The document discusses the cosmologies of indigenous groups in Amazonia and Canada. It notes that these groups do not view nature and culture as separate, dualistic concepts like Western societies do. For these groups, animals and plants are seen as intentional beings with human-like attributes. They are integrated into a non-dualistic worldview as part of a social continuum along with humans. The document provides examples from the Achuar and Makuna groups, noting they see humans, plants, and animals all as different types of "people" connected in relationships rather than divided into separate categories of nature and culture.
The document discusses the cosmologies of indigenous groups in Amazonia and Canada. It notes that these groups do not view nature and culture as separate, dualistic concepts like Western societies do. For these groups, animals and plants are seen as intentional beings with human-like attributes. They are integrated into a non-dualistic worldview as part of a social continuum along with humans. The document provides examples from the Achuar and Makuna groups, noting they see humans, plants, and animals all as different types of "people" connected in relationships rather than divided into separate categories of nature and culture.
The document discusses the cosmologies of indigenous groups in Amazonia and Canada. It notes that these groups do not view nature and culture as separate, dualistic concepts like Western societies do. For these groups, animals and plants are seen as intentional beings with human-like attributes. They are integrated into a non-dualistic worldview as part of a social continuum along with humans. The document provides examples from the Achuar and Makuna groups, noting they see humans, plants, and animals all as different types of "people" connected in relationships rather than divided into separate categories of nature and culture.
The document discusses the cosmologies of indigenous groups in Amazonia and Canada. It notes that these groups do not view nature and culture as separate, dualistic concepts like Western societies do. For these groups, animals and plants are seen as intentional beings with human-like attributes. They are integrated into a non-dualistic worldview as part of a social continuum along with humans. The document provides examples from the Achuar and Makuna groups, noting they see humans, plants, and animals all as different types of "people" connected in relationships rather than divided into separate categories of nature and culture.
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Philippe Descola
Cosmologies of the Indians d' Amazonia
The dualism, which in our companies opposes natural and culture, is unknown Indians d' Amazonia. It is also foreign to the Indians of Canada subarctic, who live in a very different environment. All and sundry confer on the animals attributes identical to those of human (intentionality, etc). In the south as in north, which we call nature formed d' integral part; a vast d' unit; social interactions where l' man n' is qu' an actor among d' others. A nondualistic anthropology is to be constituted. The dualism, which in our companies opposes natural and culture, is unknown Indians d' Amazonia. It is also foreign to the Indians of Canada subarctic, who live in a very different environment. All and sundry confer on the animals attributes identical to those of human (intentionality, etc). In the south as in north, which we call nature formed d' integral part; a vast d' unit; social interactions where l' man n' is qu' an actor among d' others. A nondualistic anthropology is to be constituted. The Summit of Rio on l' environment contributed to reinforce the feeling qu' there was a diffuse bond between the contemporary ecological concerns and the interrogations concerning the destiny of l' Amazonia. For the Western public opinions and the media, the Amazon forest and its inhabitants radically changed d' image. L' green hell of the years 1960 became the lung of planet and its principal reserve of biodiversity; as for the mysterious and worrying tribes that l' one made at one time responsible for disappearance d' Fawcett or d' Maufrais*, they were converted into companies of botanists and advised pharmacologists. The most recent misadventure of the philosophical figure of the good savage, l' Amazonia incarnates now, more than any other area of planet, this acute nostalgia qu' test the world industrialized for a lifestyle where l' balance between l' man and nature would harmoniously be preserved. Like very stereotype, this vision of l' Amazonia n' is not completely deprived of bases. Admittedly, l' idea that l' Amazonia would be the last and the vastest area of virgin tropical forest remaining on the face of the Earth is now largely beaten in breach by work d' historical ecology (1). L' abundance of the grounds anthropogniques* and their association with forests of palm trees or fruit-lofts woodland suggest that the distribution of the types of forest and vegetation in the area results partly from several millenia d' occupation by populations whose recurring