| Title | : | How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0520276116 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780520276116 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 267 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2013 |
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human Reviews
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Note to self: if you write a book about how FORESTS think, define what you mean by 'forest'. This book is all about thinking, and many different ways of thinking, by many different thinkers in a forest. But if you are wanting to read something about the agency and thinking of the actual trees or other less animate objects in a forest, you'll be disappointed. I think then you should probably read: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World by Peter Wholleben.
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Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think (2013) is an inquiry on how to think beyond human as subject of anthropological study. Thus, it provides us with academic understanding of our strongly relational ties with non-human beings, which are constitutive in and for our presence in the world. In this study, ethnography is not an object, but a medium to comprehend multiple ontologies; hence, it is much different from traditional anthropological works, which mostly focus on cultural representations. Without giving up being “human,” the writer discloses how our “selves” are interwoven with other “beings.” In this sense, he offers us to approach the human and non-human as active agents in our thinking of anthropological study.
Kohn conducts his ethnographic fieldwork from 1996 to 2000 in Avila, an Upper Amazonian village in Ecuador. He uses ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and interviews, in addition to his linguistic analysis and epistemological explorations. Thus, I was expecting an ethnographic examination on culture, gender, or kinship structures in Avila. Also, I was wondering if he would theorize social, economic and political dynamics of the region in relation to the larger historical context. However, Kohn does not do what many of the previous ethnographies have aimed to do. Rather, Kohn criticizes human-centric approach of the Western anthropology by focusing on other-than-human beings, and he proves us the importance of studying human within a relationship with its surroundings. I will explain how.
Although his fundamental theoretical approach is based on semiotics and semiosis, Kohn does not see signs just as human affairs. In his account, signs are constitutive in life both for human and nonhuman beings (43). In drawing our attention to those signs, Kohn delicately interrogates how different “beings” relate to and communicate with each other. He calls this relationality “ecology of selves,” which he finds and formulates within the rainforest of an Amazonian village, where trans-species semiosis pervades and connects all living selves. A very good example of his idea of relationality is the example he gives about ants and blowing tobacco smoke in Chapter 2. Because rain starts when ants appear, people become able to impede rain by using tobacco, whose smoke prevents ants from coming out. Similarly, when Juanicu whistles like a siren, the flying ants understand as the call of their “mothers” and they answer by coming to the source of the sign (81). As a result of such communication, a relational world, where both human and animal coinhabit, is created.
However, Kohn’s book is not only about humans and animals. In Chapter 5, he talks about “perceptions” of cross-species. For instance, Runa puma, shape-shifting human jaguar, also has a perception of seeing things around himself. Whether Runa sees you as a human being or a piece of meat totally depends on Runa’s perception of you, as well as the way you present yourself before him. Therefore, you may or may not be eaten by the jaguar depending on your visual representation. In a similar vein, the Runa in their everyday life see the game animals that they hunt in the forest as wild animals, but they know that this is not their true manifestation. Hence, they do not eat, for instance, the spirit master’s chicken (178). In other words, people, Runa, and all other organisms in the forest use signs primarily to survive in this relational world.
Therefore, he draws our attention to the revolutionary potentials and scholarly possibilities of studying another type of anthropology, in which we open up ourselves to various "selves." His study converts Redfieldian notion of “worldviews” into different “worlds” of non-human beings. Kohn introduces us another world—a world where human and non-human melt into each other through semiosis of all life. Focusing on the potentials of thinking beyond human in anthropology, he provides alternative ways of thinking within scholarly language and unconventional ways of using ethnography. Kohn uses ethnography as a tool to explore the spectrum of forest, which seems larger than "little communities." However, my critic starts right there, as I would like to know more about ethnographic aspects of his work related to the Avila community. What kinds of people are able to relate themselves to the non-human selves of the forest was one of my curiosities while reading this book. How is their society organized in relation to their semiotic relationship with the world? What are their spiritual motivations and cosmologies? How does food function in this society where hunting is a fundamental phenomenon? Is there any relationship between their colonial history and their hesitation to use power upon other beings in their surrounding? I believe, in order to understand humans’ relationality with their surroundings, we also need to know such constitutive aspects of their lives. I would like to learn more about Avila community as human is already at the center of this book. Who else is going to talk about this, if not Kohn?
Moreover, I left confused about the distinction made in the book between living and nonliving forms. The writer says that patterned distribution of rivers or the recurrent circular shapes of the whirlpools are among the nonliving emergent forms in Amazonia, as they are constrained, and thus, they cannot flow freely as much as the water itself (159). However, within a new relationality, which is supposed to be developed in the new environment, they will be living in different ways and within different forms, even though they are constrained. Furthermore, he continues discussing whirlpools as simpler forms than the freer flow of water (166). However, I left wondering what makes the water free. Shall we still consider this flowing water as free, even there is a whirlpool on its way? Or, is the water also constrained affected by the whirlpool? What is the relationship between whirlpool and water? What is the relationship between water, whirlpool, and rubber trees? In order to understand “how forest thinks” as a whole, we need to understand this relationality in a larger context with more ontological explanations.
Yes, the language is tough, and it necessitates from the reader to have some background information on semiotics, ontology, and epistemology to the extent of postmodernism and posthuman critics. I do not think that the book is for the general reader, but inevitably an innovative contribution to anthropology with its writing performance. Just as a snowflake having a provisional form between present and absent, Kohn presents us a language whose form can change in any moment. His poetic language is robust yet also fragile—as if the words may rebel at any time and break apart in front of your eyes. He perfectly uses possibilities that are provided by the language, as another sign system. Among the non-textual ways of communication with the reader, the writer’s use of photography perfectly fits with the philosophical profundity of the text. I could not prevent myself from looking at the series of very well selected photographs over and over again.
