“an Anti-nominalist Book”_ Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think _ Savage Minds

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Savage Minds Notes and Que ries i n Anth ro polo gy

June 2, 2014Rex

An anti-nominalist book: Eduardo Kohn onHow Forests Think

Earlier this month I sat down with Eduardo Kohnto talk about hisamazing bookHow Forests Think. We started out discussing hisintellectual influences and ended up ranging widely over his book, thestatus of Peirce as a thinker, what politics means, and a variety of othertopics. Thanks to the hard work of our intern Angela, Im proud to post acopy of our interview here. I really enjoyed talking to Eduardo, so I hopeyou enjoy reading it!

Wisconsin and the Amazon

RG: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk. I really enjoyed How ForestsThink. When I started it I was a little on the skeptical side, but I ended upthinking it was a mind-blowing book. I thought we could begin bydiscussing the background for the book and your training. I see the bookas mixing biology, science studies (especially Donna Haraway and BrunoLatour), and then some sort of semiotics. It seems like there are a lot ofinfluences there. You got your PhD at Wisconsin, so how did that workout? Can you tell me a little about your background?

EK: The way I got into anthropology was through research, by which Imean fieldwork. And I was always trying to find ways to do morefieldwork. I saw Wisconsin as an extension of this. When I was in collegeI did some field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I had a Fulbright togo back and do research after college, and only then did I go to gradschool. Although How Forests Think aims to make a conceptualintervention in anthropology, I think of our field as a special vehicle forengaging intensely with a place in ways that make us over and help usthink differently. The preparation I got at Wisconsin was geared toward



that. It immersed me in area studies in the broadest and most positivesense of the term. My advisor Frank Salomon is well versed in manyfacets of Andean history, prehistory, and ethnography, as well as in theQuechua languages including those spoken in Ecuador (where they areknown as Quichua). I worked with, among others, the tropical botanistHugh Iltis, the Latin Americanist geographers Bill Denevan, and KarlZimmerer, the Latin American historian Steve Stern, and I studiedEcuadorian Quichua with Carmen Chuqun. There was a real sense that Iwas preparing myself intensely for an engagement with the field interms of a multifaceted project which was going to include ecology,anthropology, history, and a serious appreciation for local languages. Ofcourse I had graduate training in social theory and the history ofanthropological thought, but I wasnt trying to get training in a particularbody of theory, it was more that I was trying to engage with a place.

I was also inspired by the way my advisor approached scholarship particularly his sensibility to language; his sensibility to writing; how onecan find ways to see the world afresh and capture that in writing. Forexample, he is very conscious not to adopt rhetorical styles, theories, orjargon from other people and he consciously tries to use writing as away to create his own sort of engagement. Hes a poet. I was very muchinfluenced by this.

RG: I had no idea that Wisconsin had such a specialty in your area. Couldyou tell me more about your advisors work?

EK: Frank Salomon is a historical anthropologist with a broad specialty inNative Andean worlds and their relation to the colonial encounter. I knewhim through his archival and ethnographic work in Ecuador (I hadactually met him in Ecuador when I was a child and he was a PhDstudent!). Most of his work is now in Peru on khipus (knotted cords) andother non-written forms of representation.

RG: I thought perhaps there was some influence on your work there, inhis work on unfamiliar forms of representation and your work onsemiotics?

EK: There is, but when I was at Wisconsin in the early 90s, one of the bigturns was historical anthropology and I was working with a historical



anthropologist. Marshall Sahlins Islands of Histories had just come out.This was the thing to do, and I was doing it. I ended up having to choosebetween two field sites: one was in a cloud forest area that had atremendously interesting colonial history, a history that was visible in oraltraditions (and I was fascinated by the connections between thosestories and the past). The other was an ecological project in the villagewhere I ended up doing the work that became How Forests Think. It wasFrank Salomon who said Look, your heart is in this ecological stuff.Frank is an historical anthropologist, youd think hed want to train hisstudents in his thing. But he recognized that my real passion was for theforest and he allowed me to see that thats where I really wanted to go.

RG: Im not sure that every advisor would be so generous to a student.