presence on the same sites upset the vegetable landscape (1). These artificial concentrations of certain vegetable resources would have influenced the distribution and the demography of the animal species which s' in feed, so that Amazonian nature is, in truth, very little natural, but can on the contrary be regarded as the cultural product d' a very old handling of fauna and flora. Quoiqu' invisible for an observer not informed, the consequences of this anthropisation are far d' to be negligible, in particular with regard to the rate of biodiversity, higher in the anthropogenic portions of forest than in the portions of forest not modified by l' man (2). Except for this reserve, it is exact that the indigenous populations of l' Amazonia and of Guyanes knew to implement strategies d' use of the resources which, transforming in a durable way their environment, did not upset therefore its principles of operation nor its conditions of reproduction. The studies d' ecology and d' ethno-ecology carried out since about thirty d' years showed the brittleness of the various Amazonian ecosystems, at the same time as diversity and l' extended from the knowledge and the techniques developed by the Amerindians to benefit from their environment and l' to adapt to their needs (3). There is advanced l' idea qu' beyond knowledge technical, botanical, agronomic or ethologic invested by the Indians in their activities of subsistence, c' was l' together of their religious beliefs and their mythology which was to be regarded as a kind of knowing ecological transposed, like a metaphorical model of the operation of their ecosystem and balances to be respected so that this one is maintained in a state d' homeostasis. From such a point of view, Amazonian cosmologies would constitute transpositions symbolic systems of the objective properties d' a specific environment; they would be, in their architecture interns at least, the reflection and the product of l' adaptation successful to an ecological medium complexes (4). L' idea is tempting. Indeed, unlike the more or less tight dualism which, in our vision of the world, controls the distribution of human and not-human in two radically distinct fields, Amazonian cosmologies deploy a scale of the beings where the differences between the men, the plants and the animals are of degree and not of nature. Achuar of l' Ecuadorian Amazonia, for example, say that the majority of the plants and the animals have a heart (wakan) similar to that of human, a faculty which arranges them among the people (aents) in this qu' it ensures the reflexive conscience and l' to them; intentionality, qu' it makes them able d' to test emotions and allows them d' to exchange messages with their pars as with the members d' other species, of which the men (5). One recognizes with the wakan l' aptitude to be conveyed without sound mediation of the thoughts and the desires towards l' heart d' a recipient, modifying thus, sometimes with l' knowledge of this one, its state d' spirit and its behavior. The human ones lay out for this purpose d' a vast range d' magic incantations, anent them, to which they can act remotely on their congeneric, but also on the plants and the animals, as on the spirits and certain artifacts. In l' spirit of Achuar, technical know-how is indissociable of capacity to create an intersubjective medium But can one speak d' here; beings of nature differently than by convenience of language? There is a place for nature in a cosmology which confers on the animals and the plants the majority of the attributes of l' humanity? Can one even speak d' space wild in connection with this forest hardly effleure by Achuar and qu' they however describe like an immense garden cultivated carefully by a spirit? What we call nature is the subject d' here; a social report/ratio; prolonging the world of the household, it is truly domestic into its most inaccessible tiny rooms. This is to say that Achuar would not recognize any natural entity in the qu' medium; they occupy? Not completely. Great social continuum brewing human and not-human n' does not include all the elements of l' environment, of which some do not communicate with anybody, fault d' a heart into clean. The majority of the insects and fish, the grasses, foams and the ferns, the rollers and the rivers remain thus external with the social sphere as with the play of l' intersubjectivity; perhaps in their machinale existence and credits they would correspond so that we call nature. Is it for as much legitimate continuing to employ this concept in order to indicate a segment of the world which, for Achuar, is incomparably more restricted than than we understand ourselves by there? In the modern thought, moreover, nature n' direction qu' has; in opposition to human works, that l' d' is chosen; to call those culture, company, history, or spaces anthropized. A cosmology where the majority of the plants and animals are included in a community of people sharing whole or part of faculties, the behaviors and the moral codes usually allotted to the men do not answer in any manner the d' criteria; such an