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Beyond Nature and Culture Book Reviews Perspectives from Gene Anderson’s Bookshelf Beyond Nature and Culture Philippe Descola. Translated by Janet Lloyd. 2013. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Xxii +463 pp. $35.00 (paperback), $65.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-22621-236-4 (paperback), 978-0-22614-445-0 (hardcover). Reviewed by Eugene N. Anderson Reviewer address: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA. Email: [email protected] Received: April 8, 2015 Volume: 6(1):208-211 Published: December 19, 2015 © 2015 Society of Ethnobiology Recently, anthropologists have been concerned with is the latest stage in our field’s history of paying the “ontological turn,” a recent term for an old serious attention to what “the natives” say, as tendency in the field. Anthropologists have always opposed to writing it off as mere myth or error. looked at local worldviews, cosmologies, philoso- Indigenous and traditional people are at least as good phies, and knowledge systems. Recently, a deeper and at thinking as anyone else, and ignoring their philoso- more philosophical concern for such things has led to phy is as foolish as ignoring their now-famed wider use of the term ontology, which is the field of knowledge of plants and animals. Some of the philosophy concerned with what is, what is not, and conclusions reached in traditional societies may seem what might be. Closely related fields include episte- strange, but some philosophers in the European mology—the study of what we can and can’t know, tradition have rather different ideas too, after all. It is and how we know it—and phenomenology, the study the underlying perceptions and basic principles that of what we think we know: what “phenomena” we matter, and they are what Descola studies. (By see in the world and how we come to see those contrast, postmodernism appears in its full racist and particular things rather than other things. neocolonialist light; postmodernists rarely had any Anthropologists have taken Indigenous ontolo- interest in finding out what the locals thought; they gies seriously since the days of Lewis Henry Morgan. were interested only in elite French or German The first book to refer explicitly to traditional and thinkers.) Indigenous peoples as philosophers was Paul Radin’s The ontological turn is, I believe, the first book Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927—and please worldwide anthropological movement to begin in the note those first two words were not pejorative or “global south.” It has emerged from South America: sexist when he wrote). He had discovered with the from South American researchers like Gerardo Winnebago that Indigenous people have perfectly Reichel-Dolmatoff, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, sophisticated and elaborated systems of philosophy Mario Blaser, Eduardo Kohn (and from a related and religion, and he was one of the first to pay these tradition Arturo Escobar), and “global north” full respect as worthy of serious study. He was researchers who have spent their careers studying followed by A. Irving Hallowell (1955), who put South American Indigenous peoples. serious study of traditional worldviews on the map, Philippe Descola, a Lévi-Strauss student and getting psychological and cognitive anthropologists leading French ethnographer, is in the latter category. interested in the whole agenda and starting a whole His book is a major study of traditional ontologies. generation of work on Canadian First Nations For him, “Anthropology that seeks to be consequen- (Hallowell’s specialty). Hallowell was one of the first tial has no choice but to gain an understanding of the to use the term “ontology” for this field (Hallowell logic of this work of composition [of culture and its 1960). There followed a great deal of research in this shared schemas], by lending an ear to the themes and area, but it failed to catch on as mainstream anthro- harmonies that stand out from the great hum of the pology. world and concentrating on emerging orders whose It has finally done so. Unlike postmodernism and regularity is detectable behind the proliferation of other recent fads, ontology is probably here to stay. It different customs” (p. 111). Ethnobiology Letters. 2015. 6(1):208-211. DOI: 10.14237/ebl.6.1.2015.481. 