Librería Portfolio

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.



Table of Contents:
Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- I. Trompe-lOeil Nature -- 1. Configurations of Continuity -- 2. The Wild and the Domesticated -- Nomadic Spaces -- The Garden and the Forest -- The Field and the Rice Paddy -- Ager and Silva -- Herdsmen and Hunters -- The Roman Landscape, the Hercynian Forest, and Romantic Nature -- 3. The Great Divide -- The Autonomy of the Landscape -- The Autonomy of Phusis -- The Autonomy of Creation -- The Autonomy of Nature -- The Autonomy of Culture -- The Autonomy of Dualism -- The Autonomy of Worlds -- II. The Structures of Experience -- 4. The Schemas of Practice -- Structures and Relations -- Understanding the Familiar -- Schematisms -- Differentiation, Stabilization, Analogies -- 5. Relations with the Self and Relations with Others -- Modes of Identification and Modes of Relation -- The Other Is an I -- III. The Dispositions of Being -- 6. Animism Restored -- Forms and Behavior Patterns -- The Variations of Metamorphosis -- Animism and Perspectivism -- 7. Totemism as an Ontology -- Dreaming -- An Australian Inventory -- The Semantics of Taxonomies -- Varieties of Hybrids -- A Return to Algonquin Totems -- 8. The Certainties of Naturalism -- An Irreducible Humanity? -- Animal Cultures and Languages? -- Mindless Humans? -- The Rights of Nature? -- 9. The Dizzying Prospects of Analogy -- The Chain of Being -- A Mexican Ontology -- Echoes of Africa -- Pairings, Hierarchy, and Sacrifice -- 10. Terms, Relations, Categories -- Encompassments and Symmetries -- Differences, Resemblances, Classifications -- IV. The Ways of the World -- 11. The Institution of Collectives -- A Collective for Every Species -- Asocial Nature and Exclusive Societies -- Hybrid Collectives That Are Both Different and Complementary -- A Mixed Collective That Is Both Inclusive and Hierarchical -- 12. Metaphysics of Morals -- An Invasive Self -- The Thinking Reed -- Representing a Collective -- The Signature of Things -- V. An Ecology of Relations -- 13. Forms of Attachment -- Giving, Taking Exchanging -- Producing, Protecting Transmitting -- 14. The Traffic of Souls -- Predators and Prey -- The Symmetry of Obligations -- The Togetherness of Sharing -- The Ethos of Collectives -- 15. Histories of Structures -- From Caribou-Man to Lord Bull -- Hunting, Taming Domesticating -- The Genesis of Change -- Epilogue: The Spectrum of Possibilities -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.