The Descola Variations

The Ontological Geography of Beyond Nature and Culture

peter skafish

Much about Philippe Descola is exactly what you end up decid-

ing you might have expected from someone holding a chair at the
Collège de France. So measured is his tone when discussing what
is clearly an extremely wide learning that it becomes obvious that
this is someone with the tact and discretion of a politician, and thus
the capacity to survive the complex trajectory leading to a professor-
ship at that almost inaccessibly elite institution. Nothing in his ap-
pearance disconfirms it: his considerable height, still full white hair
and beard, and long, masculine face give him a patrician air that you,
the disoriented foreigner, imagine to be like that of many of his Re-
publican forebears interred up the hill in the Panthéon. Objective
criteria agree—France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique
conferred upon him its highest honor, a medallion d’or usually re-
served for genius in the natural sciences, he presided until recently
over the anthropological laboratory founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
and a major, celebrated exhibition at Musée de quai Branley was a
result of his work—while a first meeting at his office might as well
be with a mid-level political official, the staff assuring you that the
Monsieur, while running late, will still see you, and he himself later
welcoming you to his office with entreaties to “Sit down, please sit
down, make yourself comfortable!” that are accompanied by a stream
66 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

of unprompted laughter so loud and prolonged that it unnerves you

until you realize that it was intended to be reassuring. (This is famous
laughter.) The conversation that follows is erudite, stimulating, and
often quite surprising, but lacks the edge and intensity of the old
French theory, and you begin to feel that you are seeing what you
have always heard: the Paris of the 1960s, 1970s, and before is indeed
no more, having been long ago replaced by a cautious, moderate ap-
proach to thinking, and here at the Collège, its old inventive, often
dangerous representatives (not just Foucault, but Merleau-Ponty, Bar-
thes, Bourdieu, and others) really are dead.1
Impressions like this have often been formed of Descola and his
work, whose chief expression is the 2005 (but only recently translat-
ed) tome Beyond Nature and Culture, a vast, sort of neostructuralist
account, among other things, of why it is we believe in Nature (a
text that one might think to be a genealogy were it not to suggest
why that particular mode of explanation has perhaps, for now, run
its course).2 Apart from the rather crucial use his lifelong friend and
interlocutor Bruno Latour made of his work in We Have Never Been
Modern—it is with reference to the indigenous Amazonian people
the Achuar, with whom Descola did fieldwork, that Latour argues
that other collectives have been better at acknowledging nature/cul-
ture hybrids than their modern counterparts—the reaction to De-
scola’s work has been unjustifiably dismissive, particularly given the
strikingly unanticipated character of his main idea.3
Q: How do we come to think there is a sphere of nature to which
humans, on account of their possession of language, culture, and his-
tory, constitute the sole exception? A: Because we identify beings, hu-
man or otherwise, in a way that becomes clear only when contrasted
with other ways of doing so. When we moderns compare ourselves, that
is, to Amazonian, other Amerindian, Siberian, and other peoples who
ascribe intentionality, humanity, and personhood to nearly the entire
gamut of earthly beings (not just animals but plants, minerals, and
tools make the cut) while differentiating them from each other and
themselves on the basis of their bodies, what emerges is that moderns
sees things in reverse: for us, humans are continuous with other be-
ings at the level of the body and discontinuous with them at the level
of mind. For animist groups, again, the continuity between humans
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 67

and nonhumans is located at the level of consciousness, and discon-

tinuity at the level of bodies, and this “ontology,” or distribution of
beings, is what renders clear the terms and configuration of our own.
Modernity becomes even more exposed, moreover, when we come
up against two other possibilities: continuity, on the one hand, at the
level of both mind and body, which is the “totemism” of Australian
Aboriginal peoples, and discontinuity, on the other, at both levels for
all beings, or “analogism,” an ontology joining so- called great literate
civilizations (ancient Greece, China, India), the high urban cultures
of the Americas (Téotihuacan, the Andes), and the Mandé-Voltaic re-
gion of Africa. We moderns, whose ontology is “naturalism”—which
is possibly Beyond Nature and Culture’s greatest concept— only stand
out as what we are when juxtaposed with these other ontologies, as
they demonstrate the contingency and historico-spatial localness of
our most certain and even, per Latour, transcendent substance: na-
ture. And only by registering these contrasts can we stop projecting
everywhere our critical universals, and begin to elaborate concepts
that do not intellectually colonize other collectives.
The broad scope, inventiveness, and political stakes of Descola’s
project should have, you surmise, ensured it a favorable reception: Be-
yond Nature and Culture forwards a novel critique of modernity; that
critique is carried out by subordinating modern ontology to other
ontologies, of which it is made a variant; these other ontologies are
largely conceived as belonging to indigenous modes of thought rath-
er than those of past European epochs; and all these moves seem to
entail unexpectedly novel notions of the human and the world. Yet
the criticisms are rife, and often very harsh. No less a thinker than
Isabelle Stengers has insinuated that Descola is the kind of hubris-
tic scientist invested in regulating everyday beliefs, while figures in
the Parisian scene complain of an institutional conservative, French
anthropologists of a structuralism unmoored from any real empir-
ical correspondence, and a prominent American anthropologist of
a dehistoricized, reductive account of indigenous life.4 Complicat-
ing matters is the somewhat notorious public debate staged in Paris
some years back between Descola and his old friend and sometime
antagonist, the Brazilian anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, another Amazonianist with a critique of nature at
68 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

once quite close to and a few light-years from his. Viveiros de Castro,
in a provocation that set off a series of tough intellectual exchanges,
cast him as a scholar detached enough to merely engage in a taxo-
nomic classification of Amerindian and other indigenous thought,
rather than being transformed by it.5 Not much love from the intel-
lectual left, it would seem, for this heir to one of the high offices of
French thought.
Philippe Descola the persona, you think, could very well elicit
such reactions, and there appear to be reasons that the same has prov-
en true of his work. What remains strange about this, however, is
that few people manage to see past these manifest faces, to another
persona and another body of thought concealed beneath them . . .
to a savagely critical thinker not at all conforming to the Republi-
can portrait you had previously drawn in your mind. This Philippe
Descola is the fieldworker who attributed his affinity with Amazo-
nian peoples to feeling like a misanthropic outsider in France, a for-
mer proponent of communism who abandoned it only for a possi-
bly more radical, ecological politics, and, in the details of his work, a
ferocious animal stalking the certainties of modernity and the West,
and redefining—as only a predator can—the Earth that constitutes
his hunting grounds.

