A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture

ABSTRACT

Philippe Descola is a self-confessed naturalist. Yet in his book Beyond Nature and Culture, he presents naturalism as just one of four possible ontologies that – for different peoples in different periods – have underwritten human thought and practice. The others are animism, totemism and analogism. In this article I explore some of the paradoxical consequences of his positing naturalism both as a frame for comparative analysis and as one of the terms enframed by it. These have to do with the logic of the ontological four-fold, the conversion of inference into schemas of tacit knowledge, the division between psychological and linguistic constructions of the self, alternative senses of interiority and physicality, the dichotomies between humanity as condition and as species, and between mind and nature, and the proper use of the concepts of production and transmission. I conclude by imagining what would happen if animism, rather than naturalism, were taken as a starting point for comparative understanding. Then life, growth and movement, rather than figuring as the exterior emanations of a world of being, would be restored to immanence in a world of becoming.

Please see the response and rejoinder to this article:

Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding (Response to Ingold's A Naturalist Abroad in the Museum of Ontology) 10.1080/00664677.2016.1212523

Rejoinder to Descola's Biolatry: A Surrender of Understanding 10.1080/00664677.2016.1212532

KEYWORDS:

• Animism
• immanence
• interiority
• naturalism
• ontology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here and in what follows, page numbers refer to the English translation of Beyond Nature and Culture (Descola 2013). This is the point at which to acknowledge my profound intellectual debt to Philippe. We have sparred for many years, but in a spirit of conviviality and friendship. He would tell me that it was in order to get away from the surfeit of heavy-duty philosophy to which young scholars are subjected in France that he took flight into ethnography. My education in Britain was just the reverse: I endured a surfeit of ethnography but received no proper training in philosophy at all. Running away from ethnography, it is the philosophy that now lures me on. Our respective ships pass, sometimes in the night, sailing in opposite directions.

2. Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method was first published in 1895.

3. This paradox is also noted in an appreciation by Feuchtwang (2014, 384), who observes that Descola ‘is still bound to consider human and cognitive sciences in the very establishment of his four-cell grid of ontological families of universes’.

4. In the French original, ‘ … rendent manifeste la structure sociale elle-même’ (Lévi-Strauss 1957, 306). Curiously, this passage is worded quite differently in English translation, Here, it is stated that social relations comprise ‘the raw materials out of which the models making up the social structure are built’ (Lévi-Strauss 1968, 279). We can only suppose that the translator was attempting to be consistent where the author is not!

5. It is worth noting that later on in the work, Descola completely contradicts his earlier assertion of the universality of the subject. ‘Rather than assume the existence of the universal subject, it will be necessary to determine what kind of a subject is produced by each mode of identification’ (282).

6. The work to which Descola refers is Paul Bloom's Descartes’ Baby (Bloom 2004). Bloom claims that the distinction between physical properties and mental states is biologically hardwired in human brains from birth. This finding is predictable, given that infant responses are filtered through the very same distinction, which naturalism brings to the study of child development. What it finds in the children, unsurprisingly, are the premises of its own inquiry. For universality, read circularity.

7. As Praet (2014) has shown, in the world of animism, to be beyond humanity is to be beyond life. Or in other words, the condition of non-humanity is death.

8. It is rather surprising that Descola makes no reference to Gregory Bateson, whose work has perhaps offered the most consistent and anthropologically informed challenge in this regard. See, for example, Bateson (1980).