‘The Composition of Worlds’ by Philippe Descola

In April 2023 the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, decided to “dissolve” Les Soulèvements de la Terre, an environmental collective that shares many parallels with Extinction Rebellion. In a news magazine controlled by Vincent Bolloré, a Catholic billionaire and France’s prime facilitator of climate skepticism and far-right propaganda, he went so far as to accuse those who inspired the movement of “intellectual terrorism.” Not intimidated by this underhanded move of a leading politician, two dozen Les Soulèvements de la Terre supporters, including high-profile ones such as Greta Thunberg and Philippe Descola, gathered in front of the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme court for administrative justice. Their protest was effective; at least, the Conseil temporarily suspended the dissolution. And the environmental collective, notwithstanding the Minister’s shameless and all-too-blatant ruse to associate it with ecoterrorism, remains very much alive and kicking.

While Thunberg needs no introduction for those who are passionate about the climate crisis, Descola perhaps does. The great merit of The Composition of Worlds is that it provides an engaging, detailed, and yet highly accessible account of the intellectual trajectory of a prominent anthropologist who is also one of France’s foremost public intellectuals, and, increasingly, the favorite thinker of a new generation of environmentalists and climate activists.

The book is written in a conversational style based on interviews conducted by the philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, himself an up-and-coming thinker of the Anthropocene and its theoretical challenges in his own right (Charbonnier 2021). In a French media landscape saturated by puffed-up characters in the style of Michel Onfray or Bernard-Henri Lévy, describing someone as a “public intellectual” may strike one as a bit of an insult. But what Charbonnier manages to bring out very clearly is that Descola is anything but loud and vacuous: what we have, rather, is a public intellectual of an entirely different caliber. As a world-renowned expert on indigenous peoples of Amazonia, his academic colleagues hold him in the highest esteem. As a public figure, he always remained true to himself: with anthropological writings full of relatively complex ideas and intricate theories that are never “dumbed down,” he nevertheless has succeeded in reaching an unusually broad audience. For academic readers, this constitutes the book’s main interest: The Composition of Worlds may not be conceived of as an instruction manual, but it does reveal the intriguing process by which a dedicated academic can influence the general public without undue compromises. Much more than an intellectual biography, the book provides an example for all academics in the social sciences and environmental humanities who dream of having a wider impact without selling their soul.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, A Taste for Inquiry, outlines Descola’s wanderings as a student and young scholar. An avid reader of adventure novels who grew up in “a family that venerated knowledge” (4), he developed the habit of “deliberate distancing” (2) from his own society early on, when his parents sent him to a British boarding school from the age of twelve. He was an avid traveler, too: as an adolescent, he crossed the Atlantic on board a cargo ship and went backpacking in the Middle East and Persia.

One book in particular made an impact on him in the early 1970s: La Pensée Sauvage (recently retranslated as Wild Thought by the University of Chicago Press). Descola’s subsequent meeting with its author, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would become his doctoral supervisor, would prove pivotal. His memory of their initial encounter is rather sweet: “I was already convinced that he was the most important anthropologist of the twentieth century. And I thought to myself that I might as well deal directly with God rather than with one of his saints. Yet it was not without some trepidation that I requested an appointment to meet with him. I think it was in late 1973 or early 1974. For me, it was like going to see Kant in Königsberg!” (24).

It was not always plain sailing though, and this is what makes The Composition of Worlds so insightful: few of his colleagues know that, before his landmark ethnography of the Achuar in Ecuador, there was an abortive bout of fieldwork in Chiapas, Mexico. Abortive because, by his own admission, Descola never really managed to connect with the people he had chosen to study there. This leads Descola and Charbonnier to an interesting reflection on the maybe not entirely coincidental link between anthropologists’ personalities and the particular regions of the world in which they end up working.        

