Philippe Descola, born in 1949, is a French anthropologist who held the chair of anthropology at the Collège de France from 2000 to 2019, and who first lived with the Achuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon in the 1970s. In Beyond Nature and Culture (French 2005, English 2013) he argues that humans everywhere sort the beings around them by two things, their inner life and their bodies, and that this gives four basic ways of seeing the world: animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. Naturalism, the modern Western view that only humans have a true inner life within one shared physical nature, becomes in his account one way among four, not simply the way things are.
Who is Philippe Descola? #
He was born on 19 June 1949 in France, studied philosophy at the École normale supérieure, then turned to anthropology as a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Funded by France’s national research centre, the CNRS, he lived with the Achuar from 1976 to 1978. From 2000 to 2019 he held the chair of anthropology at the Collège de France, and in 2012 he received the CNRS gold medal.1
His books in English include In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (1994), The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle (1996) and Beyond Nature and Culture (2013).1
Who are the Achuar? #
An Amazonian people living on the borders of Ecuador and Peru, around four and a half thousand strong when Descola described them. They are gardeners and hunters. The women run the gardens, where manioc makes up nearly sixty per cent of what is grown, and the men hunt, fish and make war. Their work for food took only about three and a half hours a day.2
What struck Descola was that Amazonian ways of life, in which people have individual relationships with animals treated as persons, could not be described with the usual Western split between society and nature. Trying to make sense of them became the starting point for his later scheme.3
What are his four ways of seeing the world? #
Four ways of deciding what kind of being something is, which he calls ‘modes of identification’. Faced with any other being, human or not, a person can only take it to be like or unlike themselves in two respects: its interiority, meaning an inner life with awareness of itself, and its physicality, meaning the body and what it can do. That gives four possibilities.4
– Animism: the other has a similar inner life but a different body. – Totemism: the other has both a similar inner life and a similar physical make-up. – Analogism: the other differs in both, so the world is made of countless separate kinds of being. – Naturalism: the other has a similar physical make-up but no comparable inner life.
These are dominant tendencies, not boxes into which whole societies fit. Descola defends the two starting points against the charge that they are Western ideas in disguise. Body and inner life are not, he argues, constructs of Greek philosophy and Christian theology, and the awareness of this duality is probably innate and specific to the human species.4
What does each way look like? #
Animism, a continuity of souls and a discontinuity of bodies, is common in South and North America, Siberia and parts of South-East Asia. Animals and spirits are said to live in villages, keep kinship rules and ethical codes, hold rituals and trade goods, because they share the same kind of inner life as humans; their bodies are often described as clothing that can be put on or taken off. What they share with humans, he stresses, is “humanity as a general condition, not man as a species.”5
Totemism is best seen in Aboriginal Australia, where a human group and its totem share the same qualities. In the 1890s the anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen showed a photograph of himself to a man of the Aranda of Central Australia, then still living largely as hunter-gatherers. He belonged to the kangaroo totem, and answered that the picture was exactly like him, “as is a kangaroo”.6
Analogism breaks the world into a multitude of essences separated by tiny steps, often arranged on a graded scale, such as the Great Chain of Being that served as the main picture of the cosmos in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Naturalism, the prevalent ontology of modernity, holds a single nature shared by everything and a variety of cultures that only humans have.7
Is naturalism just the way things are? #
Not in Descola’s account; it is one ontology among four. He turns a familiar objection round. Animism is often called anthropocentric, because it gives other beings human-like lives, but he argues that only naturalism really is, since it defines other beings by their lack of humanity and places moral dignity in humans alone. Animism, by contrast, he calls ‘anthropogenic’, because it borrows from humans only what is needed so that other beings can be treated as humans are.8
He ends the lecture by saying that the split between nature and culture, however useful it was in driving the achievements of modernity, “has now outlived its moral and epistemological efficiency.”8
What do critics say about the four ways? #
Some anthropologists question whether the four are really separate. The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that animism, totemism and analogism are better read as three forms of animism, communal, segmentary and hierarchical, that often exist together in one society, and that all of them are versions of an anthropomorphism that is our own default way of seeing.9 See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
Descola replied in the same journal that Sahlins had confused levels of analysis which the scheme keeps apart: the ways of identifying beings, the ways of grouping them into collectives, and the kinds of relationship between them.9
He had also changed his own mind once. His first account treated animism as a mirror image of totemism; he later said that he had been “quite wrong”, because that neat inversion kept the very split between nature and society it was meant to get beyond.10
How do the four ways sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Descola describes ways of seeing; Therapeutic Shamanism is a way of living and practising, so the fit is loose, but there are clear points of contact. The first is the critique of the dead world. Most Westerners divide living things from non-living things and reserve consciousness for humans and perhaps a few ‘higher’ mammals. In shamanism everything is made of energy, and that energy is alive and conscious, so everything around us is alive and conscious, though often in ways very different from ours.11 That is close to what Descola calls the animist way, and the opposite of naturalism.
The second is hierarchy. Shamanism is an entirely non-hierarchical way of looking at the world, in which humans are not superior to animals, and animals are not superior to plants and stones.12 Descola’s analogism, with its graded scale of beings, includes the Great Chain of Being among its examples, the very kind of ranking this teaching sets itself against.
The third is a difference of timing. Descola names naturalism as the ontology of modernity. Therapeutic Shamanism traces the loss of the animist way much further back, to the move from hunting and gathering to farming, when people went from belonging to the land to owning it.13 See What is the Fall?
Therapeutic Shamanism does not sit neatly in a single one of the four boxes. It shares animism’s continuity of inner life, and it also teaches that all physical things, Plants, Animals and Humans included, are the Stone People, made of the same chemical elements.14
