Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola

Author:Philippe Descola [Philippe Descola]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

10

Terms, Relations, Categories

Now that we have completed this tour of ontologies, both exotic and familiar, we can define and enrich the table of modes of identification with more precision. Depending on what characteristics humans discern in existing beings, judging on the basis of their idea of the physical and spiritual properties of their own persons, continuities and discontinuities of varying proportions are established between the entities of the world, classifications based on identity and similarity come to seem self-evident, and frontiers emerge, consigning different categories of beings to separate regimes of existence. The distribution of the four combinations of resemblances and differences is organized on the basis of two vertical axes. One is characterized by wide dichotomous separations, by the preeminence of continuity over discontinuity and by the inversion of the poles of hierarchical inclusion. In animism, the continuity of interiorities between humans and nonhumans that share the same “culture” takes on a universal value (in contrast to the particular and the relative introduced by differences in forms and biological equipment). Meanwhile, in naturalism it is the continuity of physicalities within the unified field of nature that plays this role (in contrast to the particular and the relative introduced by cultural differences). The other axis favors chromatic continuities and, in a paired symmetry, juxtaposes a system of resemblances tending toward identity (totemism) and a system of gradual differences tending toward continuity (analogism) (fig. 2).

It might reasonably be objected that the world and its ways are far too complex to be reduced to this kind of combination of elements. But we should remember that modes of identification are not cultural models or locally dominant forms of habitus. Rather, they are schemas for integrating experience, which make it possible to structure, in a selective fashion, the flux of perceptions and relations. They do this by noting resemblances and differences between things on the basis of the same resources that every human carries within himself or herself: namely a body and intentionality. Given that the principles that govern such schemas are ex hypothesi universal, they cannot be exclusive, and we may suppose that they coexist potentially in all human beings. One or another of the modes of identification certainly becomes dominant in this or that historical situation and is consequently preferred and mobilized both in practical activities and in classificatory judgments, although this does not prevent the three other modes from sometimes infiltrating the formation of a representation, the organization of a course of action, or even the definition of a field of customs. Thus, most Europeans—and I am no exception—are spontaneously naturalists by virtue of their education, both formal and informal. But that does not prevent some of them, in certain circumstances, from treating their cat as though it has a soul, from believing that the orbit of Jupiter will affect what they do the next day, or even from identifying with one particular place and its human and nonhuman inhabitants so closely that the rest of the world seems to them to be of an entirely different nature from that of the community to which they are attached.

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