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)
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The question of totemic collectives is more complex. Traditionally, totemism has been conceptualised as a form of social organisation in which humans are distributed in interlocking groups that borrow their distinctive characteristics from the realm of natural kinds, either because these groups are supposed to share certain attributes with a set of nonhumans, or because they take as models for patterning their internal differences the contrasts between eponymous species. Now, this broadly sociocentric definition has the disadvantage of introducing an analytical dichotomy between social categories and natural categories that appears to be absent from the ontological premises of those paradigmatic totemists that Australian Aboriginal people are. It is more appropriate in that case to say that humans and non-humans are distributed jointly in collectives (totemic classes) which are isomorphous and complementary, by contrast with animism wherein humans and non-humans are distributed separately in collectives (tribes-species) which are also isomorphous, but which remain autonomous in relation to each other. To return to the example of the Nungar, in the moiety of ‘the getter’ iconically represented by the White Cockatoo, one does find cockatoos, as well as the human half of the Nungar tribe, but one finds also eagles, pelicans, snakes, mosquitoes, whales, in short an apparently ill-assorted aggregate of species that cannot be matched with any of the groupings of organisms that the environment spontaneously offers to observation. By contrast, an animic collective such as the Achuar tribe of the Upper Amazon is exclusively composed of achuar-persons, while among their non-human neighbours, one finds only peccary-persons in the peccary tribe, tapir-persons in the tapir tribe, toucan-persons in the toucan tribe. If the structure and properties of animic collectives thus derive from those ascribed to human collectives, the structure of totemic collectives is defined by the differentials between bundles of physical and moral attributes that are denoted by non-human emblems (the species illustrating the totems), while the properties ascribed to the members of these collectives do not proceed directly from humans or from non-humans, but rather from a prototypical class of predicates, embodied in Australia in the Beings of Dreamtime, which pre-exist their actualisation in specific beings. Although animic collectives differ from one another because of the monospecific recruitment of their members, they are homogeneous as regards their principles of organization: for the Makuna of Colombia, the tapir tribe has the same type of leader, shaman and ritual system as has the peccary tribe, the toucan tribe and, of course, the Makuna tribe20. This is not so with totemic collectives, which are also all different as regards the composition of their members, but which are furthermore hybrid in their contents and heterogeneous in their principles of composition.
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.
Copyright Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 2010