In the Society of Nature

The Achuar Indians live in the remote forest reaches of the Upper Amazon and have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. Philippe Descola, who has gathered material over several years of fieldwork, documents their rich knowledge of the environment. He explains how this technical knowledge of the increasingly threatened Amazonian ecosystems is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society. Combining a symbolist approach with an ecological analysis, the book contributes a new theory of the social construction of nature.

Philippe Descola teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and is a member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale at the College de France