Eduardo Kohn is an anthropologist at McGill University in Canada whose book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013) grew out of four years with the Runa, a Quichua-speaking people of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Its argument is that thinking is not only a human affair: every living being reads and makes signs, every living being is a self, and so the forest is a web of thinking selves, which he calls an ecology of selves. From this he concludes that “the world is animate, whether or not we are animists”.
Who is Eduardo Kohn? #
An anthropologist who teaches at McGill University in Montreal, where he is an Associate Professor of Anthropology.1 From 1996 to 2000 he lived in Ávila, a Runa village on the foothills of Sumaco Volcano in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and he has returned there many times since.2 How Forests Think came out of that fieldwork and won the Gregory Bateson Prize in 2014, named after the thinker on mind and ecology whose ideas the book draws on.1 See Who was Gregory Bateson, and what is an ecology of mind?
The book is not a conventional account of a people’s customs. It uses the Runa’s dealings with jaguars, dogs, monkeys, ants and the spirits of the forest to make a general claim about how the world is, drawing on the American philosopher Charles Peirce’s theory of signs.
Who are the Runa of Ávila? #
A Quichua-speaking people of the Upper Amazon whose village was a mission centre in colonial times. They are not hunter-gatherers. Almost all the food they share comes from their gardens, from the rivers and streams and from the forest, through hunting, fishing, gathering and gardening; manioc gardens surround their houses. During Kohn’s years there they bought shotguns, ammunition, clothing, salt and household goods in the nearby market town of Loreto, but not food.3 So they are gardeners who also hunt, fish and gather, living alongside the market and the state.
Their history is part of the story. Colonial records describe a coordinated rising against the Spaniards in 1578 that was set off by the visions of two shamans, and in Kohn’s view Amazonian shamanism there cannot be understood apart from the colonial order that helped shape it, though it is not only a product of it.3
How do forests think? #
Through signs. The book opens on a hunting trip, with a Runa man telling Kohn to sleep face up: a jaguar that sees a being able to look back will leave it alone, but one lying face down looks like meat. If jaguars see and represent us, then seeing, representing, “and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs”.4
Kohn borrows Peirce’s three kinds of sign. Symbols, such as words, are signs by convention, and on this planet only humans use them. But symbols sit inside two older kinds of sign that all life shares: icons, which work by likeness, and indices, which point to something really connected with them. When a hunter fells a palm to frighten a monkey into the open, the crash is an index of danger and the monkey’s leap is its reading of it. A Runa scarecrow is made to look like a hawk, not to human eyes but to a parakeet’s, and it works.5
From this he draws the book’s main claims. What sets life apart from the inanimate world is that living things represent the world, and these representations are part of what they are.4 Wherever a sign is being read, there is a self, so selves are not confined to animals with brains. The forest is an ecology of selves, a web of living thoughts that holds the many kinds of beings who live there and also the spirits and the dead.5 Language, in this account, is only one way of thinking among many, and treating it as the model for all thought blinds us to the others.
What does Kohn say about animism, souls and dreams? #
That Runa animism is not just a belief. It grows out of the need to deal with other selves as selves, and it rests on what he calls an ontological fact, that there are other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human.6 He makes this as a general claim about the world, not only a report of what the Runa think, and the book closes on it: “The world is animate, whether or not we are animists.” It is full of selves, and he dares to say souls, human and otherwise.7
He also gives a name, soul blindness, to the loss of the ability to recognise other souled beings, which in the Runa world can happen to animals, plants, people and even shamans’ spent darts. Dreams, in his account, “are not commentaries on the world; they take place in it”, which is close to how journeys are understood.8
Has his work been criticised? #
Yes, on how far the idea of thinking can be stretched. The French anthropologist Martin Fortier, reviewing the French edition in 2018, argued that the idea of thought working below the level of symbols had been explored in cognitive anthropology for more than forty years, that counting every kind of representation as thinking gives thought a rather thin definition, and that a framework this broad stretches across too many cultures whilst explaining too little of the richness of Amazonian animism. He also asked what such a framework could say about the snowy plains of the Inuit, a world very different from the tropical forest.9
Fortier also praised the book: its feel for the teeming life of the tropical forest, the ethnography of its third chapter, and its use of serious thinkers such as Peirce and the anthropologist Terrence Deacon.9 Kohn’s general position, set out in the book five years earlier, is that his general claim about selfhood is made empirically, growing out of close attention to how the Runa live with other beings, and that limiting anthropology to how other people think would always leave the question of what the world is like unasked.10
How does Kohn’s work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely on one point, and at a real distance on another. The closeness is experience over belief. In Therapeutic Shamanism animism is not a belief so much as an experience: people are invited to find out for themselves that the world is alive.11 Kohn, an academic anthropologist, makes a similar case from inside his own discipline, that animism answers to how the world really is and is not only a cultural point of view.
The distance is over stones. Kohn draws his line at life. He accepts that animists may treat stones as alive, but by his own account of selves they are not: “life thinks; stones don’t.”12 Therapeutic Shamanism holds the opposite. All physical things are Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, temporarily experiencing a particular form, and the Stone People are conscious and alive, in a way very, very different from us, so different that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all.13 The two views rest on different tests of what counts as a self, a sign read in Kohn’s case, and consciousness itself in Therapeutic Shamanism, and both are left standing here. See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
