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)
17
The last mode of identification, naturalism, corresponds to the prevalent ontology of Modernity. Naturalism is not only the idea that nature exists, that certain entities owe their existence and development to a principle that is extraneous both to chance and to the effects of human will. It does not qualify only the advent, conventionally situated in the seventeenth century, of a specific ontological domain, a place of order and necessity where nothing happens without a cause. Naturalism also implies a counterpart, a world of artifice and freewill the complexity of which has progressively emerged under the scrutiny of analysts, until it rendered necessary, in the course of the nineteenth century, the institution of special sciences which were given the task of stabilizing its boundaries and characteristics: that is, the diversity of expressions of the creativity of humans as producers of signs, norms and goods. Now, if one considers naturalism ? the coexistence of a single unifying nature and a multiplicity of cultures ? not as the all-embracing template that allows us to objectify any reality, but as one among other modes of identification, then its contrasting properties appear more clearly. For instance, naturalism inverts the ontological premises of animism since, instead of claiming an identity of soul and a difference of bodies, it is predicated upon a discontinuity of interiorities and a material continuity18. What, for us, distinguishes humans from non-humans is the mind, the soul, subjectivity, a moral conscience, language and so forth, in the same way as human groups are distinguished from one another by a collective internal disposition that used to be called Volksgeist but is more familiar to us now under its modern label of ‘culture’. On the other hand, we are all aware, especially since Darwin, that the physical dimension of humans locates them within a material continuum wherein they do not stand out as singularities. The ontological discrimination that excludes from personhood non-human organisms that are biologically very close to us is a clear sign of the privilege granted in our own mode of identification to criteria based on the expression of a purported interiority (language, self-consciousness or theory of mind) rather than those based on material continuity.
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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