Philippe Descola

Descola is best known for his theory of the 'four ontologies' — animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism — which he developed as a framework for classifying how different human cultures conceptualize the relationship between humans and non-humans. This framework was fully laid out in his 2005 book 'Par-delà nature et culture' (Beyond Nature and Culture), which challenges the Western nature/culture dichotomy that Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism took for granted.

Descola conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among the Achuar, an indigenous Jivaroan people living in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. His experiences living with the Achuar in the 1970s and 1980s formed the empirical basis for much of his theoretical work, particularly his understanding of animist ontologies where plants and animals are treated as social beings.

Whereas Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology treated the nature/culture divide as a universal analytical framework, Descola argued that this divide is itself a culturally specific Western construction. His chair at the Collège de France, which he held from 2000 until his retirement in 2019, was titled 'De la nature et des formes de l'humanité' and reflected this departure from classical structuralism.

Descola is considered one of the central figures of the so-called 'ontological turn' in anthropology, alongside scholars like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Bruno Latour. His work argues that anthropologists should take seriously the idea that different cultures inhabit genuinely different realities, rather than simply holding different 'beliefs' about a single shared reality.