opposition. Achuar do not constitute an exceptional case in the Amazonian world. To a few hundred kilometers more in north, for example, in the forest of Eastern Colombia, the Makuna Indians still present a more radical version d' a theory of the world resolutely nondualistic (6). With l' instar of Achuar, Makuna categorize the human ones, the plants and the animals as of people (massed) of which principal attributes - mortality, social life and ceremonial, l' intentionality, knowledge - are in any point identical. The internal distinctions at this community of alive rest on the special characters that l' mythical origin, the food modes and the modes of reproduction confer on each class d' to be, and not on the more or less great proximity of these classes to the paradigm d' achievement qu' would offer Makuna. L' interaction between the animals and the human ones is also conceived in the form d' a d' report/ratio; alliance, though slightly different from the model achuar, since the hunter treats its game like joint potential and not like a brother-in-law. Ontological categorizations are more plastic still than at Achuar, because of the faculty of metamorphosis recognized with all: the human ones can become animals, the animals to convert itself into human and l' animal d' a species to transform itself into an animal d' another species. L' taxinomic influence on reality is thus always relative and contextual, permanent barter of appearances not allowing d' to allot stable identities to the alive components of l' environment. Similar cosmologies were described in great number for the forest areas of the lowlands of l' South America. In spite of their differences, all these cosmologies have as a common characteristic not to make distinctions d' gasoline sliced between human the d' a share, and good d' number; animal species and vegetable d' another share. The majority of the entities which populate the world are connected the ones to the others in a vast continuum animated by principles unit and controlled by an identical mode of sociability. Moreover, the characteristics allotted to these entities depend less d' a preliminary definition of their gasoline that relative positions qu' they occupy the ones compared to the others according to the requirements of their metabolism, and in particular of their food mode. What distinguishes a species d' another, c' is that of which it is nourished and the species which eat it, the community each time different from those with which it is in competition in the trophic chain, a sociology of the mutual predation, all in all, rather qu' a catalogue of intrinsic features. L' identity of human, alive and died, of the plants, the animals and the spirits is very whole relational, and thus prone to changes or metamorphoses according to the adopted points of view, since each species is considered to perceive the other species according to its own criteria and needs. This perceptive hyperrelativism gives to Amazonian cosmologies a character definitely nonanthropocentric, in what the point of view of l' humanity on the world n' d' is not that; a dominant species subordinating all the others to its own reproduction, but rather that which could have a d' kind; ecosystem transcendantal which would be conscious of the totality of the interactions proceeding in its centre. We return thus to the initial question: this systemic design of the biosphere to which seem to testify many people d' Would Amazonia be a consequence of the properties of their environment? The ecologists indeed define the tropical forest as a generalized ecosystem, being characterized by a very great diversity of the animal species and vegetable combined with a weak manpower and a great dispersion of the individuals of each species. Immersed in a monstrous plurality of forms of life seldom joined together in homogeneous units, the Indians d' Amazonia would have perhaps been unable d' to embrace like a whole this disparate conglomerate requesting their significant faculties permanently. Yielding by need to the mirage of various, they n' would not have known, all in all, to dissociate from their environment, fault of distinguishing l' major unity of nature behind the multiplicity of its singular demonstrations. C' is with an interpretation of this type which the remark made by Claude Lvi-Strauss (7) could invite lorsqu' it suggests that the tropical forest is perhaps the only environment which offers a support to the concept of mono-individuality, c' be-with-to say to l' attribution of idiosyncrasic characteristics to each individual d' a species. In a medium as diversified, it was perhaps inevitable as relations all between different individuals seemingly take precedence over the construction of macrocatgories stable and mutually exclusive. L' existence of very similar cosmologies worked out by people living in a completely different medium is the main argument with l' opposition d' such an interpretation. C' is the case, for example, Indians of the subarctic area of Canada who, contrary to the Indians of the South American tropical forest, exploit a remarkably uniform