Trompe-l'oeil nature. Configurations of continuity ; The wild and the domesticated ; The great divide --
The structures of experience. The schemas of practice ; Relations with the self and relations with others --
The dispositions of being. Animism restored ; Totemism as an ontology ; The certainties of naturalism ; The dizzying prospects of analogy ; Terms, relations, categories --
The ways of the world. The institution of collectives ; Metaphysics of morals --
An ecology of relations. Forms of attachment ; The traffic of souls ; Histories of structures --
Epilogue : the spectrum of possibilities.

Successor to Claude Levi-Strauss at the College de France, Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture - as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth - is often seen as essentially different than nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the "four ontologies"--Animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism - to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh"--provided by publisher.