33 Portrait CNRS Gold medalist Philippe Descola Philippe Descola: deciphering human society Philippe Descola, 64, specializes in human societies’ relationship with nature. He was recently awarded the CNRS Gold Medal (France’s highest scientific distinction) for his lifetime research. He has held the Chair in Anthropology of Nature at the Collège de France since 2000, and has directed the Social Anthropology Laboratory (CNRS/ Collège de France/EHESS) in Paris since 2001. His work on the Jivaros Achuar Indians in Ecuador revolutionized research on Amazonia. Philippe Descola carried out field work in the Americas between 1976 and 1978 as a CNRS project leader. This ethnographic experience provided the source material for a PhD thesis directed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which he presented in 1983. He described how the Achuar people ascribe human characteristics to nature and see humans and non-humans as part of a continuum. He gradually extended his analysis to other societies and went beyond the dualism between nature and culture. Philippe Descola has redefined the dialectics controlling our own relations with the world and other human beings. Having defined an “ecology of relationships” between humans and non-humans, he identifies four distinct ways for human societies to distinguish between self and non-self: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. His research has shed light on human societies, based on the different properties they detect in the world. His more recent work focuses on how universal modes of identification interact with modes of figuration and the use of images. Since 2011, he has also worked on landscape anthropology to identify the principles of iconic figuration and transfiguration of the environment in cultures with no conventional tradition of landscape representation. 2012 A year at CNRS
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