Part II - DWELLING IN NATURE/CULTURE

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Philippe Descola's chapter, “Beyond Nature and Culture”, sets up the main theme of Part II by presenting a radical re-examination of human relations with the world. This leads to his anticipation of “a new exciting period of intellectual and political turmoil”. The reason for this hope is the view, shared by some (but not all) other contributors to this volume, that although an alleged division between “nature” and “culture” may have triggered “the accomplishments of modernity, it has now outlived its moral and epistemological efficiency”. Bruno Latour's discussion of a public debate between Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro about understandings of animism and their deployment in “the task of composing a world that is not yet common” (2009b: 2) illustrates the importance of attention to animism.

Researchers who learn among Amazonian indigenous peoples are, like Descola and Viveiros de Castro, at the forefront of multi- and interdisciplinary debates. The nature of the world, of humans and all life is at stake. It is, then, important that arguments are tested or contested, and improved or replaced by ongoing discussion. In Chapter 7, Laura Rival asks in what distinctive ways lowland South American Indians are animists. She seeks to understand whether there is, despite the insistence of other researchers that all Amazonian life is perceived to be “cultural” not “natural”, a distinct domain of biological but not animistic knowledge. Excitingly, she reminds us that uncertainty is important -that large cultural complexes are lived out in more experimental and provisional ways in which some relations are closer and more significant than others. In doing so, she enriches descriptive and theoretical approaches to animism, ontological animism and perspectivism.