Beyond Nature and Culture (Hardcover)

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. Here finally it is brought to English-language readers. 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 sophisticated new framework the four ontologies -- animism totemism naturalism and analogism--to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.