Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola

By Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola has develop into some of the most very important anthropologists operating this present day, and past Nature and tradition has been an enormous effect in eu highbrow existence for the reason that its French booklet in 2005. the following, eventually, it's dropped at English-language readers. At its center is a question critical to either anthropology and philosophy: what's the courting among nature and culture?

Culture—as a collective human making, of paintings, language, and so forth—is usually visible as primarily diverse from nature, that is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman international, of crops, animals, geology, and traditional forces. Descola indicates this crucial distinction to be, although, not just a in particular Western idea, but in addition a truly contemporary one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from worldwide and theoretical understandings from cognitive technological know-how, structural research, and phenomenology, he formulates a worldly new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for the entire methods we relate ourselves to nature. by way of pondering past nature and tradition as an easy dichotomy, Descola bargains not anything wanting a basic reformulation in which anthropologists and philosophers can see the area afresh.

About the Author

Philippe Descola holds the chair of anthropology and heads the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale on the Collège de France. He additionally teaches on the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. between his prior books to seem in English are within the Society of Nature and The Spears of Twilight.

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By Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola has develop into some of the most very important anthropologists operating this present day, and past Nature and tradition has been an enormous effect in eu highbrow existence for the reason that its French booklet in 2005. the following, eventually, it's dropped at English-language readers. At its center is a question critical to either anthropology and philosophy: what's the courting among nature and culture?

Culture—as a collective human making, of paintings, language, and so forth—is usually visible as primarily diverse from nature, that is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman international, of crops, animals, geology, and traditional forces. Descola indicates this crucial distinction to be, although, not just a in particular Western idea, but in addition a truly contemporary one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from worldwide and theoretical understandings from cognitive technological know-how, structural research, and phenomenology, he formulates a worldly new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for the entire methods we relate ourselves to nature. by way of pondering past nature and tradition as an easy dichotomy, Descola bargains not anything wanting a basic reformulation in which anthropologists and philosophers can see the area afresh.

About the Author

Philippe Descola holds the chair of anthropology and heads the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale on the Collège de France. He additionally teaches on the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. between his prior books to seem in English are within the Society of Nature and The Spears of Twilight.

Show description

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53 In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Roman organization of space deteriorated, as a result of changing eating habits and growing insecurity in regions of the plain that were impossible to defend. Lard and animal fats took the place of oil, venison replaced other meats even in the richer households, and the products of the saltus and the silva became more widely used as the situation of the great agricultural domains worsened. The combination of the dualistic Roman system and the concentric Germanic pattern generated the medieval Western landscape in which, despite appearances, the frontier between the inhabited and the deserted zones was no longer as clear-cut as it had been a few centuries earlier.

The same term is used in all three cases. But although it is wholly domesticated, this artificial mountain forest has become a moral and economic desert; in short, it is much more “wild” than the natural forest that it replaced. 37 In Sanskrit texts, jāngala, from which the Anglo-Indian “jungle” is derived, has two main meanings. First, it is, as noted above, an uninhabited place long abandoned and fallow. But―and this is the first paradox―jāngala also designates dry land―that is to say, the exact opposite of what “jungle” has evoked for us ever since Kipling.

Possibly because they ignore the impossibility of thinking of one of the terms in that opposition without thinking of the other, some authors tend to turn the “wild” into a universal dimension of the psyche, a kind of archetype that humans have progressively suppressed and pushed aside as their mastery over nonhumans increased. That is the case of the scenario proposed by the environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger in his voluminous history of the idea of wilderness. According to him, the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with a wild environment that had many positive qualities but was hypostasized as an autonomous domain and worshiped within the framework of a “totemic” religion.

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