The Composition of Worlds Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier

In this autobiographical reflection, the distinguished anthropologist Philippe Descola looks back on his intellectual career and examines both the central themes of his work and the key questions that have shaped anthropological debates over the last forty years. 

A student of Lévi-Strauss, Descola did ethnographic research among the Achuar of the upper Amazon in the late 1970s, focussing on how native societies relate to their environment.  In this book he sheds fresh light on the evolution of his thinking from structuralism to an anthropology beyond the human, on the critique of the modern separation between nature and society, and above all on the genesis and scope of his master work Beyond Nature and Culture. This synthesis of the ways in which humans view their relationships with other-than-humans proposes four major 'compositions of worlds' (animism, naturalism, totemism, analogism) that characterise our ways of inhabiting the earth.

Presented in the form of an extended conversation with Pierre Charbonnier, this book is both a lucid introduction to the work of one of the most original anthropologists writing today and an impassioned plea for a pluralism of ontologies that would be more welcoming to the diversity of beings.

Philippe Descola is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at EHESS, Paris.

Foreword to the English edition



I. A taste for inquiry

                                            
Philosophical journeys
                                           
Discovering the mind, discovering the world
                                 
Among the tribe of anthropologists
                                     
Entering the pantheon

                                                  
    
II. An Amazonian sojourn and the challenges of ethnography

                    
The world of the forest
                                          
Living and working among the Achuar
                                    
The trial of return
                                                   

III. The diversity of natures
                                              
The four corners of the world
                                              
Methodological questions
                                              
Conceptual reform
                                                
Forms of figuration

                                          

IV. The contemporary world in the light of anthropology

                 
We Moderns
                                                 
From anthropology to ecology
                                     
Political anthropology
                                      
The museum
                                                   

Bibliography

Notes

Index