environment. The characteristics of the northern forest are exactly opposite of those of the Amazon forest: a d' small number; species coexist in this ecosystem specialized, represented each one by a great d' number; individuals. And yet, in spite of l' homogeneity of their ecological medium, the people subarctic do not regard it as an autonomous field of reality to oppose to the certainty social life. C' is especially in their designs of the animal world which the Indians of the Canadian northern forest testify to greatest convergence (8). Just like in Amazonia, the majority of the animals are conceived like equipped people d' a heart, which confers to them attributes completely identical to those of the human ones, such reflexive conscience, l' intentionality, emotional life or the respect of ethical precepts. The groups creates are particularly representative in this field. According to them, the sociability of the animals is similar to that of the men and s' feed with the same sources: solidarity, l' friendship and respect with old. Those are the invisible spirits which govern the migrations of game, manage its territorial dispersion and are in load of its regeneration. If the animals differ from the men, c' is thus only by l' appearance, a simple illusion of the directions since distinctive body envelopes qu' they raise d' ordinary are only disguises intended to mislead the Indians. Lorsqu' they visit the latter in dream, the animals appear such qu' they are actually, c' be-with-to say under their human form, of the same qu' they speak in the indigenous languages when their s' spirit; express publicly with the course d' a ritual known as of the trembling tent. One would be wrong to see in this humanization of the animals a simple play of l' spirit, a manner of language metaphorical of which relevance s' would hardly extend beyond the circumstances suitable for l' achievement of the rites or with the narration of the myths. Even lorsqu' they speak in extremely prosaic terms about the tracking, of the setting with died and of the consumption of game, the Indians express without ambiguity l' idea that hunting is a social interaction with entities perfectly conscious of conventions which govern it. Here, as in the majority of the companies of hunters, c' is by testifying to the respect to the animals that l' one s' ensure in their complicity: it is thus necessary to avoid the waste, to kill properly and without useless sufferings, to treat with dignity the bones and the skin, not to yield to the tartarinades nor to even evoke too clearly the fate reserved for the preys. Beyond these marks of consideration, however, the relationship with the animals can s' to express in more specific registers; the seduction, for example, which appears game in l' image d' a amante, or the magic coercion, which destroys the will d' a prey and the force with s' to approach the hunter. But most common of these relations, that also which underlines best the parity between the men and the animals, is the bond d' friendship qu' a hunter ties with the wire time with a singular member d' a species. L' friend of wood is designed with the manner d' a pet and will serve d' intermediary near its congeneric for qu' they s' expose without balking with range of shooting; small treason, undoubtedly, but without consequence for his, the victim of the hunter being rincarnant shortly after in an animal of the same species if its skin received the ritual treatment prescribed. Just like the people d' Amazonia, the people of Subarctique thus conceive their environment with the manner d' a dense network d' interrelationships controlled by principles which do not discriminate human thehuman ones. Admittedly, because of the objective characters of their ecosystem, and in particular of the low number of the alive species, this network d' interrelationships n' is not as rich and complex as that of the people of the tropical forest; but structures of l' one and of l' another network are completely similar, which excludes that the second is the product d' an adaptation to an environment more diversified. Far d' to be specific, Amazonian cosmologies are thus attached to a vaster family of designs of the world which n' do not make distinction sliced between the nature and the company and which make prevail like organizing principle the circulation of flows, of the identities and of the substances between entities on which the characteristics depend less d' an abstract gasoline that relative positions qu' they occupy the ones compared to the others. A term comes to l' spirit when l' one seeks to qualify such systems, a term on which l' contemporary anthropology threw an modest veil, perhaps parce qu' he too crment recalls the old debates of the discipline on the question of l' origin of the religions and on the differences supposed between the primitive thought and the scientific thought. This c' term; is l' animism. Inter alia things, l' animism is the belief which the natural beings are equipped d' a clean spiritual principle, and qu' it is thus possible to the men d' to establish with these entities