Beyond Nature and Culture
Paperback (16 Dec 2014)
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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.
Book information
ISBN: | 9780226212364 |
Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
Imprint: | The University of Chicago Press |
Pub date: | 16 Dec 2014 |
DEWEY: | 304.2 |
DEWEY edition: | 23 |
Language: | English |
Number of pages: | xxii, 463 |
Weight: | 728g |
Height: | 152mm |
Width: | 229mm |
Spine width: | 25mm |