Beyond Nature and Culture
Philippe Descola
(日本語解説版:一部の欧文文字が文字化けしています)
Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 2005 (Proceedings of the British Academy 139, pp.137-155, 2006)
13
Now, as C. G. von Brandenstein showed in his thorough analysis of the meaning of Australian totem terms, these attributes that crosscut species boundaries are not derived from what is improperly called the eponym entity, since the word designating the totem in many cases is not the name of a species, i.e. a biological taxon, but rather the name of an abstract property which is present in this species as well as in all the beings subsumed under it in a totemic grouping15. For instance, the Nungar of South-West Australia had two totemic moieties, respectively called maarnetj, that can be translated as ‘the catcher’, and waardar, which means ‘the watcher’, these two terms also being used to designate the totems of these moieties, the White Cockatoo and the Crow16. Here, the names of the totemic classes are terms that denote properties that are also used to designate the totemic species, and not the reverse, that is names of zoological taxa from which would be inferred the typical attributes of the totemic classes. It is thus difficult to maintain, at least for Australia, the classificatory interpretation of totemism, since the basic difference is between aggregates of attributes that are common to humans and non-humans within classes designated by abstract terms, not between animal and vegetable species that would provide naturally, by their manifest discontinuities of morphology and behaviour, an analogical template that could be used so as to structure social discontinuities.
1 A. Barnard, History and Theory in Anthropology (Cambridge, CUP, 2000), p.73.
2 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society; essays and addresses (London, Cohen & West, 1952), p. 130.
3 Ph. Descola, ‘Societies of nature and the nature of society’, in A. Kuper (ed.) Conceptualizing Society (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 107-126, and ‘Constructing natures: Symbolic ecology and social practice’, in Ph. Descola and G. P?lsson (eds.), Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London, Routledge, 1996), pp. 82-102.
4 For instance, T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London, Routledge, 2000) and E. Viveiros de Castro, ‘Os pronomes cosmol?gicos e o perspectivismo amer?ndio’, Mana 2 (2) (1996), pp. 115-144.
5 C. L?vi-Strauss, La pens?e sauvage (Paris, Plon, 1962), pp. 154-155, my translation.
6 True, some non-human species also ascribe properties (at least relational and behavioural features) to humans and other non-humans; but before they can be included in a general theory of ontologies, a lot of ground remains to be covered.
7 I am very grateful to Tim Ingold and Peter Marshall for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of the lecture and for their suggestions of stylistic amendments.
8 E. Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923-1924) II, Theorie der ph?nomenologischen Reduktion (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1959), pp. 61-64.
9 P. Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (New York, Basic Books, 2004).
10 E. Viveiros de Castro, ‘Os pronomes cosmol?gicos’, p. 117.
11 J. von Uexku?ll, Streifzu?ge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen ? Bedeutungslehre (Hamburg, Rowohlt Verlag, 1956).
12 E. Viveiros de Castro, 'Os pronomes cosmol?gicos', p. 117 (my translation).
13 Ibid., p. 122.
14 W. B. Spencer et F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London, Macmillan & Co, 1899), p. 202.
15 C. G. von Brandenstein, Names and Substance of the Australian Subsection System (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 54.
16 C. G. von Brandenstein, ‘Aboriginal Ecological Order in the South-West of Australia - Meanings and Examples’, Oceania XLVII (3) (1977), pp. 170-186.
17 M. Granet, La pens?e chinoise (Paris, Albin Michel, 1968 (1934)), p. 297.
18 A point which Viveiros de Castro was the first to make, ‘Os pronomes cosmol?gicos’, p. 129.
19 B. Latour, Nous n’avons jamais ?t? modernes. Essai d’anthropologie sym?trique (Paris, La D?couverte, 1991).
20 K. Århem, ‘The Cosmic Food Web: human-nature relatedness in the Northwest Amazon’, in Ph. Descola and G. P?lsson (eds.), Nature and Society, pp. 185-204.
21 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On social structure’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 70 (1940), pp. 1-12, republished in Structure and Function, p. 190.
22 M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’Esprit (Paris, Gallimard, 1964), p. 13.
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