How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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of the forest. It also entangles the lives of that forest with worlds we might otherwise consider “all too human,” by which I mean the moral worlds we humans create, which permeate our lives and so deeply affect those of others.
Gods talking through the bodies of cows, Indians in the bodies of jaguars, jaguars in the clothing of whites, the runa puma enfolds these. What are we anthropologists—versed as we are in the ethnographic charting of the distinctive meaning-filled morally loaded worlds we humans create (distinctive worlds that make us feel that we are exceptions in this universe)—to make of this strange other-than-human and yet all-too-human creature? How should we approach this Amazonian Sphinx?
Making sense of this creature poses a challenge not unlike the one posed by that other Sphinx, the one Oedipus encountered on his way to Thebes. That Sphinx asked Oedipus, “What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?” To survive this encounter Oedipus, like the members of our hunting party, had to figure out how to correctly respond. His answer to the riddle the Sphinx posed from her position somewhere (slightly) beyond the human was, “Man.” It is a response that, in light of the Sphinx’s question, begs us to ask, What are we?
That other-than-human Sphinx whom, despite her inhumanity, we nevertheless regard and to whom we must respond, asks us to question what we think we know about the human. And her question reveals something about our answer. Asking what first goes on four, then on two, then on three legs simultaneously invokes the shared legacies of our four-pawed animality and our distinctively bipedal peripatetic humanity, as well the various kinds of canes we fashion and incorporate to feel our ways through our finite lives—lives whose ends, as Kaja Silverman (2009) observes, ultimately connect us to all the other beings with whom we share the fact of finitude.
Footing for the unsteady, a guide for the blind, a cane mediates between a fragile mortal self and the world that spans beyond. In doing so it represents something of that world, in some way or another, to that self. Insofar as they serve to represent something of the world to someone, many entities exist that can function as canes for many kinds of selves. Not all these entities are artifacts. Nor are all these kinds of selves human. In fact, along with finitude, what we share with jaguars and other living selves—whether bacterial, floral, fungal, or animal—is the fact that how we represent the world around us is in some way or another constitutive of our being.
A cane also prompts us to ask with Gregory Bateson, “where” exactly, along its sturdy length, “do I start?” (Bateson 2000a: 465). And in thus highlighting representation’s contradictory nature—Self or world? Thing or thought? Human or not?—it indicates how pondering the Sphinx’s question might help us arrive at a more capacious understanding of Oedipus’s answer.
This book is an attempt to ponder the Sphinx’s riddle by attending ethnographically to a series of Amazonian other-than-human encounters. Attending to our relations with those beings that exist in some way beyond the human forces us to question our tidy answers about the human. The goal here is neither to do away with the human nor to reinscribe it but to open it. In rethinking the human we must also rethink the kind of anthropology that would be adequate to this task. Sociocultural anthropology in its various forms as it is practiced today takes those attributes that are distinctive to humans—language, culture, society, and history—and uses them to fashion the tools to understand humans. In this process the analytical object becomes isomorphic with the analytics. As a result we are not able to see the myriad ways in which people are connected to a broader world of life, or how this fundamental connection changes what it might mean to be human. And this is why expanding ethnography to reach beyond the human is so important. An ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but also on how humans and animals relate breaks open the circular closure that otherwise confines us when we seek to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans.
Creating an analytical framework that can include humans as well as nonhumans has been a central concern of science and technology studies (see esp. Latour 1993, 2005), the “multispecies” or animal turn (see esp. Haraway 2008; Mullin and Cassidy 2007; Choy et al. 2009; see also Kirksey and Helmreich 2010 for a review), and Deleuze-influenced (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) scholarship (e.g., Bennett 2010). Along with these approaches I share the fundamental belief that social science’s greatest contribution—the recognition and delimitation of a separate domain of socially constructed reality—is also its greatest curse. Along with these I also feel that finding ways to move beyond this problem is one of the most important challenges facing critical thought today. And I have especially been swayed by Donna Haraway’s conviction that there is something about our everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures that can open new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding.
These “posthumanities” have been remarkably successful at focusing on the zone beyond the human as a space for critique and possibility. However, their productive conceptual engagement with this zone is hampered by certain assumptions, shared with anthropology and social theory more broadly, concerning the nature of representation. Furthermore, in attempting to address some of the difficulties these assumptions about representation create, they tend to arrive at reductionistic solutions that flatten important distinctions between humans and other kinds of beings, as well as those between selves and objects.
In How Forests Think I seek to contribute to these posthuman critiques of the ways in which we have treated humans as exceptional—and thus as fundamentally separate from the rest of the world—by developing a more robust analytic for understanding human relations to nonhuman beings. I do so by reflecting on what it might mean to say that forests think. I do so, that is, by working out the connection between representational processes (which form the basis for all thought) and living ones as this is revealed through ethnographic attention to that which lies beyond the human. I use the insights thus gained to rethink our assumptions about the nature of representation, and I then explore how this rethinking changes our anthropological concepts. I call this approach an “anthropology beyond the human.”6
In this endeavor I draw on the work of the nineteenth-century philosopher Charles Peirce (1931, 1992a, 1998a), especially his work in semiotics (the study of how signs represent things in the world). In particular I invoke what the Chicago-trained linguistic anthropologist Alejandro Paz calls the “weird” Peirce, by which he means those aspects of Peirce’s writing that we anthropologists find hard to digest—those parts that reach beyond the human to situate representation in the workings and logics of a broader nonhuman universe out of which we humans come. I also draw greatly on Terrence Deacon’s remarkably creative application of Peircean semiotics to biology and to questions of what he calls “emergence” (see Deacon 2006, 2012).
The first step toward understanding how forests think is to discard our received ideas about what it means to represent something. Contrary to our assumptions, representation is actually something more than conventional, linguistic, and symbolic. Inspired and emboldened by Frank Salomon’s (2004) pioneering work on the representational logics of Andean knotted cords and Janis Nuckolls’s (1996) work on Amazonian sound images, this is an ethnography that explores representational forms that go beyond language. But it does so by going beyond the human. Nonhuman life-forms also represent the world. This more expansive understanding of representation is hard to appreciate because our social theory—whether humanist or posthumanist, structuralist or poststructuralist—conflates representation with language.
We conflate representation with language in the sense that we tend to think of how representation works in terms of our assumptions about how human language works. Because linguistic representation is based on signs that are conventional, systemically related to one another, and “arbitrarily” related to their objects of reference, we tend to assume that all representational processes have these properties. But symbols, those kinds of signs that are based on convention (like the English word dog), which are distinctively human representational forms, and whose properties make human language possible, actually emerge from and relate to other modalities of representation. In Peirce’s terminology these other modalities (in broad terms) are either “iconic” (involving signs that share likenesses with the things they represent) or “indexical” (involving signs that are in some way affected by or otherwise correlated with those things they