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Where are the Boundaries between Nature, Culture, and Religion?
The Critique of Naturalism in Anthropology’s Ontological Turn.
David A. Palmer
The University of Hong Kong
PREPRINT
Forthcoming in : Lily Kong, Orlando Woods and Justin Tse eds.,
Handbook of the Geographies of Religion, Springer.
Abstract:
The “ontological turn” refers to a movement within anthropology since the early 21st century,
whose proponents question the metaphysical dichotomies between nature and culture or reality
and representation that underpin the social sciences. Instead, they seek to understand, not different
cultural “representations” of a single world, but different modes of world-making. This approach
is “ontological” in that it both unpacks the naturalist ontological assumptions of social theory, and
seeks to understand indigenous ontologies and the worlds they create. By relativising “nature” as
a Western ontological category and studying how different societies distribute agency and
personhood among humans and non-humans, ontological anthropology is directly relevant to
geographical concerns about the relationships between humans and the land, the living beings, and
the spiritual entities that constitute their worlds. In this essay, I discuss four key texts that illustrate
different approaches within the ontological turn, and their relevance to the geography of religion:
Michel Charbonnier’s The End of the Great Divide, Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, Tim
Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment, and Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. I conclude with a
brief discussion of resonances between these works and recent trends in the geography of religion.
Keywords: Religion, anthropology, geography, ontological turn, naturalism, representation, post-
secularism, poetics.
Religion holds an ambiguous position within the discipline of anthropology. Themes such as ritual,
symbolism, magic and mythology have been core preoccupations since the origins of the discipline
–one need only think of Tylor’s Primitive Religion, Frazer’s Golden Bough or even of Durkheim’s
Elementary forms of the Religious Life (Charlesworth 2009). But, in the traditional and non-Western
societies that have, for much of its history, been the main subjects of anthropological research,
“religion” has typically not been a distinct institution. Rather, it is what Mauss called a “total social
phenomenon” (Mauss 2016[1925]) – something that can be found everywhere, but often not
categorized as something like “religion” in indigenous cultures. Since the 1990s, anthropologists
such as Talal Asad and others have argued that “religion” is a concept derived from Western
Christianity, universalised through colonialism and the emergence of the discipline of comparative
religion. In the view of such scholars, to apply the category of religion to other societies is
problematic, given that it presupposes a distinction between “secular” and “religious” realms that
is itself a product of modern secularism, and does not correspond to the lifeworlds of other
societies and cultures (Asad 1993, 2003, Schewel 2017). Since then, the “anthropology of religion,”
as a distinct subdiscipline, appears to have become marginal within the discipline.
In parallel, however, a theoretical and methodological trend known as the “ontological turn”,
which began in some quarters of Brazilian, Israeli, French and British anthropology in the 1990s,
has become one of the major trends in mainstream Anglo-American anthropology since the 2010s
(Descola 1992; Latour 1993; Viveiros de Castro 1998; Bird-David 1999; Strathern 1999; Mol 2002;
Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro eds. 2014, Kelly ed. 2014, Kohn 2015, Sivado 2015;
Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). Although the ontological turn does not deal specifically with “religion”
per se, it has deep implications both for the study of religion and for the secular foundations of the
social sciences themselves, not only within anthropology but also extending into philosophy and
Science and Technology studies (STS) (Woolgar & Lezaun 2013). Thus, this chapter does not
focus on trends specific to the anthropology of religion as a subdiscipline, but rather considers the
broader implications of the “ontological turn” for the social scientific study of religion, be it in
anthropology or geography, or other disciplines.
In one of the key themes of this discourse, key authors have drawn on their studies of indigenous
societies to engage in radical critiques of naturalism as the foundational ontology of modernity and
of its regimes of knowledge production, including such social scientific disciplines as sociology,
anthropology and geography (Candea & Alcayna-Stevens 2012). Given the history of anthropology
as the study of cultural variability against a backdrop of biological (natural) universality, these
critiques often focus on unpacking the assumption of an ontological distinction between nature vs
culture or nature vs society. This discourse on naturalism differs from conventional philosophical
definitions of naturalism, which focus on the distinction between the “natural” and the
“supernatural” (Papineau 2021). Thus, in contrast to academic philosophy, the anthropological
critiques rarely specifically thematize religion or the “supernatural”. But in this essay, I will show
how these debates are central to the study of religion by anthropologists and geographers alike;
and attempt to draw out some key implications for future lines of research and theoretical and
methodological issues.
