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2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 431–443
BOOK SYMPOSIUM
The difficult art of composing
worlds (and of replying
to objections)
Philippe Descola, Collège de France
Response to Hau Book Symposium on Descola, Philippe. 2013.
Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword
by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
When reading Paul Valéry (1933) many years ago I was quite surprised to learn
that the authority of the author does not exist and that “once published, a text is
like an appliance which anyone can use as one pleases; it is not sure that its builder
uses it better than anyone else,” an idea that Roland Barthes ([1968] 1984) later
transformed into a famous manifesto.1 However, when I became an author myself, I
realized how true this remark was and how futile it would be to try to redress (what
I, as author, would see as) the misguided applications of the scriptural appliances I
had produced. A few books later, I am even more entrenched in this conviction as
I have seen time and again, not only that any form of rejoinder usually remained to
no avail but also, and more interestingly, that the digestion of a text of mine by others often produced unexpected results more stimulating than the one I had intended to generate initially. This is the case in this remarkable batch of comments upon
the English edition of my book Beyond nature and culture, comments to which I
nevertheless feel compelled to answer—my previous remark notwithstanding—not
only because such a reply is explicitly expected of me in several of the comments
1. My translation; the full passage is as follows: “il n’y a pas de vrai sens d’un texte. Pas
d’autorité de l’auteur. Quoi qu’il ait voulu dire, il a écrit ce qu’il a écrit. Une fois publié, un texte est comme un appareil dont chacun se peut servir à sa guise et selon ses
moyens: il n’est pas sûr que le constructeur en use mieux qu’un autre” (Valéry [1933]
1957–1960: 1507; Barthes [1968] 1984: 61–67).
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Philippe Descola.
T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.030
Philippe Descola
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but also out of respect and gratitude for the time and intellectual energy devoted by
each of the symposiasts to taking seriously a bulky volume that some of them probably would never have read of their own initiative. I will not attempt to sum up the
argument of the book because several of the commentators have partly done so in
their own terms—notably Bruce Kapferer, Marcela Coelho de Souza, and Michael
Lambek—and it would be utterly absurd after endorsing Valéry’s proposition that
the author “has no authority” to propose another version with the purpose of reestablishing an orthodoxy.
It is not an easy task, though, to address the widely diverse assessments of the
book, themselves proceeding from a great variety of theoretical, epistemological,
and anthropological standpoints and styles, to the extent that some authors reproach me with holding a position that others regret that I held, and vice versa. For
instance, I wonder what Gérard Lenclud, who strongly opposes what he qualifies
as ontological relativism, would reply to Christina Toren’s affirmation that each human develops over time a specific schematization of experience, or to Kapferer, who
judges on the contrary that my epistemological stance amounts to an a priori universalist fifth ontology. It may be that my own theoretical positions are so clumsily
expressed that they lend themselves to a number of contradictory interpretations;
or, if I surmise that my readers dutifully apply to my propositions the principle of
charity—and I have no reasons to doubt it—that the attempt to navigate between
the Charybdis of a broadly defined phenomenological perspective and the Scylla of
cognitive realism is bound to leave many critics unsatisfied.
I will attempt to respond to some of the observations by dividing them into
two major categories. The first includes those comments that question, albeit in
very courteous terms, the soundness of my whole enterprise, either because they
detect in it a major epistemological (or logical) flaw or because, implicitly or explicitly, they do not share my view of what the anthropological endeavor is about.
Lenclud illustrates the former branch of the alternative, Stefan Helmreich the latter. The second category of comments is much broader and includes all those that
raise questions about what appears to be internal inconsistencies of the models I
put forth in Beyond nature and culture, either because they do not accommodate
certain phenomena (or accommodate them wrongly, or misrepresent them); or
because the concepts and methods I use are misguided or inadequate—e.g., ontology, schema, intentionality, cognitive dualism; or because I leave unaccounted for
some dimensions of the phenomena I pretend to deal with—ontological combinations, internal differences within ontologies, logical commensurability of the
ontological schemas, et cetera. I will not try to answer exhaustively all these insightful comments, for lack of space obviously, but also because I believe that I
have already dealt with some of them in other publications, probably too recent
(Descola 2013, 2014a, 2014b) or too exotic (Descola 2010) to have attracted the
attention of many readers.
