The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood
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Amazonian peoples treat everyday artifacts as cosmic persons — and their radical theory of materiality might permanently unsettle Western assumptions about what separates objects from subjects.
AnimismObject-Oriented OntologyPerspectivismActor-Network Theory
Theory Briefing
- Native Amazonian cosmologies hold that human-made objects were the first creations of the universe, predating living beings.
- Artifacts are treated as persons with social relationships — a direct challenge to Western subject-object distinctions.
- This worldview aligns with and extends anthropological theories of animism, suggesting personhood is a property of things, not just beings.