Philippe Descola

Cosmologies of the Indians d' Amazonia

The dualism, which in our companies opposes natural and culture, is unknown Indians d'
Amazonia. It is also foreign to the Indians of Canada subarctic, who live in a very different
environment. All and sundry confer on the animals attributes identical to those of human
(intentionality, etc). In the south as in north, which we call nature formed d' integral part; a vast
d' unit; social interactions where l' man n' is qu' an actor among d' others. A nondualistic
anthropology is to be constituted. The dualism, which in our companies opposes natural and
culture, is unknown Indians d' Amazonia. It is also foreign to the Indians of Canada subarctic,
who live in a very different environment. All and sundry confer on the animals attributes
identical to those of human (intentionality, etc). In the south as in north, which we call nature
formed d' integral part; a vast d' unit; social interactions where l' man n' is qu' an actor among d'
others.
A nondualistic anthropology is to be constituted. The Summit of Rio on l' environment
contributed to reinforce the feeling qu' there was a diffuse bond between the contemporary
ecological concerns and the interrogations concerning the destiny of l' Amazonia. For the
Western public opinions and the media, the Amazon forest and its inhabitants radically changed
d' image. L' green hell of the years 1960 became the lung of planet and its principal reserve of
biodiversity; as for the mysterious and worrying tribes that l' one made at one time responsible
for disappearance d' Fawcett or d' Maufrais*, they were converted into companies of botanists
and advised pharmacologists. The most recent misadventure of the philosophical figure of the
good savage, l' Amazonia incarnates now, more than any other area of planet, this acute nostalgia
qu' test the world industrialized for a lifestyle where l' balance between l' man and nature would
harmoniously be preserved. Like very stereotype, this vision of l' Amazonia n' is not completely
deprived of bases. Admittedly, l' idea that l' Amazonia would be the last and the vastest area of
virgin tropical forest remaining on the face of the Earth is now largely beaten in breach by work
d' historical ecology (1). L' abundance of the grounds anthropogniques* and their association
with forests of palm trees or fruit-lofts woodland suggest that the distribution of the types of
forest and vegetation in the area results partly from several millenia d' occupation by populations
whose recurring presence on the same sites upset the vegetable landscape (1). These artificial
concentrations of certain vegetable resources would have influenced the distribution and the
demography of the animal species which s' in feed, so that Amazonian nature is, in truth, very
little natural, but can on the contrary be regarded as the cultural product d' a very old handling of
fauna and flora. Quoiqu' invisible for an observer not informed, the consequences of this
anthropisation are far d' to be negligible, in particular with regard to the rate of biodiversity,
higher in the anthropogenic portions of forest than in the portions of forest not modified by l'
man (2). Except for this reserve, it is exact that the indigenous populations of l' Amazonia and of
Guyanes knew to implement strategies d' use of the resources which, transforming in a durable
way their environment, did not upset therefore its principles of operation nor its conditions of
reproduction. The studies d' ecology and d' ethno-ecology carried out since about thirty d' years
showed the brittleness of the various Amazonian ecosystems, at the same time as diversity and l'
extended from the knowledge and the techniques developed by the Amerindians to benefit from
their environment and l' to adapt to their needs (3). There is advanced l' idea qu' beyond
knowledge technical, botanical, agronomic or ethologic invested by the Indians in their activities
of subsistence, c' was l' together of their religious beliefs and their mythology which was to be
regarded as a kind of knowing ecological transposed, like a metaphorical model of the operation
of their ecosystem and balances to be respected so that this one is maintained in a state d'
homeostasis. From such a point of view, Amazonian cosmologies would constitute transpositions
symbolic systems of the objective properties d' a specific environment; they would be, in their
architecture interns at least, the reflection and the product of l' adaptation successful to an
ecological medium complexes (4). L' idea is tempting. Indeed, unlike the more or less tight
dualism which, in our vision of the world, controls the distribution of human and not-human in
two radically distinct fields, Amazonian cosmologies deploy a scale of the beings where the
differences between the men, the plants and the animals are of degree and not of nature.
