ON MULTI-CULTURALISM vs. MULTI-NATURALISM

Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism
Author(s): Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Source: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 469-488
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland

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"Such a critique, in the present case, implies a redistribution of the predicates subsumed within the two paradigmatic sets that traditionally oppose one another under the headings of 'Nature' and 'Culture': universal and particular, objective and subjective, physical and social, fact and value, the given and the instituted, necessity and spontaneity, immanence and transcendence, body and mind, animality and humanity, among many more. Such an ethnographically-based reshuffling of our conceptual schemes leads me to suggest the expression, 'multinaturalism', to designate one of the contrastive features of Amerindian thought in relation to Western 'multiculturalist' cosmologies. Where the latter are founded on the mutual implication of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures - the first guaranteed by the objective universality of body and substance, the second generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning - the Amerindian conception would suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity. Here, culture or the subject would be the form of the universal, whilst nature or the object would be the form of the particular."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:469-470).

"If Western multiculturalism is relativism as public policy, then Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multi naturalism as cosmic politics."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:472).

" [I]f 'culture' is a reflexive perspective of the subject, objectified through the concept of soul, it can be said that 'nature' is the viewpoint which the subject takes of other body-affects; if Culture is the Subject's nature, then Nature is the form of the Other as body, that is, as the object for a subject. Culture takes the self-referential form of the pronoun 'I' ; nature is the form of the non-person or the object, indicated by the impersonal pronoun 'it'(Benveniste 1966: 256)" (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:478).

ON PERSPECTIVISM

"[A]nimals are people, or see themselves as persons. Such a notion is virtually always associated with the idea that the manifest form of each species is a mere envelope (a 'clothing') which conceals an internal human form, usually only visible to the eyes of the particular species or to certain trans-specific beings such as shamans"(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:470-471).

The "notion of 'clothing' is one of the privileged expressions of metamorphosis - spirits, the dead and shamans who assume animal form, beasts that turn into other beasts, humans that are inadvertently turned into animals - an omnipresent process in the 'highly transformational world' (Riviere 1994: 256) proposed by Amazonian ontologies"(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:471).

"Amerindian thought proposes the opposite: a representational or phenomenological unity which is purely pronominal or deictic, indifferently applied to a radically objective diversity. One single 'culture', multiple 'natures' - perspectivism is multinaturalist, for a perspective is not a representation" (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:478).

"The visible shape of the body is a powerful sign of these differences in affect, although it can be deceptive since a human appearance could, for example, be concealing a jaguar-affect. Thus, what I call 'body' is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; it is an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus" (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:478).

"The notion of metamorphosis is directly linked to the doctrine of animal 'clothing', to which I have referred. How are we to reconcile the idea that the body is the site of differentiating perspectives with the theme of the 'appearance' and 'essence' which is always evoked to interpret animism and perspectivism (Arhem 1993: 122; Descola 1986: 120; Hugh-Jones 1996; Riviere 1994)? Here seems to me to lie an important mistake, which is that of taking bodily 'appearance' to be inert and false, whereas spiritual 'essence' is active and real (see the definitive observations of Gold man 1975: 63). I argue that nothing could be further from the Indians' minds when they speak of bodies in terms of'clothing'. It is not so much that the body is a clothing but rather that clothing is a body. We are dealing with societies which inscribe efficacious meanings onto the skin, and which use animal masks (or at least know their principle) endowed with the power metaphysically to transform the identities of those who wear them, if used in the appropriate ritual context." (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:482).

"[T]here is no doubt that bodies are discardable and exchangeable and that 'behind' them lie subjectivities which are formally identical to humans. But the idea is not similar to our opposition between appearance and essence; it merely manifests the objective permutability of bodies which is based in the subjective equivalence of souls." (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:482).

"This notion of the body as a 'clothing' can be found amongst the Makuna (Arhem 1993), the Yagua (ChaumeiI1983: 125-7), the Piro (Gow, pers. comm.), the Trio (Riviere 1994) the Upper Xingu societies (Gregor 1977: 322). The notion is very likely pan-American, having considerable symbolic yield for example in North-west Coast cosmologies (see Goldman 1975 and Boelscher 1989), ifnot of much wider distribution, a question I cannot consider here" (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:484).

Arhem, K. 1993. Ecosofia makuna. In La selva humanizada: ecologia alternativa en el tr6pico hUmedo colombiano (ed.) F. Correa. Bogota: Instituto Colombiano de Antropologfa, Fondo FEN Colombia, Fondo Editorial CEREC.
Chaumeil, J.-p. 1983. U,ir, savoir, pouvoir: le chamonisme chez les Ytlgua du nord-est peruvien. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
Riviere, P. 1994. WYSINWYG in Amazonia.JASO 25, 255-62.
Gregor, T. 1977. Mehinaku: the drama of daily life in a Brazilian Indian village. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Goldman, 1.1975. The mouth ofheaven: an introduction to Kwakiutl religious thought. New York: WileyInterscience.
Boelscher, M. 1989. The curtain within: Haida social and mythical discourse. Vancouver: Univ. of British ColumbIa Press.

ON VENATIC cum HORTICULTURIST IDEOLOGY IN AMAZON

"It is worth pointing out that Amerindian perspectivism has an essential relation with shamanism and with the valorization of the hunt. The association between shamanism and this 'venatic ideology' is a classic question (for Amazonia, see Chaumeil 1983: 231-2; Crocker 1985: 17-25). I stress that this is a matter of symbolic importance, not ecological necessity: horticulturists such as the Tukano or the Juruna (who in any case fish more than they hunt) do not differ much from circumpolar hunters in respect of the cosmological weight conferred on animal predation, spiritual subjectivation of animals and the theory according to which the universe is populated by extra-human intentionalities endowed with their own perspectives"(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:472).