of the d' reports/ratios; a particular type, reports/ratios of protection, seduction, d' hostility, d' alliance or d' exchange services. On l' animism thus heard, l' contemporary anthropology remained extremely discrete, undoubtedly because of the great reversal of prospect operated by Claude Lvi-Strauss in l' totemism (9) analyzes. Challenging the utilitarian psychologisantes explanations, evolutionists or who tried d' to elucidate the mystical and participative bond considered to exist between a group of filiation and the plant or l' animal which served d' to him; ponyme, Lvi-Strauss showed that the so-called totemism n' was qu' a classifying logic using discontinuities empirically observable between the species so d' to organize a delimiting order of the social units. Plants and animals offer a point d' support with the classifying thought and, because of contrasted significant qualities that their morphological and ethologic discontinuity exhibe spontaneously, they becomes signs ready mtaphoriquement to express the differences necessary to perpetuation of l' clannish organization. This interpretation turns over l' sociocentric explanation formerly suggested by Durkheim and Mauss in their famous test on primitive classifications: this n' is not l' clannish organization which provides the model of the classification of the beings of l' environment; on the contrary the perceptible differences between those will use to conceive the differences between the clans (10). Parce qu' it solved in a masterly way the question of the totemism, the demonstration of Lvi- Strauss contributed to make forget that l' objectivation of not-human by the human ones could be conceived differently qu' with the d' means; a classifying device. However l' animism is also a form d' social objectivation of the entities which we call natural, in this qu' it confers on these entities not only anthropocentric provisions - c' be-with-to say a statute of anybody often endowed with word and having human affects - but also social attributes, the hierarchy of the positions, behaviors based on the relationship, the respect of certain standards of control and l' obedience with ethical codes. These social attributes are drawn from the repertory of each culture, which will characterize its relationship with such or such segment of its environment according to the modes of sociability locally dominant: various degrees of consanguineous relationship, the relationship by alliance, l' authority of the chief on a local group or d' elder on its juniors, l' ritual friendship, l' codified hostility, etc In this direction, l' animism can be considering not like a system of categorization of the plants and animals, but as a system of categorization of the types of relations that the human ones maintain with thehuman ones. The systems animic thus constitute a symmetrical reverse of the totemic classifications heard within the meaning of Lvi-Strauss, in this qu' they n' do not use the differential relations between not-human conceptually ordering the company, but qu' they are useful contrary to the elementary categories structuring the social life conceptually to order the report/ratio of the men to the alive species and, by derivation, the relationship between these species. In the systems totemic, all in all, thehuman ones are treated like signs, in the systems animic they are treated like the d' term; a relation. Thus heard, l' animism and the totemism constitutes what j' would call readily d' modes; identification, c' be-with-to say manners of defining the borders of oneself and d' others. To apprehend like legitimate demonstrations of l' ambition to give a direction to the world does not go without raising difficulties of all kinds, in particular because of presupposed which rise from our own d' mode; identification, namely the naturalism. The naturalism is simply the belief qsue nature exists, in other words that certain entities owe their existence and their development with a foreign principle with the effects of the human will. Typical of Western cosmologies since Plato and Aristote, the naturalism produces a specific ontological field, a d' place; order and of need where nothing n' occurs without a cause, whether this cause is referred to a transcendent authority or qu' it is immanente with the texture of the world. Insofar as the naturalism is the guiding principle of our own cosmology and qu' it soaks our common direction like our scientific practice, it became for us one presupposed to some extent natural which structure our epistemology and, in particular, our perception of the other d' modes; identification. Considered from the point of view naturalist, totemism or l' animism thus seem to us representations intellectually interesting, but basically false, as of simple handling symbolic systems of this specific field of phenomena which we call nature. If l' one tries to disregard this presupposed, force is however to note that l' existence of nature like an autonomous field n' is not more one raw data of l' experiment that are not to it animals which speak or of the bonds of filiation