What kind of anthropology is scientific?
In his latest book on the epistemology of anthropology, Lenclud has launched an
attack on extreme anthropological relativism, that is, the idea that cultures are
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incommensurate and cannot be translated into one another (Lenclud 2013). Such
a view is indeed easily refutable since, to proclaim that a foreign culture has no
common premises with that of an observer, the observer must know enough of it
to be able to state his claim. To substantiate his refutation of a variety of extreme
relativism that nobody is willing to defend, Lenclud is thus forced to make up a
conceptual straw man in the guise of an imaginary ontology very loosely derived
from my definition of animism, which he then uses to demonstrate that such a construct is untenable, notably because metamorphosis—an uncommon but remarkable experimentum crucis of the conceptual structure of animism—goes against the
universal principle of numerical identity. Animism, he argues, must also be more
down-to-earth if I was able to gain sufficient knowledge of it to describe how it
works. Lenclud’s comment for this Hau Book Symposium, “From one ontology
to (an)other,” is a summary of this argument, to which I could feel free not to respond since the hypothetical animism that he dissects bears little relation with the
animism I have tried to characterize and to which I and other authors have given
ethnographic flesh. Nevertheless, Lenclud raises important epistemological and
theoretical questions that need to be discussed because they reflect a basic divide
as to what constitutes legitimate anthropological knowledge.
The first of them has to do with no less than “reality.” Lenclud holds a standard—let’s call it Searlian—view of social and cultural diversity, which is that peoples differ in their appreciation of the objective world because they have different
perspectives on it: “they see the same things differently.” I contend that this is not
the case for there is no such thing as a “thing,” a precut portion of the world that
would stand as a given with all its properties readily decipherable by everyone,
provided everyone was devoid of cultural prejudice. Let’s take a tree as the “thing.”
We know, thanks to ethnobiological works on folk categorization, that the capacity of any human subject to categorize a plant—that is, to produce a judgment of
specific identity—is dependent upon his or her familiarity with the plant world;
what is perceived by an expert botanist as a forty- to fifty-year-old beech that has
suffered from hydric stress and poor drainage due to a clay-laden soil will be just
a “tree” for a juvenile city dweller. Is there an eternal essence of the beech, which
would define prototypically its “thingness” and that humans would see differently
according to their culture? Or is it not more plausible that the plant, or any other
percept, is accessible to our knowledge as a set of clues that humans will detect or
ignore according to basic inferences that they make about the qualities and types of
behavior of objects in the world, inferences that they have learned to form during
the process of their socialization? If that is the case, as I surmise, then peoples do
not “see the same thing differently,” they actually see different things because the
qualities they detect in the same object are dissimilar due to a personal or cultural
variability in their attention to perceptual affordances.
But perhaps the example of the tree is too simplistic. For, most often, peoples
will not see the “same things” in their environment because the ontological furniture of their worlds will be composed of very different “things.” An Achuar hunter
cannot see a quark because a quark does not exist as a “thing” in the natural environment of anyone and is only detectable as an indirect clue thanks to highly
complex machinery. It does not mean that the quark does not “exist”; it means that
its ontic mode of existence is dependent upon its epistemic mode of existence, and
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that it thus cannot exist in the ontological furniture that composes the world of
an Achuar. Conversely, it is doubtful that a physicist working at the CERN Large
Hadron Collider near Geneva will be able to see an Iwianch—an Achuar spirit of the
dead—because an Iwianch does no more exist as a “thing” in the environment than
a quark does; it, too, is only detectable as a trace, and by the means of a complex set
of phenomenological clues that will enable a person who has been trained to identify them to infer its presence. It does not mean that an Achuar, properly trained
in physics, would not be able to “see” a quark; or that a physicist, after spending
a few years living with the Achuar, would not be able to detect the presence of an
Iwianch. It only means that, in normal circumstances, the Achuar and the physicist
live in worlds that are different because they are peopled by different beings whose
existence is predicated upon different ontological premises. Animism and naturalism are just heuristic models that I derived and systematized from experiences of
that kind, not self-contained glass jar into which peoples are locked up.
