In this essay, I present and analyze differences in the perception of the world by two people who are representatives of two different cultures and societies. The first one is the anthro- pologist Fernando Santos-Granero and the second is a man from the Amazonian Yanesha group named Matar. Focusing on the description of a specific event that happened during the ethnographic fieldwork, I deal with the differences in its interpretation. Referring to the interactionist theory of reasoning proposed by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier and on Anil Seth’s research on perception, I assume that these differences are the result of each person’s individually shaped perceptions and ways of reasoning. In this paper I seek to explain how perception and reasoning influence the formation of representations that arise in the human mind in relation to cultural as well as environmental phenomena.
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