Beyond “Beyond Nature and Culture”

Even sympathetic readers of Beyond Nature and Culture will laugh

at that prospect.6 The book, as was clearly broadcast by the title
of Latour’s report on the Descola/Viveiros de Castro disputatio—
“Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’?”—is indeed an intellectual project
of an often conservative kind: a social scientific typology.7 The four
ontologies form, just as Viveiros de Castro complains, a classificatory
grid: each of them is really a general perceptual schema that deter-
mines the character of certain collective practices, and that can thus
be used to group into kinds the relations humans maintain with each
other and nonhumans. Worse, the source of each ontology is, appar-
ently, a transcendental subject that gives an identity to each thing
before it on the basis of its most immediate, familiar perceptual re-
sources: its sense that it is composed, at bottom, of an “interiority”
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 69

and a “corporeality” distinct from each other. “I establish differences

and resemblances between myself and other existing entities,” as De-
scola explains of this transcendental cognitive activity, “by inferring
analogies and contrasts between the appearance, behavior, and prop-
erties that I ascribe to myself and that I ascribe to them.” The possible
combinations of the elements and values (I am like/unlike it internal-
ly/physically) yield four human perceptual schemata, each of which
is the foundation for “defining terms and their predicates” (bnc, 113):

Faced with some other entity, human or nonhuman, I can assume

either that it possesses elements of physicality and interiority iden-
tical to my own, that both its interiority and physicality are distinct
from mine, that we have similar interiorities and distinct physicali-
ties, or, finally, that our interiorities are different and our physicali-
ties are analogous. I shall call the first combination “totemism,” the
second “analogism,” the third “animism,” and the fourth “natural-
ism.” These principles of identification define four major types of
ontology, that is to say systems of the properties of existing beings; and
these serve [for the anthropologist] as a point of reference for con-
trasting forms of cosmologies, models of social links, and theories
of identity and alterity. (bnc, 121)

Although this division of ontologies initially suggested a whole

world of new conceptual possibilities, we seem instead to have reen-
tered the philosophical Old World, supposed to have been left behind,
in which predication, judgment, and a constituting consciousness are
taken as the universal foundation of human experience, a kind of
“common sense” of humankind, and the nonhuman, the object, is de-
prived of an agency entirely conferred on the human subject. As for
more directly anthropological matters, the factuality of the typology
itself is starting to seem a bit fishy: while animism’s inversion of the
formula of naturalism enabled the latter to be perceived, it was also
an attempt to correct Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of Amerindian
thought as totemism, which was in turn displaced to Australia—but
many critics fail to see the fit.8 Analogism, meanwhile, would seem
to be the slot for the leftovers and misfits, in which very different Eu-
ropean and East and South Asian materials are grouped (with some
echoes of Orientalism) on the basis of resemblances that look weak
70 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

when viewed up close. The grid’s designer is beginning to seem like

a stern classifier, indifferent not only to monstrous exceptions to his
rules but to the political stakes of neglecting them.
The two problems, from Viveiros de Castro’s perspective, ultimate-
ly stem from the same source: this is a redeployment of Lévi-Strauss’s
structuralism, specifically, the variety in which structures are fixed,
semantic or social grammars of binary oppositions whose possi-
ble configurations can be determined algebraically and that act as
schemata of thought and practice. Unfortunately, this would be the
wrong Lévi-Strauss, as opposed to a later one for whom structures are
open and undergo constant transformations. Descola drew on the
conservative one, goes the argument (found in Cannibal Metaphysics),
because he saw animism as an object to be classified rather than a
mode of thought unto itself that can transform our own. The latter
was Viveiros de Castro’s radical and now celebrated move, in his the-
orization of animism as perspectivism. Since the body, or “nature,”
is what differentiates the otherwise homogeneous souls of beings
in Amazonia, one’s identity is thus a problem that can only be re-
solved through inhabiting the other’s perspective, via its specific kind
of body, and seeing oneself from there; the agonistic and predatory
practices that often prevail there, such as hunting, shamanism, and
warfare, are all attempts to do that, and offer an alternative model of
anthropology in which only an outside perspective provides mod-
erns with an understanding of themselves. To perspectivism corre-
sponds the other notion of structure, which Lévi-Strauss developed
through analyses of the myths of these same animist peoples: open
groups of semantic distinctions that transform from myth to myth,
in a way almost isomorphic with the above practices of changing into
the other, and that are identifiable only by reverse engineering these
transformations. Not grasping animism as perspectivism effectively
means that Descola failed to allow it to transform, fundamentally, his
own approach to thinking. He opts for a classic structuralism, finds
the number of perceptual formulas it here dictates, conceives these
“ontologies” as epistemologies (a subject’s perceptual schematization
of objects), thereby subordinates them to the point of view of natu-
ralism and moderns, and, as if all this were not bad enough, makes
identities the source of differences: the four ontologies, we learn, are
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 71

fundamental modes of identification only secondarily qualified by

quasi- economic and quasi-political “modes of relation”— quite the
reverse of the differential, relational situation of Amazonia. No won-
der this potentially radical project of enumerating ontologies oth-
er than those of moderns feels like it was aborted halfway through.
“Perspectivism is what happens,” as Viveiros de Castro sums up the
problems with his old friend’s grasp of Amerindian thought, “when
the classified becomes the classifier.”9

A Geography of Being

But is that really all that can be made of this book, particularly with
respect to its questions of why and how to think that different on-
tologies exist on the Earth?10 While Viveiros de Castro’s criticisms are
extremely incisive, they come from someone so familiar with the ma-
terials at the heart of Beyond Nature and Culture as to not have any
motive to find a way to deploy it beyond its manifest intentions.11 De-
scola certainly draws up his tables on the view that classification will
yield explanation: “A multitude of reasons have been suggested to ex-
plain sacrifice, cannibalism, and ancestor worship,” he writes, “but we
are no closer to a better understanding of the motives that led some
peoples to adopt them but others not to,” unless we “ask ourselves
what it is that renders these practices compatible or incompatible
with one another” (through “an inquiry into the rules that govern the
syntax of these practices and their organization into systems”) (bnc,
391–92). Yet one need not exactly agree about the questions or meth-
ods in order to find inspiration in the results. If animism is said to be
a gigantic archipelago dotting the entire planet, and analogism looks
like a massive continent comprising physically distant lands, this is
because Descola has indeed charted, in a way that has perhaps never
been done before, an ontological world map.12
Ontological philosophy has long been concerned with the Earth
and its worlds, but it has mostly conceived the arrangements by which
its inhabitants access and experience that which is as those, ultimate-
ly, of modernity and the West. The speculative-realist treatment of
being as a nature essentially inaccessible to human perception (a tell-
ingly natural scientific and modern thought) is just the latest episode.
72 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