NATURE ONTOLOGIES

"The reader will have noticed that my 'perspectivism' is reminiscent of the notion of 'animism' recently recuperated by Descola (1992; 1996). Stating that all conceptualizations of non-humans always refer to the social domain, Descola distinguishes three modes of objectifying nature: totemism, where the differences between natural species are used as a model for social distinctions; that is, where the relationship between nature and culture is metaphorical in character and marked by discontinuity (both within and between series); animism, where the 'elementary categories structuring social life' organize the relations between humans and natural species, thus defining a social continuity between nature and culture, founded on the attribution of human dispositions and social characteristics to 'natural beings' (Descola 1996: 87-8); and naturalism, typical of Western cosmologies, which supposes an ontological duality between nature, the domain of necessity, and culture, the domain of spontaneity, areas separated by metonymic discontinuity. The 'animic mode' is characteristic of societies in which animals are the 'strategic focus of the objectification of nature and of its socialization' (1992: 115), as is the case amongst indigenous peoples of America, reigning supreme over those social morphologies lacking in elaborate internal segmentations. But this mode can also be found co-existing or combined with totem ism, wherein such segmentations exist, the Bororo and their aroe/bope dualism being such a case"(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:472-473).

"The body, in contrast, is the major integrator: it connects us to the rest of the living, united by a universal substrate (DNA, carbon chemistry) which, in turn, links up with the ultimate nature of all material bodies" (Viveiro de Castoro 1998:479).

"The human body can be seen as the locus of the confrontation between humanity and animality, but not because it is essentially animal by nature and needs to be veiled and controlled by culture (Riviere 1994)."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:480).

ON ANIMISM

"Animism could be defined as an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and non-humans: the space between nature and society is itself social. Naturalism is founded on the inverted axiom: relations between society and nature are themselves natural. Indeed, ifin the animic mode the distinction 'nature/culture' is internal to the social world, humans and animals being immersed in the same socio-cosmic medium (and in this sense 'nature' is a part of an encompassing sociality), then in naturalist ontology, the distinction 'nature/culture' is internal to nature (and in this sense, human society is one natural phenomenon amongst others). Animism has 'society' as the unmarked pole, naturalism has 'nature': these poles function, respectively and contrastively, as the universal dimension of each mode. Thus animism and naturalism are hierarchical and metonymical structures (this distinguishes them from totemism, which is based on a metaphoric correlation between equipollent opposites)"(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:473).

"This is to say Culture is the Subject's nature; it is the form in which every subject experiences its own nature. Animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals, but rather expresses the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves: salmon are to (see) salmon as humans are to (see) humans, namely, (as) human.lO If, as we have observed, the common condition of humans and animals is humanity not animality, this is because 'humanity' is the name for the general form taken by the Subject."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:477)

ON NATURISM

"In Western naturalist ontology, the nature/society interface is natural: humans are organisms like the rest, body-objects in 'ecological' interaction with other bodies and forces, all of them ruled by the necessary laws of biology and physics; 'productive forces' harness, and thereby express, natural forces: Social relations, that is, contractual or instituted relations between subjects, can only exist internal to human society. But how alien to nature - this would be the problem of naturalism - are these relations? Given the universality of nature, the status of the human and social world is unstable and, as the history ofWestern thought shows, it perpetually oscillates between a naturalistic monism (,sociobiology' being one ofits current avatars) and an ontological dualism ofnature!culture (,culturalism' being its contemporary expression). The assertion of this latter dualism, for all that, only reinforces the final referential character of the notion of nature, by revealing itself to be the direct descendant of the opposition between Nature and Supernature. Culture is the modern name of Spirit -let us recall the distinction between NaturwissenschaJten and Geisteswissenschciften - or at the least it is the name of the compromise between Nature and Grace. Of animism, we would be tempted to say that the instability is located in the opposite pole: there the problem is how to administer the mixture of humanity and animality constituting animals, and not, as is the case amongst ourselves, the combination of culture and nature which characterize humans; the point is to differentiate a 'nature' out of the universal sociality."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:473-474).

INGOLD DISTINGUISHS TWO KIND OF "NATURE"

"Ingold (1991; 1996) showed how schemes of analogical projection or social modelling of nature escape naturalist reductionism only to fall into a nature/culture dualism which by distinguishing 'really natural' nature from 'culturally constructed' nature reveals itself to be a typical cosmological antinomy faced with infinite regression. The notion of model or metaphor supposes a previous distinction between a domain wherein social relations are constitutive and literal and another where they are representational and metaphorical. Animism, interpreted as human sociality projected onto the non-human world, would be nothing but the metaphor of a metonymy."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:474).

PROBLEM OF OTHER MIND

"Like us, they distinguished culture from nature and they too believed that Naturvolker are always the others. The universality of the cultural distinction between Nature and Culture bore witness to the universality of culture as human nature. In sum, the answer to the question of the Spanish investigators (which can be read as a sixteenth-centuryversion of the 'problem of other minds') was positive: savages do have souls."(Viveiro de Castoro 1998:475).

PHAMTOM OF CANNIBALISM

"The phantom of cannibalism is the Amerindian equivalent to the problem of solipsism: if the latter derives from the uncertainty as to whether the natural similarity of bodies guarantees a real community of spirit, then the former suspects that the similarity of souls might prevail over the real differences of body and that all animals that are eaten might, despite the shamanistic efforts to de-subjectivize them, remain human."Viveiro de Castoro 1998:481).