"How forests think". Toward an anthropology beyond the human

1.

How forests think.
Toward an
anthropology beyond
the human
Eduardo Kohn

2.

Introduction
• The Monograph ‘How Forest Think’ by Eduardo is a four years
fieldwork among the Runa Ecuador Upper Amazonians; the book
which is one of it kind question, what it mean to be human from
other forms of living things, the material took anthropology beyond
human and its implication on the living, the book model a new lens or
ways to see the world pointing out that anthropologist has been too
myopic not to have explore other variables that constitute what it is
to be human.

3.

The book comprises six chapters:
• The first chapter which he termed as OPEN WHOLE, this chapter,
constitute sign beyond human which are necessarily symbolic. He
tries to point out how human is a product of that which lies beyond
human context;
• The Chapter 2, THE LIVING THOUGHT, this chapter develop the
concept of ecology of self. It identifies various themes like
relationality and perspectivism, he pointed out how life distinguishes
itself from inanimate physical realm through sign production;

4.

• Chapter 3, SOUL BLINDNESS, the chapter addresses how death is
intrinsic to life;
• Chapter 4, Trans Species Pidgin; here he discusses how to safely and
successfully communicate with other kinds of being focuses on
semiotic analysis;
• Chapter 5, FORMS EFFORTLESS; here he uses the peculiarities of
forms to refer to manifestation of generals;
• Chapter 6, The Living Future; he illuminates a special reference
among the Runa in which self is also an image of lineage, a
progressive ‘I’ sign that represent a positive future state of affair, he
establish that all signs in some ways are projecting what is not
present.

5.

Chapter 1. Open Whole
• Here Eduardo Kohn develop a perceian semiotic framework, he
pointed out that sign is more than things and they don’t come from
the mind, that mind is a product of semiosis.
• He further ague that without symbol, we would not have linguistic,
social , cultural or historical context as we have understood them
• He draw our understanding to the fact that the realm of the open
whole is symbolic, and the broader whole according to him is
identified as thought.

6.

Chapter 2. The Living Thought
• In the featured story, two women talked
about an incident in which the family's
dogs were mistakenly attacked.
• The people of Avila are able to distinguish
between the different barks of a dogs.
• The point of the story was that the dogs'
actions and the mistake they made
showed that Runa was able to see from a
dog's perspective . Seeing through
someone else's eyes, which means that a
person in this case does not feel like the
center of everything and is able to be in
touch with nature.

7.

• Eduardo Kohn argues that “how thoughts grow by association with
other thoughts is not categorically different from how selves relate to
one another. Selves are signs. Lives are thoughts. Semiosis is alive.”
(99 p.)
• So it can be interpreted that dogs life and decisions are like thoughts
that Runa people have ability to read or to “know”.

8.

Chapter 3. Soul Blindness
• Here is further developing how our awareness of self goes beyond the
body and the ability to understand how a dog thinks or another
animal creates an ecology of self;
• Understanding, that one can be and a victim and a predator;
• Rituals to gain predators properties (e. g. drinking jaguars bile to have
ability to see like puma);
• Soul blindness happens when hunters kill an animal and it can haunt
them the next day or men passes part of his soul with sperm and he
can’t hunt while his woman is pregnant (it weakens him).

9.

Chapter 4. Trans-Species Pidgins
• Teaching dogs to act properly with help of psychotropic plants and
speaking that they would understand:
“chases little rodents
It will not bite chickens
Chases swiftly
It should say, “hua hua”
It will not lie” (136 p.)

10.

Chapter 5. Form’s Effortless Efficacy
• In chapter 5, Kohn talks about the "perception" of interspecies relationships.
• For example, Runa puma, a shapeshifting human jaguar, also has the ability to see things around him.
Whether the Runa sees you as a person or a piece of meat depends entirely on how the Rune perceives you, as
well as how you present yourself in front of him. So the jaguar may or may not eat you, depending on your
visual representation. In the same vein, the Runa in their daily lives see the wild animals they hunt in the forest
as wild animals, but they know that this is not their true manifestation. Therefore, they do not eat, for example,
the chicken of the host spirit (178). In other words, humans, the Runa, and all other organisms in the forest use
signs primarily to survive in this relational world.
• Human is only one source of form.
• form is central to human though
• human, form emerges from and is part and parcel of the nonliving one as well
• The form exerts certain restrictions on living beings.

