Selfhood beyond the Species Boundary

Abstract

Growing out of fieldwork conducted in the forests around Ávila, a Quichua-speaking Runa village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon region, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think participates in what might be called the “ontological turn” in recent anthropological research. This turn calls for the comparative study of the various ontologies projected by different cultures, past and present. At issue are more or less widely shared understandings of the kinds of beings that populate the world, the qualities and abilities those beings are taken to embody (including the capacity to have perspectives on events, among other attributes linked to selfhood), and how the beings included in various categories and subcategories relate to those categorized as human. Coming to terms with differences among such categorization systems has far-reaching implications not only for anthropology but also for other areas of inquiry concerned with how systems of this sort shape various institutions and practices; pertinent fields of research include the history of agriculture, animal ethics, and the sociology of companion animals in families. Cultural ontologies also bear saliently on the study of literary and other narratives that feature the perspectives and experiences of nonhuman animals, or that more or less explicitly situate human characters in wider, trans-species constellations of agents.