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,...