Provincializing Nature

A Phenomenological Account of Descola’s Relative Universalism

Bibliographic Data

ID6427906
AuthorsGabriel Lago De Sousa Barroso (0000-0002-0492-3158, University of Fribourg, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume48
Issue2
Pages489-512
Publication date2024-07-29
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHuman Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-8548 • E-ISSN: 1572-851X
PublisherSpringer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s10746-024-09749-y
OpenAlexW4401083055
LanguageEN
References cited36

Anthropologists have recently argued that the divide between nature and culture is not a universal framework suitable for understanding collective behavior but rather a local variation among various ways of composing the experience of the world. Notably, in the case of Philippe Descola’s anthropology, this critique led to a radical reconceptualization of social sciences and the humanities in terms of ontological regimes, which draws upon key aspects of the phenomenological tradition. In this paper, I develop a phenomenological perspective on Descola’s anthropology to clarify whether and how we can assess our engagement with the world beyond the divide between nature and culture. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first section, I present the main claims of Descola’s position, which he calls “relative universalism,” and introduce two critiques of this project: the potential conflation between his ontological framework and aspects of modern naturalism and the risk of reifying cultural determinations as ontological properties. In the second section, I address the first critique by showing how the universalist claim of Descola’s anthropology, according to which collective experience is organized by the duality of planes of physicality and interiority, can be elucidated through Husserl’s account of the embodied experience to avoid a conflation with the naturalist framework. Finally, I contend that anthropology’s idea of a diversity of ontological regimes can be made coherent by analyzing the two layers of the world constitution: the primordial experience of the lived body and the intersubjective process of communalization

Conflation · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Naturalism · Politics · Sociology · Universalism · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy

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