How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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season. With all of these, people in Ávila struggle to find channels of communication.
In my pursuit of certain tangibles of the ecological webs in which the Runa are immersed I also compiled many hundreds of ethnobiological specimens. These were identified by specialists, and they are now housed in Ecuador’s main herbarium and museums of natural history.9 Making these collections very quickly gave me some sort of purchase on the forest and its many creatures. It also allowed an entry to people’s understandings of ecological relations and gave me a way to articulate this with other bodies of knowledge about the forest world not necessarily bounded by that particular human context. Collecting imposes its own structures on forest relationships, and I was not unaware of the limitations—and motivations—of this search for stable knowledge, as well as the fact that, in some important respects, my efforts as a collector were quite different from Runa ways of engaging with the beings of the forest (see Kohn 2005).
I also sought to pay attention to forest experiences as they resonate through other arenas that are less grounded. Everyday life in Ávila is entangled with that second life of sleep and its dreams. Sleeping in Ávila is not the consolidated, solitary, sensorially deprived endeavor it has so often become for us. Sleep—surrounded by lots of people in open thatch houses with no electricity and largely exposed to the outdoors—is continuously interspersed with wakefulness. One awakens in the middle of the night to sit by the fire and ward off the chill, or to receive a gourd bowl full of steaming huayusa tea, or on hearing the common potoo call during a full moon, or sometimes even the distant hum of a jaguar. And one awakens also to the extemporaneous comments people make throughout the night about those voices they hear. Thanks to these continuous disruptions, dreams spill into wakefulness and wakefulness into dreams in a way that entangles both. Dreams—my own, those of my housemates, the strange ones we shared, and even those of their dogs—came to occupy a great deal of my ethnographic attention, especially because they so often involved the creatures and spirits that people the forest. Dreams too are part of the empirical, and they are a kind of real. They grow out of and work on the world, and learning to be attuned to their special logics and their fragile forms of efficacy helps reveal something about the world beyond the human.
The thinking in this book works itself through images. Some of these come in the form of dreams, but they also appear as examples, anecdotes, riddles, questions, conundrums, uncanny juxtapositions, and even photographs. Such images can work on us if we would let them. My goal here is to create the conditions necessary to make this sort of thinking possible.
This book is an attempt to encounter an encounter, to look back at these looking-backs, to face that which the runa puma asks of us, and to formulate a response. That response is—to adopt a title from one of the books that Peirce never completed (Peirce 1992b)—my “guess at the riddle” that the Sphinx posed. It is my sense of what we can learn when we attend ethnographically to how the Sphinx’s question might reconfigure the human. Making claims about and beyond the human in anthropology is dangerous business; we are experts at undermining arguments through appeals to hidden contexts. This is the analytical trump card that every well-trained anthropologist has up her sleeve. In this sense, then, this is an unusual project, and it requires of you, the reader, a modicum of goodwill, patience, and the willingness to struggle to allow the work done here to work itself through you.
This book will not immediately plunge you into the messy entangled, “natural-cultural” worlds (Latour 1993) whose witnessing has come to be the hallmark of anthropological approaches to nonhumans. Rather, it seeks a gentler immersion in a kind of thinking that grows. It begins with very simple matters so that complexity, context, and entanglement can themselves become the objects of ethnographic analysis rather than the unquestioned conditions for it.
As such, the first chapters may seem far removed from an exposition of the complicated, historically situated, power-laden contexts that so deeply inform Runa ways of being—an exposition we justifiably expect from ethnography. But what I am trying to do here matters for politics; the tools that grow from attention to the ways the Runa relate to other kinds of beings can help think possibility and its realization differently. This, I hope, can speak to what Ghassan Hage (2012) calls an “alter-politics”—a politics that grows not from opposition to or critique of our current systems but one that grows from attention to another way of being, one here that involves other kinds of living beings.
This book, then, attempts to develop an analytic, which seeks to take anthropology “beyond the human” but without losing sight of the pressing ways in which we are also “all too human,” and how this too bears on living. The first step toward this endeavor, and the subject of the first chapter, “The Open Whole,” is to rethink human language and its relationship to those other forms of representation we share with nonhuman beings. Whether or not it is explicitly stated, language, and its unique properties, is what, according to so much of our social theory, defines us. Social or cultural systems, or even “actor-networks,” are ultimately understood in terms of their languagelike properties. Like words, their “relata”—whether roles, ideas, or “actants”—do not precede the mutually constitutive relationships these have with one another in a system that necessarily comes to exhibit a certain circular closure by virtue of this fact.10
Given so much of social theory’s emphasis on recognizing those unique sorts of languagelike phenomena responsible for such closure, I explore how, thanks to the ways in which language is nested within broader forms of representation that have their own distinctive properties, we are, in fact, open to the emerging worlds around us. In short, if culture is a “complex whole,” to quote E.B. Tylor’s (1871) foundational definition (a definition that invokes the ways in which cultural ideas and social facts are mutually constituted by virtue of the sociocultural systemic contexts that sustain them), then culture is also an “open whole.” The first chapter, then, constitutes a sort of ethnography of signs beyond the human. It undertakes an ethnographic exploration of how humans and nonhumans use signs that are not necessarily symbolic—that is, signs that are not conventional—and demonstrates why these signs cannot be fully circumscribed by the symbolic.
Exploring how such aperture exists despite the very real fact of symbolic closure forces us to rethink our assumptions about a foundational anthropological concept: context. The goal is to defamiliarize the conventional sign by revealing how it is just one of several semiotic modalities and then to explore the very different nonsymbolic properties of those other semiotic forms that are usually occluded by and collapsed into the symbolic in anthropological analysis. An anthropology beyond the human is in large part about learning to appreciate how the human is also the product of that which lies beyond human contexts.
Those concerned with nonhumans have often tried to overcome the familiar Cartesian divide between the symbolic realm of human meanings and the meaningless realm of objects either by mixing the two—terms such as natures-cultures or material-semiotic are indicative of this—or by reducing one of these poles to the other. By contrast, “The Open Whole” aims to show that the recognition of representational processes as something unique to, and in a sense even synonymous with, life allows us to situate distinctively human ways of being in the world as both emergent from and in continuity with a broader living semiotic realm.
If, as I argue, the symbolic is “open,” to what exactly does it open? Opening the symbolic, through this exploration of signs beyond the symbolic, forces us to ponder what we might mean by the “real,” given that the hitherto secure foundations for the real in anthropology—the “objective” and the contextually constructed—are destabilized by the strange and hidden logics of those signs that emerge, grow, and circulate in a world beyond the human.
Chapter 2, “The Living Thought,” considers the implications of the claim, laid out in chapter 1, that all beings, including those that are nonhuman, are constitutively semiotic. All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive. In important ways, then, life and thought are one and the same: life thinks; thoughts are alive.
This has implications for understanding who “we” are. Wherever there are “living thoughts” there is also a “self.” “Self,” at its most basic level, is a product of semiosis. It is the locus—however rudimentary and ephemeral—of a living