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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Imagery and figuration are not just figments of an artist’s imagination. Perception and imagination are always shaped by what habit has taught us to discern. The visual path we spontaneously trace through the world depends on where we are situated in the four regions of the ontological archipelago: animism, naturalism, totemism or analogism. Each of these four regions corresponds to a way of conceiving the objects that make up the world, of perceiving the continuities and discontinuities in the folds of the world and of drawing the dividing lines between humans and nonhumans.
From Alaskan Yup’ik masks and Aboriginal bark paintings to miniature landscapes from the Song dynasty and Dutch Golden Age interior scenes: each image reveals, through what it shows or fails to show, a certain figurative regime, identifiable by the formal means it uses and by the device through which it can unleash its power to act. The figurative regime enables us to grasp – sometimes better than words can – the contrasting ways of living that characterize the human condition and its relation to the nonhuman. By comparing a great diversity of visual images and artworks, Descola masterfully lays the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of figuration.
One of the world’s leading anthropologists, Philippe Descola has developed a comparative anthropology of relations between humans and nonhumans that has revolutionized both the human sciences and our ways of thinking about the great ecological issues of our time. His new book will be of great value to students and scholars of anthropology, visual art and art history and to anyone interested in art, culture and the relations between the human and nonhuman worlds.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
1. The Folds of the World
Layers of invisibility
The embodied sign
Ontologies of images
Geometries of figuration
Forms of ostension and powers to act
Notes
PART I Presences
Note
2. Embodied Spirits
Animal persons
Think animals
Who’s there?
Distinguishing resemblances
Ontological camouflage
Notes
3. Multiplying Viewpoints
Notes
4. Relational Identities
Notes
PART II Indices
Note
5. Types of Beings and Courses of Life
Figuring the ordering
Figuring the organizer
Figuring the traces of organizing
Notes
6. A Heraldry of Qualities
Notes
7. The Power of Traces
Notes
Variation 1. Repertoire-Image and Person-Image
Notes
PART III Correspondences
Note
8. Exercises in Composition
Hybrids and chimeras
Pictured bonds
The great world and the small one
Embedding and repetition
Notes
9. Conjunctive Spaces
Notes
10. Role Playing
Notes
PART IV Simulacra
Note
11. Facing the World
The conquest of the visible
Painting the soul
Instituting nature
Toward immanence
Impossible objectivity
Notes
12. Objectivizing the Subjective
Notes
13. Detecting Resemblance
Notes
Variation 2. Playing on All Fronts
Notes
Conclusion: Making Images
Ontologies
Forms
Agencies
Incarnations
Notes
Postscript: Scaffoldings
The quarrel over resemblance
Animating images
Imaged languages
Notes
Acknowledgments
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Postscript
Acknowledgments
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1
The Orion motif, Achuar, Ecuadorian Amazonia; drawing by the author.
Figure 2
Ray masks, Yukuna, Colombian Amazonia; van der Hammen 1992, 1, 149.
Figure 3
Doubling of ray orifices in a Yukuna mask; Karadimas 2015a, 49.
Figure 4.1
Anonymous Byzantine icon representing the Virgin and the Child Jesus seated on a throne…
Figure 4.2
Domenico Veneziano, Madonna and Child, known as “Carnesecchi Tabernacle,” fresco transfe…
Figure 5
Painting representing a bear on the pediment of a Tsimshian house; Boas 1955 (1927), 225, fig. 223…
Figure 6
Hārūn al-Rashīd in the Hammam, school of Kamāl al-dīn Bihzād, Herat, late fifteenth century, miniature from the poem…
Figure 7
Illustration by Simon of Orléans for the treatise on falconry by Frederick II, De arte venandi…
Figure 8
Transformation of an object (a) transposed onto the plane (b) of an image; 8.1 metric; 8.2 by similarity; …
Figure 9
Bark painting representing a spiny anteater (sagittal view) and a tortoise (transversal view), anonymous…
Figure 10
Hat woven of spruce tree roots and red cedar bark representing a crow, made by Isabella Edenshaw (bask…
Chapter 2
Figure 11
Pair of Yup’ik masks representing a grizzly bear, 11.1, and a black bear, 11.2, Alaska; Smithsonian …
Figure 12
Yup’ik mask representing an oystercatcher (wading bird), Alaska; Musée du quai Branly, Paris…
Figure 13
Yup’ik masks representing clams, Alaska; Museum für Völkerkunde, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin…
Figure 14
Edward S. Curtis, Yup’ik headband representing a guardian spirit, Alaska; Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs …
Figure 15
Asymmetrical Yup’ik masks, Alaska; Alaska State Museum, Juneau, inv. II-A-1451 and II-A-1452.
Figure 16
Button in walrus ivory, probably Iñupiat, northern coast of Alaska; Balfour 1893, 97, fig. 37.
