Beyond Language

An anthropology beyond the human

Philippe Chiambaretta : You use semiotics to demonstrate that signs go well beyond the human and indeed this is the basis on which you develop an “anthropology beyond the human.” Could you give some examples of how the Runa manage to communicate with other living entities “beyond language”?

Eduardo Kohn : Let me start off with the most “human” kind of sign: the symbol. Symbols, as opposed to the kinds of signs that are part and parcel of the rest of life, refer in an indirect way by means of a conventional system. A symbol refers to something in the world, not directly by pointing to it, but by pointing first to other symbols in a system of symbols. This creates a special form of thinking that is very powerful. It allows for abstraction and enables us humans to think of things that don’t actually exist. It is easy to get lost in the world of human thinking.

Anthropology’s great contribution to knowledge involves the theoretical work it has been able to do with the ways in which humans think with symbols (concepts like culture, the social fact, discursive regimes, and social construction, are all products of thinking conceptually with the properties of symbols). But focusing only on symbols gets us into trouble because it makes it very difficult to understand anything that lies beyond symbolic systems or how we may access this.

So anthropology’s greatest theoretical contribution involves the work it has learned to do to understand the impact of symbolic thought on human life. But anthropology is more than a set of theories, it also involves a powerful method—ethnography—that is theory-agnostic. By ethnography we generally refer to an intense immersion into a way of life coupled with a struggle to convey something about that immersion in a way that can make a maximal impact on our concepts. We generally think of anthropological immersions plunging us into exclusively human worlds. But I happened to have worked in a place in the Amazon where people live intimately with lots of kinds of beings, not just humans. Of course, they also care deeply about humans, but they live in an intensely complicated ecosystem that they need to understand. They were using some of those elements of the ecology for food, through hunting, gathering, fishing, and gardening. This has forced them to become attuned to that forest world that houses these elements. To do this, they have had to understand the ecological relations in that world as communicative relations.  

Through ethnographic immersion I learned that a lot of what they were doing was communicating with the beings of that world or communicating like the beings of that world. So, I was interested in understanding what would happen upon hearing a certain birdcall in the forest and in understanding how people interpret that call. I wasn’t just sitting down and asking people questions but having actual real life interactions. Sometimes these birds were flying over and calling and I would hear the calls, hear people’s interpretation of those calls, and then observe what they would do. Different people interpret the calls in different ways, and how they interpret them affects what they then say, and you can trace all these things very carefully.

The prototypical example of a symbol is a word in human language. But the interesting thing about the dialect of Quichua spoken by the people I lived with is that it contains within it an entire, very well-developed lexical class that is not really symbol-like and that actually involves a large number of words that are somewhat imitative. Rather than trying to capture things in the forest, these words capture what Anna Tsing would call “happenings”, “events”, or “unfoldings.” They simulate the particular flavor of a temporal action in the forest and they paint it as a sonic picture, if you will. In Quichua, there are imitative “words” (or more accurately sound images) like tsupu, that simulate an entity penetrating a body of water, or tyas, which simulated the action of a machete slicing through something, or teeeye, a shotgun firing. These are the kinds of things that mean something but that are no longer in language. They are likenesses of the things they represent. When I pronounce teeeye, my mouth is opening in the way that a blast of lead shot starts from inside a gun barrel and fires out. By using these, they are capturing a likeness of the forest itself. Those clusters of words are themselves a likeness of the kind of thinking that is happening in the forest and constitutes a picture of sylvan thinking itself.

Beyond the Anthropocene

Philippe Chiambaretta : To what extent is this communication with the beings that constitute this interconnected forest ecology fundamental for the Runa? And what happens when they lose communication with those beings?