The problem with an epistemology that is interested exclusively in the conditions of truth of statements is that it is useless, not only for saying anything relevant
about ordinary knowledge but also for saying anything relevant about sciences,
such as anthropology, which deal mainly with ordinary knowledge. It may be the
case that “all humans have a concept of objectivity,” but who makes reflexive use
of this concept except philosophers when they legislate on epistemological questions? More relevant than the vericonditionality of a proposition, at least for an anthropologist, appears to be its condition of felicity, for most of the statements that
capture the attention of anthropologists are not apodictic, or even constative, but
epideictic or performative, at least implicitly. They do not describe “objective reality”; rather they yield clues as to the state of mind with which people apprehend the
world and act upon it. If I leave a house with an Achuar on a sunny day and he says
that it is raining, I can undoubtedly judge the condition of truth of his statement,
albeit disquisitions on this kind of situation are only relevant in the thought experiments upon which analytical philosophy sustains itself. A more common situation
is one where, leaving the house, and seeing a bird of a certain species flying toward
the east, he will say, “it will rain tomorrow.” And here vericonditionality is senseless
because it does not matter much that the proposition will reveal itself true or false,
in the same way that it does not matter much that the quark physicist may disprove
the existence of Iwianch. In the end, I was not a little surprised by Lenclud’s long
developments on questions of epistemological propriety, because they seem unnecessary in view of his concluding admission that the four ontologies are different
“sciences of the world,” that is, “theoretical versions of the ways in which human
beings schematize their experience.” Indeed they are just that: no more, no less.
What kind of science is anthropology?
I am personally a great fan of STS literature (although easily bored by sci-fi) and a
number of my doctoral students actually study scientists and labs of all persuasions
in different countries; so I was surprised to read Helmreich’s general statement that
“French anthropology” seeks to “discern universals of the human condition” by
appeal to “putatively precontact small-scale tribal or village society.” It makes us
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look like a cohort of Griaulian specters, complete with pith helmets and Kantian
prejudices, haunting the gloomy corridors of the musée de l’Homme, or worse still,
the kitsch halls of this new temple of primitivism, the musée du quai Branly.2 This
nostalgic addiction to a form of neocolonial scientism would explain our indifference to the axes of differences—race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, class—
that have righteously occupied the attention in more progressive anthropological
communities.
I cannot speak here for “French anthropology” (roughly a thousand individuals, a majority of them describing themselves as women, and doing fieldwork on
every possible topic in every possible part of the world) nor will I attempt to explain why the word “gender” only appears once in Beyond nature and culture,3 since
Helmreich himself very fairly did so by referring to my own discussion of the notion in a previous article (Descola 2001). What he failed to see, though, are the
more basic reasons why the book makes scant reference to class, gender, race, et
cetera. Like most French anthropologists, I am as much interested in accounting
for “differences” between social circumstances as are North American and British
anthropologists, but I don’t see these differences in the same light. I have adopted
long ago a basic prescription of structural analysis that acknowledges that sets of
phenomena can be brought together, not in spite but in virtue of the differences
they exhibit, differences that one then attempts to order and to systematize, for
instance in a combinatorial matrix or a group of transformation, that is, in a model
that allows a study of the properties of the elements within the set and of their relations. Now the “axes of difference” along which these elements are organized are
not the Western vernacular categories that Helmreich mentions—gender, class, et
cetera—that have indeed been for quite a while the main descriptive tools of North
American anthropology. Rather, I take as axes of differences conceptual systems
of contrasts such as the various modes of identification and of relation that I have
put forth, as well as the properties they are predicated upon. Imperfect as they
may be, these structuring principles are probably less context-dependent than the
categories more common in the Anglophone social sciences. For race, gender, ethnicity, nation, class (and one could add society, history, or the state) are categories
the genealogy of which can be traced to the Euro-American modernization process of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, categories that have evolved from
2. A museum that, by the way, was bold enough to host in 2010–2011 an exhibition that
I curated, “La Fabrique des images,” where Yup’ik masks coexisted with, among others,
Dutch seventeenth-century landscapes and impressionist paintings, Roman sculptures,
and a score of scientific images, including pet-scans of the brain and chronophotographies of E. J. Marey.