between the men and the macaws. Or, it n' there does not have more objective justifications allowing d' to affirm that the human ones form a community d' organizations entirely distinct from the other biotic and abiotic components of l' environment, as we think it, qu' it n' there has to consider that the human ones, the plants and the animals form a hierarchical community people entirely distinct from minerals, as tend all over the world to think it of many companies. Where we introduce the articulated language and the bipdie like decisive criteria of l' humanity, d' other cultures prefer to choose more categories including, founded on l' animation, on the autonomous locomotion or the presence of particular features, like teeth or the sexue reproduction. L' idea that nature is a social construction into perpetual becoming installation however a formidable challenge with l' anthropology: must we restrict our ambitions to describe in the most faithful possible way the specific designs of their environment that companies built at different times, or must us seek principles d' order allowing to compare seemingly infinite empirical diversity complexes of nature-culture? I am reticent to on the matter adopt a relativistic position, because, among good d' other reasons, such a prospect presupposes this qu' it is appropriate d' to establish. The relativism indeed has as an implicit corollary the belief in a universal nature which would have everywhere the properties and the borders that our own culture allots to him and on which would spread a proliferation of particular systems of the world, definite each one by an arbitrary assembly of symbols having for function to code this natural substrate considered common to all. From such a point of view, not only the cause even of the differences in the conceptualizations of l' environment remains unexplained, but still, and in spite of all the relativistic proclamations, it becomes impossible d' to escape l' ethnocentrism, c' be-with-to say to the privilege granted to the only culture whose definition of nature serves d' implicit standard to measure all the others. Thus let us suppose qu' there exist very general structures which organize the way in which people build representations of their physical and social environment. Where does one have to start to seek to find traces of their existence and their modus operandi? The starting point which m' appeared simplest is the following: a feature characteristic of all the conceptualizations of l' environment is that those are founded on an anthropocentric reference frame. This property generates either of the models in which the categories and the social relations are used as mental gauge to order cosmos, or of the models in which discontinuities between not-human make it possible to think discontinuities between human, or of the models like ours, where nature is negatively defined as this ordered segment of the reality which develops independently of l' human action. In all the cases, c' be-with-to say qu' it operates by inclusion or exclusion, l' social objectivation of nonhuman cannot thus be dissociated from l' objectivation of the human ones. L' one and l' another process s' support on the configuration of the ideas and the practices which, within each company, defines the designs of oneself and d' others; l' one and l' another process implies that borders are traced, that identities are charged and that cultural mediations are elaborate. C' is what j' called d' modes; identification. But an additional step must be crossed if we want to finish some with dualism, as with the sterile debate between universalism and relativism which n' is itself, after all, qu' a relic of the natural dichotomy/culture. To go beyond dualism, towards an anthropology fully monist, implies that l' one ceases treating the company and the culture, just as human faculties and physical nature, like autonomous substances and causal authorities, which would allow d' to open the way with a true ecological comprehension of the constitution of the individual and collective entities. C' in this original direction d' is; a science of the relations, whose Gregory Bateson (11) or Claude Lvi-Strauss already showed fruitfulness, that l' ecology can inspire social sciences and human, and not under the species of the simplistic geographical determinism which s' is unduly seized the term. Qu' they exist by themselves or qu' they are defined of l' outside, qu' they are produced by the men or qu' they are only perceived by them, qu' they are material or immaterial, the entities which constitute our universe do not have a direction and an identity qu' through the relations which institute them as such. However, if these entities are into right quasi infinite, the reports/ratios which bind them it are not; only differ the contexts historical and cultural in which these reports/ratios are or are not brought up to date. A nondualistic anthropology should be fixed like d' field; study this process d' actualization, the elements to which it relates, as well as the circumstances and the contexts which make it possible.