INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPPE DESCOLA

Professor Philippe Descola visited Finland in the mid-1970s with the Achuar of the Upper in October 2015 to deliver the Edward Amazon, investigating how they related to Westermarck Memorial Lecture during nature in their surroundings. What sparked the biennial conference of the Finnish your interest in and compelled Anthropological Society, which had the theme, you to embark on that project? ‘Landscapes, sociality, and materiality’. During a career spanning four decades, Professor Philippe Descola (PD): Well there’s a long Descola, who currently holds the Chair in the tradition in France of social scientists converting Anthropology of Nature at the Collège de from philosophy to the social sciences. It started France, has built on his ethnographic research early on with Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi- with the Achuar of the Upper Amazon to make Strauss, and a long list of other names, and many groundbreaking contributions in the more recently Bourdieu, Godelier and other research fields of ecological anthropology, the people went through this metamorphosis. And ethnography of lowland South America, and one has to take into account that this is a certain the comparative study of human-nonhuman variety of philosophy, not French philosophy relations. Perhaps his most widely known in itself but a way of teaching philosophy in contribution has been the development of France, which is based on the critical history of a framework that displaces the assumed discursive formations. It is a very good training universality of the Western nature/culture to allow you to understand how concepts are dichotomy by providing models of four possible in interplay with other concepts in specific ontological modes of structural relations texts, how texts from one philosopher respond through which humans and nonhumans to texts from another philosopher, etc. But I form viable collectives. His current research felt dissatisfied by the fact that the questions project takes the form of a book showing how that were being asked were the questions that the differences between the four ontological had been asked ever since 2500 years ago— modes are made evident in the investigation of from the Greeks onwards—about being, about processes of iconic figuration. truth, about the legitimacy of certain kinds In connection with the conference and of scientific propositions, about morality etc., his Westermarck lecture entitled ‘Landscape without taking into account other ways of as Transfiguration’, Professor Descola granted asking these questions that had been observed the following interview, discussing some of the by anthropologists and by historians. So there main interests and themes that have informed was a self-centered dimension to philosophy his research career. which I found problematic, and this is why rather than being interested in experiments Aleksis Toro (AT): Your early studies were of thought, again like many others in France, in philosophy but you decided to pursue I preferred to study or to be acquainted with real anthropology and did fieldwork for three years life experiments—how people live and the way

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they organize their lives: questions that were found fascinating. Here was a rigorous way to not conceivable in the philosophical panorama enter the question of the diversity of forms of in general. life in the world. So that’s when I decided to I had been interested in anthropology in become an anthropologist. general very early on. I’d read Tristes Tropiques I went to southern Mexico for my first when I was 16 or 17 and I was fascinated, not fieldwork. I was, as were many of the students so much by the Indians in the book because in philosophy in my generation, a militant, I it’s an intellectual biography, but by the man, was a Trotskyite, so I thought that by going Lévi-Strauss, someone who was at the same into the cauldron of neo-colonialism to try time obviously a very learned and sensible to understand the local situation, I would be person, who wrote very well, with a very incisive faithful to my political leanings. So I went mind, who could write as well on Debussy and to southern Chiapas, to a place in the forest Rousseau and on the Bororo Indians in Brazil. where Tzeltal colonists, that is, Maya Indians So this form of humanism, of very broad culture, from the highlands, had moved to settle the fascinated me... and I said, ‘If this person is an forest because they had been pushed away from anthropologist, then anthropology must also their lands by landowners. And I was already be a fascinating science.’ This is how I decided interested in the way that people adapt to new to read a little bit more in anthropology. I environmental circumstances. The problem was went through the classical French system of they did not adapt very well, in the sense that competitive examination and to the École they felt rather unhappy. It was a very different normale supérieure, where all my co-disciples form of environment; although it was only a six were either in literature or philosophy, even math or seven days walk from the highlands, it was or physics, because it’s an integrative school, and really deep forest. So I spent a few months there they were discussing the more philosophical and then I felt dispirited because they were texts of Lévi-Strauss and anthropology like The themselves quite unhappy, and I said, ‘I can’t Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques. I was also spend two years with people who are not really interested in The Elementary Structures of Kinship happy in the forest.’ I think it’s important that and things like that which were more technical, when you do fieldwork you should at least feel so progressively I moved towards anthropology. well. Otherwise, if fieldwork is a sort of duty, I And then there was a former student of the don’t think it is good fieldwork. You can’t do École normale supérieure, , good fieldwork if every morning you say ‘I must who was young at the time and just back from get up and do my work.’ You must enter into the his fieldwork with the Baruya in New Guinea. flow of things in order to do good fieldwork. So He had just published a book which was called in that case it didn’t go well, and in fact these Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, which people became the forerunners of the Zapatista was broadly speaking a criticism of political movement, so there were good reasons not to economy and a new reading of Marx’s Capital, be happy, the landowners were also moving into which was a very common thing at the time, the forest, etc. as we were immersed in the texts of Marx and I had thought about going to Amazonia Engels, especially Marx. And so at the end of but I thought it was very petty bourgeois, you his book there is an analysis of pre-capitalist know, romantic and so on, but I decided to forms of production and exchange which I hell with my scruples, so I decided to go to

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Amazonia for a variety of reasons. One of them groups intent on killing each other, incapable was that we had no real understanding of what of controlling their natural instincts. So there Amazonia was and what Amazonian people was a leitmotif there. I was reading these were. Of course there was Lévi-Strauss and a few chronicles and then the proto-ethnography and good ethnographers—there were Stephen and the later ethnography, and I was struck by this Christine Hugh-Jones who had just come back and thought there must be something in their from the field, we’re talking about the beginning relation to nature which is very specific for this of the 1970s. I went to Mexico in 1973 and I leitmotif to go on for centuries. And at the time went to the Amazon in 1974, to Ecuador. At the main type of publication in anthropology the time there were only a very few things: some on Amazonia in the United States belonged of the things that Lévi-Strauss had written on to the so-called cultural ecology school, which mythology, there were people like Maybury- was extremely reductionist and also interpreted Lewis who had written on the Xavante—a very all social and cultural features as products of classical monograph of the British sociological adaptation to nature, so there was a continuity school—and there was Goldman on the in that sense. So I left for fieldwork with the Cubeo… There were a few books but there was idea of precisely studying in depth how these no tradition in anthropology on the lowlands. people related to what I still called at the time One of the things which struck me when ‘nature’. So that’s how I went to Ecuador with reading this scattered ethnographic literature— my wife Anne-Christine Taylor. which in fact began, by contrast with other parts of the world, very early on in the 16th century, AT: You’ve said that your central anthropo- before ethnography or anthropology became logical interests derive from the astonishment real sciences—was a sort of leitmotif in this you felt when you encountered some Achuar ethnography or in these first descriptions, which ways of doing things. Why is astonishment continues today, which is that these people are important for ethnography, and how do the mysterious and enigmatic, in the sense that they encounters and stories of your time with the don’t show any kind of institution that could be Achuar continue to inform your work? likened to the institutions we are used to. The French chroniclers who visited and some who PD: I think astonishment is absolutely settled on the coast of Brazil in the 16th century crucial. Ever since Plato it’s considered to wrote that these people were sans foi, sans roi, sans be an important quality for philosophers loi—‘without faith, king, or law’— so they did never to take anything for granted and to not exhibit any of the normal institutions. There be astonished by things, and I think it is also was no territory to speak of—at least there were true for anthropologists. This is why going to no villages, in many cases people were living in places which are, and to live among people scattered habitats—there were no chiefs, there who are, very different from the ones you’ve were no cults, few rituals, and the rituals were been brought up with, is not a question of all linked to war. Europeans were very puzzled primitivism or essentialism or whatever name by this, and what they all emphasized was that you want to give to that. It’s a question of these people were ‘naturals’, they were in fact using the distance as a lever to pry open the in a way glued to nature—either positively, in concepts that would otherwise appear matter Montaigne’s sense as naked philosophers, or as of fact or self-evident. The epistemological

