Multinaturalism

Multinaturalism is the ontological inversion of multiculturalism proposed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Where Western multiculturalism assumes one nature (a single objective reality) and many cultures (different representations of that reality), multinaturalism proposes one culture (a universal condition of subjectivity and sociality) and many natures (different material worlds constituted by different bodies). The move is not from “one truth, many perspectives” to “no truth, anything goes,” but from a metaphysics of substance to a metaphysics of relation: what exists depends on the relational position from which existence is constituted.

The concept emerges directly from Amerindian perspectivism. If all beings share the capacity for subjectivity but inhabit different worlds because their bodies — understood not as biological organisms but as bundles of affects, capacities, and habits — produce different natures, then the plurality is in the world, not in the mind. A jaguar and a human do not have different beliefs about the same world. They inhabit different worlds, constituted by the different bodies through which they relate to what is around them.

Multiculturalism, by contrast, assumes that nature is one and that cultures differ only in how they interpret it. This assumption serves a specific political function: it positions Western naturalism as the objective ground on which all cultural interpretations are evaluated. Other ontologies become “worldviews” — interesting, perhaps valuable, but ultimately less accurate than the scientific account. Multinaturalism refuses this hierarchy not by claiming that all worldviews are equally valid (which would still assume a single nature against which validity is measured) but by denying that there is a single nature to be more or less valid about.

This inversion has direct consequences for how the ontological turn engages with Western philosophy. If natures are plural and relational, then the foundation of Western naturalism — a single, pre-given, mind-independent world that science progressively describes — is itself one ontology among others, not the neutral ground on which all others are evaluated. Multinaturalism does not reject science but locates it as one way of constituting a world, produced by specific bodily and social practices, not by a privileged access to nature-as-it-really-is. The same move applies to any framework — including multinaturalism itself — that claims to describe how things really are.