11.

Kohn makes an important distinction between form and
sign.
• “Whereas semiosis is in and of the living world beyond the human,
form emerges from and is part and parcel of the nonliving one as
well,” (174)
• For the example of the distribution of rubber trees in the Amazonian
forest, which depends on the ecology of parasites as well as on the
network of rivers, argues that shamanistic hunting and the colonial
extraction of rubber were both constrained by the same form.
• It’s a the patterned distribution of rivers or the recurrent circular
shapes of the whirlpools that sometimes form in them. Each of these
nonliving forms is the product of constraints on possibility.

12.

• The distribution of water and rubber trees throughout the Amazonian
landscape also conforms to a specific pattern or form.
• The Amazon riverine network exhibits an additional regularity crucial
to the way rubber was harnessed via form: self-similarity across scale.
That is, the branching of creeks is like the branching of streams, which
is like the branching of rivers. As such, it resembles the compound
ferns that people in Ávila call chichinda, which also exhibit selfsimilarity across scale.

13.

Chapter 6. The Living Future (and the
Imponderrable Weight of the Dead)
• The final chapter of the book analyses the reversals in relation between the
Runa and White missionaries or policemen as well as the pronouns by
which Runa people refer to themselves as subjects, such as amu
• Amu is a particular colonially inflected way of being a self in an ecology of
selves filled with a growing array of future-making habits, many of which
are not human
• In the process, amu renders visible how a living future gives life some of its
special properties and how this involves a dynamic that implicates (but is
not reducible to) the past. In doing so, amu, and the spirit realm upon
which it draws its power, amplifies something general about life—namely,
life’s quality of being in futuro,” (208)

14.

In the life of signs future is also closely related
to absence
• What one is as a semiotic self, then, is constitutively related to what one is
not. One’s future emerges from and in relation to a specifi c geometry of
absent histories. Living futures are always “indebted” to the dead that
surround them.
• Runa engagements with this complex ecology of selves create even more
future.
• Chapter 6, then, is primarily concerned with one particular manifestation
of this future: the realm of the afterlife located deep in the forest and
inhabited by the dead and the spirit masters that control the forest’s
animals
• This realm is the product of the relationship that invisible futures have to
the painful histories of the dead that make life possible

15.

• Around Ávila these dead take the form of were-jaguars, masters, demons,
and the specters of so many preHispanic, colonial, and republican pasts; all
these continue, in their own ways, to haunt the living forest
• The Runa, living in relation to the forest’s vast ecology of selves, also live
their lives with one foot in future. That is, they live their lives with one foot
in the spirit realm that is the emergent product of the ways in which they
engage with the futures and the pasts that the forest comes to harbor in its
relational webs. This other kind of “beyond,” this after-life, this supernature, is not exactly natural (or cultural), but it is nonetheless real. It is its
own kind of irreducible real, with its own distinctive properties and its own
tangible effects in a future present.
• Runa are both of and alienated from the spirit world, and survival requires
cultivating ways to allow something of one’s future self—living tenuously in
the spirit realm of the forest masters—to look back on and call out to that
more mundane part of oneself that might then hopefully respond.
• It is the product of the imponderable weight of the many dead that make a
living future possible.

16.

Epilogue
• How Forests Think aims to think like forests: in images.
• This other kind of thinking is the one that forests do, the kind of thinking that thinks its
way through the lives of people, like the Runa (and others), who engage intimately with
the forest’s living beings in ways that amplify life’s distinctive logics. Those living beings
enchant and animate the forest
• Kohn chose this title because of its resonance, with Lévy-Bruhls’s How Natives Think, a
classic treatment of animistic thinking.
• At the same time, he wish to draw an important distinction: forests think; and when
“natives” (or others, for that matter) think about that, they are made over by the
thoughts of a thinking forest
• He have been trying to say something about a general that makes itself felt in us “here”
at the same time that it extends beyond us, over “there.” Opening our thinking in this
way might allow us to realize a greater Us—an Us that can fl ourish not just in our lives,
but in the lives of those who will live beyond us. Th at would be our gift, however
modest, to the living future.

17.

Thank you!
• Sources:
1. Picture on 1st slide: https://sofheyman.org/events/how-foreststhink;
2. Picture on 6th slide: https://cicada.world/es/socios/gruposindigenas/runa/.