Eduardo Kohn : Sylvan thinking, the kind of thinking that we all have as long as we are alive, the kind of thinking that is so exquisitely manifest in dense forests like those of the Amazon, is something we are always grounded in. We are sylvan beings because we are living beings. So you can’t exactly lose sylvan thinking, but what you can lose—and this is what’s scary—are the spaces where sylvan thinking flourishes and proliferates. In dense forests, like those in Ecuador’s Amazon region, sylvan thinking is generated to such a degree and with such a wealth that its properties become inescapable. In a forest you can’t but think like a forest and this kind of forest thinking can guide and inspire us at a time in which we are losing touch with the sylvan thinking that sustains us. The great madness of our world is that we are becoming “all-too-human minds” separated from what we seem to only be able to treat as “matter.” This Cartesian divide is neither ontologically correct nor is it sustainable.  This is why sylvan thinking can, to my mind, be such an important source of ethical guidance for the Anthropocene.

Philippe Chiambaretta : Are you suggesting that these times are asking us to restore the “enchanted communication” that monotheism has broken?

Eduardo Kohn : Let me just say something about the Anthropocene. I think it is a funny thing. It is criticized and not fully accepted as a real geological epoch. A geological epoch is based on indexical signs. An epoch is real if it leaves a geological trace. That’s methodologically useful but not particularly insightful in terms of life. I think the Anthropocene is a diagnosis or a critique. It draws awareness to the ways in which human “culture” is now becoming a force of “nature” as Bruno Latour puts it.

I don’t think of the Anthropocene as a place to inhabit. It is a critique of a way of being and its effects. Donna Haraway does a good job of showing that with this funny term, the Chthulucene.Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015). The Anthropocene captures the ways in which humans are becoming forces of nature in certain ways and it also captures something about time. I think that by using the image of geology, the Anthropocene forces us to think about pasts, futures, and multiple temporalities in different ways, and I think it’s very useful in that sense. The idea for me, then, is that in this time of the so-called “Anthropocene,” sylvan thinking is helpful because it tells us things about time and how futures and pasts relate to each other.

It is an ontological fact that we humans separate ourselves from the world with disastrous consequences, and the term “Anthropocene” alerts us to this. When we humans vastly simplify ecosystems for our exclusive gain, create worlds where we don’t need even need to understand where our garbage goes, where we are totally disconnected from all the ecological repercussions of our actions, this is a real problem. It’s not so much that if we just had the right theoretical lenses we could see that we are not actually separated. We are increasingly separated and that’s dangerous.

It’s very important for me to insist on the ontological properties of things like symbols. Symbols create separations. This is not a mistake; it’s a mode of being. Of course symbols aren’t ever fully separate from the worlds from which they come and to which they refer and that’s why I’m saying: “Instead of doing theoretical work with the separation, let’s do theoretical work with the connections.”

We need to be aware of connections as well as differences. The danger of a “flat ontology” is that it proposes to get humans and non-humans in the same picture and make them all the same. If you are basically saying that everything is the same, how can you explore and potentiate different kinds of ontological properties?

The kind of ontological explorations that I do, with the goal of explanation (i.e., telling you “how” forests think), is powerful but also dangerous and limited. For example, one of the problems for me (and other anthropologists) is that I am forced into disagreement with the indigenous people I work with, because according to my framework there is no way that rocks can have life. For the Runa, they do have life and, in fact, when I take psychedelics like ayahuasca with them, I understand the animacy of rocks. This is a tension that I want to sit with.

I don’t want to shy away from the productive conceptual work I’m doing with sylvan thinking but I’m well aware that it may close off certain possibilities. My hope is that sylvan thinking will suggest to me the emergent concept that will, one day, allow all of this to make sense. 

Philippe Chiambaretta : Is there a specific project that you are working on right now?

Eduardo Kohn : I’m working with communities in the south-central Amazon, where there are no roads and that can only be accessed by plane or by canoe. The people there are connected to the forest in a highly spiritual way at the same time that they have a highly sophisticated and very worldly kind of politics. Using the properties of sylvan thinking, they are allowing the forest to think through them. They are creating a politics based on what the forest tells them and I am working on that with them.

I’m also doing film work with Lisa Stevenson, who teaches anthropology at McGill. Film is the closest thing we have to thinking in pictures, to sylvan thinking.

This article was initially published in Stream 04 – The Paradoxes of the living in November 2017.

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