Although his book is not considered as a traditional ethnography for the reasons that I mentioned above, since he opens up the scholarly work into dialogic epistemologies and provides multiplicity of experiences from an unconventional inter-species analysis of subject-object relationships, it must be considered one of the finest examples of critical ethnography. -
Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human asks humans to understand the world through the perspectives of other than humans. Further, through his research, Kohn encourages anthropologists to engage in ethnography beyond the human. Kohn weaves his own ethnographic research conducted alongside Amazonian Avila with various theories such as that by Viveiros de Castro, John Berger, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Tim Ingold to just name a few whose ideas make appearances in the book. Through the intricate weave between ethnographic research and theories, Kohn claims we need to see the world/us from beyond the human perspective because such paradigm shift will not only bring about drastic destabilization of what we take for granted, but also completely change the way we see and interpret the world. Through this book, Kohn gives an example of how humans can remain distinct yet maintain their connection to other than humans at the same time. Kohn, an associate professor of Anthropology at McGill University, divides the book into six chapters. Each chapter lays a building block for understanding the following chapters.
Justifiably, Kohn begins the first chapter by discussing language structure, the basis of human ontology. In Chapter One: The Open Whole, Kohn sets out to separate thought and language. The difference between symbols, icons, and indices is key to understanding the author’s claims. To borrow Kohn’s words, “unlike iconic and indexical modes of reference, which form the bases for all representation in the living world, symbolic reference is, on this planet at least, a form of representation that is unique to humans” (31). Icons are based on their virtue of resemblance to the objects/events that icons are attempting to represent, while indices represent through direct link to the objects/events (32). Any beings in non-human form have access to icons and indices. On the other hand, symbols built upon icons and indices are only privy to humans as context-dependent form of communication/language (39). Based on such framework, Kohn claims the symbolic is both continuous with the rest of nature and novel at the same time (56). In other words, through a breakdown of language into icons, indices, and symbols, Kohn convincingly claims humans are distinct and linked to nature at the same time. If one is interested in how humans are deeply related to nature, I suggest one read David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous alongside this book because it gives an especially accessible explanation of the relationship between human language, temporality, and landscape.
In Chapter Two titled The Living Thought, Kohn builds from the claim he made in the previous chapter that humans are simultaneously distinct from and very much related to nature, to suggest that all living beings think, not just humans. Through this chapter, Kohn attempts to explore thoughts beyond the realms of language. The key term for this chapter is semiosis. According to Kohn, any living organism will exhibit characteristics of forgetting and remembering which fosters semiotic change in the living being (76). Semiosis is what differentiates living beings from non-living beings. Forests, as living beings, have a lineage of the past, present, and futurity while non-living beings like snowflakes exist just for themselves (77). Semiotic growth in living beings serves as proof of thinking that non-human living beings engage in. Thinking is an inevitable and generalizable condition of all living beings in order for them to semiotically grow with their environment. This chapter is particularly interesting in light of the popular idiom “I think therefore I am.” While scholar Kenneth Morrison disposes of the term in favor of “I relate therefore I am” in his article “Animism and a Proposal for a Post-Cartesian Anthropology,” Kohn extends the definition of thought to all living beings. I believe the chapter would have been made more interesting had Kohn engaged in Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” to link Kohn’s theory of thought to the popular idiom engrained in our (Western culture’s) ontology.
If the two chapters I mentioned above were theory-based in order to lay the groundwork for the book, the remainder of the book is more evenly balanced in terms of intertwining ethnography with ontological theory. In Chapters Three (Soul Blindness) and Four (Trans-Species Pidgins), Kohn incorporates his first chapter claim on human relationality to nature, and second chapter assertion that all living beings think, into Amazon Avila context. For Avila, death is only a way that the self surpasses the embodied limitations (105). Selves exist beyond physical death because beings have souls (105). Kohn supports such analysis by discussing “Aya,” the dead and soulless beings who lost connection with living humans (112). Not all dead humans become Aya, most maintain their souls and go to the forest master’s underground domain where the dead beings with souls take on different physical shapes and can interact with their living human relatives (110). Dead beings are not the only ones at risk of being alienated with their souls, living humans are just as likely to lose connection with souls. The “cosmic soul-blindness” makes one lose connection with other souls, and “radical soul blindness” makes one become blind to one’s own soul (130). Beings who maintain such soul-blind state may become the odd-one-out in the grand scheme of semiotic growth that all living beings partake in. Such alienation inevitably leads to ultimate death or extinction of the being.
Through a more detailed analysis of connection through souls in Chapter Four, Kohn notes of clear hierarchical order among Avila inter-species context which is not an ethically condemnatory practice but a reasonable practice born out of the Avila problem of maintaining a connection with others but also not losing oneself in the connection. Clear hierarchy exists between dogs, humans, and spirits of Avila with dogs coming at the bottom, humans in the middle, and spirits at the very top (144). Unlike many other hierarchies in Western society such as class and gender hierarchy, this particular Avila natural hierarchy, in Kohn’s observation, is not morally despicable because morality rises from symbolic language (133). Therefore, morality is confined to the human domain; the ethics used in human society cannot be utilized in understanding natural order. Instead, the dog-human-spirit hierarchy symbolizes Avila (or perhaps all human) struggles to “negotiate the tension between It and Thou” (152). In order for Avila to address the dogs through trans-species pidgin, Avila raise the dogs above the “it” status, but if humans address dogs as Thou or vice versa, humans fall to the ranks of the dog. Such precariousness represents Avila understanding of human location in nature. If a reader unfamiliar with Martin Buber’s I and Thou read this chapter, I believe this chapter would be quite difficult to comprehend. Although Buber’s theories are integral to the chapter at hand, besides an epigraph at the beginning of the chapter, Kohn does not spend much time in describing Buber’s theories.