Achuar of l' Ecuadorian Amazonia, for example, say that the majority of the plants and the
animals have a heart (wakan) similar to that of human, a faculty which arranges them among the
people (aents) in this qu' it ensures the reflexive conscience and l' to them; intentionality, qu' it
makes them able d' to test emotions and allows them d' to exchange messages with their pars as
with the members d' other species, of which the men (5). One recognizes with the wakan l'
aptitude to be conveyed without sound mediation of the thoughts and the desires towards l' heart
d' a recipient, modifying thus, sometimes with l' knowledge of this one, its state d' spirit and its
behavior. The human ones lay out for this purpose d' a vast range d' magic incantations, anent
them, to which they can act remotely on their congeneric, but also on the plants and the animals,
as on the spirits and certain artifacts. In l' spirit of Achuar, technical know-how is indissociable
of capacity to create an intersubjective medium But can one speak d' here; beings of nature
differently than by convenience of language? There is a place for nature in a cosmology which
confers on the animals and the plants the majority of the attributes of l' humanity? Can one even
speak d' space wild in connection with this forest hardly effleure by Achuar and qu' they
however describe like an immense garden cultivated carefully by a spirit? What we call nature is
the subject d' here; a social report/ratio; prolonging the world of the household, it is truly
domestic into its most inaccessible tiny rooms. This is to say that Achuar would not recognize
any natural entity in the qu' medium; they occupy? Not completely. Great social continuum
brewing human and not-human n' does not include all the elements of l' environment, of which
some do not communicate with anybody, fault d' a heart into clean. The majority of the insects
and fish, the grasses, foams and the ferns, the rollers and the rivers remain thus external with the
social sphere as with the play of l' intersubjectivity; perhaps in their machinale existence and
credits they would correspond so that we call nature. Is it for as much legitimate continuing to
employ this concept in order to indicate a segment of the world which, for Achuar, is
incomparably more restricted than than we understand ourselves by there? In the modern
thought, moreover, nature n' direction qu' has; in opposition to human works, that l' d' is chosen;
to call those culture, company, history, or spaces anthropized. A cosmology where the majority
of the plants and animals are included in a community of people sharing whole or part of
faculties, the behaviors and the moral codes usually allotted to the men do not answer in any
manner the d' criteria; such an opposition.
Achuar do not constitute an exceptional case in the Amazonian world. To a few hundred kilometers
more in north, for example, in the forest of Eastern Colombia, the Makuna Indians still present a more
radical version d' a theory of the world resolutely nondualistic (6). With l' instar of Achuar, Makuna
categorize the human ones, the plants and the animals as of people (massed) of which principal
attributes - mortality, social life and ceremonial, l' intentionality, knowledge - are in any point identical.
The internal distinctions at this community of alive rest on the special characters that l' mythical origin,
the food modes and the modes of reproduction confer on each class d' to be, and not on the more or
less great proximity of these classes to the paradigm d' achievement qu' would offer Makuna. L'
interaction between the animals and the human ones is also conceived in the form d' a d' report/ratio;
alliance, though slightly different from the model achuar, since the hunter treats its game like joint
potential and not like a brother-in-law. Ontological categorizations are more plastic still than at Achuar,
because of the faculty of metamorphosis recognized with all: the human ones can become animals, the
animals to convert itself into human and l' animal d' a species to transform itself into an animal d'
another species. L' taxinomic influence on reality is thus always relative and contextual, permanent
barter of appearances not allowing d' to allot stable identities to the alive components of l'
environment. Similar cosmologies were described in great number for the forest areas of the lowlands
of l' South America. In spite of their differences, all these cosmologies have as a common characteristic
not to make distinctions d' gasoline sliced between human the d' a share, and good d' number; animal
species and vegetable d' another share. The majority of the entities which populate the world are
connected the ones to the others in a vast continuum animated by principles unit and controlled by an
identical mode of sociability. Moreover, the characteristics allotted to these entities depend less d' a
preliminary definition of their gasoline that relative positions qu' they occupy the ones compared to the
others according to the requirements of their metabolism, and in particular of their food mode. What
distinguishes a species d' another, c' is that of which it is nourished and the species which eat it, the
community each time different from those with which it is in competition in the trophic chain, a
sociology of the mutual predation, all in all, rather qu' a catalogue of intrinsic features. L' identity of
human, alive and died, of the plants, the animals and the spirits is very whole relational, and thus prone
to changes or metamorphoses according to the adopted points of view, since each species is considered
to perceive the other species according to its own criteria and needs. This perceptive hyperrelativism
gives to Amazonian cosmologies a character definitely nonanthropocentric, in what the point of view of
l' humanity on the world n' d' is not that; a dominant species subordinating all the others to its own
reproduction, but rather that which could have a d' kind; ecosystem transcendantal which would be
conscious of the totality of the interactions proceeding in its centre. We return thus to the initial
question: this systemic design of the biosphere to which seem to testify many people d' Would
Amazonia be a consequence of the properties of their environment? The ecologists indeed define the
tropical forest as a generalized ecosystem, being characterized by a very great diversity of the animal
species and vegetable combined with a weak manpower and a great dispersion of the individuals of
each species. Immersed in a monstrous plurality of forms of life seldom joined together in homogeneous
units, the Indians d' Amazonia would have perhaps been unable d' to embrace like a whole this
disparate conglomerate requesting their significant faculties permanently. Yielding by need to the
mirage of various, they n' would not have known, all in all, to dissociate from their environment, fault of
distinguishing l' major unity of nature behind the multiplicity of its singular demonstrations. C' is with an
interpretation of this type which the remark made by Claude Lvi-Strauss (7) could invite lorsqu' it
suggests that the tropical forest is perhaps the only environment which offers a support to the concept
of mono-individuality, c' be-with-to say to l' attribution of idiosyncrasic characteristics to each
individual d' a species. In a medium as diversified, it was perhaps inevitable as relations all between
different individuals seemingly take precedence over the construction of macrocatgories stable and
mutually exclusive.