The Western concept of “nature”, derived from Greek notions of phusis, refers to the unique form,
essence, and regularity of a thing, or of the world. Nature is the norm of the world: the way things
are, which is often understood as the way things should be. This raises the question of what is not
natural. And there are three types of things that potentially don’t fit within nature:
- First, things that are “unnatural”: things that are irregular or monstrous – that don’t
conform to the intrinsic regularity or essence of a category of beings.
- Second, things that are “artificial” or man-made – what happens when humans divert a
thing from its original nature by transforming it through what we now call culture,
including technology.
- Third, things that are “supernatural” – things that come from beyond the regularities of
nature. These things might be the origin of the natural world, or they might be the source
of interventions that divert things from their natural regularities.
The concept of “nature” inevitably implies its negation, problematizing the relationship of three
domains with nature: bizarre phenomena; human technology and culture; and religion. Religion
can be seen as “not natural” in all three domains: it is often highly interested in what is bizarre and
monstrous; it is a form of culture, and thus “artificial”; and it deals with the “supernatural”.
But can a clear line be drawn between these domains? The distinction prevalent in academic
philosophy is circular: nature is what is not supernatural; the supernatural is what is not natural.
But anthropological research has shown that in different societies, the dichotomies around “nature”
and its opposites are either absent or may be conceived of in radically different ways. In this essay,
rather than a summation of the entire field of ontological anthropology, I focus on four key works
that, each in a different way, contribute to the anthropological critique of naturalism, with direct
implications for our understanding of religion.
After situating the ontological turn within the history of anthropology as a discipline, I will begin
with a discussion of Michel Charbonnier’s The End of the Great Divide (2015), which unpacks
naturalism in the history of anthropological theory, and shows how religion has always played a
critical but ambiguous role in the nature-society dichotomy. I will then turn to Philippe Descola’s
Beyond Nature and Culture (2013[2005]), which proposes that naturalism is but one of four basic
ontologies to be found within anthropology’s ethnographic corpus. Each of the four ontologies –
animism, naturalism, totemism and analogism – is based on different modalities of relating to the
interiorities and exteriorities of the beings in the world, and implies that there are four different
corresponding modalities of religion. Next, I will consider Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the
Environment (1993), which calls for a complete abandonment of naturalism through its proposal of
a “dwelling perspective”, with implications for seeing religions as different modes of relating to
the environment. Finally, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013) shows how humans are part
of the webs of semiotic communication between living beings, and implies that religion provides
humans with means of communicating and growing in relations with non-humans.
While the four works discussed take often radically different approaches, they point to a common
insight. In a naturalist ontology, religion is a means for humans to give subjective meaning and
significance to an intrinsically meaningless physical universe: religion mediates between humans
and the world as a provider of meanings. But if naturalism is abandoned or relativised as but one
of several possible ontologies, other mediating functions of religion become salient: as modalities
of engaging with the world, of perceiving the world, or of communicating with the world.
From representations to ontology in the history of anthropology
By the middle of the twentieth century, when the discipline of anthropology was reaching its
maturity, anthropologists had been studying societies in different parts of the world by conducting
ethnographic research on indigenous and local societies, investigating their social structure,
customs, religion, economy, and so on. From the beginning, the assumption was that there is one
earth, populated by one humanity -- but that humanity could be classified into different races at
different stages of evolutionary development. Gradually, however, anthropologists developed an
increasing appreciation for the coherence, depth, and complexity of indigenous cultures, which
could not be simply dismissed as characterised by primitive simplicity on an evolutionary scale.
This led to the displacement of the evolutionary paradigm with one of cultural relativism. What
emerged, then, was a view that saw humans inhabiting a single natural world, within a multiplicity
of different societies, each of which had their own unique, distinctive, and equally plausible cultures
or worldviews (Eriksen 2001).
By the 1960s, anthropologists were increasingly emphasizing the symbolic aspect of different
cultures. This symbolic turn was exemplified by prominent figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1966) in France and Clifford Geertz (1973) in the United States. Both men primarily looked at
cultures as symbol systems: sets of representations of the world that one can analyze or interpret,
just like one would analyze or interpret a myth or a work of literature. Lévi-Strauss and Geertz,
each in their own way, treated the work of the anthropologist as one of transcribing and then
interpreting or analysing a symbol system. Whether through “structuralist” or “interpretive”
anthropology, the discipline became focused on symbols or “representations”. The goal was to
unpack the inner logic and systemic coherence of the system of symbols of a given culture, which
may, to the uninformed Western or modern observer, appear as baffling or incomprehensible.
