Beyond the Human Monopoly on Personhood

Western modernity rests on a distinction so deep it usually goes unnoticed: the distinction between persons and things. Persons have minds, interests, moral standing, and the capacity for relationships. Things are objects, they can be owned, used, transformed, consumed. The natural world, in the dominant Western framework, belongs almost entirely to the category of things. A forest is a resource. A river is a hydrological system. A bear is a mammal of the family Ursidae. These are not persons, they cannot have intentions, make agreements, receive obligations, or be wronged.

Across indigenous traditions from the Americas, Australia, the Pacific, and elsewhere, this categorical distinction is either absent or arranged very differently. The claim that the world is populated by multiple kinds of persons, only some of whom are human, is not a naive pre-scientific confusion. It is a principled ontological position with its own internal logic, its own epistemological implications, and, increasingly, its own serious defenders in academic philosophy.

The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey has defined what he calls the new animism as the recognition that the world is "full of persons, only some of whom are human," and that "life is always lived in relationship with others." This formulation is important because it shifts the animist claim from a psychological thesis (indigenous peoples project minds onto natural objects because they cannot distinguish animate from inanimate) to an ontological and ethical thesis: the question is not whether trees have minds like human minds but whether trees are the kind of beings that can participate in relationships of moral significance.

The Anishinaabe biologist and member of the Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer has made this case with unusual force by joining it to a linguistic argument. In Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), she describes her encounter with the Potawatomi language, a language in which the animate/inanimate distinction is built into the grammar at the most fundamental level, and in which a vast range of entities that English treats as inanimate (plants, rivers, mountains, fire) are grammatically animate. In Potawatomi, approximately 70% of words are verbs rather than nouns, a grammar that encodes a world in motion, a world of ongoing becoming, rather than a world of static objects.

In Potawatomi and many other indigenous languages this grammar of animacy means that we have the linguistic structure to speak of the living world as if it were alive, as if it was a person, as if it were our family, because in our way of thinking, it is.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, quoted in Kate Conklin (2025) and kateconklin.com

Kimmerer's point is not merely linguistic. The Potawatomi grammar of animacy is a record of a different ontological relationship to the living world, one in which the appropriate relationship to a plant, a river, or a mountain is not manipulation but reciprocal engagement. When you speak of a plant as "it," you have already foreclosed certain ethical possibilities. When you speak of it as "ki" (Kimmerer's proposed English extension of Potawatomi animacy grammar), you have opened them.

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro developed a parallel case from his work with Amazonian peoples, particularly the Araweté and the Tupinambá. He coined the term Amerindian perspectivism to describe a cosmological structure in which humans and animals share a common spiritual or social nature (what he calls cultura) but differ in their bodies and therefore in their perspective on the world. Where Western naturalism posits one nature and many cultures, Amerindian perspectivism posits one culture and many natures. Jaguars experience themselves as persons in a social world, they have feasts, ceremonies, and kin relations. They simply inhabit a different body, and therefore a different perspective on what the world contains.