The Ecology of Others by Philippe Descola
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Although a tiny book, this hits hard.
Through the field of anthropology, Descola notes the duality of nature and culture in ecology, anthropology and biology. Hard anthropology was to establish the unity of humankind. Social anthropology is meant to explain the variation within unity. This invariant cut aligns these sciences by pre-supposing an etic paradigm reflexive of a continuum of mind-body duality.
Thus, cultural is either natured by material geography or material geography is natured by culture. Either way, nature becomes a container for the limits of the study of cultural variation, either as the generator or as the mirror.
In this way, the very study of anthropology imposes a search for an invariant ontology within all cultures. For the former (cultural materialism) we look for a master generator of material reality on a soft cultural milieu. On the latter (like the idealism of Claude Levi-Strauss) we seek a master grammar of cultural semiology. Descola points out that this structuration imposes a transcendental cut that acts as a transducer. We eliminate the internal agency of the cultures that are examined, even if the ethnography is emic in search of an invariant generator that would match the hard anthropological unity that limits the study of cultural anthropology.
As a result, this duality misses the deeper implication that all cultural ageis is expressive of a human agency that operates internal to a culture, one that serves only to reproduce itself as humans reproduce ourselves. Our desire to standardize all studies is also a desire to impose our form of agency (power) on others. His suggestion then, is to study these fields as separate cuts on their own, without looking for a hard biology/material/geography or a hard idealism to calibrate variance to. In this way, he suggests we look for rules within each culture to as determining their own values and topography. In essence, he seeks the fragmentation of the field further, to find the character of each, risking our inability to speak to one another, but at the same time, discarding the value judgement we make when we attempt to normalize the difference of the other, through generative theory.
In some ways, this is expressive of a schizoanalysis (from Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), to make a hetergeneology of anthropology rather than following a structuralist superstructure-account. While Descola does not go on this bend, or connect explicitly with these thinkers, his suggestion is very much to quantize anthropology, to atomize according to agency, rather than atomizing to qualities based on a supra-transcendental field of a virtual cultural generator. I do look forward to reading more of his work.
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