Philippe Descola, Professor Emeritus at the Collège de France, explores the cosmopolitics of the Anthropocene. 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. 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.
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