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The Composition of Worlds
Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier

Philippe Descola (Author)

9781509555482, Polity Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 October 2023

224 pages
22.4 x 14.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.34 kg

"Charbonnier's questions have engendered exquisite insights into the essence of Descola's anthropology. A very welcome translation reveals the prescience with which, long ago, this eminent thinker scaled up his concerns to address some of today's most urgent problems."
Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

"What a privilege, to accompany this brilliant anthropologist as he develops and reflects on his meta-ontology against the background of the ethnographic vocation, the Amazonian forest, structuralism, and the distinctiveness of anthropology in France! An instant classic, this exceptionally lucid work will be indispensable for teaching."
Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

"Much more than an intellectual biography, the book provides an example for all academics in the social sciences and environmental humanities who dream of having a wider impact without selling their soul."
History of Anthropology

"Will be of great interest to sociologists of knowledge and historians of ideas."
American Ethnologist

"Greatly rewarding on a number of levels"
The Australian Journal of Anthropology

In this autobiographical reflection, the distinguished anthropologist Philippe Descola looks back on his intellectual career and examines both the central themes of his work and the key questions that have shaped anthropological debates over the past forty years.

A student of Lévi-Strauss, Descola conducted ethnographic research among the Achuar of the upper Amazon in the late 1970s, focusing on how native societies relate to their environment. In this book he sheds fresh light on the evolution of his thinking from structuralism to an anthropology beyond the human, on the critique of the modern separation between nature and society, and above all on the genesis and scope of his major work Beyond Nature and Culture. This synthesis of the ways in which humans view their relationships with non-humans proposes four schemas for the ‘composition of worlds’ (animism, naturalism, totemism, analogism) that characterize our ways of inhabiting the earth.

Presented in the form of an extended conversation with Pierre Charbonnier, this book is both a lucid introduction to the work of one of the most original anthropologists writing today and an impassioned plea for ontologies that are more accommodating of the diversity of beings.

Foreword to the English edition

I. A taste for inquiry

Philosophical journeys
                                           
Discovering the mind, discovering the world
                                 
Among the tribe of anthropologists
                                     
Entering the pantheon

II. An Amazonian sojourn and the challenges of ethnography

The world of the forest
                                          
Living and working among the Achuar
                                    
The trial of return
                                                   
III. The diversity of natures
                                              
The four corners of the world
                                              
Methodological questions
                                              
Conceptual reform
                                                
Forms of figuration

IV. The contemporary world in the light of anthropology

We Moderns
                                                 
From anthropology to ecology
                                     
Political anthropology
                                      
The museum
                                                   
Bibliography

Notes

Index

Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD]
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