Philippe Descola

Nature and society : anthropological perspectives

The contributors to this book focus on the relationship between nature and society from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives. Their work draws upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies -- from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. The discussion is divided into three parts, emphasising the problems posed by the nature-culture dualism, some misguided attempts to respond to these problems, and potential avenues out of the current dilemmas of ecological discourse.

Estrutura ou sentimento: a relação com o animal na Amazônia

A certain anthropological tradition tends to interpret the symbolism of hunting as a way of expressing the ambivalence, or even the troubled conscience, that all humans are supposed to feel upon killing animals. While this interpretation appears legitimate in the framework of modern societies, marked since the 19th century by a profound evolution in the sensitivities pertaining to this domain, the same does not appear to be true for pre-modern societies, who may very well not share the same morals as late 20th-century Euro-American citizens. The way indigenous peoples deal with hunting in the Amazon illustrates how the relationship to animals there is determined less by a range of universal feelings than by behavioral schemata rooted in this cultural areas characteristic cosmological, ontological, and sociological systems.

Modes of being and forms of predication

Notions like “nature” or “culture” do not denote a universal reality but a particular way, devised by the Moderns, of carving ontological domains in the texture of things. Other civilizations have devised different ways of detecting qualities among existents, resulting in other forms of organizing continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, of aggregating beings in collectives, of defining who or what is capable of agency and knowledge. The paper emphasizes that these processes of ontological predication are not “worldviews” but, properly speaking, styles of worlding. Ontology is taken here as designating a more elementary analytical level to study worlding than the one anthropology usually calls for. It is at this level, where basic inferences are made about the kinds of beings that exist and how they relate to each other, that anthropology can best fulfill its mission to account for how worlds are composed.

All too human (still): A comment on Eduardo Kohn's How forests think

Comment on Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Beyond nature and culture: Forms of attachment. Translated by Janet Lloyd

Modes  of identification broadly schematize our experience of things, distinguishing between parcels of ontological properties distributed in accordance with the arrangements of existing beings, arrangements whose structural characteristics we have examined above, each in turn. It is a distribution of beings according to their attributes, the principles according to which socio-cosmological collectives are organized, the dominant regimes of knowledge and action, and the boundaries of identity and otherness. Each of these forms of identification defines a specific style of relations with the world. Long-established expressions of these relations are to be found in geographical regions, many of which are immense, and over very long periods. Yet we cannot use those styles as criteria for distinguishing between singular collectives with contours limited both in time and in space—the kind that historians, ethnologists and sociologists usually choose to investigate. Rather, we should regard those stylizations of experience as what are usually called ―world views,‖ ―cosmologies‖ or ―symbolic forms,‖ all of these being terms of vague epistemological status yet that constitute a handy intuitive way of synthesizing under a simple label (such as ―the modern West,‖ or ―shamanistic societies‖), ―families‖ of practices and mind-sets that seem to display affinities despite the diversity of their concrete manifestations. However, within those great archipelagos marked out by a shared mode of identification one comes across numerous kinds of collectives that consider themselves to be very different from one another (and that are, indeed, perceived as different by those who study them). This is not only on account of their different languages, institutions and, more often than not, the

Cognition, Perception and Worlding

Abstract This contribution is part of a special issue on History and Human Nature, comprising an essay by G.E.R. Lloyd and fifteen invited responses.

The difficult art of composing worlds (and of replying to objections)

Response to Hau Book Symposium on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beyond nature and culture: The traffic of souls. Translated by Janet Lloyd

Between identification  , a means of specifying the properties of existing beings, and relations, a means of specifying the general form of the links between those beings, two kinds of connection are possible. Either the plasticity of a relational schema makes it possible for it to structure interactions in a variety of ontologies, which will then present a family likeness despite the heterogeneity of their essential principles; or, alternatively, one of the modes of identification is able to accommodate several distinct relational schemas and this introduces into an ontological configuration widely distributed in space (a cultural region, for example) the kind of concrete diversity of customs and norms from which ethnologists and historians love to draw their material. The second case is what we shall now be considering. However, the combinations made possible by the conjunction of a mode of identification and a relational mode are too numerous for us to consider them all in a systematic and detailed fashion, especially since some of them turn out not to be possible for reasons of logical incompatibility, as we shall soon see. So let us limit ourselves to considering the variations of ethos that various relational schemas imprint upon one particular mode of identification: this will be animism. The demonstration will certainly not be complete, but it will at least provide the beginnings of a proof that anthropology can always hope to find when it enters into some detail in a comparative study of a number of cases. As Mauss, mobilizing John Stuart Mill in his support, declared, ―a well made experiment is enough to demonstrate a law‖ (Mauss 1950: 391).

Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold’s ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology’)

ABSTRACT The following is a response to Tim Ingold’s review article entitled ‘A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology’ and the second part of a larger dialogue concerning: Beyond Nature and Culture, by Philippe Descola. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013, xxii + 463 pp., foreword by Marshall Sahlins, preface, notes, bibliography, index, (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-226-14445-0. See also: A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture 10.1080/00664677.2015.1136591 Rejoinder to Descola’s Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding10.1080/00664677.2016.1212532

The grid and the tree: Reply to Marshall Sahlins’ comment

This response highlights a confusion of categories in Marshall Sahlins’ comments between three different analytical levels: that of the modes of identification, that of the modes of aggregation, and that of the modes of relation.