How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
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Effortless Efficacy,” is the place where I flesh out this account—to which I have heretofore been alluding—of the anthropological significance of form. That is, it is about how specific configurations of limits on possibility emerge in this world, the peculiar manner in which these redundancies propagate, and the ways in which they come to matter to lives, human and otherwise, in the forests around Ávila.
Form is difficult to treat anthropologically. Neither mind nor mechanism, it doesn’t easily fit the dualistic metaphysics we inherit from the Enlightenment—a metaphysics that even today, in ways we may not necessarily always notice, steers us toward seeing cause in terms either of mechanistic pushes and pulls or of the meanings, purposes, and desires that we have generally come to relegate to the realm of the human. Much of the book so far has been concerned with dismantling some of the more persistent legacies of this dualism by tracing the implications of recognizing that meaning, broadly defined, is part and parcel of the living world beyond the human. This chapter, by contrast, seeks to further this endeavor by going beyond not only the human but also life. It is about the strange properties of pattern propagation that exceed life despite the fact that such patterns are harnessed, nurtured, and amplified by life. In a tropical forest teeming with so many forms of life these patterns proliferate to an unprecedented degree. To engage with the forest on its terms, to enter its relational logic, to think with its thoughts, one must become attuned to these.
By “form” here, I’m not, then, referring to the conceptual structures—innate or learned—through which we humans apprehend the world, nor am I referring to an ideal Platonic realm. Rather, I am referring to a strange but nonetheless worldly process of pattern production and propagation, a process Deacon (2006, 2012) characterizes as “morphodynamic”—one whose peculiar generative logic necessarily comes to permeate living beings (human and nonhuman) as they harness it.
Even though form is not mind it is not thinglike either. Another difficulty for anthropology is that form lacks the tangible otherness of a standard ethnographic object. When one is inside it there is nothing against which to push; it cannot be defined by the way it resists. It is not amenable to this kind of palpation, to this way of knowing. It is also fragile and ephemeral. Like the vortices of the whirlpools that sometimes form in the swift-flowing Amazonian headwaters, it simply vanishes when the special geometry of constraints that sustains it disappears. It thus remains largely hidden from our standard modes of analysis.
Through the examination of a variety of ethnographic, historical, and biological examples summoned together in an attempt to make sense of a puzzling dream I had about my relation to some of the animals of the forest and the spirit masters that control them, this chapter tries to understand some of the peculiar properties of form. It tries to understand the ways form does something to cause-and-effect temporality and the ways it comes to exhibit its own kind of “effortless efficacy” as it propagates itself through us. I am particularly interested here in how the logic of form affects the logic of living thoughts. What happens to thought when it is freed from its own intentions, when, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, we ask of it no return (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 219)? What kinds of ecologies does it sound, and, in the process, what new kinds of relations does it make possible?
This chapter is also, nonetheless, concerned with the very practical problem of getting inside form and doing something with it. The wealth of the forest—be it game or extractive commodities—accumulates in a patterned way. Accessing it requires finding ways to enter the logic of these patterns. Accordingly, this chapter also charts the various techniques, shamanic and otherwise, used to do this, and it also attends to the painful sense of alienation the Runa feel when they are unable to enter the many new forms that have come over time to serve as the reservoirs for so much power and wealth.
Rethinking cause through form forces us to rethink agency as well. What is this strange way of getting something done without doing anything at all? What kinds of politics can come into being through this particular way of creating associations? Grasping how form emerges and propagates in the forest and in the lives of those who relate to it—be they river dolphins, hunters, or rubber bosses—and understanding something about form’s effortless efficacy is central to developing an anthropology that can attend to those many processes central to life, human and nonhuman, which are not built from quanta of difference.
How Forests Think is a book, ultimately, about thought. It is, to quote Viveiros de Castro, a call to make anthropology a practice for “la décolonisation permanente de la pensée” (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 4). My argument is that we are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality. We can only imagine the ways in which selves and thoughts might form associations through our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. And then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.
So, how should we think with forests? How should we allow the thoughts in and of the nonhuman world to liberate our thinking? Forests are good to think because they themselves think. Forests think. I want to take this seriously, and I want to ask, What are the implications of this claim for our understandings of what it means to be human in a world that extends beyond us?
Wait. How can I even make this claim that forests think? Shouldn’t we only ask how people think forests think? I’m not doing this. Here, instead, is my provocation. I want to show that the fact that we can make the claim that forests think is in a strange way a product of the fact that forests think. These two things—the claim itself and the claim that we can make the claim—are related: It is because thought extends beyond the human that we can think beyond the human.
This book, then, aims to free our thinking of that excess conceptual baggage that has accumulated as a result of our exclusive attention—to the neglect of everything else—to that which makes us humans exceptional. How Forests Think develops a method for crafting new conceptual tools out of the unexpected properties of the world beyond the human that we discover ethnographically. And in so doing it seeks to liberate us from our own mental enclosures. As we learn to attend ethnographically to that which lies beyond the human, certain strange phenomena suddenly come to the fore, and these strange phenomena amplify, and in the process come to exemplify, some of the general properties of the world in which we live. If through this form of analysis we can find ways to further amplify these phenomena, we can then cultivate them as concepts and mobilize them as tools. By methodologically privileging amplification over, say, comparison or reduction we can create a somewhat different anthropology, one that can help us understand how we might better live in a world we share with other kinds of lives.
The logics of living dynamics, and the sorts of ancillary phenomena these both create and catch up, might at first appear strange and counterintuitive. But, as I hope to show, they also permeate our everyday lives, and they might help us understand our lives differently if we could just learn to listen for them. This emphasis on defamiliarization—coming to see the strange as familiar so that the familiar appears strange—calls to mind a long anthropological tradition that focuses on how an appreciation for context (historical, social, cultural) destabilizes what we take to be natural and immutable modes of being. And yet, when compared to the distance-making practices associated with more traditional liberatory ethnographic or genealogical exercises, seeing the human from somewhat beyond the human does not merely destabilize the taken for granted; it changes the very terms of analysis and comparison.
This reach beyond the human changes our understanding of foundational analytical concepts such as context but also others, such as representation, relation, self, ends, difference, similarity, life, the real, mind, person, thought, form, finitude, future, history, cause, agency, relation, hierarchy, and generality. It changes what we mean by these terms and where we locate the phenomena to which they refer, as well as our understanding of the effects such phenomena have in the living world in which we live.
The final chapter, “The Living Future (and the Imponderable Weight of the Dead),” builds on this way of thinking with forests that I develop in this book as it takes as its focus another enigmatic dream, in this case one of a hunter who is not sure if he is the rapacious