Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
In the Society of Nature
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.
Introduction
“La Nature domestique” was published in Paris in 1986 and is based on the thesis Descola defended in 1983 under Claude Lévi-Strauss, after fieldwork from 1976 to 1979 with Anne-Christine Taylor among the Achuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Against the cultural ecology then current in the United States, which explained practices as adaptations to the environment, the book shows how Achuar techniques of gardening and hunting are inseparable from the way the Achuar conceive of plants and animals as persons: women address their manioc as children, men treat game animals as brothers-in-law, and magical songs accompany both. The book combines detailed observation of work and subsistence with the analysis of these representations. An English translation, “In the Society of Nature”, appeared in 1994.
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