Finally, in the two final chapters of the book, Eduardo Kohn makes, shall I say, much more overtly politically nuanced claims. While Chapter five: Form’s Effortless Efficacy expands Kohn theories via Amazonian colonial rubber industry practices, Chapter Six: The Living Future (and the imponderable weight of the dead) extrapolates on Chapter Three to make a final push to support Kohn’s claim that links us to the past and future as well as other non-human living beings. Form is the word Kohn uses to describe patterns that emerge from ways of thought (158). Like icons and indices, or thought for that matter, form does not just belong to humans. Amazon rubber trees have their own form; because of parasites that target rubber trees, the trees are widely distributed throughout the Amazon, not just clumped together in patches (161). In fact, non-human beings all have their own forms which are amplified by the ways humans or other non-humans use such form to their own benefit (225). Beings’ (especially human beings’) distinctive way of thinking, which leads to particular forms, makes one blind to other forms of life as well as our own form which constrains us from seeing other ways of living (185). Therefore, in Chapter Six, in a beautifully written sentence, Kohn summarizes the stakes of this book as going into the realm of the living into the world of spirit masters in hopes that we can better understand what continuity and growth means so that we can find better ways of living (196).
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human is a critical and insightful read for anyone interested in understanding human position in the larger ecological context. Although the book is theoretically dense and difficult to get through because each consecutive chapter builds on the previous chapters’ theories, the book has the potential of being a reference for wide range of folks from environmental activists and anthropologists to politicians. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human is also applicable for readers who just want to find their position in the vast array of beings that crowded the past, interact with us in the present, and will arrive in the future. The book may be more difficult to understand than a common self-help book, but for anyone willing to spend serious time and thought into the issues that I described throughout this review, this is the book for you. -
I'm having a hard time processing this book into 'regular' language. I suppose that means I haven't understood it so well, which is likely true. The language is so densely academic that I understand while I'm reading (or think I do) but have a difficult time relaying what I've understood.
The author lived with the Runa in the Amazon but, although an anthropological study, this is not a study of how they see the world. Or how 'we' see them. It tries to go beyond to how all living creatures have to think to solve their problems. And if we understand how they think we can move past our ways of speaking about the world which tends to divide us into us (people) and it (the natural world) or them (animals). As humans, with language, we turn images into words. Animals understand images. A crude representation of a hawk with its defining characteristics emphasized can be used as a scarecrow to frighten parakeets away from crops; they recognize the image as dangerous and humans can use this knowledge for their own purposes. We would have a greater understanding of our world if we could understand the relevant images of the non-human beings around us.
An ambitious book, the author tries to show how the forest itself is alive, a living entity that also thinks in images. Here, from what I understood, he's speaking of the genetic algorithm. Much can be learned of the shape of an anthill by looking at the shape of an anteater's snout. More than that, the anteater's snout today and now, is haunted by all the anteater's snouts before it that weren't perfectly constructed to fit the anthill and therefore are no longer represented; they're dead. In this way the past informs the present. Beyond that a living entity, in order to survive, must also be able to 'see' into the future, to predict where the prey is likely to be at a given moment, for example.
Trying to re-phrase how the author describes the forest itself as a living entity is where I get a bit lost. I have to quote: "...a world characterized by self-organization need not include life, and a living world need not include symbolic semiosis. But a living world must also be a self-organizing one, and a symbolic world must be nested within the semiosos of life."
This isn't a great summary. There are a lot of big ideas here that I can't address properly. It's truly fascinating. And for all the density of language it's a compelling, extremely original book. -
An incredibly interesting book on anthropology and how indigenous people of South America see the world.
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I first shelved this ages ago I think mostly on the strength of the title, and picked it up with a bunch of other books earlier this summer. When I dipped in to sample the first chapter, I realized it had some bearing on an upcoming project, so I put it off until the time when I was prepared to confront that project. In the meantime, I pursued another line of research that I knew was vaguely related, but which actually turned out to be important context for this book, so by the time I went back to it, a lot of the theoretical context was no longer unfamiliar. With that information in hand, I could appreciate that the project this book is engaged in is fundamentally the same one I was trying to achieve on my own: expanding postmodern epistemology to coherently describe all life.
Kohn does that by integrating anthropology with biosemiotics (the latter is the context I gained from other reading). He uses the ethnography of his study population, the Avila Runa, not so much for its own sake as for a series of nested and layered examples to illustrate his broader approach. That ingredient provides the flavor that keeps everything grounded, unsentimental, and comprehensible. There are a lot of pitfalls along the way and the book mostly avoids them. First of all, semiotics is fairly dreadful to read about, almost as bad as postmodernist critical theory itself.
Then there's the new age dimension. My reading for this project has also brought my attention back to phenomenology, and reminded me of the work of David Abram. Abram uses phenomenology in almost exactly the same way that Kohn uses semiotics, as a way to bridge human culture back into the perceptual and sensual web of complete ecosystems. I think both approaches are fundamentally valid (they are basically two sides of the same coin), but Abram is pretty unabashed about using that idea as a framework for deep ecology prose poems and meditations, Kohn is strictly business. Both of those goals are acceptable, but for a work of philosophy, I appreciate the rigor.