3. Apart from the obvious fact that the book under review is a translation and that the
English word “gender,” only lately translated in French as “genre” in feminist studies, is
in fact a good equivalent of the French “sexe” (hence the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s
essay, “Le Deuxième sexe”), a word that for at least three centuries had denoted the
social and cultural dimensions of one’s gender identity; see, for instance, the famous
(antifeminist) aphorism by Montesquieu “il n’y a plus qu’un sexe, et nous sommes tous
femmes par l’esprit” (in Desgraves 1950: pensée n° 1062). The word “sexe” taken in that
sense appears 26 times in the French edition of Beyond nature and culture.
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the status of reflexive tools for the objectification of Western historical destiny to
the status of all-purpose descriptive labels used by laypersons and social scientists
alike. As such, they are both ethnocentric and self-referential in the sense that they
express specific contrastive features and contentious issues proper to modern collectives and couched in the language of what I call naturalism.
If there is at least one common purpose in the various approaches that have
been subsumed under the label of the “ontological turn,” it is precisely our attempt
to do away with those Eurocentric categories and with the colonial project of sucking into our own cosmology peoples who, having lost their land, their dignity, and
the control of their work-force, face the added ignominy of having to translate their
ways of life into our own way of life and of being grateful to us for providing them
the tools to do so. The purpose, then, is to reproblematize the so-called social sciences without constantly paying lip-service to race, class, and gender, and to forge
new concepts that would attempt to account for patterns of life, as well as for racism,
androcentrism, and economic domination, without being subservient to the ways
these processes have been conceptualized in anthropocentric accounts of Western
history. Perhaps it is a project that borders on science fiction, as Helmreich argues
in his concluding remarks, but one of the best ways to escape from the myopia of
presentism is precisely to experiment with utopia.
What kind of phenomena should anthropology deal with?
We may now enter into the discussion of some of the more specific issues raised
by the symposiasts. The first one has to do with the question of whether the analytical models I put forth are fine-tuned enough to attend to all the phenomena I
claim they can account for. For instance, Stephan Feuchtwang argues, after G. E. R.
Lloyd (2012), that analogism may be too broad a category to accommodate on an
equal footing the cosmologies of prenaturalist Europe and of China: the former is a
world composed of elements in delicate balance while the latter is a world animated
by basic processes of change and devoid of preexisting singularities. An empirical
answer would require more space and expertise than I can muster, not to mention
that Anne-Christine Taylor has already responded cogently to the more theoretical
dimension of the question when she discussed Lloyd’s book and his assessment of
my attempt to put on the same plane China and Ancient Greece (Taylor 2013).
I will thus content myself here with a more general comment on the question of the appropriate focal lengths adapted to different types of comparison.