EK: It was a real gift. He allowed me to do my thing, and ultimately this iswhat I try to give to my students. Were motivated in the work we do bypassions we dont fully understand, and part of what we need to do asadvisors is to allow our students to tap into that without losing a sense ofwhat others around them are doing and thinking. Frank got what I wasinto, and he saw that even in my historical work I was trying to answerthe same fundamental question: Ive always been dissatisfied with theculture concept, broadly defined, and Im always trying to find ways toget beyond it without losing a sense for the reality of culture. All myprojects have had that as their focus, and this concern has just beengrowing more explicit, which has forced me to be much more preciseconceptually about what Im doing.

The problem with culture

RG: I have to say, How Forests Think is theoretical and abstract at times,but theres a clear awareness of history and of colonialism in the book,which is not necessarily what you would expect from high Francophonetheory. It was refreshing to see you foregrounding colonial processes,especially towards the end of the book, where they became central toyour argument. Could you tell me a little bit more about that critique ofculture? How does that work? What makes you unhappy about culture?

EK: Some of my French colleagues think that theyre beyond cultureand have never had to deal with the problems that the American culture



concept has created; they feel that they can sidestep it completely. Butwhat I mean by culture is a much broader thing and it applies to justabout every approach in the social sciences. The social sciences as weknow them are based on what I would call a linguistic turn (though itisnt always explicitly phrased as such).

Think of Durkheim (who wasnt especially oriented towards language).Society for him was a relational system: One institution can only beunderstood in terms of another; social facts are to be understood only interms of other social facts; you cant, for example, explain social realitypsychologically. The Boasian approach of course is much more overtlylinguistic. But in both you get a system with the same kinds of properties.Certain things can only be understood in terms of their contexts.

I was just rereading Boass famous article On Alternating Sounds, whichwas published in American Anthropologist in 1889. Its a brilliant essay inwhich he says, look, philologists think Native American languages areprimitive because their speakers use different sounds whenpronouncing the same words. And he was able to go back and say,You can see that this is actually the effect of a lack of training in specificAmerindian languages. The philologists are perceiving the sounds notbased on the native phonemic context, but in terms of the languagesthey already know. Boas is making a profound argument aboutcontext. We only hear those sounds that fit the phonemic contexts weknow.

The goal of linguistic anthropology for Boas was to learn to get thesecontexts that are not necessarily our own. And of course you canextend this argument to cultural and historical context as well. Andthen, if you think about Saussure and the influence he had onstructuralism and post-structuralism, and combine that with Durkheimand Boas, you get just about everybody whos doing social theory insome way or other informed by concepts that have to do with howlanguage works. The special realities that were dealing with inanthropology and related fields are relational ones, theyd say, and youcan only understand them in terms of the complex networks that makethem what they are. So any kind of relatum, whether we are talkingabout a social fact or cultural meaning or even an actor in ActorNetwork Theory is the product of the relationships that make it.



RG: Right. In the case of sounds, phonemic contrast is the result of thephonemic structure of the whole language, and it is internal to thosestructures. In Saussure, each sign has its meaning in relation to othersigns, rather than anything outside the system.

EK: Yes. All of these approaches hold that the fundamental humanreality is symbolic thinking, it structures our world, and its different fromall the other things that one might study. It requires its own kind ofscience, a human science. This is not biology, and its not chemistry.

This is all good. But the problem is that theres no way to understandhow these kinds of relational systems connect up to things that are notlike them. Thats the big question: how are these open to the world? Myengagement with culture is about addressing this problem. The STSliterature, the animal studies literature and multispecies ethnography areall wonderful and profound, and are obviously finding ways to getoutside of culture. But they often fall back analytically on something thatI would still call culture in a formal sense. Thats clearest in ActorNetwork Theory. The relata may happen to be material things, but theformal system thats mapped out, the network and the ways in whichentities are made through the relationships that emerge there well, nosurprise, it exhibits the relational properties of human language.

My goal is to try to leave the human, to try to get beyond that kind ofthing. So when I say culture I refer not only to the traditionalanthropological concept but also to the sets of assumptions aboutrelationships that inform Foucault, so much of Science Studies, as wellas other posthumanist approaches. They all explore the properties ofwhat I would call culture in this formal sense even when they arentdealing explicitly with humans or the culture concept.

