Beyond Nature and Culture

Philippe Descola, Janet Lloyd

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226145006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture?
Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies"— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

Index

Aboriginals, Australian: “dream times” of, 414n29; hot and cold polarity lacking in, 221; metaphysics of morals and, 291–98; nomadic spaces and, 34, 35–36, 37; objectification and, 296; schematisms and, 414n29. See also totemism in Australia

acculturation (syncretism), 17, 109–10

Achuar: classificatory mechanisms and, 241; collectives and, 249–50, 252–54; cultivated land and, 5, 7, 27–28, 38–39, 41–42, 252, 288, 324; Dreaming and, 7; forest and cultivated land spaces and, 38–41, 42–43, 409n14; head-hunting and, 338; hunting and, 4–5; hybrid collectives and, 258–59; interiority in combination with physicality and, 123; knowledge and knowledge mechanisms for, 100; men’s affinity relations, 6, 252–53; metamorphosis in context of animism, 137, 416n22; nature and culture continuity and, 3–8, 15, 407n2; the Other and, 123; perspectives in context of animism, 417n33; predation and, 393; reality and, 84; self in context of animism and, 284; soul as subject and, 288; taming practices and, 253; women’s relations with plants, 5–6, 252

Africa: cultivated land in, 36–37, 223; nature and culture continuity in, 25–27; protection and, 326; transmission and, 332, 425n42. See also East Africa; Mediterranean region; West Africa

ager (cultivated land) space, 48–51, 53–56, 410n38, 410n42. See also cultivated land

Aguaruna, 338

Akuriyó, 352

Algonquin, 166–71, 358, 408n15, 426n30

Aluridja, 148–49, 151

Amazonia: analogism and, 16–21, 214; animism and, 129, 337, 425n4; collectives and, 9–10; cultivated land, 10, 42, 135, 362; Dravidian systems, 319, 356, 360; ecosystems, 11, 13–14; exchange and, 317–18; forest and cultivated land spaces, 41, 42; forms in context of animism and, 134; hot and cold polarity, 221, 421n38; hunting, 4–5, 11, 15, 16; hybridization in context of totemism, 163; interiority in context of animism, 283–84; nature and culture continuity in, 3–11, 13, 15, 16, 27–28, 407n2; objectivization and, 11–13, 407n11; perspectivism and, 11–12; predation and, 337, 393, 425n4; production and, 323–24, 325; reality and, 84; social organization,...