Beyond Nature and Culture Contributor(s): Descola, Philippe (Author), Lloyd, Janet (Translator), Sahlins, Marshall (Foreword by) |
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ISBN: 0226144453 ISBN-13: 9780226144450 Publisher: University of Chicago Press OUR PRICE: $98.01 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: June 2013 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Philosophy | Social - Social Science | Human Geography |
Dewey: 304.2 |
LCCN: 2012036975 |
Physical Information: 1.3" H x 6.4" W x 9.1" (1.75 lbs) 488 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture--as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth--is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies"-- animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism--to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. |
Contributor Bio(s): Descola, Philippe: - Philippe Descola holds the chair of anthropology and heads the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale at the Collège de France. He also teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Among his previous books to appear in English are In the Society of Nature and The Spears of Twilight.Lloyd, Janet: - Janet Lloyd has translated more than seventy books from the French by authors such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, and Philippe Descola.Sahlins, Marshall: - Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books. |