With the rise of post-structuralist approaches by the 1970s and 80s, however, there was a rising
skepticism toward scholars’ reconstructions of neatly coherent symbol systems. Critiques of
Orientalism and of the colonial conditions of the production of knowledge about cultural Others
also led to a suspicion of “exoticism” in the discipline (Thomas 1991). Earlier generations of
anthropologists were criticised for focusing on elaborate cosmologies and complex ritual and
kinship systems, rather than on banal and mundane dimensions of life, or on the ways in which
non-Western societies were appropriating modern ideas and practices. “Post-structuralist”
anthropologists became more interested in deconstructing coherent “symbol systems” as
expressions of hegemonic systems of power -- whether it was the power of the exoticising
Orientalist gaze, or the cosmologizing power of an indigenous political system. “Deconstruction”
became the trend. In line with post-modernist aesthetic sensitivities, many anthropologists became
more interested in the messiness of life, in the fragmented and ad-hoc ways in which people
construct meanings, and the ways in which they resist or undermine systemic constructions of
culture (Clifford 1988; Clifford & Marcus eds. 1986; Marcus & Fischer eds. 1986).
In spite of their differences, however, structuralist, post-structuralist, and other types of
interpretive anthropologists all focused primarily on representations. Their shared ontological
assumption was that there is a single reality that can be represented or symbolised in different ways.
It is in this context that some anthropologists began to question this assumption. Is the idea that
there is one shared universal reality – nature – onto which we can affix any number of equally valid
cultural meanings or interpretations – not itself a specifically Western ontology, that should be
relativized? With this question in mind, by the late nineties, some anthropologists shifted their
focus back to indigenous cosmologies and their metaphysical implications. But this time, the
purpose was not simply to describe the interesting worldviews of exotic others, but to let those
cosmologies speak back to the basic ontological assumptions of anthropologists themselves, and
of Western ways of knowing and building worlds (Paleček & Risjord 2013; Palmer, Tse & Colwell
2019).
This trend marked both a return to classical questions and themes of the early years of the
discipline, even as it carried even further some of the tendencies of post-structuralist anthropology.
In their review of the ontological turn, Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) have stressed the
amplification of the reflexivity that has long been central to anthropological methodology as a
discipline based on the encounter with a cultural Other: not only should researchers question their
location in the construction of authorised knowledge within a system of power relations; now,
they should allow their encounter to lead them to question their basic ontological assumptions
about what reality is.
Religion and the nature-society divide in the classical roots of the anthropology of religion
Central to the ontological turn is a critique of naturalism as a foundational assumption of the social
sciences. In his study of the divide between “nature” and “society” in the history of anthropology,
Pierre Charbonnier (2015) explores how this conceptual division became paradigmatic in the social
sciences. Charbonnier shows how, in the history of anthropology, naturalism has played out
through debates on the relationship between nature and society. Society, he shows, is a concept
that has evolved in the social sciences precisely in contrast to the notion of nature. It is, by
definition, a non-nature. But “nature” always plays a role in the way society is defined in contrast
to it.
Charbonnier begins with the earliest classical theorists of sociology, starting with the “father of
sociology”, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). In his Cours de philosophie positive (1830), Comte considers
the evolution of the forms of social organization. The most primitive form of social organization,
he says, is “fetishism”. Fetishism is characterized by humans extending their own self-
understanding of the human spirit to the entire world. Thus, they postulate that the relations
between all beings are the same as the relations of humans with each other: that is to say, social
relations, which are moral relations. For Comte, the earliest humans were not conscious of the
distinction between “nature” and “society”, and therefore treated the whole world as a form of
society. It was only through humanity’s gradual evolution that the realm of “society” was separated
from the realm of “nature”, thus removing nature from the domain of moral concern and
restricting moral consciousness and obligation to humans (Charbonnier 2015: 28-36). We can say
that fetishism, for Comte, plays a mediating role between society and nature, allowing humans to
engage in moral relations with non-humans.
With Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the intellectual project of delineating an autonomous domain
of “society” is most explicit and influential. But, in his theorization of the autonomy of the social,
Durkheim can’t escape some profoundly ambiguous relationships between society and nature.
