Anthropology of Work
• Descola

References for Theme: Descola

• Descola, Philippe
• In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (1996)

• "Societies of nature and the nature of society" (2002)

• La nature domestique: symbolisme et praxis dans l'écologie des Achuar (2004)

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.322) Marx’s position is indicative of the more general tendency of modern thought to regard production as the element that determines the material conditions of social life and as the principal way for humans to transform nature and, by doing so, transform themselves. Whether or not one is a Marxist, it is now commonly thought that the history of humanity is primarily founded on the dynamism introduced by a succession of ways of producing use value and exchange value of the materials that the environment provides. But it is fair to question whether this preeminence ascribed to the process of productive objectivization applies generally to all societies. To be...

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.323) The idea of production as the imposition of form upon inert matter is simply an attenuated expression of the schema of action that rests upon two interdependent premises: the preponderance of an individualized intentional agent as the cause of the coming- to- be of beings and things, and the radical differencebetween the ontological status of the creator and that of whatever he produces. According to the paradigm of creation- production, the subject is autonomous and his intervention in the world reflects his personal characteristics: whether he is a god, a demiurge, or a simple mortal, he produces his oeuvre according to a preestablished plan and with a defi...

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)

  (p.325) As a way of conceiving action on the world and a specific relationship in which a subject generates an object, production thus does not have a universal applicability. It presupposes the existence of a clearly individualized agent who projects his interiority on to indeterminate matter in order to give form to it and thus bring into existence an entity for which he alone is responsible and that he can then appropriate for his own use or exchange for other realities of the same type. Now, to return to our two examples: the production model does not correspond either to the concept of a continuous autopoietic process as...

• Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)