy so central to modern Western thought. If all beings are persons, then human-animal, human-plant and human-landscape relations are not subject-object relations but subject-subject relations. Hunting is an encounter between persons (hunter and prey), with its rituals and reciprocities. Agriculture is a relation with plant-persons. The landscape is inhabited by non-human persons with whom one must negotiate.
For the theory of consciousness, Amerindian perspectivism is one of the most important contributions of indigenous thought to the contemporary philosophical debate: it offers an ontology radically alternative to Western naturalism, in which consciousness is ubiquitous and difference is of body, not of spirit. There are parallels with philosophical proposals such as panpsychism, with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology (on the body as perspective), with Donna Haraway's animal philosophy, with the "more-than-human" anthropology of Eduardo Kohn (How Forests Think, 2013). Perspectivism invites us to recognise that Western modernity is not the only possible philosophy, nor necessarily the most sophisticated, on the question of consciousness.
Strengths
- Rigorous philosophical articulation of indigenous worldviews.
- Powerful challenge to Western anthropocentrism.
- Dialogue with analytic and continental philosophy.
- Influence in political ecology and postcolonial studies.
Main critiques
- Possible excessive generalisation among diverse Amerindian peoples.
- Tension with Western worldviews assumed in academia.
- Difficulty of adequate translation between ontologies.