On selves, forms, and forces. About Eduardo Kohn's book How Forests Think

(P171)
On selves, forms, and forces. About Eduardo Kohn's book How Forests Think application/pdf icon
2014

"On selves, forms, and forces" 2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 1–6.

Abstract

https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.2.014
I read How forests think as part of a vast movement to equip anthropologists, and more importantly, ethnographers, with the intellectual tools necessary to handle a new historical situation: the others are no longer outside; nonhumans have to be brought back in the description in a more active capacity. Both of those features, naturally, mark the disappearance of older notions of nature and of its counterpart, namely culture; disappearance, that is itself due to the fact that everybody—ethnographers as well as former informants—are pulled deeper and deeper into the same ecological maelstrom. Whatever the term—is it an ontological or a semiotic turn?—the importance of the book relies on the most crucial turn of all: that is, a turn to experience and how to describe it empirically.