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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This is particularly the case in Australia where there exists a great variety of totemic groupings and where humans can belong simultaneously to several of them. Here again, the contrast is notable with animic collectives which are on the contrary predicated on a speciesspecific physicality, since the affiliation to each ‘society’ is based on the fact that all its members share the same physical appearance, the same habitat, the same diet and the same mode of reproduction. It is in animism, not in totemism, that the biological species provides a model for the composition of collectives. And this is so because animic collectives, like biological species, are never integrated into a functional whole at a higher level: above the achuar tribe-species, the toucan tribe-species, the peccary tribe-species, there is nothing in common, except this abstract predicate that anthropologists who try to make sense of these arrangements call ‘culture’. No such thing with totemism, where the integrative whole formed by the juxtaposition of the different totemic classes cannot be represented on the basis of the groupings that the natural world proposes: the only available model would be the species, since the genus is a taxonomic fiction, but the species is precisely not liable to be decomposed in contrastive segments that would be analogous to totemic classes. While animism and naturalism take human society as the paradigm of collectives, totemism thus mixes in hybrid sets humans and non-humans that use one another in order to produce social linkage, generic identity and attachment to places. But it does so by fragmenting the constitutive units so that the properties of each of them become complementary and their assemblage dependant upon the differentials that they present. Such a system is not driven by a L?vi-Straussian classificatory logic nor by a Durkheimian sociocentric logic, but by a principle that may be called cosmogenic. As animism is anthropogenic because it borrows from humans what is necessary for non-humans to be treated like humans, so totemism is cosmogenic in that it derives from sets of cosmic attributes ? that is, which cannot be referred to a particular species ? everything that is needed for some humans and non-humans to be included within a single collective.
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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