This is especially the case in his magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Here,
Durkheim uses the case of Australian totemism to make the argument that, on the one hand,
religious ritual is the foundation of social life; but what people experience as the power of the
totem or god is none other than the power of society. Thus, what people worship through their
rituals is society itself, externalized in the symbolic form of the totem. The ambiguity of
Durkheim’s argument lies in the fact that he claims that the power of society is entirely internal to
itself and merely projected onto the totem; and yet, society needs the mediation of the external
sacred object – a non-human being – for its power to operate. And this non-human sacred object
is “supernatural” (a deity, totem or spirit), itself often derived from the “natural” world (such as
an animal which is treated as the totem).
Durkheim not only recognizes the importance of specific totems or deities as concrete
manifestations of sacred/social power; he also posits the generalized and circulatory nature of this
power through his discussion of the Melanesian concept of the life-force or mana. Just as social
power is more than the aggregate of the individuals who constitute a society, mana is a power that
is more than the specific objects which are imbued with it from time to time. Durkheim essentially
considers that there is such a thing as mana, but that the Melanesians were mistaken in
misattributing the origin of this force, which, for Durkheim, is purely social. In effect, Durkheim
considers that indigenous religions are sociological theories that accurately describe the location
and circulation of social forces, but simply lack the awareness of “society” as a distinct ontological
reality, which is the true source of the mana. If the indigenous people use their theory of mana to
integrate as a society, the sociologists must step out of the social world to identify the true origin
and mechanism of the mana (Charbonnier 2015, 62-63).
Charbonnier points out that Durkheim’s argument can be understood in two ways. The
conventional reading is that the non-human sacred object has no specific significance, since it
exists only as an expression of a social reality. But another reading would suggest that the sacred
is a relationship that unifies society with something beyond itself, and that, in order to constitute
itself, society needs to reach beyond itself (Charbonnier 2015, 59-60). It needs to ground itself, it
seems, around a sacralised or super-naturalised nature. In effect, the “supernatural” mediates the
relationship between the “social” and the “natural”.
Descola’s typology of ontologies
Charbonnier’s analysis, which he further extends to all the leading figures in the history of French
anthropology, shows that, while the nature-society dichotomy is central, if only implicitly, to most
of their theories, their schemes always contain elements of ambiguity that destabilise the
dichotomy. But it was with Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, first published in French
in 2005, and in English in 2013, that the naturalist structure was explicitly analysed and relativized.
Descola begins his anthropological analysis by questioning the universality of the conceptual divide
between nature and culture. For example, when members of the Amazonian Achuar tribe hunt
and are within striking distance of a prey, they sing an incantation to address the prey. A naturalist
would divide the hunt into hunting techniques based on knowledge of nature and magical practices
based on cultural beliefs. But the Achuar see the hunt as part of their ongoing relationship with
the prey. For them, the incantation is a way of signaling and framing the relationship—with a
repertoire of different incantations corresponding to different types of relationships (Descola 2013,
84).
This example highlights that while naturalism posits two types of relationships in the hunt –the
hunter’s instrumental relationship with the natural world out of which the animal is hunted, and
his intersubjective relationship with fellow humans who share cultural meanings about animals --
for the Achuar animists, the hunt consists in negotiating the intersubjective relationship between
the hunter and the animal. Thus, Descola proposes to “set up a typology of possible relationships
to the world and others, be they human or nonhuman, and to examine their compatibilities and
incompatibilities” (Descola 2013, 92). He builds his typology by taking a structuralist approach
based on “cognitive schemas:” partly or wholly unconscious structures that orient peoples’
perceptions, shape the way they behave and express their thoughts and feelings, and frame their
interpretations in ways that can be communicated with others. These “integrative schemas”
connect many domains of life and give people the sense that they share the same lifeworld that
arises from their shared experiences. It is these “integrative schemas” that Descola calls
“ontologies” (Descola 2013, 104-105).
Descola establishes a typology of four basic types of integrative schemas. For Descola, all humans,
in all cultures, experience the world through the dual experience of interiority and exteriority or
physicality: we experience the world both as an “I” with invisible thoughts, feelings and dreams;
and as a visible, external body that acts in the world. But different societies may posit that non-
humans have interiorities similar to humans, or not; and that non-humans have similar exteriorities
to humans, or not. By combining these possibilities, Descola (2005) generates a typology of four
ontologies or integrative schemas: animism, naturalism, analogism and totemism.
Similar interiorities
Dissimilar interiorities
Similar exteriorities
Totemism
Naturalism
Dissimilar exteriorities
Animism
Analogism
Animists relate to non-humans on the assumption that they share a similar interiority; it is because
they have different external forms that non-humans perceive the world differently as different
species. For animists, the world is populated by countless different types of beings with subjectivity,
who see the world through different bodies.