One of the most important things Kohn achieves is in distinguishing the biosemiotics approach from Actor – Network Theory, which fails (to my limited knowledge) precisely because it tries to achieve the same thing by throwing many meaningful distinctions out with the realist bathwater. That kind of precision is important, as is dispelling notions that this opens up channels to oneness with the universe or something. Kohn carefully articulates a hierarchy of processes, forms, and sign relationships and specifies the ways in which they do, and do not, enrich the perceptual world available for the ethnographer to describe. He is especially careful to emphasize that the highly attuned ecological consciousness of the Runa doesn't necessarily produce results that are kinder or even more sustainable than how we would see the same landscape.
So to recap the argument, where postmodernism sees human worldviews as webs of symbols (concepts and language), and therefore at least implicitly makes nonhuman animals incapable of having a worldview (I've never heard anyone articulate or defend this implication but nor have I heard anyone explain why it doesn't follow), semiotics recognizes two kinds of signs that are not symbolic. These signs, called index and icon, are the currency with which nonhuman life represents its worlds. And because we share these kinds of signs, is a currency we can tentatively use to translate nonhuman representations into our own. Where Actor-Network Theory tries to do this by simply asserting that nonhuman and even nonliving beings have functionally linguistic agency, biosemiotics keeps account of which kinds of signs mean what things to what selves. Rather than introducing a metaphysical and epistemological nightmare, Kohn is just opening anthropology's eyes to a kind of shared perceptual, motivational ecology that is just as scientifically as the shared energetic economies it took up much earlier.
One particularly interesting implication, which I hope there's some more research on somewhere, is the unexpected overlap with Chang's Active Scientific Realism. He even (purely coincidentally) explicitly uses Lavoisier as an example of a case where thought and symbol become icon and index and back again. I'm not necessarily confident enough to articulate it yet but it seems like there's a philosophically interesting way to articulate "true knowledge as ability to do things" in a way that spans science and perception in here somewhere.
One of the most interesting things about the Runa worldview is what Kohn calls "multinaturalism." Our multicultural perspective assumes that nature is static and perception of it is variable. The Runa imagine perception is static and nature is variable. When a vulture smells carrion, it has the same experience that a Runa woman has smelling manioc beer. The spirit master of game animals controls the economy of the jungle in the same way the white man controls the economy of trade goods, so the spirit master is in some sense a white man. Wild animals are the property of the spirit master in the same way that chickens and pigs are property of Runa. Using dreams and hallucinogens, one can assume the perspective of someone above you on the chain, so game animals appear as domestic animals in dreams, shamans take ayahuasca to see the forest as the spirit master does and to speak with them, and people give toxic hallucinogens to dogs so that dogs can temporarily understand their masters. It's weird and fascinating and you wonder what a science grown from a worldview like that would learn. -
Probably three stars is not fair -- if I were to evaluate this on its own terms, the terms in which it explicitly seems to want to be taken seriously, as highly theorized academic discourse, it would get five stars. But as a lay person reading just for interest, I found that what it was saying actually seemed to be very basic: there are non-human subjects and agents in the world that communicate with each other. This is one of those things that must be theorized and argued and justified to be acceptable to academics, but which seems blindingly obvious to most of us. I, for example, am engaged at this very moment in a complex dance of guilt and desire with a dog, who very much wants to go for a walk, and is using 30,000 years of honed techniques for communicating that desire to a human, in a complexly layered manner communicating emotions such as excited anticipation and asking through body language, followed by a complex conveyance of resignation and borderline martyrdom when it became clear that I was not going to go for a walk this minute, but in a while, when my writing time is done.
To a certain point it was interesting to learn how academics theorize this -- with "representational forms that go beyond language" (8). So he uses "Piercian semiotics" to understand modalities of representation beyond the symbolic, including "iconic" (involving signs that share likenesses with the things they represent) or "indexical" (involving signs that share likenesses with the things they represent)" (8).
Kohn argues that his project is to "decolonize thought," in order to see that thinking is not necessarily circumscribed by language, the symbolic, or the human" (41) to which, as someone who has lived with dogs and cats for 20 years, I can only say, "Well, duh." I guess if critical theorists have found a way to articulate or justify a pretty normal experience of the world, bully for them.
The rich ethnography was interesting, but didn't significantly rock my view of the world. I felt like if _The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate_ or Hope Jahren's _Lab Girl_ had been available when this book was written, Kohn could have saved himself a lot of mental gymnastics. Or perhaps if he had read Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" or "The Author of the Acacia Seeds," which seem to me to embody what he's thinking in a form much easier to digest and relate to. -
My Aussie eco-poetic friend Stuart Cooke gave this 3 stars, and I respect him, but I found the book completely preposterous, and I did want so much to like it. But Eduardo Kohn hyper-romanticizes the Amazonian Runa as the nearly perfect community, the paragons for all of us (in large part, no doubt, because the Runa happen to be the culture he has spent some time with over a brief four years; if he'd spent time with the Havyakas in Karnataka, one gets the feeling he would make the same claims for them). The Runa could be machine-gunning monkeys from trees and setting fire to the forest to scare out monkeys too hidden to shoot, and Kohn would go into ecstasy about how perfectly attuned and sensitive the Runa are to their environment, to their spiritual communion with the forest, to their genius for "intimate engagement with thoughts-in-the world." Every gesture the Runa make serves to teach us the limitations of our "assumptions about the logic of linguistic relationality." Kohn ends up sounding as much like those hippies who insistently attached themselves to Native American communities in the 1960's as like Heidegger or T.S. Eliot mooning over some imagined cultural purity.
