Philippe Descola: Beyond Nature and Culture (2005–)

“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. 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 new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature.”

First published as Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, Paris, 2005.

Translated by Janet Lloyd
Foreword by Marshall Sahlins
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2013
ISBN 0226144453, 9780226144450
xxii+463 pages

Reviews: David Berliner (Anthropological Quarterly, 2010), Des Fitzgerald (Somatosphere, 2013), Gildas Salmon & Pierre Charbonnier (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014), Céline Grandjou (Humanimalia, 2014), Tim Frandy (Journal of Folklore Research, 2014), Michael W. Scott (Anthropology of This Century, 2014), Voytek Lapinski (n.d.).

Book symposium: Lenclud, Helmreich, Feuchtwang, Kapferer, Toren, Lambek, Coelho de Souza, Descola (Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2014, pp 363-443).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF
ARG

More from Descola.

Nicholas Gaskill, A. J. Nocek (eds.): The Lure of Whitehead (2014)

“Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have embraced Whitehead’s thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media.

The Lure of Whitehead offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch.”

Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Nathan Brown, Peter Canning, Didier Debaise, Roland Faber, Michael Halewood, Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, Erin Manning, Steven Meyer, Luciana Parisi, Keith Robinson, Isabelle Stengers, James Williams.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2014
ISBN 9780816679959
ix+427 pages

Review: Ronny Desmet (Constructivist Foundations, 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2021-3-9)

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere (2012)

“A tour-de-force in the anthropology of ours and other cosmologies. The first official version of the lessons which sparked one of the most influential anthropological movements of the twenty-first century. Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, February-March 1998.” (from the back cover)

“The subject of these lectures is that aspect of Amerindian thought which has been called its “perspectival quality” or “perspectival relativity”: the conception, common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. I shall try to persuade you that this idea cannot be reduced to our current concept of relativism, which at first it seems to call to mind. In fact, it is at right angles, so to speak, to the opposition between relativism and universalism.” (from page 45)

With an Introduction by Roy Wagner
Publisher HAU, Manchester, 2012
HAU Masterclass Series, 1
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
ISSN 2049-4769
168 pages

Publisher

PDFs, EPUBs, HTML (from the publisher)
single PDF (6 MB)

For more from Viveiros de Castro see Monoskop wiki.