This book represents a major achievement, that should shake up anthropology and, indeed, is doing a fair amount of shaking already. It is part of an "ontological turn" in the field, basically a return to the old practice of looking seriously at what traditional, and modern, groups of people think about the world--what exists, what "persons" are, what "others" are, how the world works. This line of research goes back to the beginnings of anthropology, and was developed especially by Paul Radin and Irving Hallowell in the early 20th century, but was in eclipse in the 1990s due to the "postmodern" movement, which adulated French and German thinkers to the point of ignoring the views of local subjects (a bit of racism and neo-colonialism, by the way). Of course, Descola is a major French thinker too, but unlike the Derridas and Lacans he takes seriously the views of people in other societies. The "ontological turn" has come up from South America, and has generally been a province of South American anthropologists--Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff foreshadowed it, and more recently Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mario Blaser, Eduardo Kohn, and others have adopted it, with Arturo Escobar developing a rather related political-ecological view. Descola has worked in Amazonia for decades, and become very much a part of the South American ethnographic scene.
This book lays out four general classes of ontology. Animism considers animals and plants to be consubstantial with us humans in interiority (soul, essence, intangible personhood) but different in physical appearance--though that may be merely a skin donned for convenience (salmon are human in appearance when back under the sea). Totemism, found largely in Australia, sees deep bonds in both interiority and physical aspect between people and nonhumans around them. Analogism sees life-forms (including different types and groups of people) as quite different in both aspects, but tied together by webs of interaction--often of interacting essences, like the qi of Chinese thought. Naturism sees humans as sharply cut off from "nature" in interiority but subject to the same physical laws: only humans have souls (Descartes) or, in the modern version, only humans have language (Chomsky), yet we evolved from animals and share most genes with them. It will not have escaped the anthropological reader that animism and totemism go with hunting-gathering and horticultural societies, analogism with tributary agrarian states, and naturism with the modern industrial world, but Descola does not make much of this (though he does not ignore it). A Weberian would say that analogism follows from the first disenchantment, when priests and kings took over religion, and naturism from a later disenchantment, when humans became self-consciously dependent on machines and capital, cut off from nature (however defined). Descola is no Weberian, but there seems to be some influence here.
Descola is a Levi-Strauss student and a structuralist, and this leads him to a rather black and white view of the world. I find it awfully hard to see these four things as watertight compartments. Perhaps he meant them only as ideal types (Weber again!), but if so he is remarkably silent about it. I can't see them that way, largely because I have done research in societies that substantially mix them up. In local Chinese minority communities, Maya communities, and some Northwest Coast communities, various things that Descola considers hallmarks of animism and analogism mix freely, with some naturism now added by modernizing influences. At some point, shamanism probably transformed into analogism in Mexico, and almost certainly did in ancient China and elsewhere; what did the transition look like? (We have some documents from China that actually tell us something about that.)
Unlike Levi-Strauss, Descola does not consider aesthetic phenomena. This is a major cost. Groups such as the Australian Aboriginals and the Northwest Coast First Nations do a great deal of their communicating through arts. Ignoring that as cost Descola such insights as the incredible importance of "country" (mythologized, totemically rich landscape) for the Australians. Considering that would likely have changed his views on totemism. Analogistic societies are almost all rich in art (and that can't be mere coincidence), and there again they look less atomistic and differentiating when they are expressing their worldviews in arts. One can imagine a quite different take on ontologies derived from study of expressive forms rather than simply from stated worldviews.
That being said, this book is not only a major achievement, but a desperately needed reactivation of anthropologists' traditional concern with what traditional small-scale societies actually say and teach about the world. Descola restricts his application of it to the last page, but there he states emphatically that some concern for basic worldviews has to be part of saving the planet; obviously, naturism can't last.
- Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account
