Work · Structuralism & Poststructuralism
Beyond Nature and Culture
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.
Introduction
Descola published “Par-delà nature et culture” with Gallimard in Paris in 2005. Its first chapters trace how the opposition of nature and culture took shape in European thought and argue that many peoples studied by ethnographers do not draw it. The book then derives four ways of identifying beings from two criteria, interiority and physicality: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. It combines them with modes of relation such as exchange, predation and gift, and illustrates them with examples ranging from Amazonian and northern hunters to Aboriginal Australia, ancient China, Mesoamerica and Renaissance Europe. Descola treats Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism as a feature of animism. A German translation appeared in 2011 and an English one, by Janet Lloyd, in 2013.
Connections
Builds on
- Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage)1962 · Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism1998 · Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Criticized in
- Cannibal Metaphysics2009 · Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
More works by Philippe Descola
Sources: Wikidata
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