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distance is always created of course, but if There was a troop of woolly monkeys and he there is effectively a cultural distance, it helps killed many more than he needed to kill. It’s a destabilize one’s own assumptions. And this is very classical story among hunters everywhere why Amazonia was very interesting, because it in the world: his hubris made him responsible was perhaps the farthest one could go in terms for the revenge that took the form of a snake of differences. There was a sort of logical scandal bite on his wife. And talking to him I realized in these people: where was society there? how important it was. Especially among the Achuar: again, living You know when you do fieldwork it takes in a very scattered habitat, feuding between a long time to learn the language—it took us themselves, having no chief... I had heard before about a year, and so progressively you understand a very interesting description by a Dominican bits and pieces. There was only one young man missionary who had been living near the Achuar who knew a little Spanish. The first place where at the end of the 19th century, who said they had we landed people accepted us quite willingly, no religion except birdsongs and dreams. And I suspect because we were a distraction. We were that was very clever to understand because like pets. They have pet animals everywhere in dreams are one of the means of communication their houses so we added to their collection of with nonhumans, the spiritual dimension of pets. They were observing us, my wife and I, and nonhumans, and birdsongs are songs that the it was a day to day distraction, so I suspect this Achuar and the Jivaro in general sing constantly was one of the reasons they received us, and in order to connect themselves with them. So he after a while we just became part of the daily had a clear idea of what their religion was, but life. And so learning the language progressively this lucidity was not very common at the time. is like watching a movie in a language you don’t So this is why the Achuar were fascinating. understand and then you have subtitles that begin to appear, but they are disconnected so AT: Is there a particular encounter or story you get bits and pieces. When you really start that was very memorable? understanding things, this is precisely when you realize these dimensions. So during the first few PD: I mentioned a specific episode in Beyond months I did a very thorough study of the way Nature and Culture, at the beginning of the they were using plants and animals, which could book. In this story we are in a house and the be defined as economic anthropology or human lady of the house goes to dump the garbage by ecology. I collected plants and specimens of soil, the river and she’s bitten by a snake. It’s a very etc. I wasn’t idle in that sense. And progressively dangerous snake so she’s terrified, and everyone I came out of this gathering of technical and in the house begins wailing, ‘She’s going to die, quantifiable material to understanding what she’s going to die!’ I had serum so I gave her people were saying about the things I had an injection but the husband was completely been measuring. And obviously there was a devastated. I tried to speak with him to lift up huge void between what I was considering at his spirits, but he said, ‘It’s my fault, it’s my fault the time, which was the way these people were because it was the revenge of the Master of the adapting to their environment, and the way they Animals. Yesterday I went to the forest; I had thought about it, which was in fact as a series a new shotgun…’ He used to hunt before with of interactions with nonhumans treated as his blowgun only and he had acquired a shotgun. social partners. So that’s when I came to realize

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that it was absurd to think in terms of a society in myth and classification, etc. But there was adapting to a natural environment. ‘Nature’ and more of course than this, in the sense that the ‘society’ were useless concepts for that. Achuar were not concerned only with nature as an intellectual problem, they were concerned AT: In your first monograph entitled In the with nature, with nonhumans, on a day to day Society of Nature you sought to bridge the gap basis. So they were social partners: nature was between ecological and symbolic approaches not only good to think, it was good to interact in anthropology and to demonstrate how the with. That was the thing that became absolutely material and cultural processes that shape obvious for me, that it was good to interact with. Achuar interactions with nonhumans are So how do you interact with nonhumans? You deeply interwoven. Could you say more about can’t interact with nature, it’s a hypostasis; it’s how your approach was informed by the work like interacting with the state. You can’t interact of Marx and your mentor Lévi-Strauss? with the state; you interact with a representative of the state or a representative of nature. So it’s PD: There were three important threads that best to eliminate nature altogether and to see many anthropologists at the time were trying to how people interact with nonhumans. weave together. One was Marxism, which was And in fact I did that after my doctoral very important for us, the other was dissertation, which was published in English and the third was phenomenology. As students under the title In the Society of