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 from Amerindian perspectivism, in which 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. Multinaturalism is not a claim about cultural diversity but about ontological plurality: the plurality is in the world, not in the mind.
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.
Related terms
- Perspectivism — the framework from which multinaturalism arises
- Ontological turn — the broader philosophical movement
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position multinaturalism expresses
- Settler colonialism — the political structure that enforces mononaturalism
- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro — principal theorist