1. Divisions of Humanity

The identity of humanity is partially nomadic and extendable: ‘what is humanity’ is an animal species, but ‘what humanity is’ is variable.

The Brazilian anthropologist and metaphysician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro shows how Amerindian ‘perspectivism’ defines what humanity is as a form rather than as an object: the form of what is a subject of its cosmos. The determination of what is humanity thus depends on an adopted view, on an object considered as subject:

Viveiros de Castro claims that human form and culture, which can be attributed to other animal species, function as a kind of cosmological ‘pronoun’ or ‘deictic’, immanent to perspective. ‘Humanity’ would not be very different in this perspective from an infralinguistic ‘I’. ‘I’ is not an objective identity, connected to the definition of one particular object. Rather, it is an identity assumed by whoever says ‘I’, whoever adopts this form. ‘Humanity’ would be a comparable form, without objective definition, but assumed by all animal organisms that have a view of the surrounding world. 'Humanity' means, then, the position of whoever has a world when she considers herself in this world. In the world for us, one animal species among others, we are 'humans', but in the world of jaguars, another animal species, a jaguar is 'human' for itself.