L' existence of very similar cosmologies worked out by people living in a completely different medium is
the main argument with l' opposition d' such an interpretation. C' is the case, for example, Indians of the
subarctic area of Canada who, contrary to the Indians of the South American tropical forest, exploit a
remarkably uniform environment. The characteristics of the northern forest are exactly opposite of
those of the Amazon forest: a d' small number; species coexist in this ecosystem specialized,
represented each one by a great d' number; individuals. And yet, in spite of l' homogeneity of their
ecological medium, the people subarctic do not regard it as an autonomous field of reality to oppose to
the certainty social life. C' is especially in their designs of the animal world which the Indians of the
Canadian northern forest testify to greatest convergence (8). Just like in Amazonia, the majority of the
animals are conceived like equipped people d' a heart, which confers to them attributes completely
identical to those of the human ones, such reflexive conscience, l' intentionality, emotional life or the
respect of ethical precepts. The groups creates are particularly representative in this field. According to
them, the sociability of the animals is similar to that of the men and s' feed with the same sources:
solidarity, l' friendship and respect with old. Those are the invisible spirits which govern the migrations
of game, manage its territorial dispersion and are in load of its regeneration. If the animals differ from
the men, c' is thus only by l' appearance, a simple illusion of the directions since distinctive body
envelopes qu' they raise d' ordinary are only disguises intended to mislead the Indians. Lorsqu' they visit
the latter in dream, the animals appear such qu' they are actually, c' be-with-to say under their human
form, of the same qu' they speak in the indigenous languages when their s' spirit; express publicly with
the course d' a ritual known as of the trembling tent. One would be wrong to see in this humanization
of the animals a simple play of l' spirit, a manner of language metaphorical of which relevance s' would
hardly extend beyond the circumstances suitable for l' achievement of the rites or with the narration of
the myths. Even lorsqu' they speak in extremely prosaic terms about the tracking, of the setting with
died and of the consumption of game, the Indians express without ambiguity l' idea that hunting is a
social interaction with entities perfectly conscious of conventions which govern it. Here, as in the
majority of the companies of hunters, c' is by testifying to the respect to the animals that l' one s' ensure
in their complicity: it is thus necessary to avoid the waste, to kill properly and without useless sufferings,
to treat with dignity the bones and the skin, not to yield to the tartarinades nor to even evoke too
clearly the fate reserved for the preys. Beyond these marks of consideration, however, the relationship
with the animals can s' to express in more specific registers; the seduction, for example, which appears
game in l' image d' a amante, or the magic coercion, which destroys the will d' a prey and the force with
s' to approach the hunter. But most common of these relations, that also which underlines best the
parity between the men and the animals, is the bond d' friendship qu' a hunter ties with the wire time
with a singular member d' a species. L' friend of wood is designed with the manner d' a pet and will
serve d' intermediary near its congeneric for qu' they s' expose without balking with range of shooting;
small treason, undoubtedly, but without consequence for his, the victim of the hunter being rincarnant
shortly after in an animal of the same species if its skin received the ritual treatment prescribed. Just like
the people d' Amazonia, the people of Subarctique thus conceive their environment with the manner d'
a dense network d' interrelationships controlled by principles which do not discriminate human
thehuman ones. Admittedly, because of the objective characters of their ecosystem, and in particular of
the low number of the alive species, this network d' interrelationships n' is not as rich and complex as
that of the people of the tropical forest; but structures of l' one and of l' another network are
completely similar, which excludes that the second is the product d' an adaptation to an environment
more diversified. Far d' to be specific, Amazonian cosmologies are thus attached to a vaster family of
designs of the world which n' do not make distinction sliced between the nature and the company and
which make prevail like organizing principle the circulation of flows, of the identities and of the
substances between entities on which the characteristics depend less d' an abstract gasoline that
relative positions qu' they occupy the ones compared to the others.