As Feuchtwang notes, he is himself familiar with a narrower kind of comparatism than the one I engage in, namely that between China and Europe, in itself a
long-standing specialty in Western scholarship if one cares to date it back to the
Jesuits writings of the eighteenth century. The question is then: at what level does
a difference become relevant according to the type of contrast that one wishes to
emphasize? It is obvious that there are multiple and basic differences between the
cosmologies of China and Ancient Greece—as there are also fundamental disparities between those and other analogist cosmologies, such as those of the Aztecs or
of the Chipaya of Bolivia. These disparities bear upon the number and the nature of
the beings identified, the forms of relation that they maintain, the types of network
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they constitute, the keys that insure their interoperability, the way they come (or
not) into existence, et cetera. Nevertheless, when compared with cosmologies that
correspond to a totemist or an animist mode of identification, the internal differences within analogism tend to fade as they can all be reduced to a general dialectical relation between multiplicity and totalization. All these cosmologies are not
identical; but, at the specific scale chosen to apprehend them, they resemble each
other in the sense given to resemblance by Lévi-Strauss, that is, as a particular case
of difference where the difference approaches zero.
The comparative issue that seems to worry Feuchtwang—for instance when he
writes that ontology is inadequate for China since it presupposes the existence of
being—is also one of vocabulary. So, at the cost of repeating myself, let me make
clear that ontology is not taken here as the science of being expressing itself in
Greek—to borrow Heidegger’s qualification of philosophy; an ontology is simply
a concrete expression of how a particular world is composed, of what kind of furniture it is made of, according to the general layout specified by a mode of identification (animism, totemism, etc.). By contrast with the latter, a cosmology (like
those of China or Ancient Greece) is simply the form of distribution in space of the
components of an ontology and the kind of relations that conjoin them. If one were
to make an analogy with political systems, the mode of identification would be the
general form of government—monarchy, democracy, aristocracy, et cetera. Ontology would be the type of constitution that specifies in each of these regimes the
balance of power, the nature of the assemblies, the forms of representation; while
cosmology would correspond to the set of legal and regulatory texts that govern the
life in common. Seen from that angle, monarchies do form a more relevant unified
set, in spite of their internal differences, than the charts governing property rights
or taxes.
What kinds of concepts should anthropology make use of?
Another set of comments addresses the relevance of some of the concepts and
methods I use by questioning either their philosophical orientation of their epistemological adequacy to the object I employ them for. Kapferer thus challenges
the Husserlian regressive experiment upon which I have founded the deployment
of the four modes of identification, that is, the idea that a transcendental subject
immersed in the world without previous knowledge of it can only avail itself of its
body and its intentionality to distinguish between self and nonself. According to
him, such a position smacks of atomistic reductionism, even downright Eurocentric individualism, and thus runs counter to the holistic trend that he favors himself
and that was illustrated by previous French anthropologists, notably Louis Dumont
and Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose project he sees me nevertheless as pursuing in other respects. This is a recurrent criticism, although usually less cogently formulated
for lack of philosophical expertise, and it calls for an explication de texte, all the
more necessary since Kapferer’s judgment on my intellectual filiation is accurate.
Probably because of my own philosophical training—heavily influenced, as
Kapferer shrewdly noticed, by a teratological combination of Marxism, structuralism, and phenomenology—I felt the necessity to establish the ontological matrix
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of the modes of identification upon a transcendental foundation, much as LéviStrauss had done when he anchored the development of the forms of marriage
alliance in the primordial scene of the shift from nature to culture. Although developmental psychology also provided resources that allowed one to conceive the
duality of accesses to percepts (and in spite of Edmund Husserl’s own stern strictures against “psychologism”), it appeared to me that the phenomenological idea
of an antepredicative experience of the world offered a sound substratum for a
radical reworking of the concepts and objects of anthropology. Is my hypothetical
transcendental subject a crypto-bourgeois individual? I think not for at least two
reasons. First, because this is decidedly not the case in Husserlian phenomenology.
