Philosophy
Viveiros de Castro uses Amerindian perspectivism to unsettle inherited divisions between human, nonhuman, nature and culture.
The familiar view holds that there is one shared nature which different cultures interpret differently. In the perspectivist worlds the book describes, the arrangement runs the other way: all kinds of beings share the same culture and way of being a person, and what differs is the world their bodies give them. Public multiculturalism has a cosmic counterpart in multinaturalism.
Saying animals are persons does not mean they are secretly just like us. It means that, as persons, they are something else at bottom, the far side of a relation, different even from themselves. Perspective is a way of thinking variation itself, not a claim of shared identity or a simple flip of categories.
The usual model of knowledge treats understanding as reducing something to an inert object. Perspectivism reverses this: to understand something is to grant it its own agency and point of view. The better you know a thing, the more fully you see it as a subject.
Each kind of being sees itself as a person and sees its own food and habits as ordinary human ones. A predator sees itself as human, sees humans as prey, and sees the blood it drinks as beer. Personhood is the default point of view, not a privilege belonging to one species.
Organizing society around lines of descent tends to produce and serve a state. Where relationships are built instead through ties of marriage and alliance, extended even to animals and spirits, they work against the formation of a state. How a people reckon relatedness carries political consequences.