A term comes to l' spirit when l' one seeks to qualify such systems, a term on which l' contemporary
anthropology threw an modest veil, perhaps parce qu' he too crment recalls the old debates of the
discipline on the question of l' origin of the religions and on the differences supposed between the
primitive thought and the scientific thought. This c' term; is l' animism. Inter alia things, l' animism is the
belief which the natural beings are equipped d' a clean spiritual principle, and qu' it is thus possible to
the men d' to establish with these entities of the d' reports/ratios; a particular type, reports/ratios of
protection, seduction, d' hostility, d' alliance or d' exchange services. On l' animism thus heard, l'
contemporary anthropology remained extremely discrete, undoubtedly because of the great reversal of
prospect operated by Claude Lvi-Strauss in l' totemism (9) analyzes. Challenging the utilitarian
psychologisantes explanations, evolutionists or who tried d' to elucidate the mystical and participative
bond considered to exist between a group of filiation and the plant or l' animal which served d' to him;
ponyme, Lvi-Strauss showed that the so-called totemism n' was qu' a classifying logic using
discontinuities empirically observable between the species so d' to organize a delimiting order of the
social units. Plants and animals offer a point d' support with the classifying thought and, because of
contrasted significant qualities that their morphological and ethologic discontinuity exhibe
spontaneously, they becomes signs ready mtaphoriquement to express the differences necessary to
perpetuation of l' clannish organization. This interpretation turns over l' sociocentric explanation
formerly suggested by Durkheim and Mauss in their famous test on primitive classifications: this n' is not
l' clannish organization which provides the model of the classification of the beings of l' environment; on
the contrary the perceptible differences between those will use to conceive the differences between the
clans (10). Parce qu' it solved in a masterly way the question of the totemism, the demonstration of Lvi-
Strauss contributed to make forget that l' objectivation of not-human by the human ones could be
conceived differently qu' with the d' means; a classifying device. However l' animism is also a form d'
social objectivation of the entities which we call natural, in this qu' it confers on these entities not only
anthropocentric provisions - c' be-with-to say a statute of anybody often endowed with word and having
human affects - but also social attributes, the hierarchy of the positions, behaviors based on the
relationship, the respect of certain standards of control and l' obedience with ethical codes. These social
attributes are drawn from the repertory of each culture, which will characterize its relationship with
such or such segment of its environment according to the modes of sociability locally dominant: various
degrees of consanguineous relationship, the relationship by alliance, l' authority of the chief on a local
group or d' elder on its juniors, l' ritual friendship, l' codified hostility, etc In this direction, l' animism can
be considering not like a system of categorization of the plants and animals, but as a system of
categorization of the types of relations that the human ones maintain with thehuman ones. The systems
animic thus constitute a symmetrical reverse of the totemic classifications heard within the meaning of
Lvi-Strauss, in this qu' they n' do not use the differential relations between not-human conceptually
ordering the company, but qu' they are useful contrary to the elementary categories structuring the
social life conceptually to order the report/ratio of the men to the alive species and, by derivation, the
relationship between these species. In the systems totemic, all in all, thehuman ones are treated like
signs, in the systems animic they are treated like the d' term; a relation.
Thus heard, l' animism and the totemism constitutes what j' would call readily d' modes; identification,
c' be-with-to say manners of defining the borders of oneself and d' others. To apprehend like legitimate
demonstrations of l' ambition to give a direction to the world does not go without raising difficulties of
all kinds, in particular because of presupposed which rise from our own d' mode; identification, namely
the naturalism. The naturalism is simply the belief qsue nature exists, in other words that certain entities
owe their existence and their development with a foreign principle with the effects of the human will.
