Audiobook10 hours
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
Written by Eduardo Kohn
Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Can forests think? Do dogs dream? In this astonishing book, Eduardo Kohn challenges the very foundations of anthropology, calling into question our central assumptions about what it means to be human-and thus distinct from all other life forms. Based on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ecuador's Upper Amazon, Kohn draws on his rich ethnography to explore how Amazonians interact with the many creatures that inhabit one of the world's most complex ecosystems.
Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction-one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
Whether or not we recognize it, our anthropological tools hinge on those capacities that make us distinctly human. However, when we turn our ethnographic attention to how we relate to other kinds of beings, these tools (which have the effect of divorcing us from the rest of the world) break down. How Forests Think seizes on this breakdown as an opportunity. Avoiding reductionistic solutions, and without losing sight of how our lives and those of others are caught up in the moral webs we humans spin, this book skillfully fashions new kinds of conceptual tools from the strange and unexpected properties of the living world itself. In this groundbreaking work, Kohn takes anthropology in a new and exciting direction-one that offers a more capacious way to think about the world we share with other kinds of beings.
Author
Eduardo Kohn
Eduardo Kohn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.
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Reviews for How Forests Think
Rating: 4.289999992 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
50 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the best books I've ever read in my whole life (and I read a lot!).
2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A friend recommended this book to me when discussing the field of biosemiotics.This book has been my first real introduction to the field of semiotics, which is about signs, meaning, and communication. Language is a form of semiotics. Biosemiotics is the study of how living systems communicate.Kohn's context for the book is his time as an ethnographer with the Runa, and Upper Amazon indigenous nation. In it, he describes epistemology of the Runa, and their cosmology, which places them in the middle of a hierarchy of beings, with dogs below them and forest spirits above them.In reading the title, I expected a book a bit more akin to Merlin Sheldrake's "Entangled Life," which explores the ways in which mycelium weave together different super organisms (such as forests). This book is not about forests, but rather about some of the animals, as well as a few insects, that live within them (such as puma, peccaries, dogs, monkeys, etc.). Also, the book is anthropocentric, in that it seeks to articulate a more nuanced theory of how humans are by looking at non-humans. This provides insight, but again, is truly about forests.Overall, the book leaves me wanting to learn more about both semiotics and biosemiotics.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A great strength of Kohn's book How Forests Think is that he, at necessary points, restates his theses and keeps his arguments present in the mind of the reader. Where other theorists would let their theses become lost to obfuscation as the text progresses, Kohn reasserts arguments at salient junctures, and also grounds his theses in real world anecdotes he experienced living among indigenous Ecuadorians. As an element of his writing style this choice, quite importantly, points to an insistence on accessibility of knowledge. While the book or its ideas and arguments is by no means simplistic, it seems apparent that Kohn wants a fairly diverse array of readers (students and practitioners of philosophy, anthropology, biology, environmental studies, indigenous history) to have a clear understanding of his work, and that points to how he views representation and access as concepts. For Kohn, the very idea of thought of thought and what beings can think and what is a “being”, and moreover what constitutes a being, might be radical to philosophical traditionalists, but it is a vital formulation of a new way of seeing that stresses the precipice we stand on as a society with regard to sustainability and how we live in and with nature.Kohn's particular claim about the necessity of overcoming dualism in regards to man and nature, and their being and representation, is that in overcoming such dualism we do not “do away with representation.” Kohn continues in a parenthetical to illustrate how doing way with representation would also discard telos. For man and forest both telos is an important consideration, especially when the existence of both hang by a thread as we watch industrialism's last vestiges swallow themselves and suck down the Earth and its capacity for life with them. Selfhood, as another example, is also not to be discarded. However, in holding on to our notions of selfhood would must revise them and limit our solipsistic tendency to cast the forest as object, usable but ultimately without value (a dire mistake). Can the forest, perhaps be a self, and on its own terms? Again, we do not say that because representation is faulted because of this dualism that we take issue with representation altogether. Instead, Kohn argues, we realize that we must rethink representation and how it functions. However, he cautions, we must be wary of ascribing human representation to the forest. We cannot, through some ridiculous and half hearted New Age reasoning, anthropomorphize the forest. Kohn isn't trying to claim that trees are sentient or that they “think” in this reductive anthropocentric way that we think about the nature of thinking. Kohn proscribes that we must “radically rethink what representation is. We must free it from our anthrocentric perspective. To do this, he posits, we need to “provincialize” language. We have to sever language from it's imperialist tendencies. Language asserts dominant narratives, not only of the colonizer over the colonized (and we know that the region we now call Latin America has suffered this greatly), but we must expand how we conceptualize language and overturn the epistemologies of language that our rooted in our definition of “the human” and therefore constrained as an expressive mode to only materialize through a specific lens of ho we conceptualize the nature of “being.”Kohn illustrates this by employing several anecdotes about his experiences in the forest hunting and doing other activities with the Runa people. How describes how they heard language in the actions and happenings of the forest, and how they recognized a complete vocabulary in these events. We can only acknowledge this if we “decolonize thought,” because this ends a certain agency and, even more, a representational mode of being, to the forest itself. The fascinating thing about inhabiting (as much we can, so ensnared in our philosophical lineage) this mode of thinking that the Runa acknowledge is that we see how the language of the forest is made up of and reliant on the many animals, plants, and also people that inhabit the forest. It is a language expressed collectively and not in isolation. Also, it's important that we say the Runa acknowledge the thought and language of the forest, rather than say they “formulate” it or “ascribe language” to the forest because in doing that we would reassert the colonial narrative, slyly discrediting their ontology and superimposing their own, casting them as primitive or folksy, reducing their ontology to a sort of metaphorical lay or an indigenous type of “language game” (in the Wittgensteinian sense). To provide us with a new way of seeing as scholars and as inhabitants of the world is a difficult achievement, but Kohn, having spent so long among the Runa and thoughtfully immersing himself in their world, is able to communicate it effectively, to show us that the modes of representation and how we conceptualize thought must be open to revolutionary reinterpretation and new ways of seeing.