There is no primacy of the Self because the transcendental subject is relational ab
initio thanks to its being an intentional agent, thanks to its capacity to pair with an
aliud, i.e., with an alter that is as yet indeterminate.4 By contrast with Descartes’
transcendental subject, who is obliged to seek the ultimate foundation of objectivity in divine truth, Husserl’s transcendental subject accesses objectivity by the
means of intersubjectivity. As Paul Ricoeur very aptly puts it in his comment of
Cartesian meditations, “Husserl transcends the Ego by the alter ego” (1954: 77, my
translation). The second reason is also epistemological but in another sense. In
any foundational work in anthropology, it seems reasonable to start from universal
features of the human species, which are necessarily lodged in the consciousness,
body, brain, capacities, dispositions, et cetera, of an individual. Even in Gibsonian
or Varelian approaches, these features are necessary for enaction or for the actualization of affordances (I hope Lenclud will feel reassured). Representations, emotions, intentionality, memory, pain, pleasure are first and foremost experienced by
individuals, often in empathy with other individuals; they do not float in ether nor
are they flowing out of institutions. I hope that it is clearer now why this egological
stance has little relation with Eurocentric possessive individualism as defined by
Macpherson or Dumont, for instance.
But there is more. My use of a transcendental subject is in some ways ironical5;
but it leads to a sole objective, which in turn is very serious: it generates a device, the
ontological matrix, which allows me to treat norms, practices, institutions, collectives, epistemic stances, and the like in an absolutely holistic way, that is, as transformations of each other, and not as the results of the whims and desires of conflicting
human individuals (which, by the way, is what history does). So instead of going
from wholes to parts through the tortuous paths of historical agency—which I understand is what Kapferer advocates—I try to go from (transcendental) parts to
(structural) wholes thanks to an unexpected bypass from egology to ontology.
Toren objects also on epistemological grounds to the way I use a concept, namely that of schema, arguing that I ignored the autopoietic and self-regulating dimensions of this highly complex class of structure as defined by Jean Piaget, and
reduced it instead to a stabilized mechanism for integrating the experience and
knowledge acquired and developed within a certain milieu. The schema is a tricky
concept because, as Piaget insisted, after Kant and Bergson, this mysterious object
4. A useful distinction which I borrow from Vincent Descombes (1989: 89).
5. Manipulating a transcendental Ego is thrilling—it must be like driving a Ferrari.
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is not directly perceptible, so that its presence and its nature can only be inferred
by what is regarded as its consequences, that is by the repetition of a physical or
cognitive action in similar circumstances. However, to view Piaget’s schema as an
exclusively “dynamic, self-producing system” that would be basically nonrepresentational appears to me as an oversimplification of his views. For Piaget, schemas
organize a variety of functions (action, thought, interpersonal relations, regulation of bodily activities . . .) and they are thus capable of assimilating information in a variety of ways: reproductive (the repetition of some activity), recognitive
(recognizing objects by giving them a meaning) and generalizing (which implies
indeed a differentiation according to new situations).6 So, for Piaget at least, the
autopoietic process is only a part of the story, and it goes along with mechanisms
of assimilation and of repetition of information obtained from the environment.
However, getting Piaget right is not what is at stake here. The main question
is whether Toren’s own definition of the schema is appropriate for any anthropological project that would attempt to make sense of “patterns of culture,” to use an
old-fashioned terminology. Because, if it were true that “ideas and practice are not
transmitted,” if it were true that the only continuity of a human person through
time is that of “a self-regulating transformational system,” how then would we go
about studying the cultural and social practice of these aggregates of totally idiosyncratic beings who never reproduce patterns of thought and behavior nor maintain an ontological stability through time? Toren’s answer is this: “by demonstrating
the historical processes that continue over time to give rise to ontologies.” Very
well, and how do we proceed to do that? By studying the way “historical processes”
(whatever that is) affect each individual (but this, surely, would be even more reductionist than what I do)? By studying ethnographically the differential ontogeny
in a given context? And in the latter case—which is what Toren accomplishes herself excellently—how do we move from the vernacular categories rendered analytical by the ethnographer in a specific place to the vernacular categories rendered
analytical by the ethnographer in another place, except by trying to put forth analytical categories that could mediate between the two sets? This is precisely what I
have attempted.