Nature. I started in philosophy we had read a lot of Husserl, and teaching at the École des hautes études—I was of course Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. And fortunate enough to get a position soon after so the question was: how do you combine or I finished my doctoral thesis—and I started a weave together these obviously incompatible seminar. I was ravenous to understand, with traditions? And so Godelier, for instance, was ethnography from neighboring societies—that an interesting case of trying to produce a is from Amazonia and then progressively with structural Marxism. Everything I did, I did ethnography from other parts of the world— because I felt dissatisfied, on the one the hand, …how people interacted with nonhumans with a materialist perspective where there would elsewhere. So I discovered that in Amazonia be a material basis and then a series of layers, most of the features I’d described among like a layer cake—the political system and the the Achuar were present. There was a very ideological system, etc. Then you spend your life common ground there. The game animals trying to understand how these different layers were all considered as affines, and affinity is a communicate and of course you can’t because good relationship to qualify this. This is when you’ve started by dividing, disconnecting them. I began to read Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The other dimension, which was not necessarily who took affinity from the point of view of the that of Lévi-Strauss but of some of his students, relationship with humans, while I was interested was treating nature as a purely intellectual in affinity as the relationship with nonhumans, problem, the study of folk classifications, for and we discovered that there was a continuity. instance, which Lévi-Strauss does very well in We arrived at affinity from different perspectives The Savage Mind. So nature is a sort of catalogue and interests: he came to affinity by studying of properties which the mind uses in order to cannibalism in general and Tupian attitudes construct interesting and complex combinations towards affinity and in-laws, etc., while I came

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to it by studying the relationship with game good enough basis of agreement in order to be animals, and we discovered that it was the same able to disagree. This is when I realized that my realm of social relations, in general. definition of animism was a bit too Durkheimian So during this process the seminar was because I had contrasted it with totemism in the very good because it was a research seminar, and Lévi-Straussian sense, that is, totemism as the I was systematically discussing these materials use of natural categories to conceptualize social with the students, first from Amazonia and then categories, transposing differences between from northern North America. I progressed species to differences between human groups. northward and then westward to Siberia and I’d used this definition of totemism to contrast I discovered that also in Siberia, the main with animism, in the sense that animism was relationship with the game animals was a almost the reverse, using social categories in relationship of affinity—although it wasn’t order to deal with nonhumans. Then I realized presented exactly like that, rather they are that that was a bit Durkheimian, and we had potential spouses, etc.—and that is one of the a lot of discussions with Viveiros de Castro ideas of animism. There is something there which in this respect and with Tim Ingold, who said is not linked to hunting and gathering because that the Lévi-Straussian definition of totemism they are not hunter gatherers. In Amazonia the was much too classificatory and intellectual. main cultigens have been domesticated at least So I started also reading material on Australia, 8,000 years ago, so it’s rather a specific outlook and I became aware that it was much too towards nonhumans that you find in different classificatory. This is how, after a while and places in the world. And this is when I decided some years, I came to the combinatorial matrix to revise this old concept of animism, which had that I put forth in Beyond Nature and Culture, fallen into disrepute, to define the fact of treating where in fact the relationship between what I nonhumans through using the same categories call animism, totemism, naturalism—which is that were used to treat humans. Because, of ‘our’ way of doing things since the 17th century, course, what I’d found with the Achuar as if you wish to give a specific date – and what I well was not only that the game animals were call analogism were all transformations of each considered and treated as affines, but very often, other, as a transformation of an initial contrast especially among the Achuar, cultivated plants between, on the one hand, interiority and were treated as consanguines. So the two main physicality and, on the other, between difference categories with which, in Dravidian kinship and resemblance. This provided a sort of systems, people are organized—which are initial matrix to differentiate ways of detecting consanguines and affines—were used also to continuities and discontinuities among humans deal with nonhumans. and nonhumans. It was my first theory of animism, refined afterwards with a lot of discussions over the AT: In Beyond Nature and Culture you present years with colleagues I like to call sparring this combinatorial matrix of models for partners—Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Tim possible relationships with nonhumans by Ingold, Bruno Latour—who are both friends considering a vast amount of ethnography and sparring partners in the sense that we can from around the world. How did you intend discuss freely. We agree to disagree; we have a the book to be taken up by anthropologists, for

