Philippe Descola: Thinking with the Achuar and the Runa in Amazonia

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a re-reading of one of Philippe Descola’s earliest works, La Selva Culta, Simbolismo y Praxis en la Ecología de los Achuar. Despite Descola’s focus on the relation between natural domains, consanguinity, affinity and marriage, this book’s rich descriptions show the Achuar’s understandings of non-human sociability. The book also gives insight into the mutually constitutive assemblies of which human plants and animals form part. In later work, Descola reinterprets the ethnography of La Selva Culta, now with a focus on the human/non-human relationship. I explore the openings and closures of these new interpretations, and see them in relation to the possibilities and blind zones that conceptual tools related to more-than-human approaches may offer. In the discussion of the latter, I draw on my own work on the Runa, and reflect on the implications for more-than-human approaches when, as Descola suggests, humanness exceeds the concept of ‘the human’.

KEYWORDS:

• Human
• more-than-humans
• gender
• ontological modes
• Amazonia

Acknowledgements

Without the generosity of the people of the Alto Bobonaza in Ecuador, this article would never have been written. My gratitude goes to them. I would also like to thank the Guest Editors of this special issue, Marianne Lien and Gísli Pálsson for their comments and suggestions. Lena Gross and Esben Leifsen provided valuable feedback on early versions of this article. I also thank Ethnos anonymous reviewers who helped me clarify my argument. The Norwegian Research Council supports this work under grant 240995.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 ‘From here onwards I refer to this as La Selva Culta.

2 La Selva Culta: Simbolismo y Praxis en la Ecología de los Achuar was published in 1988 while the English translation In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia in 1994. Although I used mainly the Spanish translation, I refer to the latter in specific citations.

3 I use more-than-human as a label to refer to those approaches that recognise sociality as a condition which is not limited to the human world, and that thereby goes beyond the human.

4 The use of particular understandings of the social in the description of animals’ sociality is, of course, quite common as Despret’s (2016) work on scientists’ research on animals demonstrates.

5 My translation differs from the English translation which uses ‘physically associated’ instead of ‘carnally associated’ and ‘nurtures it’ instead of ‘making it live’. The Spanish translation illustrates more clearly my argument.

6 The word used in Achuar is sai. From the perspective of male Ego it refers to the category sister’s husband, wife’s brother, father’s sister’s son and mother’s brother’s son.

7 Here I do not follow this part of her argument as I limit myself to her discussion of consanguinity, identity and sameness in relation to gardening.

8 Descola underlines that the typology of modes of identification cannot be taken as a typology of isolated ‘worldviews’. He states that hybridity is the most common situation about these four different kind of inferences about the identities of being in the world. This would result in a variety of complex combinations.

9 Descola’s modes of identification have been criticised by authors holding different stands, from those who question him for advocating a variety of extreme relativism (Lenclud 2014), for adopting a cognitive standpoint as the basis of his modes, but misunderstanding how cognitive schema function (Toren 2014), for not being able to distinguish between sex and gender, or to account for gender and class differences (Hemreich 2014) or to those who see his modes as part of a resurgence of structuralism (Lambek 2014) or a rigid ahistorical neo-structuralist approach (Kapferer 2014).

10 Canelos Kichwa when it is used nowadays refers to the Runa who live in and trace their origins to the area of Canelos (Guzman-Gallegos 1997). I use Runa here which is the word people use to refer to themselves.

11 As Galli (2012) and Mezzenzana (2017) demonstrate, this is also the case for women who live in cities.

12 Runa women in the Tigre River no longer make ceramics, therefore I do not discuss the importance of ceramic making in becoming Runa women in this paper, see Whitten and Whitten (1988), and Mezzenzana (2017).

13 The importance of making kin through conviviality and consubstantiality has been a central theme to Amazonian anthropology; see for instance Overing and Passes (2000).