Beyond Nature and Culture

"Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come." Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition

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?

Cultureas a collective human making, of art, language, and so forthis often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a 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 analogismto account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.

"A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might goand what we might imagine in its place." Somatosphere

"The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss's Anthropologie Structurale." Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence

"Descola's challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended." Choice

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