Descola, Philippe

Philippe Descola is a French anthropologist born in 1949. He devotes his theories to the modes of the socialisation of nature and to the relationships between human beings and what surrounds them. With the goal of going beyond the nature/culture dichotomy he has suggested an analysis reading grid of four modes of social identification which are ways of establishing a border between self and other, according to the perception of resemblances or differences in the interiority and physicality between the human and the non-human. These four modes are naturalism, totemism, animism and analogism, described in his work "Par delà nature et culture" (Beyond Nature and Culture).

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