Philippe Descola
Descola argues that peoples differ not only in culture but in how they identify beings: comparing interiorities and physicalities yields four ontologies – animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism; the modern split between one nature and many cultures is one of these, not anthropology’s neutral ground.
Placement
French anthropologist, a student of Lévi-Strauss, who did fieldwork among the Achuar in Amazonian Ecuador: “Beyond Nature and Culture” (2005) treats the modern Western split between nature and culture, “naturalism”, as one of four ontologies found across human societies, beside animism, totemism and analogism.
Key ideas
- Four ontologies: animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism
- Naturalism as one ontology among others
- Interiority and physicality
- Anthropology of nature
Teachers: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Influence
Influenced by 1
Claude Lévi-Strauss studied with
studied with
Descola wrote his doctoral thesis on the Achuar of Amazonian Ecuador under Lévi-Strauss’s supervision (EHESS, 1983); it was printed as La nature domestique (1986). P. Descola, La nature domestique (1986); Collège de France, biography of P. Descola
Evidence: AI draft
Claude Lévi-Strauss › 1908–2009
Influenced 1
Bruno Latour
influenced
Latour took up Descola’s analysis of naturalism as one ontology among four to question the Moderns’ divide of nature and culture (‘Perspectivism: “Type” or “bomb”?’, 2009). B. Latour, “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘bomb’?”, Anthropology Today 25/2 (2009); Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches (1996; 2009); P. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (2005)
Evidence: AI draft
Bruno Latour › 1947–2022
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
criticised by
Viveiros de Castro objected that Descola turns perspectivism into one type within a typology of ontologies, defusing its challenge to Western thought (debate, Paris, 2009; Métaphysiques cannibales, 2009). Public debate, Maison Suger, Paris, 30 Jan. 2009, reported in B. Latour, “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’?”, Anthropology Today 25/2 (2009); E. Viveiros de Castro, Métaphysiques cannibales (2009); P. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (2005)
Evidence: AI draft
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro › b. 1951
Works
Descola’s doctoral study of the Achuar of Ecuador: gardening, hunting and forest use are bound up with kinship, as women treat cultivated plants as children and men treat game as in-laws, so that ecology and symbolism cannot be separated.
Comparative study of how peoples identify beings by attributing to them an interiority and a physicality like or unlike their own; the four resulting ontologies – animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism – make the modern divide of nature and culture one option among others.
Position
Descola is on the map for a comparative anthropology of the relations between humans and non-humans. The Achuar studies (“La Nature domestique”, 1986; “The Spears of Twilight”, 1993) described a world in which women treat garden plants as their children and men treat game animals as in-laws, so that “nature” appears as a society of persons. From there Descola asked whether the opposition of nature and culture, long taken for granted in anthropology, is itself a local idea. “Beyond Nature and Culture” (2005) distinguishes four “modes of identification” by the way people attribute to other beings an interiority and a physicality similar to or different from their own: animism (similar interiorities, different bodies), naturalism (different interiorities, the same physical make-up), totemism (similar in both) and analogism (different in both, held together by networks of correspondences). Modern naturalism, in this account, is one ontology among four. The book carries Lévi-Strauss’s structural method into a comparison of ontologies; Latour took it up in science studies, and it is often discussed together with Viveiros de Castro’s work under the heading of an “ontological turn” in anthropology. Viveiros de Castro, a long-standing interlocutor, objected that such a typology defuses the challenge of Amerindian thought; the two debated this in public in Paris in 2009. Later books dealt with images (“La Fabrique des images”, 2010).
Life & context
Philippe Descola was born in Paris in 1949. After studying philosophy at the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, where Maurice Godelier was among the teachers, Descola trained in ethnology at the University of Paris X (Nanterre) and the École pratique des hautes études. From 1976 to 1979 Descola did fieldwork among the Achuar, a Jivaroan people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, together with the anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor; the doctoral thesis on the Achuar’s relations with their environment, supervised by Claude Lévi-Strauss, followed in 1983. After teaching at the university in Quito, Descola became maître de conférences at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and in 1989 directeur d’études there. From 2000 to 2019 Descola held the chair of anthropology of nature at the Collège de France and until 2013 directed the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale. In 2012 the CNRS awarded Descola its gold medal.
Further main works
- Les Lances du crépuscule (1993; The Spears of Twilight, 1996)
- La Fabrique des images (2010)
- La Composition des mondes (2014, conversations with Pierre Charbonnier)
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