Naturalists, on the other hand, relate to non-humans on the assumption that the latter don’t have
an interiority, but that their exteriority is made of the same material substances and that follow the
same physical, chemical, and biological laws as humans. For naturalists, interiority is unique to
humans in the universe – and each individual or collectivity has a unique interiority.
Analogists relate to non-humans on the assumption that their interiorities and exteriorities all are
dissimilar. Analogical cosmologies posit a fragmented cosmos in which all beings are ever changing
composites of elements and energies, which share analogical features. Order is created by making
analogical connections between different categories of beings. As Descola puts it, “Everything is
in everything and vice versa” (p. 304). Finally, Totemists relate to non-humans on the assumption
that both their interiorities and exteriorities are of the same nature.
Descola surveys hundreds of ethnographic cases in all parts of the world, suggesting that all the
cosmologies existing in the ethnographic record can be classed within these four types (though
overlaps and transitions from one to the other can be identified). Hunter-gatherer societies tend
to be animist (or totemist for Australian aborigines); agrarian societies tend to be primarily
analogical; and naturalism is characteristic of modern society.
Descola thus offers a universal scheme for mapping out the ways that humans relate to the beings
in the world. In this typology, naturalism is relativized as but one among four options, each of
which is an equally plausible outcome of the combination of two simple logical choices. There is
thus no simple binary division of the world between “modern/traditional” or “Western vs non-
Western.”
While Descola did not apply his scheme to religion per se, the four integrative schemas suggest a
typology of four different modalities of religion. For example, animist religion is primarily
concerned with negotiating relationships with non-humans in the environment, in which the non-
humans are related to as persons. Analogical religion is primarily concerned with cultivating a
fragile order out of a chaotic world, developing consciousness of a oneness underlying the chaos
by making analogical parallels and connections between elements of the universe, aligning with
these analogical principles, and performing order through ritual. Naturalistic religion is primarily
concerned with accentuating the spiritual meaning of an individual’s life in contrast with a lifeless
and alienated material world, and with building unique communities of people who share the same
universe of subjective meanings.
In the contemporary world, we increasingly find combinations and transitions between these
different ontological types. For example, Western Christianity was primarily analogical until the
Renaissance; and then, arguably, became increasingly naturalist from the 17th century onwards.
Today, many forms of “alternative spiritualities” are derived from analogical cosmologies, which
combine with both animist and naturalist modalities of spirituality. In Asia, there has long been an
overlapping culture of animism and analogism, with the main religions (Hinduism, Daoism,
Buddhism) superimposed over an ”animist substratum” (Århem, & Sprenger, 2016). Now,
naturalism is widespread among the educated populations, leading to transitions and combinations
between naturalist, analogical and animist modes of religiosity (Palmer & Siegler 2017).
Descola’s typology suggests new directions for the study of religion. A naturalist approach to
religion assumes that a religious community consists of a group of people with shared subjective
meanings or beliefs about a natural world that is ontologically distinct from the beliefs. The focus
of naturalist research on religion, then, is the meanings and beliefs of this human community. If
an animist ontology is prevalent, however, the focus of attention might rather be on the types of
relationships that humans maintain with non-human persons. In the case of analogical ontologies,
the focus might be on how the community aligns itself with the non-human cosmos by drawing
analogies between the cosmos, the human body, and the socio-political system.
Ingold’s dwelling perspective
Descola’s typology has the benefit of relativising Western naturalism as but one of four basic
ontological types, each of which has its inherent logic. It points to how different integrative
schemas posit different sets of basic relationships between humans and non-humans, and implies
that the study of religion should be attentive to these modes of relating. However, many
anthropologists are skeptical of the structuralist logical formalism of Descola’s model (Feuchtwang
2014) . An alternative is the more phenomenological approach of Tim Ingold, which has been laid
out in a series of essays collected in his book The Perception of the Environment (1993) – which offers
a radical critique and complete rejection of naturalism.
In Perception of the Environment, Ingold discusses several dualities that underlie the modern
relationship between nature and culture: on the one hand, there is nature (in the singular), and, on
the other hand, there are cultures (in the plural). Both are observed from the outside by Western
universal reason. Within this dichotomy, nature and culture are made up of completely different
types of beings: nature includes organisms who follow natural laws and live in populations, whereas
cultures are made up of persons who have meanings and live in intersubjective relationships. The
world is thus divided into two completely, ontologically different types of beings: organisms that
live in the world of nature, and persons in the worlds of culture. As such, human beings have a dual
ontological nature: they are both organisms that follow natural laws, and they are persons who live
in worlds of meanings.