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So, this is going to sound harsh and one doesn't like to be so harsh, but it has to be, I'm afraid. First, if you're a sociocultural anthropologist then you *might* get a lot out of Kohn. For the rest of us poor mortals—even those genuinely curious about anthropology—this is a waste of time. I was trained as an ecologist and historian, and lately have made forays into the social sciences, hence the reason I picked up 'How Forests Think'. Suffice to say I didn't learn anything much about how forests think. What I found was thick, highly speculative, quasi-mystical drivel. The premise seems to be that anthropologists ought to take account of nonhuman living things. Well, duh. OK, fine. I mean, welcome to the party. Nice to see you even if you're a century or so late. But then Kohn goes on to throw rigour and readability out the window in exchange for a swag of romantic presumptions about the natural world and Indigenous peoples' relationship to it that would make the proverbial noble savage blush. I found myself by turns muttering and shouting aloud at the book, 'But how do you know that?!' I'm told his stuff makes more sense if one grasps semiotics. (In which case, a little Semiotics 101 mightn't have gone astray. But, hell! Why would an author actually want to communicate to anyone?!) Rarely—and here I'm being generous—does Kohn actually test his pronouncements about how other animals and plants experience the world against decades of biology and behavioural science, or any other relevant field. Even a little dipping of Kohn's anthropological toe into those fields would surely have revealed a vast landscape of useful ideas to pair with his conjectures/guesses/observations, no? As for the writing: wretchedly opaque, arcane, verbose, and just plain bad. Thus, even the patient reader, prepared to hear Kohn out, is left wondering what on earth he's on about and why. If ever there was an award based on Michael Billig's 'Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences' this book would win it in spades. All the author manages to do is reinforce the stereotype of the out-of-touch anthropologist too distracted by the voices in their head and seduced by their own wordiness to be worth a jaguar's poo in the woods.
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Plodding, arcane, and bewilderingly detached from its stated subject matter. I was not persuaded as to the utility of framing the study with the linguistic model of Charles Peirce, which seemed more of an in-house distraction for the benefit of anthropologists and one more layer of mediation between the reader and the subject. Show, don’t tell. In the end, undertaking a ‘post-human’ project that does not more fully and equally engage with non-humanist, scientific knowledge (of forests, jaguars, ecology, etc.) remains inescapably anthropocentric. There is definitely a hunger - and a need - for the kind of ‘post-human’ understanding of living communities promised by the book’s title, but this exercise does not deliver. Many of the same ontological reorientations and philosophic-poetic meditations a work like this is aiming for are more forcefully arrived at through a direct study of the biology of forest communities, such as David George Haskell’s outstanding work. See ‘The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors.’ Perhaps the best way to displace anthropocentrism is to not write like an anthropologist.
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How Forests Think was, for me, a surprisingly enjoyable read - lively, humorous, and open.
Kohn explores the nonsymbolic representational modalities (outside of human language) that pervade the living world.
"Understanding the relationship between distinctively human forms of representation and these other forms is key to finding a way to practice an anthropology that does not radically separate humans from nonhumans. Semiosis (the creation and interpretation of signs) permeates and constitutes the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multi-species relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensible" (p.9).
In other words, if you are listening, you can hear the non-human world as it is thinking. -
I love how the book is composed and divided in chapters. It makes us think about the semiosis and semiotics models of communication in a new light. It also talks about the rituals and hierarchies which are more than humans. Although the book is quite an interesting read and talks about some interesting things, But, somehow I felt cheated because the preface promises something which is quite extraordinary, it ends in a very humanistic view of both the non-human and human world used in the context of the books.
It uses bold statements and tries to challenge our views on the principles of communication and how that is similar and different from other non-human aspects of both co-existence and evolution. But it still lacks the promise of what it advertised. Maybe because I am not a student to anthropology and also the reason that I was here to fulfil something else which was advertised on the cover as well as on the summary of the book. I found interesting things but not what I wish to find. -
Life is constitutively semiotic
Charles Sanders Peirce's 3 types of signs: icons, indices, symbols
Only the third type of sign (symbol) specifies human language, but humans and non human animals represent themselves and the world through the first two
An anthropology beyond the human accounts for the semiosis (interpretation and representation) of living beings
All living beings are selves - loci of a living ecology
All living beings live to inhabit a future
All living beings have a tendency to take on habits - the generality of living thought -
Eduardo Kohn’s highly theoretical and intellectually rigorous work, How Forests Think, invites its readers to critically engage with the site of Kohn’s fieldwork -- the uniquely enchanted, semiotically rich “ecology of selves” that comprises the Upper Amazonian Forest – in this fascinating discussion of thinking selves. Rooted in concrete ethnographic experiences, the text is simultaneously dedicated to thoroughly developing Kohn’s argument for an expanded view of the kinds of selves that think and make meaning. This argument serves as the basis of what Kohn envisions as an anthropology beyond the human, in which semiosis through the symbolic modality of language is deemphasized and humans are understood as but one, distinct kind of self. How Forests Think thus challenges the anthropocentric conventions of anthropology in this admittedly dense, but rewarding work.
The very title of Kohn’s book, How Forests Think, is a striking testament to the endeavor within the text. Suggesting that forests think in the first place immediately places the reader in an unfamiliar territory, yet also makes possible all the different kinds of entities that can think in the forest’s oft-referred to “ecology of selves”. Throughout the text, Kohn uses the conceptual framework of semiosis to relate the many different kinds of selves recognized by the Runa people of Ávila, from humans, to wild/domesticated animals, and even the spirit masters that so complexly govern Runa daily life. Yet, the ingenuity of Kohn’s work comes from his ability to represent and creatively unpack the semiotic processes that take place in the real, ethnographic encounters observed in his fieldwork. In many instances, Kohn explicates his claims both through purely theoretical discussion and then through analysis of isolated events that take place in Ávila.