RG: Its interesting you should mention Boas. I would just note that forsome Boasians, culture is a unique object, which requires a uniquescience. Thats Kroebers argument. But thats not the argument of Sapir,and its not the argument of Boas. I think itd be interesting if we focuseda little bit more on the Sapirian alternative, which is to understandscience as defined by its level of particularity, rather than its object ofstudy. Boas also takes this line in The Study of Geography: He doesntthink that theres something called culture, and we have a unique



science, which must study it. Hes doing something much weirder. I feellike we should take a look at this again.

EK: Youre absolutely right. I didnt get into the technical semiotic stuffuntil my post doc. Before that one of the major sources for me to getoutside language (along with the work of the anthropological linguistJanis Nuckolls) was Sapir. Hes got these beautiful essays on soundiconism. He would interview children about invented words and askwhich of these refers to the big table and which refers to the littletable? And words that have very elongated vowels would invariably belinked to the larger object. And of course Sapir was interested inpoetics. Boas, on the other hand, took evolution very seriously. Iremember in grad school I wrote an essay about Boas as anevolutionary anthropologist, and one of my teachers criticized me: Howcan you say that! He was fighting against scientific racism! But Boasclearly was in profound ways dealing with humans as biologicalorganisms, and I appreciate that tradition.

But the Boasian legacy as its been taken up has ended up moving froma focus on a context that includes the environment to studying contextsthat are much more restricted to humans, like meaning systems. Andthen you get Margaret Meads concept of culture, which we still adopt,even when we reject her approach, or when we bring in historicalprocess.

RG: I think thats really true, and it speaks to the kind of fieldwork thatgets done. Maureen Molloy points out that Mead was one of the firstproblem-based fieldworkers. Her ethnographies were not appreciatedby Kroeber because they werent particularistic. She would go into aplace, do the ethnography, move somewhere else. You kind of wonder,maybe if shed hung around a little bit longer she would have startedasking what are these bugs?

Anyway, you were just now talking about how you got interested inbiology. Was that as a post-doc?

EK: Ive been apprenticing myself to tropical biologists since I was incollege. I did a tropical ecology graduate course in Costa Rica as part ofmy graduate training. I took plant systematics classes and forestry



statistics. I was always interested in finding ways to get into forestecology without necessarily going through humans.

RG: Your book doesnt speak the language of evolutionary biology, but itseems informed by a deep awareness of the forest that comes bothfrom doing fieldwork with Runa people and having that sciencebackground. Its necessary for your project.

EK: And different projects require different kinds of skills, but yes, thatswhat I needed for this project.

Terrence Deacon and Charles Sanders Peirce

RG: The work of Terrence Deacon is a major influence on your book.How did you come across him? Was that during your post-doc?

EK: Basically, Id done this research in the Amazon. I wrote a dissertation,got thinking about articles, and was formulating an article that was tostake out what I would be doing in the book. This was How DogsDream, which came out in American Ethnologist in 2007. I was workingon that at Berkeley, and the year that I came there Terry arrived from theBoston area and we had offices right next to each other. We startedtalking. I would go into his office at four in the afternoon and come out atnine at night

Terrys life project has been to understand the origins of mind. His firstbook was about the evolution of symbolic capacities in humans and hismost recent book Incomplete Nature is about the emergence of mindfrom matter. So when I was at Berkeley I got very much involved withthat, and it was the most intellectually exhilarating thing Ive ever done. Academically, that is. Of course doing fieldwork in the tropical worldwas exhilarating in its own right. But in terms of the academic world, Idnever been exposed to such an interesting set of ideas that was so newto me but that fit so completely with what I was already doing. I dont getto California that much, but he has an ongoing seminar and whenever Ican, I try to participate in it and its still very exciting to me.

RG: Peirce is a major part of your book. I think of Peirce as someone whoinforms semiotic anthropology, for instance the circle that includes



Michael Silverstein and others. But you dont let Silverstein own Peirce,youre drawing on Deacon talking about Peirce? Is that where you gothim? Or do you read Peirce alongside Deacon?

EK: Deacon has been thinking about Peirce for a long time. Whenanthropologists use Peirce they tend to collapse certain things and notdeal with certain elements of Peirce, like his interest in evolution, andthey tend to frame a lot of his work in terms of something you can thinkof as culture.

