Philippe Descola: Thinking with the Achuar and the Runa in Amazonia

Abstract

This article proposes a re-reading of one of Philippe Descola’s earliest works, La Selva Culta, Simbolismo y Praxis en la Ecología de los Achuar. Despite Descola’s focus on the relation between natural domains, consanguinity, affinity and marriage, this book’s rich descriptions show the Achuar’s understandings of non-human sociability. The book also gives insight into the mutually constitutive assemblies of which human plants and animals form part. In later work, Descola reinterprets the ethnography of La Selva Culta, now with a focus on the human/non-human relationship. I explore the openings and closures of these new interpretations, and see them in relation to the possibilities and blind zones that conceptual tools related to more-than-human approaches may offer. In the discussion of the latter, I draw on my own work on the Runa, and reflect on the implications for more-than-human approaches when, as Descola suggests, humanness exceeds the concept of ‘the human’.

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