Giorgio Agamben, for example, put the biopolitical catastrophes of

modernity at the center of certain critical agendas at the price of con-
ceiving the collapse of the Occidental zoe/bios distinction as the new
“nomos of the Earth”—an ontological law in force over the entire
planet. Hardt and Negri likewise treat the global spread of biopoli-
tics under Empire as complete, leaving nothing outside to resist it but
a spontaneous life still conceivable in vitalist, modern terms. Even
Deleuze, who spells out how integral the Earth was to the emergence
of philosophy among the Greeks, equates authentic philosophy with
what happened in Greece and Christian Europe while denying it to
not just Hindu and Chinese but also Jewish and Islamic thought (all
of which, shockingly, are instead said only to think through “figures,”
and mostly against immanence).13 If “being” was thought differently
by other peoples, this certainly bears on what ontological thought is
and should be. Would philosophy not then belong only to certain
collective arrangements of being among others? Would it not then
have to accord real, equal parity to the ontologies of other peoples,
reflexively formalized or not, and concern itself with thinking the
relations between them and itself? And wouldn’t that project, which
bursts the philosophical canon at the seams, be metaphysics?
Outside thought based on other intellectual traditions or with de-
colonial aims, most philosophy, even when radical and inventive, is
more than happy to affirm that thought coming from and chiefly
concerned with the West is adequate for addressing problems cre-
ated by the West but that primarily affect peoples not living in or
conforming to the West.14 Whether the present world order is tak-
en as leaving nothing outside it or philosophy is supposed to be so
universal in scope as to have already anticipated alien perspectives,
modernity and the intellectual discourses belonging to it are seen as
the point through which everything must pass in order to be viably
thought. At the moment of a global ecological crisis whose material
conditions owe so much to Western metaphysical categories, it would
be extremely tone deaf to continue to think that only better modern
concepts are sufficient for thinking it, and that those of other peoples
have already been converted into modern ones or are simply irrele-
vant to us.
Despite not commenting directly on concepts like bare life and
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 73

vitalism, even a cursory reading of Descola’s book gives lie to the

reasons they are treated as universals, and never put into comparison.
Merely the continued existence of the collectives, often indigenous,
corresponding to animism, totemism, and even analogism attests
that modernity, its political, economic, and technological world-
system, and its ontology do not form the horizon of what everyone
on Earth thinks and does. Other ontologies remain and persist, and
the mere reality of it cries to be accounted for when philosophy con-
strues itself, whether tragically or arrogantly, as so universal as to not
need to reckon with them. Descola provides an antidote to that uni-
versalism simply by drawing up this very different, pluralizing survey.
More than that, he does so by continuing, as almost no one has, Lévi-
Strauss’s practice of putting philosophers and indigenous peoples on
a level playing field. Descola continually poses questions of the form,
“What would an Achuar say about . . . ?,” which grants a certain intel-
lectual authority, as Marshall Sahlins has also remarked, to peoples
whose proper names are usually not even known, let alone imagined
to be synonymous with theoretical ideas.15
Going so far off the grid to find interlocutors that then redraw it
with him is hardly consequential, it will be said, for the big contempo-
rary questions—life, the human, their future in the Anthropocene—
spoken to by critical thought today. But this is precisely where the
stakes of this new geography of being come into view. Recall that
what Descola most wants to address by means of his ontological
quartet is both the source and relative character of modernity’s fun-
damental conceptual dualisms, those that seem self- evident and in-
controvertible to us: nature and culture, human and nonhuman.
But his means of doing this is entirely different from those of many
philosophies and theories with similar concerns.16 Instead of presum-
ing that the contingency of modern ontology emerges when con-
trasted with the arrangements of epochs antecedent to it, Descola
makes the comparison synchronically and horizontally and thereby
breaks with the consensus that it is best and unproblematically done
historically, through a history internal to the West. Modernity can be
identified as naturalism not because this stands out when it is juxta-
posed with its past—nothing there makes its construal of humans as
physically continuous but intentionally discontinuous with nonhu-
74 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

mans evident—but because the animism of Amazonian and other

indigenous peoples exposes it as their polar opposite.
This geography of being can thus be taken as an anti-genealogy.
The criticism, made several times in France, that the analogism De-
scola attributes to early modernity, the Middle Ages, and the Greeks
is little more than a convenient fiction misses the point by obsessing
over a historical issue literally foreign to his analyses. Since analogism
does not exist, the charge goes, the naturalism said to emerge from it
could neither have the precise character ascribed to it nor be as fin-
ished or discrete a formation as claimed (we indeed would have never
been modern). Yet analogism could not have been derived through
a purely historical comparison of naturalism with its past, since it is
defined far more on the basis of Mesoamerican, Peruvian, and West
African materials than through Plotinus, Leibniz, and other represen-
tatives of “the Great Chain of Being,” and its ingenuity as a category
lies in the fact that it thus treats the cosmology of pre- and early mod-
ern Europe as merely one instance of a form of thought belonging to
a far broader swath of humanity. However inventive and critical they
were in Foucault’s hands, archaeology and genealogy look extremely
provincial in comparison, and even worse: by characterizing mod-
ern European being in relation only to its past, they in the end lose
perspective on the very contingency that they at first so effectively
revealed. In spite of exposing ideals like Man and life as recent inven-
tions, archaeology and genealogy are conceived as largely immanent
to the powers and knowledges that gave rise to them and thus have
quite limited access to outside perspectives from which to define,
criticize, and rethink them. Their cutting temporal edge, not their
external, disavowed ontological siblings, are used for that, which con-
fers on Western science and politics a false aura of inevitability and
even a posteriori necessity.
Descola himself may not emphasize the difference between an-
thropological and historical ontology, but it leaps from his work, in
a way that puts him both in proximity to and at a distance from a
major source of ontological thought. If genealogy and certain kinds
of thinking derived from it are failing today, it is precisely because
they emerge, whatever else the Foucauldians would like to say about
it, from another history of being, the history of being—Heidegger’s.
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 75

What is often forgotten or simply not understood about Heidegger

is that he eventually conceived the history of being—the series of
substances and ideals mistaken for being by philosophy from the
Presocratics forward—as a structure in which each such “clearing”
was substituted for by the other without some original, true open-
ing of “Being” lying behind and setting the process in motion.17 The
non-teleological, non-substantialist character of that history means
there is little, ultimately, to distinguish archaeology and genealogy
from it, particularly with respect to its view that ontology is to be
approached through an account of Western thought and its history.
Even if Foucauldian historical ontology is radically critical in nature,
the presumption is still that what being is for us now— “what we are
becoming,” “what is emerging,” “the historical ontology of ourselves”
(however it is put, the question is always ontological)—is primarily
legible in relation to modernity’s past, which makes being belong to
an effectively European ethnos. By simply taking a step out of history
and time and onto a synchronic, geographical plane, Descola opens
the possibility that modern thought can account for itself through
contrasting its basic ontological arrangements with others without
for that conceiving these as internal to its own history and thus (un-
acknowledged and unspecified) ethnic identity. “Other ways of being”
are indeed other ways of being, and the way being is for us (moderns)
can only be understood in comparison with them.18 The allusive crit-
icisms of Heidegger scattered throughout the book are therefore not
entirely accurate with respect to the relation Descola holds to him:
beings are still opened to humans through basic dispensations, but
those of Europe and “the West,” present and past, do not have pride of
place among them. We very clearly see that they do not and should
not be used to determine the possible, which thus yields us more ox-
ygen, and in turn lets us help the other ways breathe again.19