RG: For people who arent super familiar with Peirces biography, he wasa favored son of Boston Brahmins and then ended up going off on hisown way, and I think at one point had to earn a living by drawing mazesfor people to do in the back of newspapers. He had a very strange life.His work is really a whole philosophy of the universe, its not just aboutlanguage, its very philosophical and I guess bizarre in some sense.

EK: Its an architecture of the universe. Its a huge opus. Hes got 80,000manuscript pages out there. But there are some really consistentquestions that come up over and over again. He has a continuistframework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related toeverything else and philosophical frameworks that posit radical breaksare problematic. Dualisms of all kinds are problematic. So any attempt tounderstand humans without relating humans to other entities that arenthuman is a problem for Peirce. Hes worked out all sorts of ways tomove across those kinds of boundaries.

The other thing thats really important is that his philosophy is directional.By which I mean that he sees certain processes as nested within othermore basic processes. And this is very problematic for us asanthropologists because we want to see complexity and freedom andindeterminacy. Peirce also makes space for spontaneity, but hes verymuch interested in the formal qualities of things. One of the places tosee the nested nature of his approach is in his semiotics. You can haveindexical reference without symbolic reference (as is manifest in thebiological world) but you cant have a symbolic system without indices.Symbols are nested within indices, and a Peircean framework can allowyou to see that. These are the kinds of things that are unpopular. In fact,they get collapsed in a lot of the ways in which Peirce is used in



anthropology. Anthropologists tend to think about icons and indiceswithin the context of cultural systems. Now, of course you do get iconicand indexical processes that are framed within historically contingentsystems, but whats interesting to me are the things that can move inand out of symbolic systems, and how outsides connect to insides.

So when I was at Berkeley I was reading a lot of Peirce, and I was talkingabout it with Terry but also with Bill Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, and others.The standard way to domesticate Peirce is: Peirce, hes yourtheoretician, you apply him to your field site. Or you say, Oh yeah,Peirce, he had his own social context just like everybody else. Both ofthese statements are true, but Peirce is also in some ways more like amathematician. He is extracting things from properties in the world andhes predicting formal properties that the world will exhibit. If hes correctyou will see these properties in the world. And in fact what happened isthat I realized that the ethnographic problems I had isolated werealready semiotic problems and they were also about the connectionswe humans have with processes that are not fully circumscribed byhumans. The Runa were dealing with other kinds of communicativeworlds, the worlds of spirits and animals. This is a problem for them as itwas for Peirce. The material I was dealing with was semiotic. The reasonwhy Peirce and the Runa meet is because theyre being made over bythe same world.

RG: So youre doing explanatory work in two directions: first, youre usingPeirce to explain the Runa. But you also use Runa ethnography to helpexplain Peirce as a thinker. One of the things youre doing in theethnography is saying: All of that stuff in Peirce that we had to ignore inorder to make him a linguistic theorist, it makes sense and can be used.The book helps us see Peirce as a complete figure and makes sense ofhim intellectually rather than just having a massive part of him that weignore or that we dont find interesting or think its too weird to deal with.You give us a more complete picture of him.

EK: Thats right. In fact, one of our colleagues at the University ofToronto, Alejandro Paz, calls this other part, the weird Peirce.

The other thing thats interesting is how concepts can acquire lives oftheir own. For example, go back to Darwin. Darwin had profound



insights about how you get designs without a designer. It doesnt matterwhether or not he believed in God. It doesnt matter if he didntunderstand genetics or got some things wrong. It doesnt matterbecause he discovered a property of evolutionary dynamics that has alife of its own.

You can say the same thing about Peirce. Somebody can say, you see,Peirce thought that crystals think or whatever. And he may have saidthat. But I can show you in Peircean terms and on Peircean grounds howthat doesnt necessarily make sense. Hes no longer the owner of theseconcepts. I dont want to out-Peirce Peirce. Theres a lot of stuff abouthim that I dont understand, and there are many experts on him, and Imnot necessarily one of them. But theres a way in which theres afundamental logic about certain things I can get because the world isdoing it, and Peirce was able to tap into that and Im also able to tap intothat. What were tapping into exceeds both of us.

