Interview with Philippe Descola

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 anthropology 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 suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 15 Interview with Philippe Descola 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, Maurice Godelier, 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 suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 16 Interview with Philippe Descola 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.

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