208 Book Reviews Perspectives from Gene Anderson’s Bookshelf In it, he classifies ontologies according to a Lévi- systems, language, culture, songs, dances, and all. They Straussian type of structural matrix. He sets up a two- also help humans, often as predators or prey or by-two table setting interiority (soul, essence, spirit, helpers in the hunt. They have various relationships of mind) against physicality (body, physical stuff) and their own. “The swallow-tailed kite is the father of shared against nonshared. For him, animism involves edible insects: the shaman pays regular visits to its humans sharing their interiority with other lifeforms wife to ask her to allow her children—who are but not their physicality. Animals and plants are regarded as the shaman’s brothers—to accompany people, with souls and minds similar to ours, and with him so that humans can feed on them” (p. 353). To their own societies and shamans. It is widespread understand this, you have to know that the swallow- among hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, and tailed kite is a particularly conspicuous feeder on those characterizes the views of the Achuar and their same insects, and this recapitulates the family relation- neighbors, whom Descola studied in the Upper ship of hunter and prey. Humans, similarly, can shape- Amazon region. shift, at least if they have shamanic power. It is never Totemism, found mostly in Australia but some- easy to tell whether a bear/human is usually a bear what in Native North America, is the view that we shaman or usually a bear. humans share both physicality—or some of it—and Totemism is more complex. Humans share some interiority with many other lives (and even with rocks physical and spiritual traits, essences, or attributes with and landscapes). Analogism holds that humans differ nonhumans, but the relationship is complex. An both physically and spiritually from other lives, but Australian Aboriginal man may have a Dreaming from that there are countless interpenetrating essences, his father’s clan, another from his mother’s, another flows, or qualities that link us all into a vast web. from his birth spot, another from life encounters, and Examples are found in traditional China and among so on; or he may have several Dreamings from each the Nahuatl of Mexico. Finally, naturism is the view of these sources. Totemism usually involves essences that we are all subject to the same physical laws and manifested from Dreamtime beings, in original times, made out of the same stuff, but that humans are so that shape-shifting is less common today (though it sharply separated from nature by having a totally may occur, and also the original times of the Dream- different interiority: soul for Descartes, language for ings are still going on now, in something like a parallel Chomsky and others, consciousness for some modern universe). philosophers (who apparently cannot tell whether Analogism is most familiar from premodern their dog is asleep or awake). European cosmology and from traditional Chinese These are complemented by six modes of thought. Humans are separate from natural kinds, and transaction: exchange, predation, gift, production, groups of humans from each other. But in Europe, protection, and transmission (see table, p. 334). spiritual connections, astrological influences, the Theoretically, we could thus have 24 combinations, qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry) of Galenic medicine, and but Descola says many of these (unspecified) do not other subtle links wove the universe into one vast exist in the real world. He also discusses different order. In China, flows of qi, the force fields mistrans- modes of interaction. lated “elements” in western literature, and other Most of the book consists of discussion of the spiritual connections link everything in highly com- four basic ontologies, with many examples. Descola is plex ways. Analogistic thinking shows itself in widely read and a careful scholar. Naturally, his “transmigration of souls, reincarnation, metempsycho- knowledge is fullest when it comes to the Upper sis, and, above all, possession” (Descola, p. 213) and Amazon, but he is quite aware of ontologies from also in macrocosm/microcosm parallels, so typical of Mongolia and Siberia to Mexico and Canada. China. “Analogical collectives are thus alone in having veritable pantheons, not because they are polytheist (a Animists are the people so familiar in anthropo- more or less meaningless term), but because…the logical accounts, who tell us that trees are people, organization of their little world of deities extends that rocks are people, and even the wind and the sky are of the world of humans with no break in continui- people who can be humanoid or at least act socially as ty” (p. 275). humans. Animals often have spaces to which they can repair to shed their animal skins, appear as human or Naturalistic ontologies seem limited to the humanoid, and act like humans, with leadership modern technological world. They are our familiar Cartesian views. Ethnobiology Letters. 2015. 6(1):208-211. DOI: 10.14237/ebl.6.1.2015.481. 209 Book Reviews Perspectives from Gene Anderson’s Bookshelf It will not have escaped the anthropological to manage well with that, but his knowledge of reader that these types sort with socioeconomic totemism would have been improved by knowledge of formations: animism and totemism with hunter- Australian Aboriginal song, dance, and visual art. gatherer and horticultural societies, analogism with Much of their ontology is carried in those media. For traditional agrarian civilizations, naturalism with instance, he has missed the all-important role of modern industrial civilization.
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