RG: Right, and the animals tap into that as well, and plants tap into it too. Iwas so surprised at the end of the book to find that you were critical ofthe culture concept. I thought: This is it! This book provides a scaffold tounderstand how culture articulates with biology and biological science,and it provides an argument about the reality of cultural phenomenaeven though theyre immaterial. So much of our idea of reality is tied upin materiality, right? There are things that are real and emergent (forinstance form, or what Sahlins would call structure) even though theydont have physical bodies. That is a powerful way to talk about cultureas a force without reifiying it as a substance.

EK: I am not anti-culture. I think culture is a real thing. But there are twoproblems with how we deal with culture. First, its very difficult to seehow culture relates to the non-cultural. Second, we tend to make culturethe only domain where generality and abstraction occur. What Im tryingto show is that there are other areas where generalities are produced.This is an anti-nominalist book. Humans are not the only producers ofgenerals in the world. It doesnt mean that culture isnt a uniquephenomenon that creates unique realities and unique kinds of structuresand categories. But I dont think that, for example, these spirits of theforest who I discuss in chapter six are necessarily only culturalphenomena. In some ways theyre a product of culture, but theyre an



emergent product of other things, including the semiosis of the forest,which is not fully subsumed by a cultural or symbolic framework.

RG: And you have a way to understand culture as real without having tofall back on some weird 19th-century spiritualist position. You connect itwith the framework of modern biology.

EK: I lay this out in the first chapter. Its called the open whole, incontrast to the traditional Tylorian definition of culture as a complexwhole. I want to say, yes, its a complex whole, but its also an open one.That opening is whats so interesting to me. Culture has the real effectand property of closure, but its also open, and how this works is one ofthe things Im trying to write about in the book.

RG: You mentioned the masters of the forest in chapter six. I would glossthem as a structure of the longue dure that exists at the conjuncture ofa bunch of different causal forces that include things like the naturalenvironment the stuff colonialism just kind of gets sucked into. Since,you know, colonialism is only 400 years old.

Theory, fieldwork, andethnography

One of the things that strikes me about you in the course of thisinterview is that youve really learned and grown and developedthroughout your intellectual career. Youve taken on new influences attimes when some other people would say, I have my framework andIm done. Do you have any tips for students about how to stay activeintellectually and remain able to embrace new ideas when the ideas thatyou already have might seem good enough for you?

EK: I think one of the things that helped, and this was a real luxury andits difficult for me now because I cant do the kind of fieldwork I used todo, is to have ethnographic problems that are interesting to you, that youcant fully resolve, that force you to ask questions.

Thats the beauty of our field that somehow its the ethnographic workthat is making us over, and we then develop theories that might help us.We have problems that trouble us, and we dont know how to talk aboutthem, but we know that theyre important. I was interested in the human-



animal relationships in the forest and all of a sudden I was then involvedin this multi-species turn and having conversations with people likeDonna Haraway. But I wasnt a savvy graduate student, I didnt evenknow who Donna Haraway was when I was in the field! I didnt knowwhat the trends were. It was the world that eventually led me to DonnaHaraway, not the other way around.

Its the same with the ontological turn. Its my work that leads me topose questions ontologically (at a moment when people happen to bedoing this) rather than a current trend driving my work. This is theadvantage that we have as anthropologists. We are thinking with theworld. Thats whats going to keep our thinking fresh. Whats difficult forme now is that I need to go back and think with the world myself.

RG: I think there is something strange about the structure of ouranthropological careers: theres a period of intense immersive research,and then teaching and family, and then never going back to the fieldagain. Sometimes, it feels like no matter how hard you try, thats the sortof political economy of the professoriate. I think it has a tremendouseffect on how anthropological theory works. When you cant get back tothe field, suddenly youre interested in elaborating coherent theoreticalframeworks from the top down, since you dont have fresh data to leadyou from the bottom up, like you were saying.

Is How Forests Think an ethnography? Is that the genre?

