Abstract
In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia by Philippe Descola. 1994 (paperback 1996). Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Reviewed by William H. Fisher
Highlights
Reading Descola’s book brought to mind a conversation I’d long forgotten
Descola seeks to bridge the gap between ecological and symbolic paradigms that have separated scholars of Amazon into opposing camps. These opposing camps rarely have much of interest to say to one another and their exchanges lack the open willingness to agree to disagree evinced by my Amazonian hosts’ cross-cultural conversation on food taboos
Rather than fortify the opposition between materialism and idealism he seeks to demonstrate the irreducibility of praxis in understanding human ecology
Summary
Reading Descola’s book brought to mind a conversation I’d long forgotten. Once when canoe fishing during my thesis fieldwork in Brazil I overheard a Juruna man, whose people have long dwelled along a major Amazonian waterway, grill a forest-dwelling Kayapo about his tribe’s dietary restrictions. The narrative of these chapters, in which myths, incantations, symbolic exegesis, species names, and measurements of labor time and productivity are all interspersed, is meant to bolster Descola’s central contention: these diverse types of data are all essential to understand Achuar ecology, and the possibility of their analytical integration lies in an analytical focus on Achuar practical activity.
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