Part 2, An Amazonian Sojourn and the Challenges of Ethnography, focuses on Descola’s work among the Achuar (conducted with his wife, Anne-Christine Taylor), and on his lifelong fascination with the concept of nature or, rather, the absence of nature, for it greatly puzzled him that he could not identify any equivalent of that modern concept in the Amazonian context. In this regard, he went beyond what was generally accepted in the 1980s, including by his own mentor, Lévi-Strauss. The section illustrates his intellectual transformation from an economic anthropologist primarily inspired by the likes of Maurice Godelier and Marshall Sahlins, to a scholar who would renew structuralism by elaborating an unprecedented style of research—what would later become known as “the anthropology of nature.” It also illustrates his maturation from a talented ethnographer to an authority on the ethnology of lowland South America: from the 1990s onwards, Descola has made significant contributions to most if not all of the debates that matter in Amazonian anthropology, including debates on Amerindian perspectivism and historical ecology.

Part 3, The Diversity of Natures, is for me personally the most interesting section of the book, as it provides precious clues about how he developed his signature technique of writing anthropology, an acrobatic balancing act combining rich ethnographic detail, audacious worldwide comparison, and unexpected cross-temporal leaps, for which he is now renowned in academic circles. It offers readers a glimpse into how Descola invented a strange, new telescope: studying human diversity through the lens of four “modes of identification” (animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism), while discarding more familiar, commonly accepted lenses such as culture, nationality, or historical period. Charbonnier’s take is helpful because it clearly explains that this is not an exercise in cultural classification, as some of Descola’s critics assume, but an attempt to grasp how fully-fledged worlds are composed.

Just a few weeks before writing these lines I happened to visit a big retrospective exposition of the work of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), which beautifully showed how, during the 1940s, an estimable, technically-proficient yet not necessarily outstanding painter discovered, fairly abruptly, his trademark style featuring rectangular stains of translucent color. From that point forward, Rothko becomes instantly recognizable. The comparison is no doubt imperfect, but I cannot help noticing a parallel: starting with the publication of Par-delà Nature et Culture (2005)^[1]Published in English as Beyond Nature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Descola’s writings carry an unmistakable fingerprint. In the 2000s, just as Rothko did in the 1940s, he found his very own, immediately recognizable style, which became instantly influential as well. It is to Charbonnier’s credit that he managed to entice Descola to talk about this process in a candid and exceptionally honest way: he is willing to admit mistakes, and recounts how close colleagues such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Tim Ingold made him change his mind on various occasions.

Part 4, The Contemporary World in the Light of Anthropology, zooms in on the question of modernity, his longstanding collaboration with the late Bruno Latour, and the explicitly political turn the anthropology of nature has taken in recent years. Modernity, for Descola, is characterized by a constitutive division between what falls under nature and what falls under society. This results in a kind of “apartheid” in the way that moderns deal with the beings that populate their world. This regime of conceptual apartheid may have functioned reasonably well in the past three centuries or so (at least for Westerners, if not so much for colonized peoples and nonhuman beings), but in the age we now refer to as the Anthropocene, this metaphysical framework will no longer suffice: that, in a nutshell, is the conviction that Descola and Charbonnier share.

The challenge, then, is to imagine better alternatives: not to reinstate antiquated forms of animism or totemism, but to renew our institutional heritage in such a way that nonhumans (e.g., tigers and whales, but also entities such as glaciers, carbon dioxide, and viruses) are given sufficient room and are better taken into account in our political assemblages. The idea that nonhumans could become the allies of all those who are exploited in the current neoliberal system—that one could envisage an inter-species, anti-capitalist coalition of sorts—may sound a bit quirky at first, but that it has gained a considerable amount of traction, especially among young environmentalists and climate activists, is both telling and promising. As Descola (2022, 91) puts it in another, as yet untranslated publication: “C’est d’abord dans la tête que l’on change de monde, car les institutions sont des idées qui s’incarnent dans et par les pratiques.” Changing worlds first happens in one’s head, because all institutions are merely ideas incarnated by definite yet changeable practices.   

Works Cited

Charbonnier, Pierre. 2021. Affluence and Freedom: an Environmental History of Political Ideas. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Descola, Philippe and Alessandro Pignocchi. 2022. Ethnographies des mondes à venir. Paris: Seuil.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2021. Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée Sauvage.” Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt. Chicago: Chicago University Press.