Beyond Nature and Culture Paperback / softback
by Philippe Descola
Paperback / softback
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Description
Successor to Claude Levi-Strausa at the College de France, 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 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 than 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.
Information
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In Stock - Less than 10 copies availableFree UK DeliveryEstimated delivery 2-3 working days
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:488 pages
- Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
- Publication Date:22/10/2014
- Category:
- ISBN:9780226212364
Other Formats
- Hardback from £66.25
Information
-
In Stock - Less than 10 copies availableFree UK DeliveryEstimated delivery 2-3 working days
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:488 pages
- Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
- Publication Date:22/10/2014
- Category:
- ISBN:9780226212364