01 December 2019
The Latest of Knowledge Transfer Project Publications: “Beyond Nature and Culture”
To transcend the Western dualism that opposes nature and society as two different and separate realms of beings. To include in our study the relation between human and non-humans – gods, spirits, plants, animals, objects. 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. 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, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— “Animism”, “Totemism”, “Naturalism”, and “Analogism”—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh.
This book titled “Beyond Nature and Culture” is the 34th in a series of publications by Bahrain Culture Authority. The project has so far translated : “ Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn”, “Did Greeks Believe in their Myths?” by the French intellectual Paul Veyne, and Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century”, and “ Psychoanalysis as a Science, Therapy and Cause” by the Egyptian psychoanalyst living in France, Mustapha Safwan. and “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity” by Marc Augé and Three ABCs by Clarisse Herrenschmidt, “The End of the World as We Know it” by the American Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Story of Art” by Ernest Gombrich, “A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet” by n Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, “Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc” by Arthur Miller, “The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation” by Hayden White, “ Ethnology Approach” by Pacal Debie, and “Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity” by Marc Augé, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel ? by Pierre Levy, and “ Should We Think of the World in Another Way” by Chritian Gratello, “The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity Paperback”, “Sociology of Religion” by Amartya Sen, Danièle. Hervieu-Léger, Jean-Paul Willaime “Sociology of Religion”, Irwin Dianatelle and Michael Louis, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method”Marianne W Jorgensen “,“ History at the Limit of World History” by Ranajit Guha, “ The World of Thought in China Today” by Lan Chung”, “How to Do Things with Words” by John L. Austin.