Figure 17
Polar bear in walrus ivory, Dorset culture, Igloolik region, Canada; Canadian Museum of His…
Figure 18
Aquatic bird in walrus ivory, Thule culture, Canada and Greenland; Canadian Museum of History, …
Figure 19
Animal figurines in walrus ivory, Koryak from the Kamchatka coast, Russia; Jochelson 1908, 658, …
Figure 20
Miniature figurines of aquatic birds in walrus ivory, Ungava Inuit, Quebec; L. Turner 1894, 260, fig. 83.
Figure 21
Cap in bent wood, decorated with figurines in walrus ivory (seagull, walrus, seal) and flanked by bird…
Figure 22
Simon Tookoome, A Vision of Animals, colored pencils, 1972; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Figure 23
Yup’ik mask representing an animal spirit master, Alaska; E.W. Nelson 1900, 408, fig. 100.
Figure 24
Fox-Woman, sculpture by George Tataniq, 1970; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, inv. 96/989. …
Figure 25
The Fox-Woman, drawing by Paulusi Sivuak; Saladin d’Anglure 2006, 182, fig. 19.
Figure 26
Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) transformation mask figuring a bull-head fish, a crow, and a hum…
Figure 27
Yup’ik mask representing a bearded seal from Goodnews Bay, Alaska; Thomas Burke Memorial …
Figure 28
Yup’ik mask, walrus–caribou transformation, Alaska; National Museum of the American …
Figure 29
Yup’ik mask of the ircenrrat type (a fox spirit), Alaska; Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State …
Figure 30
Ma’Bétisek mask figuring the tiger spirit moyang melur, sculpted by shaman Ahmad Kassim, Malaysia; private …
Figure 31.1
Arabesques on the back of an Alsatian chair; Musée alsacien, Strasbourg; Musées de la ville de Strasbourg, M. Bertola, Licence …
Figure 31.2
Ornamental border of a Saamaka board used to crush peanuts, Suriname; Image Collection Sally and …
Figure 32
Paintings for the Kwakiutl dance of the bear (32.1) and the frog (32.2); Boas 1955 (1927), 250–255, figs. …
Figure 33
Kaluli costumes at rest (33.1) and in motion (33.2); photographs 6 and 7. © Steven Feld. From Steven Feld, Sound …
Figure 34
Baniwa feather ornamentations, Brazilian Amazonia; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 70.2008.41.1.1.3. …
Figure 35
A Yanomami from the village of Mishimishimaböwei-teri, Venezuela; Chagnon 1974, 12. Napoleon A. Chagnon.
Figure 36
Wauja drawing by Kamo: the “normal” frog avatar (eyusi); Barcelos Neto 2002, fig. 61.
Figure 37
Wauja drawing by Kamo: the Yerupoho-frog avatar (Yerupo eyusi); Barcelos Neto 2002, fig. 63.
Figure 38
Wauja drawing by Kamo: the apapaatai frog avatar (apapaatai eyusi); Barcelos Neto 2002, fig. 47.
Figure 39
Wauja drawing by Kamo: the “monster” apapaatai frog avatar (apapaatai iyajo eyusi); Barcelos Neto 2002, fig. 62.
Figure 40
Wauja masks of the eyusi (frog) type, male and female, made by Itsautaku; Museu Nacional de Etnologia, …
Figure 41
Wauja drawing by Aulahu: Arakuni’s snake-costume; Barcelos Neto 2002, fig. 53.
Chapter 3
Figure 42
Encounter on the village square between an apapaatai spirit mask and a frightened child; Wauja, Brazil. …
Figure 43
Taniki, Shamanic Vision, felt markers on paper, 1978–1981; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, …
Chapter 4
Figure 44
Shuar from the Rio Chiguaza, Ecuadorian Amazonia, 1917; Kulttuurien Museo, Helsinki; Finnish Heritage …
Chapter 5
Figure 45
Lake Djarrakpi, bark painting by Manapana Maymuru of the Manggalili clan; Morphy 1991, 219, fig. 10.1. …
Figure 46
Painting of a kangaroo, Kunwinjku, Alligator River, Arnhem Land, Australia, c. 1915; Musée du quai Branly, …
Figure 47
Cave painting of a barramundi (Asian sea bass), Bala-Uru, Deaf Adder Gorge, Northern Territory, Australia, early …
Figure 48
A mimih chasing a kangaroo, painting by Dick Nguleingulei, Murrumurru, c. 1980; National Museum of Australia, …
Figure 49
Painting of “Namanjwarre, the estuary crocodile,” by Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra, c. 1985; Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal …
Figure 50
A human and Kandakidj, the Antilopine Kangaroo being of the Dreamtime, sketch based on a painting by Yirawala, …
Figure 51
Bark paintings by Yirawala, representing Lumaluma at various stages of his dismembering; Australian National Gallery, …
Figure 52
Tracing of a cave painting of a Wandjina; unidentified source.
