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. (shrink)

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the division between nature and culture has been fundamental to Western thought. In this groundbreaking work, renowned anthropologist Philippe Descola seeks to break down this divide, arguing for a departure from the anthropocentric model and its rigid dualistic conception of nature and culture as distinct phenomena. In its stead, Descola proposes a radical new worldview, in which beings and objects, human and nonhuman, are understood through the complex relationships that they possess with one (...) another. The Ecology of Others presents a compelling challenge to anthropologists, ecologists, and environmental studies scholars to rethink the way we conceive of humans, objects, and the environment. Thought-provoking and engagingly written, it will be required reading for all those interested in moving beyond the moving beyond the confines of this fascinating debate." --Publisher's note. (shrink)

Dans le dernier numéro de 2010 de l’ Interdisciplinary Science Reviews intitulé « Histoire et nature humaine », Brad Inwood et Willard McCarty, rédacteurs en chef, ont invité le professeur G.E.R Lloyd, à écrire un article sur le débat entre universalistes et relativistes, reprenant les thèses de son récent livre Cognitive Variations (Oxford University Press, 2007). À cet article répondent des spécialistes de diverses disciplines. Nous publions ici la réponse de deux anthropologues : Philippe Descola et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Claude Levi-Strauss mentioned several times in his work that the notion of transformation is the keystone of the structural analysis he pratices. By his own admission, this notion stems from his reading of D’Arcy Thomson’s book On Growth and Form during World War II in the United States. But Levi-Strauss makes use of two very different meanings of transformation, relating to two distinct morpho-genetic traditions. On the one hand, he is inspired by Goethe’s Morphology. All forms can be seen as (...) transformation of a Urform, an original form, from which they grow out like a tree. But on the other hand, D’Arcy Thomson’s emphasis lies on the geometric simplicity of a transformation grid that allows the transition from one biological form to the other without considering any original from which other forms would be derivable. Levi-Strauss’ epistemological choice to study myths and masks can be better understood when his concept of transformation is clearly defined in relation to Goethe and D’Arcy Thomson. Thus, the originality of his own interpretation will become clear. (shrink)

Following the methods of structural anthropology and Bruno Latour, the contribution discusses societies not as wholes in Durkheim's sense but as collectives. Along the fundamental duality between material processes and mental states four main ontologies of social forms are presented, in which the two axes regulate specific continuities and differences between humans and non-humans of a collective: animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. German Im Anschluss an die Methoden der strukturalen Anthropologie und an Bruno Latour diskutiert der Beitrag Gesellschaften nicht als (...) Ganzheiten Durkheimscher Prägung, sondern als Kollektive. Entlang der basalen Dualität zwischen materiellen Prozessen und mentalen Zuständen werden dabei vier Haupt-Ontologien sozialer Formen vorgestellt, in denen die beiden Achsen jeweils spezifische Kontinuitäten und Differenzen zwischen Menschen und Nichtmenschen eines Kollektivtyps regeln: Animismus, Totemismus, Naturalismus und Analogismus. (shrink)

Following the methods of structural anthropology and Bruno Latour, the contribution discusses societies not as wholes in Durkheim’s sense but as collectives. Along the fundamental duality between material processes (corporeality) and mental states (inwardness) four main ontologies of social forms are presented, in which the two axes regulate specific continuities and differences between humans and non-humans of a collective: animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism.