Beyond Nature and Culture Descola Philippe
Beyond Nature and Culture Descola Philippe Successor to Claude Levi-Strausa at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond…
Specifikacia Beyond Nature and Culture Descola Philippe
Beyond Nature and Culture Descola Philippe
Successor to Claude Levi-Strausa at the College de France, 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 publication in 2005. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers.
Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. 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.