This book focuses on the nature/society interface from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, drawing upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies - from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. Among the questions posed by the authors are the following: Are the different cultural models of nature conditioned by the same set of...

This book focuses on the nature/society interface from a variety of theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, drawing upon recent developments in social theory, biology, ethnobiology, epistemology, sociology of science, and a wide array of ethnographic case studies - from Amazonia, the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, the Mollucan Islands, rural comunities from Japan and north-west Europe, urban Greece, and laboratories of molecular biology and high-energy physics. Among the questions posed by the authors are the following: Are the different cultural models of nature conditioned by the same set of...

The Achuar Indians of the Upper Amazon have developed sophisticated strategies of resource management. The author documents their knowledge of the environment, and explains how it is interwoven with cosmological ideas that endow nature with the characteristics of society.

The Achuar people have survived in isolation in the Amazonian jungle by aggressively resisting intruders. In this book, Descola depicts an altogether unfamiliar civilisation, whose values often seem bizarre to Western eyes.

Stephen Rostain's book is a culmination of 25 years of research on the extensive human modification of the wetlands environment of Guiana and how it reshapes our thinking of ancient settlement in lowland South America and other tropical zones. Rostain demonstrates that populations were capable of developing intensive raised-field agriculture, which supported significant human density, and construct causeways, habitation mounds, canals, and reservoirs to meet their needs. The work is comparative in every sense, drawing on ethnology, ethnohistory, ecology, and geography; contrasting island...

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture?
Culture as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants,...