I’ve been trying, albeit very slowly, to read through Philippe Descola’s book Beyond Nature and Culture. One particular passage, which I’ve just read, reminds me so much of something I wrote about that I wanted to draw attention to and make explicit what might have been implicit in that recent post.
The passage is in a section describing the ways indigenous peoples of the Amazon, specifically the Achuar and the Makuna, understand and relate to their environment and its cohabitants. According to Descola, they don’t really have the same distinction between nature and culture that is inherent in “Western” languages and their concomitant worldviews. For them, “most plants and animals possess a soul (wakan) similar to that of humans. This constitutes a faculty that classifies them as ‘persons’ (aents) in that it provides them with a reflexive awareness and intentionality that enable them to experience emotions and exchange messages with both their peers and also members of other species, including humans.”
As Descola points out, considering plants and animals to be persons makes the idea of nature or the natural as separate from the human or cultural a little hard to justify. “Is there any place for nature in a cosmology that confers most of the attributes of human beings upon animals and plants? … Can one even describe as a ‘wild space’ this forest that is barely touched by the Achuar, yet that they regard as an immense garden that is carefully cultivated by some spirit? … here nature is no transcendent element nor simply an object that needs to be socialized. Rather, it is a subject in a social relationship. It is an extension of the world of the homestead, and in truth it is domesticated even in its most inaccessible reaches.”
However that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways the Achuar and Makuna distinguish and classify between these different relationships and beings. It just means that what elements qualify you for inclusion or exclusion from some category are different. That is, since humans, plants, and animals are all considered persons, they all share the attributes that Euro-descendants generally consider only humans possess. Yet even within these two groups, the Makuna’s classifications, “are far more flexible than those of the Achuar, by reason of a faculty of metamorphosis that is attributed to all: humans can become animals, animals can change into humans, and animals of one species can change into animals of another species. Their taxonomic grasp of reality is thus always contextual and relative, for the permanent swapping of appearances makes it impossible to attribute stable identities to the environment’s living components.”
Hopefully it’s becoming clearer why I think this is related to my recent post. Here, in full, is the passage I mentioned at the beginning:
The diversity of the classificatory indicators use by Amerindians to account for the relations between organisms shows just how flexible boundaries are in the taxonomy of living beings. For the characteristics attributed to the entities that people the cosmos depend not so much on a prior definition of their essence but rather on the positions that they occupy in relation to one another by reason of the needs of their metabolism and, in particular, their diet. The identities of human beings, both living and dead, and of plants, animals, and spirits are altogether relational and are therefore subject to mutations and metamorphoses depending on the point of view adopted. In many cases it is said that an individual of one species apprehends the members of other species in accordance with his own criteria, so that, in normal conditions, a hunter will not realize that his animal-prey sees itself as a human being, or that it sees the hunter as a jaguar. Similarly, a jaguar regards the blood that it drinks as manioc beer, while the monkey-spider that the cacique bird thinks it is hunting is, to a man, nothing but a grasshopper, and the tapirs that a snake considers as its preferred prey are really human beings. It is thanks to the ongoing swapping of appearances engendered by these shifting perspectives that animals in all good faith consider themselves endowed with the same cultural attributes as human beings. To them, their crests are feathered crowns, their pelts are clothing, their beaks are spears, and their claws are knives.
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture
Without belaboring the point, when Zhuangzi speaks of not knowing whether he is a man dreaming he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man, I read it to mean and embody a way of existing in the world that is more like the indigenous Makuna way than anything else I know of. I don’t interpret the Zhuangzi to be speaking cleverly or metaphorically, I interpret it to be speaking literally, that the transformation of things and identities is constitutive of life itself. The butterfly views the nectar as an ambrosial tonic fit for the gods just as our libations are nectar and pollen for the monarchy.
The challenge, for me at least, is how to experience or access the experience of the transformation of my identity. If this transformation and mutation of who I am is constitutive of life, what is preventing me from recognizing that and knowing that fully? Writing and thinking about it is one thing, but to inhabit the body and mind of another—a non-human other—and experience that perspective as my self? How do I do that?
I’ll end with another passage from Beyond Nature and Culture:
The roundabout of perceptions in Amazonian cosmologies engenders an ontology that is sometimes labeled ‘perspectivism,’ which denies a privileged point of view from on high to human beings and holds that multiple experiences of the world can cohabit without contradiction. In contrast to modern dualism, which deploys a multiplicity of cultural differences against a background of an unchanging nature, Amerindian thought envisages the entire cosmos as being animated by a single cultural regime that becomes diversified, if not by heterogeneous natures, at least by all the different ways in which living beings apprehend one another. The common referent for all the entities that live in the world is thus not Man as a species but humanity as a condition.
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture