How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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share these other semiotic modalities with the rest of nonhuman biological life (Deacon 1997). These nonsymbolic representational modalities pervade the living world—human and nonhuman—and have underexplored properties that are quite distinct from those that make human language special.
Although there are anthropological approaches that do move beyond the symbolic to study the full range of Peircean signs, they locate such signs exclusively inside a human framework. Accordingly, those who use signs are understood to be human, and though signs may be extralinguistic (with the consequence that language can be treated as something more than symbolic) the contexts that make them meaningful are human sociocultural ones (see esp. Silverstein 1995; Mannheim 1991; Keane 2003; Parmentier 1994; Daniel 1996; on “context,” see Duranti and Goodwin 1992).
These approaches fail to recognize that signs also exist well beyond the human (a fact that changes how we should think about human semiosis as well). Life is constitutively semiotic. That is, life is, through and through, the product of sign processes (Bateson 2000c, 2002; Deacon 1997; Hoffmeyer 2008; Kull et al. 2009). What differentiates life from the inanimate physical world is that life-forms represent the world in some way or another, and these representations are intrinsic to their being. What we share with nonhuman living creatures, then, is not our embodiment, as certain strains of phenomenological approaches would hold, but the fact that we all live with and through signs. We all use signs as “canes” that represent parts of the world to us in some way or another. In doing so, signs make us what we are.
Understanding the relationship between distinctively human forms of representation and these other forms is key to finding a way to practice an anthropology that does not radically separate humans from nonhumans. Semiosis (the creation and interpretation of signs) permeates and constitutes the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multispecies relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensible.
This way of understanding semiosis can help us move beyond a dualistic approach to anthropology, in which humans are portrayed as separate from the worlds they represent, toward a monistic one, in which how humans represent jaguars and how jaguars represent humans can be understood as integral, though not interchangeable, parts of a single, open-ended story. Given the challenges posed by learning to live with the proliferating array of other kinds of life-forms that increasingly surround us—be they pets, weeds, pests, commensals, new pathogens, “wild” animals, or technoscientific “mutants”—developing a precise way to analyze how the human is both distinct from and continuous with that which lies beyond it is both crucial and timely.
This search for a better way to attend to our relations to that which lies beyond the human, especially that part of the world beyond the human that is alive, forces us to make ontological claims—claims, that is, about the nature of reality. That, for example, jaguars in some way or other represent the world demands a general explanation that takes into account certain insights about the way the world is—insights that are garnered from attention to engagements with nonhumans and that are thus not fully circumscribed by any particular human system of understanding them.
As a recent debate makes clear (Venkatesan et al. 2010), ontology, as it circulates in our discipline, is a thorny term. On the one hand, it is often negatively associated with a search for ultimate truths—the kinds that the ethnographic documentation of so many different ways of doing and seeing is so good at debunking (Carrithers 2010: 157). On the other hand, it sometimes seems to function as nothing more than a trendy word for culture, especially when a possessive pronoun precedes it: our ontology, say, versus theirs (Holbraad 2010: 180).
In mobilizing Amazonian ethnography to think ontologically, I place myself in the company of two eminent anthropologists, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who have had a great and lasting influence on my research. Their work has gained traction in anthropology because of the ways it renders ontology plural without turning it into culture: different worlds instead of different worldviews (Candea 2010: 175). But the recognition of multiple realities only side steps the question: Can anthropology make general claims about the way the world is?7 Despite the many problems that making general claims raises—problems that our various forms of relativism struggle to keep at bay—I think anthropology can. And I think anthropology, to be true to the world, must find ways of making such claims, in part because, as I will argue, generality itself is a property of the world and not just something we humans impose on it. And yet, given our assumptions about representation, it seems difficult to make such claims. This book seeks to get beyond this impasse.
I do not, then, wish to enter the ontological from the direction of the human. My goal is not to isolate configurations of ontological propositions that crop up at a particular place or time (Descola 2005). I choose, rather, to enter at a more basic level. And I try to see what we can learn by lingering at that level. I ask, What kinds of insights about the nature of the world become apparent when we attend to certain engagements with parts of that world that reveal some of its different entities, dynamics, and properties?
In sum, an anthropology beyond the human is perforce an ontological one. That is, taking nonhumans seriously makes it impossible to confine our anthropological inquiries to an epistemological concern for how it is that humans, at some particular time or in some particular place, go about making sense of them. As an ontological endeavor this kind of anthropology places us in a special position to rethink the sorts of concepts we use and to develop new ones. In Marilyn Strathern’s words, it aims “to create the conditions for new thoughts” (1988: 20).
FIGURE 2. Ávila circa 1992. Photo by author.
Such an endeavor might seem detached from the more mundane worlds of ethnographic experience that serve as the foundations for anthropological argumentation and insight. And yet this project, and the book that attempts to do it justice, is rigorously empirical in the sense that the questions it addresses grow out of many different kinds of experiential encounters that emerged over the course of a long immersion in the field. As I’ve attempted to cultivate these questions I’ve come to see them as articulations of general problems that become amplified, and thus made visible, through my struggles to pay ethnographic attention to how people in Ávila relate to different kinds of beings.
This anthropology beyond the human, then, grows out of an intense sustained engagement with a place and those who make their lives there. I have known Ávila, its environs, and the people who live there for a human generation; the infants I was introduced to on my first visit in 1992 were when I last visited in 2010 young parents; their parents are now grandparents, and some of the parents of those new grandparents are now dead (see figure 2). I spent four years (1996–2000) living in Ecuador and conducting fieldwork in Ávila and continue to visit regularly.
The experiential bases for this book are many. Some of the most important encounters with other kinds of beings came on my walks through the forest with Runa hunters, others when I was left alone in the forest, sometimes for hours, as these hunters ran off in pursuit of their quarry—quarry that sometimes ended up circling back on me. Still others occurred during my slow strolls at dusk in the forest just beyond the manioc gardens that surround people’s houses where I would be privy to the last burst of activity before so many of the forest’s creatures settled down for the night.
FIGURE 3. Drinking beer. Photo by author.
I spent much of my time trying to listen, often with a tape recorder in hand, to how people in everyday contexts relate their experiences with different kinds of beings. These conversations often took place while drinking manioc beer with relatives and neighbors or while sipping huayusa tea around the hearth in the middle of the night (figure 3).8 The interlocutors here were usually human and usually Runa. But “conversation” also occasionally involved other kinds of beings: the squirrel cuckoo who flew over the house whose call so radically changed the course of discussion down below; the household dogs with whom people sometimes need to make themselves understood; the