Philippe Descola
Eugene Sheffer Distinguished Lecture
In many parts of the world, the use of land depends on a host of non-human entities endowed with an autonomous agency with whom humans must negotiate – deities, spirits, genies, ancestors, mountains, animals, meteors. The political relationship to the land differs from what we are familiar with in the Western world, either because non-humans are social agents within an encompassing collective, or because they are seen as subjects acting within their own collectives. These examples are worth considering for a less destructive and less anthropocentric approach to the Earth.
Philippe Descola is Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France where he held the Anthropology on Nature chair from 2000 to 2019. He headed the Social Anthropology Laboratory (a joint laboratory of the Collège de France, EHESS and CNRS) until 2013, while continuing to direct studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he taught a weekly seminar on the comparative anthropology of relations between humans and non-humans.
One of the world’s leading anthropologists, Philippe Descola has developed a comparative anthropology of relations between humans and nonhumans that has revolutionized the human sciences and challenged our ways of thinking about the urgent ecological issues of our time. For Descola, modernity is characterized by the perception of a constitutive division between nature and society. He proposes instead viewing human diversity through the lens of four “modes of identification” (animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism), as described in detail in Beyond Nature and Culture. Philippe Descola is one of France’s foremost public intellectuals today, and highly regarded by a new generation of environmentalists and climate activists.
His books include La Nature domestique (Éditions de la MSH, 1986), Les lances du crépuscule (Plon, 1993), La remontée de l'Amazone (co-edited with A.-C. Taylor, L'Homme, 1993), Les Idées de l'anthropologie (with G. Lenclud, C. Severi and A.-C. Taylor, A. Colin, 1988), Claude Lévi-Strauss: Un parcours dans le siècle, (Odile Jacob and Collège de France, 2012), Nature and Society (co-editor, 1996), Par-delà nature et culture (Gallimard, 2005), La Fabrique des images: Visions du monde et formes de la représentation; L'Écologie des autres: L'anthropologie et la question de la nature (Quae, 2011), and La Composition des mondes (dialogue with Pierre Charbonnier, Flammarion, 2014). Many of these works have been translated into other languages, contributing to the international impact of his work. The newest English translation of his work is Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration (Polity, September 2025). He is currently at work on a book about the anthropology of landscape (paysage), entitled What is a Landscape?
The Eugene Sheffer Distinguished Speaker series honors eminent scholars whose work has had an important impact on their field of study. This series was created by the family of Eugene Sheffer to honor his commitment to the Columbia Maison Française, which he directed from 1942 to 1966.