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instance in political ecology, and how would etc.—that we had been using as matter of fact you sum up its central message for a wider ever since the 19th century. We must go beyond audience? them precisely at the level where people detect continuities and discontinuities in the world, PD: When you write a book like that, although so it’s a very elementary level. And the kind of I had these sparring partners, one of them being systematization that people will do, according to of course my wife Anne-Christine Taylor, you the social setting where they have been brought pursue a solitary path. I had no idea at all what up, as to continuities and discontinuities, seems would be the reception of the book, so I was to me to fall within one of these four formulas very surprised when I saw that it triggered a lot or models. So I’m providing models with of interest in many quarters. It’s been translated which to try to understand the rules governing only recently into English but in French it was compatibilities and incompatibilities between published more than ten years ago, which is a features. It’s not intended as a descriptive long enough period to see the results. And it has tool; it’s intended as an analytical device to had an important effect among philosophers, understand the conditions of bringing together, architects, artists, geographers… a number of in what I call collectives, certain features and people. Not necessarily for what I intended to do, excluding other features. It’s heuristic in that for a variety of reasons, with each reader taking sense. And so when I speak of collectives— from it something which he found interesting or borrowing the word from Bruno Latour, relevant to the discussion in his own discipline. although with a different sense than the one So I’m entirely convinced of the idea that once he gave to it—it’s because I’m interested in the you write a book it escapes you entirely, as it is form of associations that exist all over the world being read and commented on, interpreted by with humans and nonhumans. ‘We’ naturalists other people. I think it was Valéry who said that are one of the aggregates. In a sense I disagree it may even be that the interpretation that the with Latour on that. ‘We’ decided that there reader gives may be more interesting than the were beings which were natural and beings one you give of your own writing. So you do which were humans. This was a very important not own a copyright on your ideas. They are just dividing line with a lot of consequences, and scattered in the wide world and it’s absurd to this dividing line resulted in the fact that we maintain any orthodoxy. People use it and I’m deal with societies as societies of humans. You observing with interest what people are doing can speak in ethology at times of ‘social species’, with it. for instance, but the great obsession of ethology I did this book because I was interested in is to avoid projecting sociological concepts onto providing tools which would allow people to the nonhuman animal species being studied. go beyond the classical distinctions on which So we have excluded nonhumans from the social sciences had been based ever since our collectives. Others have brought them into the Enlightenment. What I did has at times their collectives, but in very different fashions. been defined as being part of the so-called Animists, for instance, see—as I understand . And if I am part of this it is it—all forms of life, or all morphologically because I feel it’s necessary to go to an analytical distinguished beings who are active, in a way, level which is beyond the classical concepts— as constituting a tribe, or a tribe-species, as like ‘society’, ‘history’, ‘nature’, ‘transcendence’, I call them, who are in interaction with each

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other. So there are as many collectives as there in the world, and this reframing has many are morphologically distinct forms of being. I consequences, some of them being political. The always quote this description by Bogoraz of the state of the world, including global warming Chukchi, when he said that for the Chukchi the and mass extinction and pollution, is a result, shadows on the wall live in their own villages, among other things, of this idea that there is, where they subsist by hunting. What does on the one hand, a natural environment and, on this mean? Of course they’re not idiots; they the other, a society that views and understands understand that the shadows are formed by the and projects its conceptualization of this interposition of bodies with a source of light, environment. This idea is partly responsible but this is a specific form of being, which is a for the current situation. It was responsible shadow, and as any other form of being, it has its for very good things also—the development of autonomy, it has its social rules, it has its culture, sciences, of physics, of chemistry etc. I’m