EK: Thats a great question. Its not the standard ethnographicmonograph its not bounded by the Runa. Its not about getting theircontext. So, its not an ethnography in that sense. Although after readingit I hope you do get some sense of having had an ethnographicimmersion. But it doesnt have that kind of boundedness in the sensethat my concerns are not necessarily their concerns. My analyticalframework is not restricted to their analytical framework. Its not thatmine is bigger, but just that my project only partially intersects withtheirs. In that sense its not an ethnography. Although it is a form ofthinking that grows from ethnography. And so it is empirical, orexperiential. So in this sense it is extremely ethnographic.

RG: Im just trying to understand whether youre using the ethnography



to elaborate the theory, or using the theory to elaborate theethnography. Whats the relationship between the theoreticalintervention and the descriptive material?

EK: In the actual writing theres a lot of back and forth. If one were tolook at my dissertation, which has none of the theory, no engagementwith semiotics, no engagement with multispecies ethnography or any ofthat stuff, one would find many of the same examples that Im dealingwith in the book as conundrums that allow me to explore the largerquestion of how to situate the human in some sort of larger non-humandomain.

It really is driven by ethnography in that sense. Ethnographic problemssuggest a certain kind of conceptual thinking. But there were alsomoments in writing the book when I had an idea that grew out of a non-ethnographic settings, and I was like, let me find an ethnographicexample to illustrate that. So there is a certain amount of artifice incrafting something like this, where you tack back and forth. But thegeneral movement of this book is that the ethnography is demanding acertain kind of conceptual framework, and the ethnography andconceptual frameworks are coming together because theyre drawingon a shared world.

Is theory political?

RG: A lot of anthropologists in the States would insist that there has to bea political intervention in ethnography. You close the book making theargument that Michael Scott and other thinkers, like Latour, would make:that its politically important to think outside of our establishedframeworks. I just imagine there are anthropologists out there whowould say, thats the lousiest definition of politics that Ive ever heard!How would you respond to that kind of position?

EK: Theres a passage in Marilyn Stratherns The Gender of the Giftwhere she says that radical politics is always linked to intellectualconservatism because to act radically you have to have agreement onwhat youre taking a stand on, and radical intellectual thought creates acertain kind of political conservatism because once youre taking allsorts of things apart, its very hard to act based on shared established



categories.

Its a real problem. On the one hand I feel I can isolate ways of thinkingabout political agency that are different. I can contribute toconversations about things like resistance, and I can think aboutproblems of environmental politics in different ways, but ultimately, Imnot necessarily doing a kind of political work like.

RG: Terry Turner?

EK: Yes. Or some form of witnessing a kind of injustice to which I haveto find some way to attend. Im not doing that. Yet, the question for mepolitically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in theAnthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human andnonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in theirmutual uncertainty? This is where Im headed. And in the book I begin tothink about this political problem. But how does that articulate withwhats happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Whomight be doing something like this? I dont know. Its very abstract rightnow, but thats where the political part of this would go.

RG: Its funny, I cant remember who said this; I think it was June Jordan?She said that the way that it works is that you do the activism first, andthen the theory comes afterward that the theoretical work comes outof the concrete political work of activism and social change. Thatposition sounds Peircean to me, Eduardo Kohnian to me, because itemphasizes the process of being in the world, and is committed to theidea that praxis leads to theoretical innovation. That claim, I think, mayrun counter to the idea that theres something intellectually conservativeabout radical politics.

EK: I like your formulation. There is some way in which I share affinitieswith activism, in the sense that Im being made over first by the worldand then finding ways to account for that, but it doesnt necessarily fallinto the category of politics in terms of addressing oneself to socialinjustices, per se, as the central focus.

RG: What are your future projects?



EK: Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene throughthe logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians butalso with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and Idont know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live inthe Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But Idont know what that means on the ground.

The other project Ive been working on and this is with Lisa Stevensonis also related to thinking forests. Well, for me at least. Lisa is coming toit from a different place and shes been working on it for much longerthan I have. But in terms of my work on thinking forests Im interested informs of representation that are non-language-like and non-symbolic.One of the areas where this crops up is in forms of ethnographicrepresentation that are non-language like. Ive always been interested inphotography (you can see a bit of this through the images in the book)and Ive become increasingly interested in ethnographic film. Wevebeen working together on a few films that are trying to bring out someof this non-discursive representational logic and this is one of thedirections I find the most inspiring at the moment.

