Beyond Nature and Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780226144450)

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.

Author: Philippe Descola
ISBN-10: 0226144453
ISBN-13: 9780226144450
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 06/01/2013
Pages: 488
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.40w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2013