Philippe Descola: Familiar art in a strange light

When the French anthropologist Philippe Descola studied the indigenous culture of the Achuar in the Amazon in the 1970s, he had an experience that his teacher Claude Levi-Strauss had already described: The categories in which the Achuar thought and described the world were so different fundamentally from the scientist's expectations that in order to understand them he had to forget part of his own tradition of thought.

A distinction between nature and culture did not exist in Achuar thinking, nor did areas called "technology", "religion" or "history".

If he wanted to even begin to understand this different way of thinking, the traveler in a foreign country first had to become a stranger to himself.

Descola later processed this experience in his famous study "Beyond Nature and Culture" - an anthropological re-measurement of the world that did not have to fear comparison with Michel Foucault's "Order of Things".

However, where Foucault focused on three centuries of Western thought, Descola outlines an ontology on a global scale.

A gifted creature called "Human"

The flight altitude is high, and when viewed from up there, some nuances and details recede into the background.

On the other hand, large-scale structures become recognizable that a geographically and historically close-up view of the ground cannot grasp.

Descola speaks of various "ontological filters" that decide whether the world in which one moves corresponds to the order of animism, totemism, analogism or naturalism.

Only the thought tradition of naturalism, which Descola assigned to the western world since the Middle Ages, categorically distinguishes between intellectually gifted beings called "human" on the one hand and non-human beings on the other.

The very differently organized world of totemism does not provide for such a separation.

Humans, animals, and plants all belong to a common prototype—such as the eagle class—because they share certain characteristics.

On this basis, Descola develops a comparative anthropology of the image in his new major book.

If "the modes of identification", according to the author, "actually have the structuring function that I ascribe to them, then it must be possible to find them in the pictures".

After the somewhat abated debates about the

, Descola's book is nothing less than the draft of a new theory of images.

Descola shares the basic assumption of image science, according to which visual evidence differs fundamentally from the logic of writing.

Instead of “image” the author prefers to speak of “figuration” – a term that is intended to include the visualization of what is represented as well as its anchoring in a specific ontology.

As the attempts at a “world art history” made around 1900 show, universalist designs easily run the risk of regarding one's own culture as a binding norm.

Water, dune, possum and plum tree

Descola escapes from being brought into line by the fact that he doesn't even use the term "art".

Focusing on the special case of art proves to be of little help in attempting its global anthropology.

The schematic depiction of a lake painted on the bark of a tree by a member of the Australian Manggalili clan may appear at first glance to be an artistic depiction of a landscape.

As Descola shows, however, the scheme does not represent an existing topography; rather, the landscape only comes about through the inner relationship of the beings living in it.