How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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as a result of this process. The world is thus “animate.” “We” are not the only kind of we.
The world is also “enchanted.” Thanks to this living semiotic dynamic, mean-ing (i.e., means-ends relations, significance, “aboutness,” telos) is a constitutive feature of the world and not just something we humans impose on it. Appreciating life and thought in this manner changes our understanding of what selves are and how they emerge, dissolve, and also merge into new kinds of we as they interact with the other beings that make the tropical forest their home in that complex web of relations that I call an “ecology of selves.”
The way Runa struggle to comprehend and enter this ecology of selves amplifies and makes apparent the peculiar logic of association by which living thoughts relate. If, as Strathern (1995) has argued, anthropology is at base about “the Relation,” understanding some of the strange logics of association that emerge in this ecology of selves has important implications for our discipline. As we will see, it reveals how indistinction figures as a central aspect of relating. This changes our understandings of relationality; difference no longer sits so easily at the foundation of our conceptual framework, and this changes how we think about the central role that alterity plays in our discipline. A focus on this living semiotic dynamic in which indistinction (not to be confused with intrinsic similarity) operates also helps us see how “kinds” emerge in the world beyond the human. Kinds are not just human mental categories, be these innate or conventional; they result from how beings relate to each other in an ecology of selves in ways that involve a sort of confusion.
Just how to go about relating to those different beings that inhabit this vast ecology of selves poses pragmatic as well as existential challenges. Chapters 3 and 4 examine ethnographically how the Runa deal with such challenges, and these chapters reflect, more generally, on what we can learn from this.
Chapter 3, “Soul Blindness,” is about the general problem of how death is intrinsic to life. Hunting, fishing, and trapping place the Runa in a particular relationship with the many beings that make up the ecology of selves in which they live. These activities force the Runa to assume their points of view, and indeed to recognize that all these creatures that they hunt, as well as the many other creatures with which those hunted animals relate, have points of view. It forces them to recognize that these creatures inhabit a network of relations that is predicated in part on the fact that its constitutive members are living, thinking selves. The Runa enter this ecology of selves as selves. They hold that their ability to enter this web of relations—to be aware of and to relate to other selves—depends on the fact that they share this quality with the other beings that make up this ecology.
Being aware of the selfhood of the many beings that people the cosmos poses particular challenges. The Runa enter the forest’s ecology of selves in order to hunt, which means that they recognize others as selves like themselves in order to turn them into nonselves. Objectification, then, is the flipside of animism, and it is not a straightforward process. Furthermore, one’s ability to destroy other selves rests on and also highlights the fact that one is an ephemeral self—a self that can all too quickly cease being a self. Under the rubric “soul blindness,” this chapter charts moments where this ability to recognize other selves is lost and how this results in a sort of monadic alienation as one is, as a consequence, avulsed from the relational ecology of selves that constitutes the cosmos.
That death is intrinsic to life exemplifies something Cora Diamond (2008) calls a “difficulty of reality.” It is a fundamental contradiction that can overwhelm us with its incomprehensibility. And this difficulty, as she emphasizes, is compounded by another one: such contradictions are at times, and for some, completely unremarkable. The feeling of disjunction that this creates is also part of the difficulty of reality. Hunting in this vast ecology of selves in which one must stand as a self in relation to so many other kinds of selves who one then tries to kill brings such difficulties to the fore; the entire cosmos reverberates with the contradictions intrinsic to life.
This chapter, then, is about the death in life, but it is especially about something Stanley Cavell calls the “little deaths” of “everyday life” (Cavell 2005: 128). There are many kinds and scales of death. There are many ways in which we cease being selves to ourselves and to each other. There are many ways of being pulled out of relation and many occasions where we turn a blind eye to and even kill relation. There are, in short, many modalities of disenchantment. At times the horror of this everyday fact of our existence bursts into our lives, and thus becomes a difficulty of reality. At others it is simply ignored.
Chapter 4, “Trans-Species Pidgins,” is the second of these two chapters concerned with the challenges posed by living in relation to so many kinds of selves in this vast ecology of selves. It focuses on the problem of how to safely and successfully communicate with the many kinds of beings that people the cosmos. How to understand and be understood by beings whose grasp of human language is constantly in question is difficult in its own right. And when successful, communication with these beings can be destabilizing. Communication, to an extent, always involves communion. That is, communicating with others entails some measure of what Haraway (2008) calls “becoming with” these others. Although this promises to widen ways of being, it can also be very threatening to a more distinctly human sense of self that the Runa, despite this eagerness for expansion, also struggle to maintain. Accordingly, people in Ávila find creative strategies to open channels of communication with other beings in ways that also put brakes on these transgressive processes that can otherwise be so generative.
Much of this chapter focuses on the semiotic analysis of human attempts to understand and be understood by their dogs. For example, people in Ávila struggle to interpret their dogs’ dreams, and they even give their dogs hallucinogens in order to be able to give them advice—in the process shifting to a sort of trans-species pidgin with unexpected properties.
The human-dog relation is special in part because of the way it links up to other relations. With and through their dogs people connect both to the broader forest ecology of selves and to an all-too-human social world that stretches beyond Ávila and its surrounding forests and that also catches up layers of colonial legacies. This chapter and the two that follow consider relationality in this expanded sense. They are concerned not just with how the Runa relate to the forest’s living creatures but also with how the Runa relate to its spirits as well as to the many powerful human beings who have left their traces on the landscape.
How the Runa relate to their dogs, to the living creatures of the forest, to its ethereal but real spirits, and to the various other figures—the estate bosses, the priests, the colonists—that over the course of time have come to people their world cannot be distentangled. They are all part of this ecology that makes the Runa who they are. Nonetheless, I resist the temptation to treat this relational knot as an irreducible complexity. There is something we can learn about all these relations—and relationality more broadly—by paying careful attention to the specific modalities through which communication is attempted with different kinds of beings. These struggles to communicate reveal certain formal properties of relation—a certain logic of association, a set of constraints—that are neither the contingent products of earthly biologies nor those of human histories but which are instantiated in, and thus give shape to, both.
The property that most interests me here is hierarchy. The life of signs is characterized by a host of unidirectional and nested logical properties—properties that are consummately hierarchical. And yet, in the hopeful politics we seek to cultivate, we privilege heterarchy over hierarchy, the rhizomatic over the arborescent, and we celebrate the fact that such horizontal processes—lateral gene transfer, symbiosis, commensalism, and the like—can be found in the nonhuman living world. I believe this is the wrong way to ground politics. Morality, like the symbolic, emerges within—not beyond—the human. Projecting our morality, which rightfully privileges equality, on a relational landscape composed in part of nested and unidirectional associations of a logical and ontological, but not a moral, nature is a form of anthropocentric narcissism that renders us blind to some of the properties of that world beyond the human. As a consequence it makes us incapable of harnessing them politically. Part of the interest of this chapter, then, lies in charting how such nested relations get caught up and deployed in moral worlds without themselves being the products of those moral worlds.