Kohn draws particular attention to semiotic modalities that exist outside of the solely human domain of symbols (of which language is an example), leaning heavily on Charles Pierce’s theoretical contributions to the study of semiosis. Though symbols have their own, distinct properties, they are dependent upon an interrelated hierarchy with two other classifications of signs – icons and indexes. Non-human selves, Kohn argues, can relate iconically and indexically, and are thus semiotically engaged in the world around them in ways that may not be apparent to humans. In Chapter 1, he provides a memorable example of this triad of signs, recalling a monkey being startled as the branch she perches on is cut down. The sound as the tree is cut down, pu-oh, is iconic, as it harbors meaning without any external reference; the crashing of the tree is an index, as it factually represents the event in itself; yet, the event cannot be symbolic as a monkey, linguistically inhibited, cannot indirectly refer to the tree being cut down (31-32). Most importantly, Kohn demonstrates here that a monkey, as representative of non-human beings, has the capacity to interpret signs as a self in a way that is unique but equivalent to humans. As the text progresses, Kohn moves beyond even physical entities in attesting the semiotic capacities of the forest’s selves.
Despite urging an anthropology beyond the human, How Forests Think still embraces and elucidates distinct features of human relations. Among these are the moral co-opting of self-emergent hierarchies, such as those existent in the biosocial rubber economy of the Upper Amazon, and the linguistic nuances of human symbolic reference (Chapter 5). Discussion of the latter comprises my favorite subsection of the book, “The Play of Form”, in which Kohn offers two differing accounts of an antbird call. When an antbird (chiriquíqua in Quichua) is startled by a jaguar, it, according to the Ávila, calls out chíriqui. While Luisa’s account maintains that the antbird uttered its natural call, Amériga’s holds that the bird actually said Chiriquíhua, which attaches symbolic meaning, (175). Kohn brilliantly emphasizes Luisa’s non-symbolic engagement with the bird as an example of the possibilities of the kind of beyond-human interactions that would be employed by an anthropology beyond the human. As evidenced in this section of the text, Kohn’s intention is not to remove human subjectivity in the anthropological encounter so much as reimagine it so that humans are more considerate of the ecology selves in which they exist.
The intricacy with which Eduardo Kohn compiles his theory requires the focus, engagement, and, at times, determination of the reader in their analytical endeavor, although the text is certainly not insurmountable. Despite finding myself rereading passages several times, I appreciated the intellectual rigor of the work and took away many new and rewarding insights into this ontologically driven moment in anthropology. I should say that while How Forests Think masterfully incorporates the tools and attentiveness of ethnographic research, the work itself is not an ethnography. Yet, readers of ethnography will appreciate Eduardo Kohn’s representative capabilities and his brilliant way of extracting relevant generals from the specific experiences of the Runa people with whom he worked. Those who make it through the text will be rewarded with a rich, theoretical framework with which to engage a world urgently in need our environmental sensitivity. -
I loved how this book made me feel.
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I'm an anthropologist and this book really helped me to think about some of my own experiences in a different way. I highly recommend it.
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I just finished reading Kohn's How Forests Think for the second time -- once during my first term in grad school and now in the penultimate quarter of the Master's program -- and I can honestly say that his exploration of an "ecology of selves" is a formative component of my approach to Anthropology. More clearly than other social theorists, Kohn breaks down several binaries caught up in that persistent Cartesian worldview, whose destruction is the project of many postmodern social scholars. In this re-read, I especially latched onto the way that he leans on Peirce to smear "reality."
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"How other kinds of beings see us matters. Th at other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing,
and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs." -
Awesome book. Am reading it for the second time & will have to do so again. Dense and academic, this book lives deeply in the blurry border of human-nature relations, working to trouble divides we have wrought. Other reviewers have written more articulate and specific reviews, but i highly recommend this to anyone investigating the issue.
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The title of this book is utterly misleading. I’d call it the hard-copy version of clickbait. Though a few parts educated me, I’d liken the experience to that time you ordered hot chocolate, but the barista gave you black coffee.
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How nonhumans signify.
Beyond binaries.
Human interactions with nonhumans.
Distrust of your own body.
Trans/inter-subjectivity occasioned by rotting fruit. -
So disappointing and difficult to ascertain what he means because he constantly jumps back and forth between topics that he already wrote a conclusion to.
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The book has built on Charles Peirce’s semiotics, so it is not an original anthropological reflection. You must learn Peirce’s logic for the book to become sensible. In other words, it is a kind of mental experiment of the author in semiotics that curtained his ethnographical observations. Hence, the book is unintelligible if you do not have any knowledge of Peircean semiotics. The book has its bases more on the thoughts of this pragmatic philosopher than any detailed ethnographic background that it lacks.
How Forests Think; Toward an anthropology beyond the human, a book-length reflection of Eduardo Kohn on the life of contemporary native communities of Ecuador, aims to build a theoretical framework for doing anthropology “beyond humans.” The author relies on semiotics as the basis of organic life on the earth and makes it the foundation of every living being to become a Self. He insists that “life is possible because of semiosis abilities [of organisms].” The basic premise, I think, is that thinking is not just a human affair. Symbolic representations are products of humans, but there are representational forms that go beyond linguistic symbols. Most of the signs that animals use to go through their life are extralinguistic. According to Kohn, life is possible because of signs that make communication between predators, prey, and protectors possible. Selfhoodness drives from this communicative network of multi-species relations through signs that most of them are indexical or iconic by nature. This hetero-specifity -in the words of Roberto Marchesini- brings what Kohn calls “the ecology of self.” This term is the source of anthropology beyond humans.
