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"Descola, Philippe"
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Modes of being and forms of predication
Notions like “nature” or “culture” do not denote a universal reality but a particular way, devised by the Moderns, of carving ontological domains in the texture of things. Other civilizations have devised different ways of detecting qualities among existents, resulting in other forms of organizing continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, of aggregating beings in collectives, of defining who or what is capable of agency and knowledge. The paper emphasizes that these processes of ontological predication are not “worldviews” but, properly speaking, styles of worlding. Ontology is taken here as designating a more elementary analytical level to study worlding than the one anthropology usually calls for. It is at this level, where basic inferences are made about the kinds of beings that exist and how they relate to each other, that anthropology can best fulfill its mission to account for how worlds are composed.
Journal Article
Transformation transformed
The key methodological tool of Lévi-Straussian structural anthropology is the group of transformation. A structure only acquires an analytical dynamism thanks to its capacity to organize the transformations between the models of a same group of phenomena. The paper explores various approaches to this concept and builds on these results to examine the consequences of apprehending ontological pluralism as a group of transformation.
Journal Article
The difficult art of composing worlds (and of replying to objections)
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.
Journal Article
Humano, demasiado humano?
A partir de una afirmación de Alejandro de Humboldt, este artículo revisa los orígenes del Antropoceno y los asocia a un sistema, un modo de vida, una ideología, cuyas particularidades deben conocerse para intentar evitar algunas de sus consecuencias más dramáticas. Tres preguntas guían el texto: ¿cuándo comenzó esta nueva época de la historia de la Tierra que se denomina Antropoceno? ¿En qué consiste? ¿Qué aportes ofrecen las ciencias sociales para paliar sus efectos y tener un mejor futuro? Para ello, se propone repensar tres rocesos fundamentales en la relación de los humanos entre sí, y entre humanos y no humanos: adaptación, apropiación y representación.
Journal Article
The Sex Thieves
While working in Africa, anthropologist Julien Bonhomme encountered an astonishing phenomenon: people being accused of stealing or shrinking the genitals of strangers on the simple occasion of a handshake on the street. As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the \"sex thieves\" are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the \"penis snatcher,\" asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon-unique in its spatial and temporal scale-without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor's success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.
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