Thanks once more for everything.Descola conceived a conceptual scheme that distinguish 4 possible combinations of distributing spiritual and material proprieties to beings He calls these combinaisons ontologies or modes of identificationHe has conducted an ethnographic study from 1976 to 1979 with the Achuar indigenous people living in the Amazonian forest between Peru and Ecuador.
The Achuar are part of Jivaros group formerly known as warriors and head hunters. There would be a lot more agreement if it were otherwise.no human phenomenon has a meaning in itself, that it only becomes relevant when it is contrasted with other phenomena of a similar kind – a system of marriage with other systems of marriage, a variant of a myth with other variants of a myth; so that the object of the inquiry is less the description of the phenomenon than the logic of its contrasts. This article is an alternative reading of Philippe Descola’s ontological scheme, arguing that animism, totemism, and analogism are but three forms of animism, namely communal, segmentary, and hierarchical. Thus, for Kuhn, it marks the limit of one paradigm and the impossibility of clearly establishing its relationship to a successive or adjacent one. Philippe Descola A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1997, The Spears of Twilight chronicles the experiences of Philippe Descola, student of Claude Lvi-Strauss, … That was partly because the terms and concepts, coming from disparate historical and cultural traditions, were incommensurable to one another. But I think it melts the concept of agency to extend it to melting.
“ The elementary structures of being (human): Comment on Philippe Descola’s Beyond nature and culture.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 245 – 251 . Incommensurability marks the limit of what structuralism can say. I am also inclined to think, along with Wittgenstein, that if trees or forests were to speak, we would not be able to understand them.One question is whether the two models of transformation are meant to show how we may best organize the diversity we perceive through empirical investigation or to model how diversity was and continues to be produced.But binary contrasts are not always evident.
(p. 37)I do not think one can purify anthropology of its anthropocentrism, not only because by definition it is the study of humankind, but also because I take a Gadamerian hermeneutic position that we cannot fully escape our own prejudices.
… That is to say how non-human can have an intentionality, an ability to act and a spiritual power, so that they can transform the world and have social relations with other species of beings.Descola specifies that none of this ontological model is pure and that they can overlap.This research blog discuss the relationship between societies and the natural environment in the Southeast Asian region.