Interiority and Physicality

Even if you agree about our political and metaphysical need for such
a geographical approach to thought—what Patrice Maniglier has
called, with uncommon perspicacity, “a superior comparativism”—
you may at this point object that Descola’s apparently doubly con-
76 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

servative postulate that the mind gives rise to the quartet through
its various applications of interiority and physicality reinstates, at a
transcendental level, the most notorious of modern metaphysical op-
positions, and thereby domesticates the other ontologies within nat-
uralism.20 Not only would the step out of the West have been a false
one, but whatever insights Beyond Nature and Culture contains would
be compromised by an essentially epistemological metaphysics.
Although some precision will be required to show it, this is where
things become extremely interesting. Descola certainly conceives
interiority and physicality in transcendental, phenomenological
terms— “my first resources for apprehending the world . . . applied
to other things” by, he sometimes says, a transcendental subject—and
this ascription, in a basically Kantian way: a schema fitting those cat-
egories to perceptions.21 But need such philosophical baggage prede-
termine and confine interpretations of his work? Our Descola does
not think so, largely because he defies expectations on these points
by breaking, at other times, with both phenomenology and a Kantian
assumption usually tied to schematism. “The project I have in mind,”
he states, “has no need of any transcendental subject or disembodied, im-
manent mind acting as a catalyst of meaning,” in the sense of a source
of intentional acts (bnc, 305; my emphasis). Nor does his conception
of a perceptual schema depend on the privileging of the subject’s
relation to things over the things themselves. In both cases, this is
because identification is defined, surprisingly, in far more contempo-
rary terms: as the means by which humans perceive certain real, ex-
isting similarities and dissimilarities between their own qualities and
those of initially opaque, impenetrable things, while in the process
neglecting other such characteristics. “This elementary mechanism of
ontological discrimination,” he explains

does not stem from empirical judgments regarding the nature

of objects that constantly present themselves to our perception.
Rather it should be seen as what Husserl called prepredicative ex-
perience, in that it modulates the general awareness that I have of
the existence of the “other.” (bnc, 115)

The mechanism of mediation between the self and the nonself

seems to me, from a logical point of view, to precede and be external
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 77

to the existence of an established relationship with something other, that

is to say, something the content of which can be specified by its
modalities of interactions, given that the “other” in question here is not
one term in a pair but an object that exists for me in a general otherness
yet to be identified: aliud, not an alter. (bnc, 112; my emphasis)

In spite of the invocation of Husserl, this is not a phenomenological

notion of perception, at least as normally understood.22 The subject,
instead of conferring sense onto its impressions of a pre-available
object, contrasts with itself an initially opaque, unrelated thing and
thereby perceives certain of its properties (intentional and/or physi-
cal), which stabilizes it as a subject, an object, or a combination of the
two. At the same time, the perceiving subject also necessarily fails to
perceive other aspects of that thing, not because they are difficultly
accessed primary qualities but simply because they fall outside its
mode of identification, even if they are or can be captured by anoth-
er. The thing, or aliud, is thus an “object” in the contemporary phil-
osophical sense—something neither originally correlated to human
perception nor largely accessible in its properties—while the perceiv-
ing subject is not, for the same reasons, the center of reference around
which the definition of things turns. This is a minimally, almost post-
correlationalist notion of the human, and interiority and physicality
are the elementary forms by which it manages to establish, somewhat
arbitrarily, what objects will be for it, and not how it receives them as
they finally are.23
No matter how contemporary the deployment, these two elements
might still seem to leave us on all too familiar metaphysical ground.
They do contain, however, a deeply estranging, anti- Occidental pow-
er, and this is because they come from elsewhere. Descola’s interiority
and physicality are not kitsch, pseudo- Cartesian antiques dusted off
and given an inappropriately dominating position in an otherwise
decidedly heterogeneous assemblage.24 The couplet really is of Am-
azonian provenance, and it has been redeployed here first and fore-
most because extensive fieldwork among the Achuar formed the ini-
tial foundation for the book. One does not have to accept Descola’s
own explanation, offered at a colloquium dedicated to the theme of
“Comparative Metaphysics,” that after inductively hitting upon their
78 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

relevance to understanding the diversity of existing “natures,” he then

managed to establish deductively, through broad comparative re-
search, their fundamental, transhistorical, and “transcultural” role in
human cognition.25 It is enough to regard them as a radically foreign
conceptual dualism through which the world has been refracted, and
then assess the perspectives thereby opened up.
The most incisive of these indeed concern ecology and life. The
grip naturalism has on moderns is evident for Descola in how even
heterodox sciences faithfully reproduce its basic dualism, reversing
the order, but not the differential ascription, of its terms. Phenom-
enological and late cybernetic theories of cognition, such as that of
Rosch, Varela, and Thompson, laudably conceive cognition not as
mental representation but as embodied, sensory-motor patterns that
are shaped by the environment and that in turn enable perception
and action within it, but they thereby eliminate interiority in favor
of an extreme version of naturalist physicality.26 The old disembodied
“Cartesian” mind can be conceived as an epiphenomenal system of
emergent properties precisely because the exceptionality of human
interiority with respect to a virtually all- encompassing physicality
calls, in naturalism, for explanation. The issue with this new physical-
ism is that it rules out, in advance, the animist affirmation of nonhu-
man interiorities and the ontological challenge they pose to modern
science and politics. Even anthropologists fall into this when they
conceive the hunting and environmental practices of animist peoples
in phenomenological terms (his foil here is Timothy Ingold), as this
results in a new ontological exclusion, of inanimate nonhumans—
even if, as with machines, they might in some way think. The issue
this science has with such beings is not that they lack commensurate
intentionality or even reflexive awareness but that they would only
have minds, while it is an organic body, not the brain or computa-
tional hardware, that would constitute subjectivity (even artificial in-
telligence relies on connectionist models of the mind). In contrast,
Descola counters, “when an Achuar or Cree says that an artifact or
an inorganic element in the environment has a ‘soul,’ what he means
by this is that those entities possess an intentionality of their own
that is of the same nature as that of humans and so does not does not
stem from the type of molecular substratum in which it is lodged
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 79

nor from the type of process through which it comes into existence”
(bnc, 188).27 From this animist point of view, the modern body is not
a maligned force that needs to be extracted from its imprisonment in
the soul, but instead a clever means of denying a soul to other beings
and of drawing a dividing line between life and nonlife.
The discrepancy between these conceptions of soul and body is of
high stakes because it exposes us to the political limits of ecology, as
well as to other concepts that lie beyond it. The core issue, once again,
is whether humans share in common with nonhumans the body or
consciousness, and by that measure, even efforts against anthropo-
centrism in environmental philosophy come up naturalist: either by
conferring rights only to animals developed enough to be sentient or
by arguing that we are responsible for life and abiotic elements be-
cause of our physical interdependence with them. The consequences
in both cases are serious misunderstandings, with often terrible prac-
tical effects. The objections, for example, that even left conservation-
ists and animal-rights activists have to the hunting practices of South
American and Circumpolar indigenous peoples have led the former
to support corporate and state encroachments on their territories.28
But it is not enough, we learn, to defend such peoples by construing
their environmentalist opponents as unwitting agents of soft North
Atlantic power (although that is more often the case than one might
suspect). “No measures of compensation, however well-intentioned,”
Descola observes of animist peoples, “can ever totally dissipate the
brutality of the fact that the maintenance of human life involves the
consumption of nonhuman persons” (in the sense of “nonhuman hu-
mans”) (bnc, 286); but these collectives must try anyway, and often re-
sort to ritual offerings, of either food or souls, to the wronged animal
societies. Such measures arguably contribute to more stable equilibri-
ums of forces between nonhumans and those collectives, which stand
in sharp contrast with naturalism’s now overwhelmingly devastating
effect on nonhumans.29 Do such observations not indicate that it is
high time to ask whether ecological politics can really be undertaken
on the basis of nature alone, and if the actual and potential actions
of other collectives might somehow be needed, and even somehow
practicable, by moderns as well?
The reason it is possible to raise such questions, to come back to
80 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

