Perspectivism, as developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro from Amerindian ethnography, is the proposition that all beings see themselves as human — that is, as subjects — but see other beings according to the kind of body they inhabit. A jaguar sees itself as a person drinking manioc beer in a longhouse; what it sees as manioc beer, a human sees as blood. The world is not one nature viewed from many cultural perspectives (multiculturalism) but one culture — subjectivity, intentionality, sociality — instantiated through many natures (multinaturalism).
This is not relativism. Relativism holds that there are many representations of one world; perspectivism holds that there is one mode of representing (culture, in the sense of subject-position) and many worlds that bodies produce. The difference between a human and a jaguar is not a difference in belief about the same reality but a difference in body, and therefore a difference in the reality each inhabits. The body is not a biological substrate on which culture is inscribed but a bundle of affects and capacities — what a body can eat, how it moves, what it fears — that constitutes a perspective, and therefore a world.
Perspectivism has consequences for ontology, epistemology, and politics. Ontologically, it replaces the substance-property model with a relational one: what something is depends on who is looking, not because reality is subjective but because relations constitute the terms they connect. This makes perspectivism a form of relational ontology arrived at through ethnographic and philosophical analysis rather than through formal mathematics, though the convergence with the relational framework developed in this research program is not accidental. Politically, perspectivism refuses the colonial operation of reducing Indigenous ontologies to “beliefs” while treating Western naturalism as “knowledge.”
Related terms
- Multinaturalism — the ontological framework perspectivism entails
- Ontological turn — the broader movement perspectivism helped catalyze
- Animism — the relational personhood of other-than-human beings
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position perspectivism articulates
- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro — the principal theorist
- Refusal — declining the colonial reduction of ontologies to beliefs