not etc. So when you’re talking of collectives you’re a moralist in that sense. I’ve been discussing not presupposing that society, as we understand this with Tim Ingold, for instance, because it, is the basis, the central concept of analysis, I think he has a more moral position; for him that we are giving ourselves—it’s just a form of Western epistemology, to use a vague word, association among others. And what we have to is responsible for a completely immoral and study and understand is how people constitute false view of the world—if you wish, a false these associations, and this is repeatable for apprehension of the world. Whereas I think every other concept. The subject, for instance: it’s a partial apprehension of the world. Any a subject is not necessarily derived from the ontology leads to a specific systematization of individual human subject as it is conceived in certain properties of the world, so any ontology the West. And nor is epistemology, which is gives a blueprint for composing certain kinds reflection on what is knowable, something that of worlds. But there are no worlds that are can be understood as it is in the West under the intrinsically better than others. They are all conditions of the truth of statements. So every partial realizations of potentialities, qualities, philosophical or metaphysical problem that processes, or relations that, for some of them, has been posed in the West is being posed in a obviously exist independently from us; and all different manner elsewhere, and you have to go these partial realizations are legitimate. We beyond the traditional concepts to understand can, and we should, fight the consequences of them. This is why it’s ontological. You cannot Western hubris and of what naturalism has say it’s sociological because being sociological provoked but, as such, it’s not more true or false would mean that society would explain than an animist or analogist point of view. So everything, which is not the case. Society is the in that respect, if I were to give a definition product, the thing to be explained. It’s not the of anthropology, it would be the study of the explanatory factor. art of composing worlds. And the political I’m not the only one engaged in this relevance of it is that we can gain through project, but it implies a complete reformulation this study an understanding of better ways to of all the concepts we’re using, and in fact of compose a common world where nonhumans the intellectual framework with which we as well as other modes of composition could all understand human and nonhuman diversity legitimately be represented.

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AT: Your current research on landscape because they are active in certain circumstances, extends your work on the four ontological notably ritual circumstances, and they also modes. How does the concept of iconic trigger mechanisms of recognition which are figuration relate to these four ontological necessary for their agency to be expressed in the modes? What is its critical value for the right way on the right kind of persons. So what anthropology of landscape and in what I’m doing now is studying both how images are direction do you imagine this will take you in good iconic clues of certain ontologies—in the the future? sense that they reveal processes and connections between existents that are indicative of a PD: I think one has to distinguish what I’m certain way of composing a world in a specific doing on landscapes and what I’m doing on ontology—and, at the same time, how they are images. When I propounded the analytic agents that can play an active part in the life framework of the four modes of identification in of humans in certain circumstances because in Beyond Nature and Culture I was using discursive each of these ontologies they are activated by materials. Even if they mostly belonged to certain formal devices, which are also specific to so-called oral literature, they were propositional; the ontologies. So it’s a madly ambitious project and I said, ‘If there is any relevance in what because the amount of visual material which it I’m proposing it might be a good idea to see requires is absolutely huge. how it works with images, to see whether the Landscape is another thing. It’s going to continuities and the discontinuities which I be obvious in the lecture I will give later on surmise that people perceive in the objects today that I’ve been dissatisfied with the way of their environment are rendered visible in that landscape has been treated in anthropology icons.’ So initially I became interested—apart or in the social sciences in general. As a very from a personal interest I had for many years loose term, nevertheless based on a quite in the visual arts and their history as a manner definite genealogy in the West, landscape has of verifying or ascertaining how these modes been used—and in fact listening to some of of identification would be expressed in images, the papers at the conference confirmed this and then progressively I went much beyond impression—very much like mana was used in that. I’m working on that still. I’m writing a anthropology some decades ago. That is, it’s a book—which is taking much more time than I European concept with different local origins, thought—in which the central argument is that whether you consider landscape, landschaft, images are iconic agents. They are both signs