Ingold attempts to overcome this ontological split by proposing what he calls the dwelling perspective.
This perspective is largely inspired by Heidegger (1993) and also the work of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (1962[1945]), as well as Gibson's environmental psychology of perception (1979). Ingold
claims that, in the world in which we dwell, rather than speaking of “nature” and “culture,” there
is a single “sentient ecology” in which all beings feel each other and respond to each other with
intuition. This is not a meaningless world onto which humans overlay “representations” to
produce culture. Rather, the world presents itself.
Ingold gives the example of music, which is a direct presentation of itself. The music does not
represent something else. And our knowledge of the world arises through a process of educating
our attention to the world, leading to what Ingold calls revelation. To illustrate this concept, Ingold
gives the example of his father showing him, as a child, the mushrooms of a forest and teaching
him their names and qualities. Ingold’s father used those names to direct his attention, so that, by
perceiving the mushrooms in a specific way, the qualities of the mushroom could be “revealed”
to him. Ingold’s father, by naming the mushrooms, is not overlaying a symbolic scheme onto a
meaningless natural world; instead, he assists in the arising of meaning by guiding attention towards
relating to specific qualities of the world.
Ingold defines life as an unfolding field of relations in which every being is a singular center of
awareness and agency. Humans are engaged in this unfolding field of life, and they engage with
other beings that are also involved in this unfolding field of life. Humans, for example, are the
environment of plants as much as plants are the environment of humans. Within this unfolding
field, all beings have their own point of view, and they respond to each other's points of view.
They thus seek the revelation of the intentions of the other beings in the relational field of life.
As dwellers, we are beings in the world; we are not individuals who confront a world outside of
us. This dwelling perspective is compared with what Ingold calls the “building perspective.” He
contrasts a beaver building its lodge with architects and engineers constructing a house according
to a predetermined plan, which is separate from and overlaid onto the environment. The beaver
is already dwelling in its environment, and, by building its lodge, is simply cultivating or
transforming its dwelling. Ingold argues that we should see ourselves like beavers—we dwell first
in the world, and we build our house within the world that we dwell in.
The process of dwelling, and constantly building our home within the dwelling process, leads
Ingold to a new understanding of the concept of land. The landscape, for Ingold, is a living and
rhythmic process—we do things in the landscape. We have things to do, sequences of tasks, as we
busy ourselves in the landscape. Through these tasks we relate to other beings; we weave meanings
into our relationships through the tasks that we undertake in our relationships. The landscape, for
Ingold, thus becomes a “taskscape.”
In the taskscape, we engage in wayfinding – in which we move through a region, looking here and
there. When we tell somebody how to go from here to there, what we describe is actually a
succession of vistas—a recollection of vistas, as when we say “you’ll see this building ahead, and
then you turn left, and when you reach the intersection, you'll see a tree to your right.” When we
give directions, we narrate a succession of vistas. This is in contrast to the map, which is a lifeless
representation from above.
Following a similar logic, Ingold distinguishes between a skill in the dwelling perspective, and
technology and machine in the building perspective. Skill is a form of embodiment that is developed
through the field of relations of the person within its environment – a process that Ingold calls
enskilment. This not the transposition of an explicit program. Enskilment may involve the use of
tools, which are contrasted to the machine. The tool is an extension or exteriorization of the body.
The body is central and the tool is an extension of it. A machine, on the other hand, is an
automated mechanism. By functioning automatically, it puts humans at the margins of the process.
The machine tries to separate persons from the process of production – to eliminate social
relations from the process.
Ingold did not specifically problematise religion in his critique of naturalism. But we can draw
some implications. From a naturalist perspective, religion is part of culture -- an external man-
made program that is overlaid onto and gives meaning to a meaningless world. Religions tend to
be seen as different cultural programs that are executed in the world, leading to the construction
of religious institutions, buildings, or fixed practices and doctrines. And so, anthropological
descriptions of religion often involve decoding or extracting the religious “program” from people's
life-worlds. Out of that embodied life, the researcher maps out the religious program. But this can
lead to the fallacy of thinking that people are merely implementing the program that scholars or
theologians have drawn up. Some religions, with their explicit theologies and codified doctrines,
seem to have the program already mapped out. But to what extent are these doctrines embodied
in religious life? And many religions, notably indigenous and folk religions everywhere, are deeply
embodied without an explicit “program”.