whether there is finally any “Beyond Naturalism” here, is that the sub-
ject changes from ontology to ontology, along with the character of
its scientific questions, and Descola lets this affect his overall concep-
tion of both things. In the case of animism (Descola almost speaks
in tandem with Viveiros de Castro on this point), the subject is con-
fronted in its experience not with a reality where other beings are
initially objects but rather by a seemingly limitless panoply of other
subjects, whose specific identities are derived from but also concealed
by their various kinds of bodies.30 That is, beings are experienced as
subjects that are only different from humans in that they are clothed
in strange, exotic bodies, and truly understanding these subjects (who
they are, and what and how they think) therefore requires under-
standing their bodies. The other’s body is thus a sort of enigma, func-
tioning like an ungraspable object until the subject has found a way
to metamorphose into and inhabit it, and thereby assume the iden-
tity it gives. The division of ontologies is thus indeed from a certain
point of view based on an epistemology, but one achieved by trans-
posing the fundamental animist problematic into naturalist science.
This is also what makes Descola’s project, from another perspective,
something of a metaphysics. If human renderings of beings can be
thought to always start with the similarities and differences between
the souls and bodies of humans and nonhumans, this is because tru-
ly thinking about how peoples other than us think transforms the
foundations of what we think. Where Descola’s own thought under-
went such a change is with respect to which ontology, or who on the
planet, has final intellectual authority. And it is arguably the animists
that get the last word, for whether or not the diurnal Descola always
or in the end puts it this way, the nocturnal predator in him effective-
ly does: not only by emphasizing the Amazonian origin of his inqui-
ry but also by letting the epistemological problematic and catego-
ries of another world define the first, basic conditions of any human
thought whatsoever, those of modern science included.31 Before them
comes the Achuar a priori. What many critics take for an overreach-
ing classificatory project is therefore, instead, an uncanny, subversive
experiment in doing science from an animist perspective. It could
even be said that Descola thinks the other being is for humans ini-
tially not an alter but an aliud, an opaque thing, because the object,
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 81

until the specific subjectivity in it is detected, remains impenetrable.32

And he can think that, again, because an ontological project precedes
and enables the analytic one: contrasting how worlds are composed.33

Relative Universalism, Ontological

Pluralism, and Planetarity

The animist basis of Descola’s thought, then, is what in the end suc-
cessfully undermines the transcendental tendency of its modern side,
and thereby ensures that the divergent, incommensurate character
of the other ontologies are not reduced back to naturalism—that an
“ontological pluralism” is opened and maintained.34 Interiority and
physicality are, indeed, even more strangely configured as one pass-
es to the other two ontologies and their distributions of beings and
forms of collectivity (“society” only happens under naturalism).35 The
totemic formula of continuity at both levels between humans and
nonhumans yields collectivities comprising both kinds of beings and
nearly transitive identifications between the former and the latter.
If both consciousness and body are of the same kind as those of the
animals, plants, and minerals in one’s “clan,” then there is no truly hu-
man experience of either register, and they cannot be said to be the
modern version of these resources. This absence of a purely human
experience is even more dramatic in analogism, since being both in-
tentionally and physically discontinuous with nonhumans entails a
near lack of self-identity for the perceiving subject that has to be com-
pensated for by drawing analogies between itself and nonhumans,
which in turn yields hypersimilitude with them. (If body and soul
alike reflect, resemble, and receive influences from a vast host of other
beings, then neither one is felt to be entirely human.)36 The further
the territories demarcated by the map are crossed, the more the possi-
bility that the schemata have a pure, underlying form that is peculiar
to naturalism fades. Each ontology opens a distinct experience of oth-
er beings and oneself that widely diverges from the others.
But does that mean we really have here a sort of metaphysics? The
amount of energy Descola devotes to elaborating a conception of the
human obviously makes his thought much more an anthropology
(in the disciplinary sense) than a metaphysics, and thus a science. But
82 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

we should not be too quick, you realize, to decide that this is the
end of the story, because his science of the human not only derives
from but actively carries out his metaphysics, especially when the
other, animist Descola is doing the talking. His answer to how his
table of ontologies escapes naturalism indeed comes in the form of
an anthropology, but a unique and highly philosophical one: a “rela-
tive universalism” (or, we could say, a “situated humanism”) in which
modern dualism provides the starting point but not the ultimate
terms of the definition of the human (under which it is subsumed
as a mere case), and in which modern ontology is conceived relative
to the others. This is, he states, a conception of the human which
does not presume that “natures and cultures, substances and minds,
and discriminations between primary and secondary qualities[!]” are
either the stable substances or basically valid analytic distinctions by
which it can be defined, but treats as its universal characteristics only
“the relations of continuity and discontinuity, identity and differ-
ence, resemblance and dissimilarity that humans everywhere estab-
lish between existing beings, using the tools that they have inherited
from their particular phylogensis: a body, an intentionality, [and] an
aptitude for discerning differential gaps” (bnc, 305). Relative univer-
salism, therefore,

does not demand that an equal materiality should at the outset

by ascribed to all beings, along with the possibility of giving to
them contingent meanings. It is content simply to detect salient
discontinuities both in things and in the mechanisms of their ap-
prehension and to accept . . . that the options [available to humans]
for making use of that recognition are limited, either when one
ratifies a phenomenal discontinuity or when one invalidates it by
continuity. (bnc, 305)

This may be a universalist concept of the human, but it is an exceed-

ingly strange one. The human is a selector of discontinuities that un-
dertakes the selection in discontinuous ways, a varying redistributor
of existing distributions of beings. Such a rejection and reconceptual-
ization of Homo sapiens, Man, and even critical notions of humanity
arguably deserves, by virtue of its anti-substantialism and poly-, ver-
sus ethno-, centrism, an entry on the lists of major contemporary the-
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 83

oretical ideas (which contain many others still entangled in modern

dualism, from performativity to vital matter). Moreover, relative uni-
versalism is also an approach to thinking which acknowledges that
thought is not correlated with being but which takes as its primary
problem that thought differentiates into divergent ways of linking
with and arranging being, and that to think one’s own way, one must
also think what the other ways think.37
Taking Viveiros de Castro’s criticisms of Descola as our point of de-
parture provided a way of bringing out not only these philosophical
virtues of Beyond Nature and Culture but also its continuity with the
anthropological metaphysics practiced by the former and arguably
initiated by Lévi-Strauss. In Viveiros de Castro’s interpretation of ani-
mism, truly understanding that its first datum is a multitude of other
perspectives that are also worlds requires that the same be the case
for us, which means accepting that every alien world is effectively a
perspective whose comprehension is tantamount to a transformation
of our own.38 Perspectivism further requires accepting that thought
thus comes in the plural—that its instances are heterogeneous, in-
commensurate, and without a shared foundation—and that it there-
fore is always eventually referred outside itself, and has to think it-
self in terms of how some of its other instances think. Although this
idea demands a transformation of perspective more extensive than
Descola undergoes, he still comes very close to it, which becomes
clear if the Lévi-Straussian roots of his project are kept in view. Per
Patrice Maniglier’s arguments, all true structuralist comparison and
Lévi-Strauss’s in particular were already metaphysical endeavors of
this kind because of their common method of defining their objects:
phonemes, myths, énoncés, and so on. Any instance of those objects
was granted identity on the basis of both an analysis of its differences
from other such possible instances and the idea that they were sub-
stitutable for it; and that peculiar way of distinguishing an object
was even extended to the sciences responsible for the analysis.39 In
the case of myth, Lévi-Strauss identified a given story as a myth by
demonstrating not that it fit the genre but that other stories deployed
semantic distinctions that inverted and reordered those that were its
own; these other myths’ different way of actualizing that first myth’s
elements thus entailed, according to him, that they were interchange-
84 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

