Philippe Descola 
The Composition of Worlds [PDF ebook] 
Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier

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.

Table of Content

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

About the author

Philippe Descola is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at EHESS, Paris.