It is the anthropology of place. But, first of all, what is the place? The place is, according to Kohn, that interconnected ecological network that is made by the semiotic communications of those who make their lives there. Here, anthropology beyond the human grows out of the sustained engagement with the place. It is “beyond the human” because it regards the human being as a part of a greater whole of that ecological network. Cultural anthropology traditionally considers any place primarily as a place of humans. These human places then constitute the proper context of anthropological investigations in terms of economic and ecological motifs. If we regard a place not just as for humans but as an entanglement of many living and nonliving forms and entities, the context will no longer remain taken for granted. It is so because the human is also a product of that which lies beyond human contexts. This beyond-the-human context produces different selves living together and always communicating with each other. Within this ecology of self, every individual engaging in communication with others involves in the process of “becoming with” the others. The dog will not be a dog once it enters human groups. It becomes the “other-than-itself’ relating to humans and vice versa. Every self within this trans-species ecological place is composed out of its semiotic relationship with the others.
Kohn says that we humans are the products of the multiple nonhuman beings that have come to make and continue to make us who we are. This statement has a deep evolutionary biological resonance. In this regard, there is no room for dogs to be just animals; they should become people. Dogs can acquire jaguar-like attributes, but with humans and within the human world of actions, not in their way. Some kinds of trans-species pidgin languages emerge from dog-human interactions. Similar to these pidgins are what emerge in colonial situation contacts. It seems that the villagers colonize creatures around them, just as whites colonized them. In this context, hallucinogens blur the man-dog boundary on the one hand, and the man-spirits boundary on the other hand. Kohn exemplifies the special treatment of villagers with the jaguar. When a man encounters a jaguar in the forest, she must not start to run away or turn her face. On the contrary, she must gaze at the jaguar. According to Kohn, returning the jaguar’s gaze encourages this creature to treat you as an equal predator. If you look away, it may well treat you as prey, soon-to-be-dead meat. But, I think, it is a bodily encounter full of caring for the other. It is semiosis in action; that is, an indexical inter-species encounter between two mammalian species that communicate biologically in more than one way. In this way, the jaguar represents the encountered man as similar to itself and not as its next prey.
But this place also contains nonliving forms. These forms produce economic relationships within and between species. These forms, such as riverine networks or distributive patterns of some plants and trees, create the ahistorical economic network of the trans-species of that place. Such nested patterns can, for example, link indigenous communities in the deepest forests to rubber barons at the mouth of the Amazon and even in Europe. Or, as another example, the nested pattern in the distribution of some fruit trees in riversides absorbs some kinds of fish species that might become marine food for people. It is a trans-species economy that rises directly from nested ecological patterned forms of the forest.
This economy is fundamentally political. It creates power relations, again at a trans-species level. Every creature of the forest, humans included, is continually harnessing such forms. Each of these harnessable forms in the jungle takes their values through two scales of power relations; one interspecies and the other intraspecies. Therefore, according to Kohn, power works through the form as a kind of reality “beyond the human.” These power relations create their mode of thinking. This mode of thinking is far away from what we call symbolic analytical or even optimized thinking. Here Kohn speaks of dreaming, and I see this as the thinking of an unconscious body (as Michael Taussig calls it) that thinks not in isolation but inside and with the forest and other creatures that live in it. It gets caught up and amplified in the multispecies memory-laden wilderness of an Amazon forest.
But it has a profoundly humanistic element in itself. I could be all-too-human even within an indigenous culture. This all-too-human is the moral webs we humans spin to include all the others. Within these webs, every part of the jungle and its living beings becomes a codified symbolic representation of the human itself. The danger of losing the dreams and their amplified mode of thinking through the others lies here. Kohn makes another version of binary thinking, this time human vs. all-too-human. Of course, it is not humanistic as we know of western philosophical discourses of the 17th-18th centuries. But I think it is more challenging than that because in seeking to find what is beyond the human, it traps itself in a realm that is all-too-human; a dreaming land! Here, the Whole of the forest eventually becomes human!
When Kohn says, “it is by attentively engaging with the many kinds of real others that people this thinking forest -the animals, the dead, the spirits- that this anthropology beyond the human can learn to think about a living future in relation to the deaths that make that future possible,” I have no choice but to see it as just another dualistic intellectual shelter for creating Other-ness. It is not western vs. “rest-ern,” white vs. colored, etc., but, in my view, it is much more critical than all previous making-the-others efforts. It concerns making a human vs. all-too-human dualism. And this makes it subjective, intellectualistic, and at the same time, the whitish, male-ish monologue of some detached, narcissistic mind with himself and toward himself, without any deep participation of the ethnographic subjects.
One of Kohn’s main aims at writing the book, it seems to me, is to introduce his method to do anthropology that was called by him “amplification.” In this book, there is no clear we can know much about the proposed method and how one can follow it, and accordingly what steps one has to take in any future research. We just told that amplification is better than, say, comparison or reduction!
It seems to me as a person who was born and raised in the middle east that the writer as a Western White has an extravagant obsession with colonialism and attempts to decolonize everything!