able, that is, that they could, in fact, have been it. Each myth identi-
fied in this way thus proved to be a variation, in a peculiarly onto-
logical sense, of the others: to be both itself and other myths that it
could have been and also, at a virtual (or structural) level, is. Because
Lévi-Strauss’s approach to defining myths was at the same time re-
cursive, affecting the categories of his analysis itself, apparently cer-
tain generic concepts on which it depended (like narrative, and even
philosophy) were also transformed, in effect, into variations of myth.
Each of Descola’s modes of identification is a variation of the others
in the same way that myths are, and it is recognition of this that leads
him to treat naturalism, too, as a version of the others, rather than as
the ground for their comparison.
The reason we need Descola’s variations in particular goes beyond
everything we saw that they allow us to think about the modern, the
human, ecology, and life and into their implications (which is why
it was emphasized above) for the newest iteration of “the world”: the
planet. The critical understanding of the global as space of Empire
and/or the government of multicultural difference is currently being
transformed in the face of ecological crisis into another, which is the
Earth as a massive, collective agent inextricable from the most hu-
man of politics and histories. Unless we foolishly trust that modern
tools are sufficient for undoing the crises they have engendered, then
multiple concepts of that massive “object” (which is arguably myriad
subjects) will have to constitute our overall sense of it. Despite the
Collège de France chair’s reticence about breaching scientific reserve
and making explicit political interventions, the other, fierce Descola
manages to break through to spell out the consequences of his uni-
versalism for this problem. “Might humans of every kind,” he asks in
a passage whose poorly concealed passion betrays its radical intent,
“all with their own ideas about the collectives to which they belong,
animals and machines, plants, and deities, genes and conventions, in
fact the whole immense multitude of actual and potential existing
things, find a more welcoming refuge in a new kind of regime of
cohabitation that would once again reject discrimination between
humans and nonhumans, yet without resorting to the formula tried
out in the past?” He continues:
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 85

That such a reform is indispensable is clearly indicated by every-

thing around us, ranging from the revolting disparity between the
conditions of existence in the countries of the South and the coun-
tries of the North across the board to the alarming degradation,
as a result of human action, of the major bases of the equilibri-
um in the biosphere. However, it would be mistaken to think that
Amazonian Indians, Australian Aboriginals, or Tibetan monks can
bring us a deeper wisdom for the present time than the unstable
naturalism of late modernity. Every type of presence in the world,
every way of connecting with it and making use of it, constitutes
a particular compromise between, on the one hand, the factors of
sensible experience that are accessible to us all, albeit interpreted
differently, and, on the other, a mode of aggregating existing beings
that is adapted to historical circumstances. The fact is that none of
those compromises, however worthy of admiration some may be,
can provide a source of instruction for all situations. Neither nos-
talgia for forms of living together, the muted echoes of which are
conveyed to us by ethnographers and historians, nor the prophet-
ic wishful thinking that animates certain quarters of the scholarly
community offers an immediate answer to the challenge of recom-
posing into viable and unified groups an ever-increasing number
of beings needing to be represented and treated equitably. It is up
to each of us, whatever we may be, to invent and encourage modes of
conciliation and types of pressure capable of leading to a new universal-
ity that is both open to all the world’s components and also respectful
of certain of their idiosyncrasies. We might then hope to avert a distant
point of no return when, with the extinction of the human race, the
price of passivity would have to be paid in another fashion: namely, by
abandoning to the cosmos a nature bereft of its recorders simply because
they failed to provide it with genuine modes of expression. (bnc, 406;
my emphasis)

Is this a refusal to grant that something from other ontologies could

enter ours, or just a scientist’s tepid, noncommittal response to a vast
problem? No and no. The great insights of this passage are that a
single ontology is not suited to the present situation, that the future
world- composition in which every being would have a place and
86 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

agential role will thus be drawn from several ontological feeds, and
that the possible disappearance of humans (or perhaps only some of
them: note that nature is what is given back to the cosmos) can be
averted only through efforts at once cognizant of the planetary scope
of the environmental crisis and radically pluralist in their affirmation
of other responses. One single map will not do, and navigating the
Earth without others will leave it appearing extended and round, its
dominant territories stretched out of proportion, and the humans
inhabiting the rest like insignificant specks, dim and poorly defined.
Humans, yes humans, conceptually and politically inconsequential,
because poorly, neglectfully defined.
At a moment when some sciences expectantly await confirmation
that organisms thrive beyond this planet and the capitalist elite is
speeding toward the colonization of local astronomical space, you
may want to ponder what not equating nonhumans with life and na-
ture has enabled other peoples to discern in the heavens, and thereby
see about the Earth. Perhaps even further different peoples that, were
we to encounter them, might also find naturalism rare and exception-
al, and the primary condition for our current stampede toward death.
They might ask us moderns whether our sibling variations ever fac-
tored into our conception of what it is to be human.

peter skafish currently teaches in the department of anthropology

at the University of California, Berkeley, and was until recently Maître
de conférences associé at the Collège de France. He is the editor, with
Pierre Charbonnier and Gildas Salmon, of Comparative Metaphysics: On-
tology after Anthropology (2016) and the translator of Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics and Catherine Malabou’s The Heideg-
ger Change. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the meta-
physical thought of the American mystic and “channel” Jane Roberts.

