Philippe Descola

Dzieła

• 1986La Nature domestique (Natura udomowiona)

  Rozprawa doktorska Descoli o Achuarach z Ekwadoru: ogrodnictwo, łowiectwo i korzystanie z lasu są splecione z pokrewieństwem, ponieważ kobiety traktują rośliny uprawne jak dzieci, a mężczyźni zwierzynę jak powinowatych, tak że ekologii i symboliki nie da się rozdzielić.

• 2005Poza naturą i kulturą

  Porównawcze studium tego, jak ludy identyfikują byty, przypisując im interiorność i fizyczność podobne lub niepodobne do własnych; cztery wynikające stąd ontologie – animizm, totemizm, analogizm, naturalizm – czynią nowoczesny podział na naturę i kulturę jedną z możliwości wśród innych.

Stanowisko

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).

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• La Nature domestique. Symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar (1986; In the Society of Nature, 1994)
• Les Lances du crépuscule (1993; The Spears of Twilight, 1996)
• Par-delà nature et culture (2005; Beyond Nature and Culture, 2013)
• La Fabrique des images (2010)
• La Composition des mondes (2014, conversations with Pierre Charbonnier)