Inhuman beings: Morality and perspectivism among Muinane people (Colombian Amazon)

Like many other Amozonians, Muinane people often use perspectival imagery in discussions of relations between human beings and animals. It is a distinct possibility, within their ontology, that beings that humans perceive as animals, perceive themselves as human, and there are numerous complementary entailments to this. What is most striking about Muinane people's perspectival imagery, however, is that they use it saliently in their moral evaluations of subjectivity and action. I show that this makes perspectivism central to the everyday meaningful practices through which Muinane people achieve social life, and to their understandings of themselves. On that basis, I claim that accounts of Amerindian perspectival cosmologies should attend ethnographically to their morally evaluative potential and to their use by individuals in their discourses and other practices.