Notes

This text began as a lecture I gave in my “Comparative Metaphysics”

seminar in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University
during the autumn of 2013. My thanks to Simone Kaplan-Senchak,
Sheehan Moore, Alonso Gamarra, and Daniel Seggie, whose thought-
ful contributions to that seminar inspired me to write the current
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 87

piece. Special thanks to Matthew H. Evans for his perceptive editing

and suggestions, to Louis Morelle for his comments, and to The An-
drew W. Mellon Foundation, McGill’s Department of Anthropology,
the Collège de France, and the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale for
their generous financial and institutional support.
1. You may wonder, if you need less persuasion than some readers, why
Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, both of whom Descola is quite continuous
with, are not themselves listed among the dangerous. I agree: they in-
deed are, which is one of the points of this little essay.
2. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Originally published as Par- delà
nature et culture (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2005).
3. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–48.
4. For Stengers’s criticisms, see “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux Journal 36
(July 2012), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/reclaiming-animism. I share
many of the political and philosophical concerns Stengers expresses in
this essay, right down to that of whether old ladies—particularly if they
are witches—are right to think that their cats understand them. Our
capacity, that is, to affirm and perhaps engage in animism is a serious
intellectual problem. Michael M. J. Fischer is the American anthropol-
ogist whom I mention. See his “The Lightness of Existence and the
Origami of ‘French’ Anthropology: Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro,
Meillassoux, and Their So- Called Ontological Turn,” Hau 4, no. 1 (2014):
331–55. Fischer raises a few worthwhile criticisms of Beyond Nature and
Culture but tends not to engage the book with much precision.
5. During the same debate, a promising young French philosopher called
Descola a bishop presiding over a cathedral built of Brazilian stones . . .
meaning Viveiros de Castro’s. You can perhaps imagine the effort re-
quired to produce an engaged reading of Beyond Nature and Culture
amid such contention.
6. Apart from Latour, who will probably recognize this intellectual por-
trait of the Descola of Beyond Nature and Culture, there is one other
very notable exception: Michel Serres. In Ecrivains, savants, et philosophes
font le tour du monde (Paris: Le Pommier, 2009), he playfully rereads
modern philosophy, science, and literature on the grid of Descola’s four
ontologies.
7. Bruno Latour, “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’?” Anthropology Today 25,
no. 2 (2009): 1–2. Anyone trained in anthropology, sociology, or other
social sciences will know how stifling many of the great typologies,
88 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

like those of Weber, are when they are not taught or interpreted with
questions different from their authors’ in mind. The rehabilitation of
typology in Descola and Latour, however, requires some creativity in
order to think with, rather than just react to, it.
8. Barbara Glowczewski, for instance, sees a rhizomic ontological style
among Aboriginal peoples, and not the stable collective identities that
Descola does. See her Desert Dreamers (Minneapolis: Univocal Publish-
ing, 2016). See also Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late
Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), which refuses to treat
what she calls the analytics of existence of her Karrabing colleagues as
totemic (a concept that is in her view contaminated by its origins in a
“colonial geography of power”) in favor of showing how they exceed
both the liberal and critical terms ordinarily used to capture them.
9. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish
(Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014), 84. Hereafter cited as cm. I
am somewhat twisting Viveiros de Castro’s criticisms to my ends, as
what he really argues is that the ontology by which Descola charac-
terizes the other three within is analogism, not naturalism. Assessing
that claim is beyond the scope of this essay, but it should be given seri-
ous consideration by anyone wanting to understand Beyond Nature and
Culture. See cm, 81–84 for the full account.
10. The sense ontology has acquired among anthropologists associated
with their discipline’s so- called ontological turn is not the same as De-
scola’s (who has himself spoken recently more of “ways of composing
worlds” than ontologies). For those anthropologists, ontologies are the
results of always-failed attempts to translate other collectives’ nonrepre-
sentational cosmologies into modern terms; the other ontological dis-
tributions then attributed to them are, strictly speaking, the anthropol-
ogist’s best attempt at that translation.
11. I am in nearly complete agreement with Viveiros de Castro’s philosoph-
ical objections to Descola’s text, so my interpretation should be under-
stood as an attempt, optimistic if not a bit quixotic, to show how it
contains a series of the very sorts of transformed, recursive thoughts the
former says it should.
12. This may indeed make Beyond Nature and Culture something of a fan-
tastic geography. I nonetheless think it would be important to under-
stand the empirical character of his claims (which are much stronger
than is usually admitted) and the precise metaphysical consequences
they contain before lauding them for their powers of imagination.
13. Note that they are also said to think analogistically. See Deleuze and
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 89

Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press),

as well as my own criticism of this, in my introduction to Viveiros de
Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics, cf. 15–18. This reference of course rais-
es the question of whether Descola has simply produced an inferior
“geophilosophy,” focused only on big, molar differences. My answer, still
tentative, is that geophilosophy and much of the Deleuzo- Guattarian
corpus remains naturalist on account of Deleuze’s decision to treat be-
ing as univocal, and his treatment with Guattari of indigenous concepts
as haecceities and individuations no different in their kind of differ-
ence from any other. The new anthropological philosophy, and per-
spectivism in particular, instead treats being as radically equivocal, or
plurivocal—given a distinct sense, in principle prevailing on all others,
by each and every being—and thus requiring attention to the differ-
ences between these, starting with those produced by humans. Other
maps, with less predictable, non-preformatted scales and shapes, are cer-
tainly needed, but that would be precisely the point of a “generalized”
perspectivism.
14. This formulation is hardly satisfactory, as it could also and really should
be “North Atlantic” rather than “West.” But I think the dominant cardi-
nal direction and voice in philosophy, critical theory, and even “social
theory” remains the Western European and North American version
of the “Western”— Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—intellectual
tradition, so employing this term is at the same time necessary. A better,
different version of this essay would start from another geographical
vantage altogether, and thus also with a different author.
15. See Sahlins’s foreword to bnc: “Descola marshals not only an all-
continent ethnography but a broad philosophical erudition in which,
since we of the West are also one of the Others, the likes of Plato, Aris-
totle, Leibniz, Spinoza, or Foucault sometimes appear in the capacity of
natives rather than scholarly interlocutors” (bnc, xi). See also chapter 10
of bnc (232–44), in which Descola critically discusses cognitive science
and environmental ethics on the basis of what animists would say in
response to them.
16. Others are François Jullien, Latour, Viveiros de Castro, and behind
them all, of course, Lévi-Strauss.
17. For Catherine Malabou’s simple but poignant explanation of that
point, see Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath, trans.
David Wills (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), and Malabou’s
The Heidegger Change: On the Fantastic in Philosophy, trans. Peter Skaf-
ish (New York: suny Press, 2012). In the latter text she also stresses that
90 qui parle fall/winter 2016 vol. 25, nos. 1–2

Heidegger might in the end have thought that “Being” was an effect of
a transformability of the real more primary than itself.
18. I do not assume that you, reader, have “white skin,” European origins,
and an obsession with reflecting on modernity as if it were your right-
ful intellectual and political inheritance. I say “we” because I think it is
highly unlikely that you are not a cosmopolitan modern, whether in a
majority or “minor” sense. Even if you hail from places that lead you to
have an animistic or analogistic side (where shamanism or witchcraft
and possession, animal or ancestral spirits affect you), I doubt that you
entirely identify with and lack ambivalence about them. And if you are
indeed barely or in no way modern in the sense discussed here, then un-
derstand that I write, even if I inevitably fail, in metaphysical solidarity
with you.
19. Certainly Descola remains close, as Viveiros de Castro points out, to the
Foucault of The Order of Things, but that one is precisely the Foucault in
whom Heideggerians most found their master. We thus see in Desco-
la what might have happened had the second—“ontological”—rather
than the first—“phenomenological”—Heidegger been more widely
taken up by anthropology.
20. For this expanded, metaphysical sense of comparison, see Patrice Mani-
glier, “Manifeste pour un comparativisme supérieur en philosophie,”
Les Temps Modernes 682, no. 1 (2015): 86–145.
21. Specifically, it is about schematizing practices, through almost innate
integrative cognitive schemas.
22. Identification as Descola defines it is, I believe, phenomenological only
if interpretations of Husserl like Graham Harman’s are becoming the
rule rather than the exception. See, for example, the second chapter of
Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of
Things (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007); cf. Dan Zahavi, “The
End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism,” International
Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 no. 3 (2016): 289–309. The difference
between Descola’s account of prepredicative experience and Husserl’s,
in Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), is significant. Even if that
text seems to have influenced Descola, Husserl presumes there that per-
ception is initially of corporeal entities, and, after that, if appropriate, of
other consciousnesses (55–56). That initial perception of bodies (in its
simplest, non-founded mode) is achieved when the subject distinguish-
es like from unlike qualities within unified fields of perception, not
when it contrasts them with its own (74).
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 91