landschap, paesaggio, paisaje, paysage, etc. And it that stand for something and agents that act is being used much like mana was; that is, as upon humans (and other beings). There has been a blanket concept, never precisely defined, you a curious drift of late between people who treat can use to describe almost any form of human images mainly as having agency—Alfred Gell relation to space, especially those to which you gave prominence to the idea but it started long have no direct access. And I don’t think it’s a before—and people who treat images as iconic good way to do anthropology, to use a concept signs which render visible a referent. Obviously just to subsume under it almost anything, from they are both, and so you have to study how they the subjective relation to sites to anthropogenic can be both at the same time. They have agency environments. So this is the basis of my interest

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in landscape, a militant one; it is also based on do anthropology to resolve your own identity a personal taste for landscape painting, gardens problems, so trying to study a place where you and walking ‘in nature’. were born and where you were raised might be good to your soul or your self-esteem, but AT: What do you consider the most significant you have to have outstanding self-reflexive ways fieldwork has changed since the 1970s and critical capacities to do that well. So I when you began to do ethnography? In what don’t think it’s a very good tendency. I don’t ways has it remained unchanged, and how advocate going to ‘primitive tribes’ but I think would you advise students starting their the cultural and social, even linguistic distance research careers today? is important in the sense that it provides the initial movement towards being aware of the PD: There’s an anecdote I told once in a lecture differences. Another dimension which I think which was told to me by Meyer Fortes in is interesting but not very easy to develop is Cambridge years ago. It was what Malinowski multi-sited ethnography, because you have told him before he went to do fieldwork with to stay in each of the sites long enough to the Tallensi. Malinowski said, as recounted by undergo the kind of progressive understanding Fortes, ‘Meyer, you’re going to write me a letter which Meyer Fortes was mentioning, and after a few weeks saying that it’s horrible: the which I think most anthropologists will have food is horrible, the climate is horrible, the the experience of. And finally—pleading for people are not nice at all. Then you’ll write me a my parish in a way—I think that if you are series of letters saying things are getting better, interested in the relationship between humans you’re getting to work, getting good material and nonhumans, what is called multispecies and then at the end of the year you’re going to ethnography now, it requires a good capacity write me a letter saying, “I think it’s alright now, to study nonhumans. So if you are interested in I have all the material, I have a few more things the study of the relationship between humans to ascertain and then I’ll come back.” And and specific plant communities, it requires then you’ll write me another letter, one month botany and the physiology of plants, how plants after that, saying, “I got it all wrong, I have to communicate, etc.; if you are interested in the stay much longer.”’ And this is the standard study of the relationship between humans experience of fieldwork, for everyone anywhere, and specific animal communities, it requires and if it’s not the case, if you feel you can wrap ethology, animal cognition and communication, it up in six months, then I don’t think it’s good physiology of reproduction, etc. There are fieldwork. Fieldwork is a very bizarre experience people who are doing that more and more. They which is often compared to psychoanalysis; are not so numerous because in fact it requires there is a series of steps wherever the fieldwork acquiring a double training. I have a young is being done that one has to follow in order to a colleague who has been doing that for wolves get a grasp of what is going on, and this doesn’t and herders. He is both an ethologist studying change: this is the miracle of ethnography. wolves and an ethnologist studying herders, so So what are the changes with respect he can understand how the communities have to that? The main changes are that more and evolved together in specific circumstances, and more people tend to study social settings that how one community of wolves is different are closer to their own upbringings. You don’t from another community of wolves that he

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studies comparatively elsewhere. He started depth at the same time as humans. But it’s his work with herders in Kyrgyzstan. He did always a relationship, otherwise you become an his PhD, then he’s been studying relationships ethologist. If you really are interested in doing with wolves and large predators in Norway multispecies ethnography you have to study and Macedonia. I think this is compulsory how humans and nonhumans influence each if you don’t want to stay in the realm of fancy. other, and I think it’s a very interesting direction When you talk about human relationships of research for avoiding the anthropocentric with animals you have to study the latter in prejudice of the social sciences.

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