What might be the implications of adopting Ingold’s dwelling perspective to study religion? The
environments in which we dwell -- our taskscapes -- include sacred spots, temples, ritual practices,
scriptures, teachings, and so on. How do we see these within a dwelling perspective? To what
extent are they woven into the environment within which we dwell, rather than forms of culture
superimposed onto the natural world? How are sacred sites and practices woven into an unfolding
field of tasks, as part of humans’ overall patterns of comings and goings? (Palmer 2014). If we see
humans as located within an unfolding field of relations, which include relations with non-humans
– what, then, would be the implications of including what Sahlins (2022) has called meta-humans
– deities, spirits and so on – within this unfolding field?
What might be the implications of taking religious knowledge, not so much as programs that are
applied by humans, but as an embodied education of attention – an enskilment -- leading people
to becoming attentive to different signs that appear as they relate to different beings and
experiences in the world? What, in this education of attention, would be the religious skills that
are trained and embodied? How might these concepts shape our understanding of religious
tradition -- as a form of wayfaring in the landscape, of education of attention and skill for engaging
with the world, and shaping the landscape in specific ways?
Kohn’s thinking forests
In the sentient ecology conceptualised by Ingold, all beings feel each other and respond to each
other. But how does this actually happen? The question of our interactions with nonhumans is
developed in depth by Eduardo Kohn in his book How Forests Think (2013) – an ethnography of
relationships between humans and the beings of the forest among the Avila in the Amazonian
regions of Ecuador. While Ingold can be situated within a phenomenological tradition, Kohn takes
inspiration from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
What does it mean to say that a forest "thinks"? It depends on how one defines "thinking." For
Kohn, following Peirce, to think is to interpret signs. Let us use some concrete examples: a dog in
the forest hears a rustle, and it responds by pouncing or fleeing. The dog's response is an
interpretation of the sound. Likewise, a plant senses light, and it responds through the form and
direction of its growth. Put in semiotic terms, the plant's response is its interpretation of the light.
For Kohn, to live is to respond to signs, and to interpret with intention. To live, by interpreting
the signs in the world, is to think.
A plant's semiotic interpretation of sunlight—the form it takes by bending towards the light—is
also a sign for other beings, which will respond to this sign. For example, ants, bees, and other
animals will respond to the plant; each will interpret the motion of the plant and act in line with
its own intentionality. All living beings are signs that other beings interpret and respond to. There
is an inter-species flow of interpretations, responses, and signifying: an inter-species flow of
thinking.
Kohn does not claim that plants and animals "think" in the same way as humans do. Here, Kohn
uses Peirce's semiotic theory to clarify the distinction. There are three types of signs for Peirce:
iconic, indexical, and symbolic. While all living creatures make use of iconic and indexical signs
(including humans), only humans operate at the level of the symbolic. To explain Peirce's three
types of signs, a classic example that is used is a sign on a men’s washroom door. This sign is an
"icon": a sign that looks like what it represents, namely a man. This sign is also an "index": a sign
that points to something else, namely the men's washroom.
The sign is also a "symbol" that can only be understood in relation to other symbols: in this case,
we know that the symbol refers to "man" as opposed to "woman," rather than "human" as
opposed to "animal," or "standing people" as opposed to "sitting people."
Signs can be considered in terms of an ecology: a rustling sound in the bushes is an indexical sign:
it points to whatever is moving in the bushes. Pheromones left by an ant are an indexical sign: they
point to a path to be followed by the ants. While symbols are unique to human thinking and
communication, humans and other beings are constantly emitting and interpreting iconic and
indexical signs—both within our own species and between species.
For Kohn, when there is interpretation, there is a self doing the interpretation. All living beings –
not only animals with brains -- have intentionality. They interpret the signs they perceive from the
world. Their self is the product of their relations with their environment, and of their anticipation
of the future. A self reproduces itself; thus, the self remembers its own form. The self is an iconic
sign of itself, and it reproduces itself in anticipation of a future toward which it tends. Therefore,
thought is the present self communicating with the future self. The forest is alive with living
thoughts oriented to the future.
Kohn claims that “Living thoughts ‘guess’ at and thus create futures to which they then shape
themselves,” whether they are human or non-human (p. 90). To follow this, selves (human and
non-human) are thus “loci of enchantment.” This implies, for Kohn, that selves have souls --
because selves extend into a future that does not exist, and because they emerge out of interactions
with other selves; they exist beyond the body. “Souls emerge relationally in interaction with other
souled selves in ways that blur the boundaries we normally recognize among kinds of beings” (p.