23. Beyond Nature and Culture was published in 2005, just before Graham
Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics (2007) and Quentin Meillassoux’s Après
finitude (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 2006). Unlike Meillassoux, however,
there are for Descola neither primary nor secondary qualities in reality.
Descola is instead proposing something like Harman’s fourfold distinc-
tion between, on the one hand, real objects and their qualities, and on
the other, sensual objects and their qualities.
24. They do, though, have a certain resonance with Spinoza, which ought
to be pursued.
25. See Philippe Descola, “Varieties of Ontological Pluralism,” in Compar-
ative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonnier,
Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (London: Rowan Little International,
2016). I nonetheless do not think, given just how contemporary De-
scola’s thought proves to be—minimally correlationist, object- oriented,
neo-structuralist, radically pluralist, etc.—that the inductive explana-
tion should be rejected as untrue or without relevance. The equivoca-
tion mentioned above between a transcendental subject and a reduced
one reveals that the induction has a radical side. The simple, econom-
ical argument for interiority and physicality is based as much on facts
self- evident to non-moderns as others that are self- evident to moderns.
Dreams, dissociation, and even out- of-body experiences are all said to
be basic human experiences that indicate that an interiority distinct
from corporeality is one of the two basic means of identification. The
intention, however, to make an accurate judgment about a state of af-
fairs is not one of them.
26. See Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson, The Embod-
ied Mind (Cambridge: mit Press, 1991), as well as Descola’s discussion in
bnc, 185–88.
27. “Differences of form and behavior are recognized,” Descola continues
about this ascription, “but they do not constitute sufficient criteria for
excluding a blowpipe or mountain from the advantage of a shared inte-
riority. In contrast, when one says that an animal resembles us because
it thinks with its body but that a computer, even if it speaks and plays
chess, does not resemble us because its parody of interiority is not lu-
bricated by vitality, what returns to the forefront is the argument is a
distinction between an objectivized physicality (a machine) and a sub-
jectivizing physicality (a body). In other words, whatever the anticog-
nitivists may claim, what we have here is the barely readjusted topog-
raphy of the extremely dualist distribution of existing beings between
subject and objects” (bnc, 188).
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28. See, for example, Nastassja Martin, Les âmes sauvages: Face à l’Occident, la
resistance d’un peuple d’Alaska (Paris: La découverte, 2016).
29. Collectives Descola associates with analogism, such as the Classic Maya,
have produced deforestation or overused agricultural land to the point
that it undermined their urbanized societies, but they did not create en-
vironmental conditions jeopardizing large numbers of animal species
and human life as such.
30. This animist experience, in other words, is subsequent to identification.
31. I believe that G. R. E. Lloyd also noticed this about Descola, but he saw
it as an error rather than something to be affirmed. See Lloyd’s Being,
Humanity, and Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014),
17–28.
32. This is to say that the reason Descola thinks that the other is an aliud
is that he has accepted the premise, translated from and attributed to
certain Amerindian peoples by Viveiros de Castro, that “an object is
only an insufficiently interpreted subject”: one always has to determine
first if I am like the other’s consciousness or its body because there is in-
teriority and consciousness hiding within those otherwise inscrutable
things.
33. La composition des mondes is the title of a recent collaborative book be-
tween Descola and Pierre Charbonnier (Paris: Flammarion, 2015).
34. On “ontological pluralism,” see Pierre Charbonnier and Gildas Salmon,
“The Two Ontological Pluralisms of French Anthropology,” Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (2014): 567–73.
35. That one of the ambitions of bnc is to provide some concrete indica-
tions of the character of collectivities without a notion of the social is
yet another reason to engage it.
36. I will spare you the difficulty of following the further turns of analo-
gism, as I will myself the hard work of describing them. What I am ad-
umbrating is the idea that when the subject sees beings as having both
interiorities and physicalities different from its own, it is left without
an initial means of attributing to them identities and compensates for
this by drawing analogies between them and between them and itself;
this establishing identities for them and itself at a secondary level. The
subject is said, for instance, to be analogous, whether by resemblance
or analogy proper (which concerns similarities between relations, i.e.,
A is to B as C is to D), to certain plants, animals, stars, and gods. At the
same time, both that initial absence of identity and the means of com-
pensating for it divides beings, including itself: parts are often taken for
wholes, and then identified on analogy with other beings in a way that
 Skafish: The Descola Variations 93

further undermines the wholes to which they belong. This is why hu-
man interiority and physicality are often conceived as being composed
of a plurality of elements rather than as themselves. The effect of all of
this is to undermine the sense, if it is there in the first place, that inte-
riority and physicality are altogether human in the sense that moderns
assume that they are.
37. I realize that this and other such formulations here remain abstract
with respect to the consequences they might have on the fact that peo-
ple(s) who think in the other ways have been forced to think about (or
just to think) what the other thinks, and that it is only certain people(s)
in the precincts of naturalism that have the existential and political lux-
ury of deciding whether they will think about what the other thinks.
Beyond reaffirming the usefulness of a thought like Descola’s for vari-
ous decolonial projects, I would go a step further and point out that it
is rare that one engages in this kind of heterological thinking outside of
any kind of radicalization or revolutionary conversion.
38. For anyone unfamiliar with Viveiros de Castro or the ontological
turn, the point that understanding alien concepts is synonymous with
a change in ours could be put as follows: if anthropology’s task is to
state faithfully what decidedly nonmodern people think rather than
represent it in terms that are largely incommensurate with it, and if
it wants to report that animist peoples think that all beings, human
and nonhuman, are human, apperceptive, and social, and that they are
only differentiated into kinds by their bodies, or “nature,” then anthro-
pology must state that the modern ideas of nature and culture are not
concepts agreeing with animist thought and can only express its equiva-
lent “concepts” if these two terms’ meanings and functions are inverted
(what is culture to them is nature to us, with culture being general and
nature specific) . . . in other words, only if the two concepts are recon-
ceptualized, which is a metaphysical act. The additional point I made
above, that this thereby involves adopting the alien “concepts,” is im-
plied: changing the terms and functions of nature and culture involves
accepting as valid their Amerindian variations.
39. See Patrice Maniglier, “Signs and Customs: Levi-Strauss, Practical Phi-
losopher,” trans. Matthew H. Evans, Common Knowledge 22, no. 3 (2016):
415–30.