Western thought since Descartes has operated on a model that the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro calls multiculturalism: there is one nature, but many cultures. Different human groups have different representations, beliefs, and practices, but they are all responding to the same underlying physical reality. Anthropology, on this model, explains cultural variation while assuming a shared natural world.
Viveiros de Castro proposes inverting this. Amazonian Amerindian thought, he argues, operates on a model of multinaturalism: there is one culture, roughly, the mode of being a person, a subject, a social being, but many natures. All beings share a spiritual or social dimension; what differs is their bodies, their physical perspectives, their forms. A jaguar has the same kind of social interior (desires, kin, rituals) as a human, but a different body that constitutes a different world.
The analogy that makes this vivid: imagine that what we call "honey" is what jaguars experience as blood. Same substance, different worlds, because the world that each being inhabits is constituted by its bodily perspective. The jaguar does not have a false belief about honey/blood. It inhabits a different nature.
This is not merely poetic or metaphorical. Viveiros de Castro argues this is a genuinely different metaphysics, one that places relations rather than substances at the center of reality, and perspectives rather than representations at the center of knowledge. It is philosophically continuous with Leibniz's perspectivism and with aspects of Whitehead's process philosophy, but it arrives from an entirely different direction.
The ontological turn in anthropology, associated with Viveiros de Castro, Marylin Strathern, and others, is the methodological proposal that anthropologists should take seriously the possibility that what they encounter in fieldwork is not just different beliefs about the same world but different ontologies: different configurations of what exists, what relates to what, and what kinds of agency are possible. The methodological shift is from translation ("what do they believe about X?") to ontological self-questioning ("what if their X is not our X?").
For example: when a community in Papua New Guinea distinguishes between 50 kinds of social relationship that English collapses into a few terms, this is not just an exotic vocabulary for the same social facts. The distinctions are operative, they determine who you can marry, who you can eat with, what obligations you have, who constitutes a person in legally and ritually significant ways. Imposing Western ontological categories (individual, property, nature, culture) on these practices is not translation, it is distortion.
Arturo Escobar, working in a more explicitly political mode, uses the pluriverse to argue for what he calls territorial rights: the right of communities to maintain and enact their own worlds, their own ontologies, their own relationships with land and non-human beings, against the pressure of a globalizing modernity that treats its own ontology as the universal default. From this perspective, the destruction of Amazonian rainforest is not just an ecological disaster; it is an ontological destruction, the elimination of a world, not just the clearing of land.