What kind of consistency should (my) anthropology aim for?
A last series of comments addresses neither broad methodological and epistemological issues, nor my arguable handling of debatable concepts; more importantly
perhaps, they concentrate, from as it were an internal point of view, on certain
problems raised by my theoretical models, pointing out that they incompletely
achieve what they purport to realize. These perceptive comments mainly come
from Lambek and Coelho de Souza and they are harder to answer because they accurately pinpoint difficulties of which I am aware myself and that I have been trying to supersede with various degrees of success. I will restrict myself to discussing
two of these questions that are closely interdependent: one is methodological but
6. See the synthesis that Piaget provides of these processes in chapter 3 (“Transposition du
problème de l’analytique en termes génétiques”) of Apostel et al. (1957).
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has conceptual implications—is the ethnography I use a source for the ontological
models or an illustration of them?—while the other is conceptual but has methodological implications—how do the models accommodate ontological hybridity?
The first question is thus put by Lambek: “what is the relationship of pure
(ideal) types to actual life?” and it goes with his remark that the criteria I used to
define the ontological matrix proceed from a priori rational hypotheses while the
actual distribution of phenomena resulting from the operation of the matrix is historically-driven. This is probably inevitable. For a variety of reasons, and notably
because of my growing annoyance with the kind of subjectivist and overinductivist
approach typical of contemporary “ethnographism,” I chose to present the argument of Beyond nature and culture in a classical hypothetico-deductive format: an
initial set of hypotheses organized along two major oppositions—one epistemic,
with the contrast between interiority and physicality, the other logical with the contrast between identity and difference—are then systematically tested by examining
how they account for the various states of a set of phenomena, namely the different ways of expressing continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans. This methodological choice was partly inspired by Lévi-Strauss’ famous
dictum that “it is not comparison which founds generalization, but the reverse”
(Lévi-Strauss 1958: 28, my translation); a remark that has often been found cryptic
or paradoxical but that is only meant to emphasize that comparison is not a form
of empirical discovery, an intuitive pairing of similarities and differences but a process of ascertaining a posteriori, by using a wide variety of historical material, what
is already, if not absolutely known, at least hypothesized. I also confess to a certain
esthetic partiality for highly formal modes of presentation such as the one Pierre
Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1970) adopted in their book on social and
ideological reproduction, which is modeled on the geometrical order of Spinoza’s
Ethics, itself inspired by Euclid’s Elements. Much as with my toying with a transcendental subject, there was thus an element of irony in mimicking a demonstration
more geometrico, although few readers have perceived it.
However, it is obviously only at the cost of an oversimplification that a stark
distinction can be made between ethnography and anthropology as opposing, on
the one hand, a descriptive, inductive technique dealing with observed facts to, on
the other hand, a hypothetico-deductive science dealing with models. For the logical construction of my argument in Beyond nature and culture is not entirely immune from the preliminary procedures that made it possible and that the internal
economy of my demonstration, and an esthetic addiction to symmetry, led me to
render invisible.7 Actually, it was by a series of inductive generalizations from ethnography, mine and that of others, that the transformational model progressively
took shape because, as is the case for all anthropologists with a formal turn of mind,
it is only through a long established familiarity with all sorts of ethnographical
literatures that the particular social and cultural features that will become relevant
within a model can be retrieved from one’s own memory. And one is able to deal
7. Except in chapter 6, on animism, where I retrace my conceptual itinerary and the
reasons that made me evolve from a previous triadic model (animism, totemism, naturalism) to a quadratic one (with the addition of analogism) where all the terms are
logically redefined in relation to one another.