106).
Kohn discusses the Avila notion that there is a “realm of the masters” deep in the forest where
people go to after dying, developing a concept of “supernature”. The “realm of the masters” is the
ultimate future destination toward which selves orient themselves. In the realm of the masters,
some of the dead attain a higher, quasi-transcendental status. Selves in the present moment
contribute to their emergence by imagining and relating to their future selves in that state.
“Supernature,” therefore, “is the place where one can be called into being by this higher-order
other self that is both strange and familiar” (p. 214).
This is an enchanted world in which all living beings have innate meaning and purpose.
Disenchantment refers to the notion that there are no longer any ends inherent to the world. Kohn
concludes that all living beings, not only humans, have values: they value what is conducive to
their growth and survival (p. 133). But, for Kohn, only humans have morality and ethics, because
they use symbols – which are unique to humans – to think morally and act ethically. As Kohn
(2013) puts it: “The moral … requires the ability to momentarily distance ourselves from the world
and our actions in it to reflect on our possible modes of future conduct – conduct that we can
deem potentially good for others that are not us. This distancing is achieved through symbolic
reference.” (p. 133)
What are the implications of Kohn’s thesis for the study of religion? As with Descola and Ingold,
Kohn did not specifically thematise the category of religion, even though he goes so far as to
incorporate concepts such as “soul” and “supernature” as realities within his theoretical framework.
But, within Kohn’s account of intentional communication between human and non-human worlds,
what is typically referred to as “religion” may well be the acts, signs and symbols that mediate this
communication of intentionalities. We might then see religion as a mode of communication with
the non-human world in terms of reading, interpreting, and responding to signs in the world.
Religion, in this view, is a kind of self-making in relation to a thinking environment, and in relation
to both one’s past and one’s future.
From here, then, one might generate a theory of animism and enchantment which is not a system
of meanings that are overlaid onto an inanimate world, but rather a system of living
communication and relationality between human and non-human beings. The question that
follows would not be, “How is it that religions enchant a world that is in itself without meaning?”
but rather, “how do religions mediate and manage the intrinsically enchanted nature of the world?
Concluding remarks
The implications of the anthropological critique of naturalism resonate with some trends within
the geography of religion. Many geographers have argued for the necessity of taking a “post-secular”
approach to the study of religion, moving beyond conventional distinctions between “religious”
and “secular” spheres of society to pay attention how the religious seeps into the secular and the
secular seeps into the religious (Kong 2010, Woods 2013, Tse 2014). In societies traditionally
studied by anthropologists, the distinctions between the religious and the secular have always been
difficult to draw. The ontological turn in anthropology, however, goes even further in suggesting
not only that the religious/secular binary is not useful for accounting for the empirical reality of
both traditional and post-modern societies – but that this binary is an expression of the naturalist
binary between a nature that is secular in essence and cultures that are religious in diverse forms.
To the extent that the naturalist binary should be questioned as a governing principle of social
scientific thinking, ontological anthropology implies a radically post-secular methodology and
theory.
Many of the recent anthropological discourses on animism and on how non-human beings and
forces, often in the idiom of religion, communicate with humans, resonate with Kong’s call for
geographers to turn their attention to the poetics of religion (Kong 2001: 218-220). As she notes,
many geographers and other scholars have reflected on how non-human or meta-human entities
or forces, often at very specific places, “irrupt” into human life, “choose” humans, or “reveal”
themselves to humans (Eliade 1959, Lane 1988, Japhet 1998, Hume 1998, Palmer 2014). Letting
themselves be affected by the poetics of numinous experience, spiritual and religious practitioners
communicate and work with these forces and beings in active processes of sacralization, thereby
transforming human and natural geographies. The grounded location of these processes – that
take place while developing embodied “skills” in a “taskscape” in which we perpetually weave our
“dwelling” within the landscape – resonates with Kong’s call for a greater attention to religion as
sensorial and embodied processes, and with Della Dora’s (2018) emphasis on affect, fluidity, and
on the perpetual processes of making and unmaking of religious assemblages.
To conclude, ontological anthropologists question the nature-culture dichotomy that sees religion,
as well as other forms of culture, as systems of human representations about an intrinsically
meaningless world. This naturalist ontology is either wholly rejected, or relativized as one of many
possible modalities of relating to the world. The focus, then, becomes the investigation of different
modalities of relating to the world and the beings that live within it. Religions appear as mediating
systems through which humans perceive, dwell in, communicate with, and transform the world.
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