If the relation of Avila with its surrounding world mirrors that of colonizers with it, it seems that every organism in the wild is just a colonist. I think, as a third-party observer, that the writer is super-obsessive of its ancestral legacy! For him, the world and its creatures are either colonists or colonized. For this reason, maybe, he wants to decolonize our thinking by showing how forests think! -
Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think (2013) is an inquiry on how to think beyond human as subject of anthropological study. Thus, it provides us with academic understanding of our strongly relational ties with non-human beings, which are constitutive in and for our presence in the world. In this study, ethnography is not an object, but a medium to comprehend multiple ontologies; hence, it is much different from traditional anthropological works, which mostly focus on cultural representations. Without giving up being “human,” the writer discloses how our “selves” are interwoven with other “beings.” In this sense, he offers us to approach the human and non-human as active agents in our thinking of anthropological study.
Kohn conducts his ethnographic fieldwork from 1996 to 2000 in Avila, an Upper Amazonian village in Ecuador. He uses ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and interviews, in addition to his linguistic analysis and epistemological explorations. Thus, I was expecting an ethnographic examination on culture, gender, or kinship structures in Avila. Also, I was wondering if he would theorize social, economic and political dynamics of the region in relation to the larger historical context. However, Kohn does not do what many of the previous ethnographies have aimed to do. Rather, Kohn criticizes human-centric approach of the Western anthropology by focusing on other-than-human beings, and he proves us the importance of studying human within a relationship with its surroundings. I will explain how.
Although his fundamental theoretical approach is based on semiotics and semiosis, Kohn does not see signs just as human affairs. In his account, signs are constitutive in life both for human and nonhuman beings (43). In drawing our attention to those signs, Kohn delicately interrogates how different “beings” relate to and communicate with each other. He calls this relationality “ecology of selves,” which he finds and formulates within the rainforest of an Amazonian village, where trans-species semiosis pervades and connects all living selves. A very good example of his idea of relationality is the example he gives about ants and blowing tobacco smoke in Chapter 2. Because rain starts when ants appear, people become able to impede rain by using tobacco, whose smoke prevents ants from coming out. Similarly, when Juanicu whistles like a siren, the flying ants understand as the call of their “mothers” and they answer by coming to the source of the sign (81). As a result of such communication, a relational world, where both human and animal coinhabit, is created.
However, Kohn’s book is not only about humans and animals. In Chapter 5, he talks about “perceptions” of cross-species. For instance, Runa puma, shape-shifting human jaguar, also has a perception of seeing things around himself. Whether Runa sees you as a human being or a piece of meat totally depends on Runa’s perception of you, as well as the way you present yourself before him. Therefore, you may or may not be eaten by the jaguar depending on your visual representation. In a similar vein, the Runa in their everyday life see the game animals that they hunt in the forest as wild animals, but they know that this is not their true manifestation. Hence, they do not eat, for instance, the spirit master’s chicken (178). In other words, people, Runa, and all other organisms in the forest use signs primarily to survive in this relational world.
Therefore, he draws our attention to the revolutionary potentials and scholarly possibilities of studying another type of anthropology, in which we open up ourselves to various "selves." His study converts Redfieldian notion of “worldviews” into different “worlds” of non-human beings. Kohn introduces us another world—a world where human and non-human melt into each other through semiosis of all life. Focusing on the potentials of thinking beyond human in anthropology, he provides alternative ways of thinking within scholarly language and unconventional ways of using ethnography. Kohn uses ethnography as a tool to explore the spectrum of forest, which seems larger than "little communities." However, my critic starts right there, as I would like to know more about ethnographic aspects of his work related to the Avila community. What kinds of people are able to relate themselves to the non-human selves of the forest was one of my curiosities while reading this book. How is their society organized in relation to their semiotic relationship with the world? What are their spiritual motivations and cosmologies? How does food function in this society where hunting is a fundamental phenomenon? Is there any relationship between their colonial history and their hesitation to use power upon other beings in their surrounding? I believe, in order to understand humans’ relationality with their surroundings, we also need to know such constitutive aspects of their lives. I would like to learn more about Avila community as human is already at the center of this book. Who else is going to talk about this, if not Kohn?
Moreover, I left confused about the distinction made in the book between living and nonliving forms. The writer says that patterned distribution of rivers or the recurrent circular shapes of the whirlpools are among the nonliving emergent forms in Amazonia, as they are constrained, and thus, they cannot flow freely as much as the water itself (159). However, within a new relationality, which is supposed to be developed in the new environment, they will be living in different ways and within different forms, even though they are constrained. Furthermore, he continues discussing whirlpools as simpler forms than the freer flow of water (166). However, I left wondering what makes the water free. Shall we still consider this flowing water as free, even there is a whirlpool on its way? Or, is the water also constrained affected by the whirlpool? What is the relationship between whirlpool and water? What is the relationship between water, whirlpool, and rubber trees? In order to understand “how forest thinks” as a whole, we need to understand this relationality in a larger context with more ontological explanations.
Yes, the language is tough, and it necessitates from the reader to have some background information on semiotics, ontology, and epistemology to the extent of postmodernism and posthuman critics. I do not think that the book is for the general reader, but inevitably an innovative contribution to anthropology with its writing performance. Just as a snowflake having a provisional form between present and absent, Kohn presents us a language whose form can change in any moment. His poetic language is robust yet also fragile—as if the words may rebel at any time and break apart in front of your eyes. He perfectly uses possibilities that are provided by the language, as another sign system. Among the non-textual ways of communication with the reader, the writer’s use of photography perfectly fits with the philosophical profundity of the text. I could not prevent myself from looking at the series of very well selected photographs over and over again.
Although his book is not considered as a traditional ethnography for the reasons that I mentioned above, since he opens up the scholarly work into dialogic epistemologies and provides multiplicity of experiences from an unconventional inter-species analysis of subject-object relationships, it must be considered one of the finest examples of critical ethnography.
