Anthropologist and researcher at McGill University in Montreal, he is the author of the book How do forests think (Comment pensent les forêts) in which he studies the Quichuas Runa tribe (Ecuador) and hypothesizes an anthropology " beyond the human "by analyzing the inter-species semiotic communication.
The anthropologist and author of How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) recounts his Amazonian experience among the Runa people in order to convey to our Western minds the idea of a language that can go beyond words and symbols. A language that connects the beings of the forest, both human and non-human. A language that we seem to have forgotten…
In a continuation of contemporary ontologies, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn goes beyond modern dualism and shows the unique nature of the living via semiology. Through his anthropological research in Amazonia, he explored “sylvestrian thinking” – shared with all of the living – and its philosophical consequences: though the West only considers human thought, Kohn uses his theory to overturn signs of opposition between language based beings and others, within the living. The Runa of Amazonia, who live in an intimate relationship with a group of beings, within a complex ecosystem consisting of the non-human and the inert, have in this way developed an interspecies communication that, similar to the artistic experience, goes beyond language. The Runa understand ecological relationships within this world as being relationships based on communication. Kohn endeavors to bring legitimacy to sylvestrian thinking so as to draw ethical orientations from it that will allow us to go beyond the Anthropocene. Eduardo Kohn is the author of the book How Forests Think: Towards and Anthropology Beyond the Human, University of California Press (2013).
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