[Amazonian worldviews] have a strong “constructional” dimension. Amerindian constructivism is particularly salient in mythical accounts narrating the creation of the world and the different life forms that populate it. It conceives of all living beings as composite entities, made up of the bodies and parts of bodies of a diversity of life forms, among which artifacts occupy a prominent place. According to these cosmologies, at the beginning there were only people and their artifacts — and sometimes, only artifacts. These artifacts are conceived of as the primordial building blocks out of which the bodies of people, and even gods, were first created. In this Amerindian view, artifacts fall on the side of the “natural” or the given — they were the first divine creations — whereas humans, animals, and plants fall on the side of the “cultural” or the constructed.

Thus anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero, introducing a volume of essays on the role played by made things — variously, masks and flutes, baby slings, headdresses and other bodily ornaments, identity cards, bibles, and airplanes — in the cultural life of the societies of the Amazon basin. Santos-Granero and his colleagues are responding not just to the intrinsic interest of the topic but to a broadly cited view, associated in particular with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, that the distinguishing feature of the Amazonian worldview is its “perspectival” quality. Here perspectival refers to a tendency, widespread in the hunting societies of the Americas and the boreal taiga and tundra of North America and Eurasia, to view certain animals — generally those significant to the hunt — as possessed of a quality of sociality comparable to our own. These animals have a perspective, they look out on the world, as we do — and see us, variously, as predators, prey, and junior partners in an ongoing effort of worldbuilding. This is so, Santos-Granero says — the worldview of the peoples of the Amazon is perspectival — but that is not the whole story.

In fact we can go further. Not only do material artifacts play a distinguished role in the theory of personhood common to the peoples of the Amazon: we observe something similar practically anywhere we look. Consider, by way of maximal contrast, the words of legal scholar Margaret Radin, from 1982.

Most people possess certain objects they feel are almost part of themselves. These objects are closely bound up with personhood because they are part of the way we constitute ourselves as continuing personal entities in the world. They may be as different as people are different, but some common examples might be a wedding ring, a portrait, an heirloom, or a house.

One may gauge the strength or significance of someone’s relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss.

Is it surprising that a people who could use against stubborn wood and pliant grass and bloody flesh nothing more serviceable than stone — is it surprising that such a people should have become so familiar with the idea of metal? Each one of us, in his dreams, had felled tall trees with blades that lodged deep in the pale pulp beneath the bark. Any of us could have enacted the sweeping of honed metal through a stand of seeded grass or described the precise parting of fat or muscle beneath a tapered knife. We knew the strength and sheen of steel and the trueness of its edge from having so often called it into possible existence.

In “Land Deal” (1978), the novelist Gerald Murnane imagines the colonization of Australia as the dreamed encounter of two “race[s] of men”, the narrators and the “men from overseas”, those who propose — preposterously, in the narrators’ view — to exchange implements of steel and glass, wool blankets, and quantities of flour for use of the narrators’ land. That they, or someone, must be dreaming is confirmed for the narrators by the fact that they recognize their counterparts’ trade goods from past dreams — and by the dreamlike abstractness of the men from overseas themselves.

The dreamer … had invented a race of men among whom possible objects passed as actual. And these men had been moved to offer us the ownership of their prizes in return for something that was itself not real.

… The pallor of the men we had met that day, the lack of purpose in much of their behaviour, the vagueness of their explanations — these may well have been the flaws of men dreamed of in haste. And, perhaps paradoxically, the nearly perfect properties of the stuffs offered to us seemed the work of a dreamer, someone who lavished on the central items of his dream all those desirable qualities that are never found in actual objects.

… In any case, we had been fairly sure that the foreigners failed to see our land. From their awkwardness and unease as they stood on the soil, we judged that they did not recognise the support it provided or the respect it demanded. When they moved even a short distance across it, stepping aside from places that invited passage and treading on places that were plainly not to be intruded on, we knew that they would lose themselves before they found the real land.

The question remains of who is dreaming. At first the narrators assume it is they themselves. Later they are forced to consider the possibility that it is the men from overseas: