What is blood to a human is beer to a jaguar

"...The matter does seem to come down, as Beatrice Marovich suggests, to a matter of perspective. From one point of view, multiverse cosmologies are an internal, disruptive other to the western metaphysics of substance and politics of dominion. From another, they assist and reaffirm it. This is the reason that I find perspectivism itself such an apt cosmological motif: as Cusa knew, any cosmic body occupies the center of its own universe. As Einstein figured out, any body can be said to be at rest or at motion from its own perspective. And as Marovich reminds us, what is “universal reason” from one perspective is a limited, exclusionary exercise in categorical-material violence from another perspective, which is arguably more valid than the first. (To affirm a multiplicity of perspectives is not to say they are equally defensible.)

"To gain some perspective on these multiple constructions of perspectivism, I find helpful Tânia Stolze Lima’s and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s work on Amazonian ontologies. As Lima explains, what is a “hunt” for the Juruna is a “warfare” for the white-lipped peccaries, who just like the Juruna see themselves as “human” and the other as “animal” (Lima, “The Two and Its Many,” 121). Similarly, a “snake” to the Matsiguenga is a “fish” to neighboring strangers; what is “blood” to a human is “beer” to a jaguar (Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives, 472). “What seems to be happening in Amerindian perspectivism,” Viveiros de Castro explains, “is that the substances named by substantives like fish, snake, hammock, or beer are…relational pointers” (472). In other words, every thing is only itself-to-something-else, or itself from a particular perspective. And something else from another."

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