RG: Right, Eduardo. Thanks very much for this interview!

EK: Thank you!

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2 thoughts on An anti-nominalist book: Eduardo Kohn onHow Forests Think

JohnMcCreery

Eduardo, thank you for writing this book. Rex, thank you forrecommending it. The Kindle edition is now on my iPad,and the first few pages have already convinced me that Iam in for a treat. The opening scene, in which Eduardo isinstructed to sleep on his back so that the jaguar will seehis face and know that he is not prey is brilliant. It evokedgrowing up in a family of occasional hunters in theAmerican south, and reading that how the animal sees youis important was what I call, using the Japanese expressiona narudhodo (of course) moment. Not quite as dramaticas facing a jaguar; but anyone who has ever sat on a log inthe woods trying to sit still so that the squirrels wont seeyou will know what you mean in a visceral way. Of course,it matters how the animals see us, just as it matters howthey see each other; the natural world is full of camouflageand deception. But then along came Pierce and yourpointing out the difference between symbols on the onehand and icons and indices on the other. The philosophicalconcepts and the verifying experience came together witha bang, like the Zen masters whack on the head.

June 5, 2014 at 8:04 pm



But getting back to more academic anthropology: Howwould you see the relation between your work and that ofMary Douglas in Natural Symbols? She is, of course, stilldealing primarily with symbols, but also with the body asan iconic image of society. It might be interesting to seewhat combining your thoughts would produce. AnotherZen-like whack on the head perhaps.

JohnMcCreery

FYI, I posted the following on OAC. There, too, there hasbeen zero response. Intriguing that, since Kohns book is abrilliant challenge to conventional wisdom.or could thatbe the problem?

Over on Savage Minds, Rex has posted an interview withEduardo Kohn, the author of How Forests Think: Toward anAnthropology Beyond the Human. Kohn has spent a lot oftime working with the Runa, a people who live inAmazonian Ecuador. These people are constantlyconcerned about the intentions of the other non-humanselves that make up a large part of their world.

An older anthropology might simply have checked a boxlabeled animism. Kohn develops a powerful argument byusing terms borrowed from C.S. Pierces semiology toanalyse how Runa perceive the world. He does not denythat there is a part of the world where processesuninformed by intention suffice to explain what is going on.Neither does he deny that humans are unique in theirextraordinary ability to use symbolic forms ofcommunication: language, in particular. But Piercesdescription of semiosis, the process by which intention,purpose and meaning are generated,is not confined tosymbols, which refer arbitrarily to their referents, as theJapanese inu and Chinese gou both refer to the animalsthat English speakers call dogs.

June 22, 2014 at 8:55 am



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Semiosis begins with icons, resemblances, e.g., thepresence of warm blood that attracts ticks regardless ofthe species of mammal in question. It continues withindices, signs that signal the presence of differences, e.g.,between the sounds made by a deer and a jaguar, forexample. Symbols properly speaking emerge from acontext in which both icons and indices are alreadypresent. Where do we find icons and indices, asks Kohn.Wherever there are living things whose behaviour isoriented toward future, not yet present, events (whatTerence Deacon calls abstentia). The jaguar lurking in waitfor prey and the deer alert to avoid its attack both exhibitthis kind of behaviour, as do human hunters. And so, saysKohn, do plants that seek the conditions they need togrow, putting out roots toward sources of water, or leaningin the direction from which sunlight comes. On Kohnsaccount, the whole living world is shaped by semioticprocesses of which human use of symbols is only a specialcase.

What is powerful about Kohns argument for me is the waythat it resonates with childhood experience hunting, fishingand gardening with my father. If we wait here and stay still,we will see a squirrel pop out of that nest, The rockfishprefer the shallows near the marsh, These tomatoes wantmore sun. Yes, we can look for mechanisms that explainaway the intentions that these sorts of remarks assume;but as Terence Deacon also observes, they are rarely ifever sufficient to explain what we see.

Do I believe all this? Maybe. Do I find it fascinating? I do.

“an Anti-nominalist Book”_ Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think _ Savage Minds

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Transcript of “an Anti-nominalist Book”_ Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think _ Savage Minds