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expertly with ethnographic information thanks to another kind of expertise that
is proper to our trade and is extremely difficult to formalize, namely fieldwork
experience, which renders immediately familiar to us the rarely explicit procedures
of the objectification process by the means of which other ethnographers have collected, filtered, and presented their data. So Lambek is right: in Beyond nature and
culture there is a constant to-and-fro movement between induction and deduction,
formal models and historical descriptions, direct and mediate knowledge, which is
inevitable in anthropology and makes of this enterprise as much an art as a science.
Through the deceptively simple device of asking why I had dropped from Beyond nature and culture an analysis I had previously propounded of the combination existing among the Brazilian Bororo between animism and totemism, Coelho
de Souza poses the most formidable questions of all: how can the orthogonal contrasts of the matrix—which only allow for a system of large indivisible differences—be made to accommodate a composition of distinct ontological principles that
necessarily entails a set of narrow differences? Indeed, it is not sufficient to argue,
as I did, that structural or historical combinations between ontologies can take the
form of a hierarchical encompassment—which, strictly speaking, can only apply
to the relation of an element to the whole—or of a Marxian formal subsumption,
whereby a dominant ontology would subordinate to its reproduction a dominated
one, because these types of articulation are merely accidental while, if I were faithful to my premises (and to a structuralist inspiration), they should have been built
as potentialities into the very structure of the initial set of contrasts.
There is no easy answer to that formidable question. The directions I have been
following to overcome this difficulty are globally resonant with Coelho de Souza’s
own suggestion when she advocates a “reciprocity of asymmetric perspectives”;
they imply a possibility of requalifying the terms by allowing them to take a wider
variety of positions, in particular by introducing in the modes of identification the
perspectival dimension, which I had hitherto confined to the modes of relation.
Beyond the flexibility that an interplay between symmetry and asymmetry would
introduce, notions of identity and difference in value, function, and context are
also called for, much in the light of the complex permutations and internal dynamism that Lévi-Strauss’ canonical formula allows. But the extension of the field
of relational positions for the initial terms of the matrix cannot simply take the
form of a transcendental deduction—a demonstration based solely on principles;
it must make use of empirical deductions—demonstrations based on facts—which
is another way to restate my previous insistence on the complementarity between
logical consistency and ethnographic relevance.
A way to do that which I have been following these past years is exploring ontological hybridity as expressed in images. Complex combinations between animism
and totemism can be found elsewhere than among the Bororo, in particular among
native societies of the Northwest Coast such as the Tsimshian. Now, not unlike
the dualist Platonician philosophy of the Bororo that J. C. Crocker describes so
vividly, and where the domains of animism and totemism do not define classes
of beings but chart an opposition between essences and processes, the Tsimshian
endow with animist or totemist qualities different types of images—for instance
masks or rattles in the first case and heraldic poles or headlets in the latter—that
often depict the same referents, say an otter, a raven, or an eagle; these images are
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Philippe Descola
442
thus distinguished not so much by what they figure than by the conditions—spatial, temporal, social, ritual—of their production and their use. The variation in
the ontological predication of images then becomes an effect of the inflection that
the terms receive when they are displaced in a different pragmatic setting. I hope
that the book I am presently writing on the ontology of images will render these
processes clearer and provide a more encompassing framework for treating the
question of hybridity.
For a short conclusion, I would like to return to Valéry’s remark on the text as
an appliance that anyone can use and to which the author has no privileged access
for he is not necessarily in the best position to use it efficiently. If I find this remark
profoundly true it is not because I want to distance myself from what I wrote—for
this I claim full responsibility—nor out of a misguided sense of false modesty; it
is because I find fascinating the actual uses that a score of authors have made of
the models I put forth in Beyond nature and culture, all the more so because most
of them are not anthropologists. Whether philosophers, historians, sociologists,
literary scholars, or archaeologists,8 they have sometimes transformed beyond recognition the tools that I had provided, thus giving them a new purchase on a new
domain and, perhaps, expanding their life-span. In that respect, as Kapferer aptly
puts it, “the proof is in the pudding.” As it always should be.
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Philippe Descola
Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale
Collège de France
52, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France
[email protected]
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