Typical of Western cosmologies since Plato and Aristote, the naturalism produces a specific ontological
field, a d' place; order and of need where nothing n' occurs without a cause, whether this cause is
referred to a transcendent authority or qu' it is immanente with the texture of the world. Insofar as the
naturalism is the guiding principle of our own cosmology and qu' it soaks our common direction like our
scientific practice, it became for us one presupposed to some extent natural which structure our
epistemology and, in particular, our perception of the other d' modes; identification. Considered from
the point of view naturalist, totemism or l' animism thus seem to us representations intellectually
interesting, but basically false, as of simple handling symbolic systems of this specific field of
phenomena which we call nature. If l' one tries to disregard this presupposed, force is however to
note that l' existence of nature like an autonomous field n' is not more one raw data of l' experiment
that are not to it animals which speak or of the bonds of filiation between the men and the macaws. Or,
it n' there does not have more objective justifications allowing d' to affirm that the human ones form a
community d' organizations entirely distinct from the other biotic and abiotic components of l'
environment, as we think it, qu' it n' there has to consider that the human ones, the plants and the
animals form a hierarchical community people entirely distinct from minerals, as tend all over the world
to think it of many companies. Where we introduce the articulated language and the bipdie like
decisive criteria of l' humanity, d' other cultures prefer to choose more categories including, founded on
l' animation, on the autonomous locomotion or the presence of particular features, like teeth or the
sexue reproduction. L' idea that nature is a social construction into perpetual becoming installation
however a formidable challenge with l' anthropology: must we restrict our ambitions to describe in the
most faithful possible way the specific designs of their environment that companies built at different
times, or must us seek principles d' order allowing to compare seemingly infinite empirical diversity
complexes of nature-culture? I am reticent to on the matter adopt a relativistic position, because,
among good d' other reasons, such a prospect presupposes this qu' it is appropriate d' to establish. The
relativism indeed has as an implicit corollary the belief in a universal nature which would have
everywhere the properties and the borders that our own culture allots to him and on which would
spread a proliferation of particular systems of the world, definite each one by an arbitrary assembly of
symbols having for function to code this natural substrate considered common to all. From such a point
of view, not only the cause even of the differences in the conceptualizations of l' environment remains
unexplained, but still, and in spite of all the relativistic proclamations, it becomes impossible d' to escape
l' ethnocentrism, c' be-with-to say to the privilege granted to the only culture whose definition of nature
serves d' implicit standard to measure all the others. Thus let us suppose qu' there exist very general
structures which organize the way in which people build representations of their physical and social
environment. Where does one have to start to seek to find traces of their existence and their modus
operandi? The starting point which m' appeared simplest is the following: a feature characteristic of all
the conceptualizations of l' environment is that those are founded on an anthropocentric reference
frame. This property generates either of the models in which the categories and the social relations are
used as mental gauge to order cosmos, or of the models in which discontinuities between not-human
make it possible to think discontinuities between human, or of the models like ours, where nature is
negatively defined as this ordered segment of the reality which develops independently of l' human
action. In all the cases, c' be-with-to say qu' it operates by inclusion or exclusion, l' social objectivation of
nonhuman cannot thus be dissociated from l' objectivation of the human ones. L' one and l' another
process s' support on the configuration of the ideas and the practices which, within each company,
defines the designs of oneself and d' others; l' one and l' another process implies that borders are
traced, that identities are charged and that cultural mediations are elaborate. C' is what j' called d'
modes; identification. But an additional step must be crossed if we want to finish some with dualism, as
with the sterile debate between universalism and relativism which n' is itself, after all, qu' a relic of the
natural dichotomy/culture. To go beyond dualism, towards an anthropology fully monist, implies that l'
one ceases treating the company and the culture, just as human faculties and physical nature, like
autonomous substances and causal authorities, which would allow d' to open the way with a true
ecological comprehension of the constitution of the individual and collective entities. C' in this original
direction d' is; a science of the relations, whose Gregory Bateson (11) or Claude Lvi-Strauss already
showed fruitfulness, that l' ecology can inspire social sciences and human, and not under the species of
the simplistic geographical determinism which s' is unduly seized the term. Qu' they exist by themselves
or qu' they are defined of l' outside, qu' they are produced by the men or qu' they are only perceived by
them, qu' they are material or immaterial, the entities which constitute our universe do not have a
direction and an identity qu' through the relations which institute them as such. However, if these
entities are into right quasi infinite, the reports/ratios which bind them it are not; only differ the
contexts historical and cultural in which these reports/ratios are or are not brought up to date. A
nondualistic anthropology should be fixed like d' field; study this process d' actualization, the elements
to which it relates, as well as the circumstances and the contexts which make it possible.