Figure 53
Figuration in the “X-ray” mode (front) and in the topographic mode (back) of the Barramundi being of the Dreamtime …
Figure 54
Dream of Witchetty Larvae, painting on canvas by Paddy Japaljarri Sims, Walpiri, Yuendumu, Northern Territory, Australia; …
Figure 55
Some guruwari animal track motifs, Warlpiri; drawings by the author based on Munn 1973, 134.
Figure 56
Some guruwari motifs indicating displacements, Warlpiri; drawings by the author based on Munn 1973, 134.
Figure 57
Churinga figuring the oldest of the women accompanying the men of the Ukakia Dreamtime being, Aranda. …
Figure 58
Wuta Wuta Tjangala, Ngurrapalangunya, 1974; sketch by Fred Myers, in Myers 2002, 42. © Estate of …
Figure 59
Old Mick Tjakamarra, Dreaming of the Children’s-Water, with Possums, 1973. © Estate of the artist, …
Chapter 6
Figure 60
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Five Dreamings, 1976; © Papunya Tula Artists. © Estate of the artist, licensed by …
Figure 61
Painting representing a dogfish shark, Haida; Mallery 1893, 402, plate XXV.
Figure 62
Engraved slate dish representing a shark, Haida, anonymous, late nineteenth century; American Museum of Natural History, …
Figure 63
Chilkat dancing cape, Tlingit, “distributive” mode, last third nineteenth century; American Museum of Natural …
Figure 64
Tony Hunt, Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) artist, performing the “headdress dance” wearing a chilkat cape, having …
Chapter 7
Figure 65.1
Ritual representation of the totemic being Night (Munga) by Walpiri during a banba ceremony; drawing by Alessandro Pignocchi after a photograph …
Figure 65.2
Night motifs on shoulders, torso, and calves, and on poles; Munn 1973, 196.
Variation 1
Figure 66
Skateen, a Tsimshian Wolf chief from the village of Gitlaxdamks, British Columbia, c. 1890; photograph from Barbeau and Beynon 1987, 283; British …
Figure 67
Naxnɔ’x mask of eagle-person, Tsimshian; Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, inv. VII-C-1349. © Canadian Museum of History, VII-C-1349.
Figure 68
68.1 and 68.2: Chief Sǝmǝdi.’k of Kitwanga, British Columbia; photography by Marius Barbeau, 1923; Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau, negatives 59730 and 59746. …
Figure 69
Ceremonial headdress representing the eagle crest, Tsimshian, second half nineteenth century; American Museum of Natural History, New York, inv. 16/249.…
Figure 70
Chief’s cape in wool bordered with ermine, bearing two crests with eagles holding arrows in their claws, made in mother-of-pearl …
Figure 71
Crest painted on the pediment of a Tsimshian house in the village of Lax Kw’alaams, Fort Simpson, British Columbia; acquired by James G. Swan in 1875; American …
Figure 72
Drum with eagle decoration, Tsimshian, last third nineteenth century; American Museum of Natural History, New York, inv. 16/748. © American Museum of Natural …
Chapter 8
Figure 73
Raghubir Singh, Pavement Mirror Shop, Howrah, West Bengal, 1991. © 2025 Succession Raghubir Singh. All rights reserved.
Figure 74
Counter-sorcery mask of the Koma Ba type, Maou ethnic group, Ivory Coast; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 73.15583. © RMN-Grand Palais/Michel …
Figure 75
Shark-man identified with Béhanzin, sculpture by Sossa Dede, Abomey, Benin; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 71.1893.45.3. Wikicommons.
Figure 76
Dancers from the Ciwara initiatory society, village of Dyélé, Mali; photograph by Catherine de Clippel, 1986. © Catherine de Clippel.
Figure 77
Headdress crest, Ciwara initiatory society, Bougoni region, Mali; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 71.1939.26.3. © RMN-Grand Palais/Patrick …
Figure 78
Mimbres bowl with a pair of bird-fish composite creatures, 1000–1300, New Mexico. Photo © WBC ART/ Alamy Stock Photo.
Figure 79
Large mask of the Oruro Diablada, Bolivia; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 71.1971.64.1. © RMN-Grand Palais/Michel Urtado/Thierry …
Figure 80
Florentine Codex, book XI, folio 63, illustrations of four species of Nahuatl lexical hybrids; Ms Med. Palat. 220, folio v; Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. ©
Figure 81
Demons Straddle and Drive the Mount of the Soul, this Composite Elephant, anonymous, Mughal school, early sixteenth century; Bibliothèque nationale de …
Figure 82
Borâq, the Composite Sphinx of the Prophet, anonymous, Deccan school, Muslim South India, mid-eighteenth century; Musée Guimet, Paris, inv. MA2754. …
Figure 83
Two div “demons” in a garden, Mohtashem wool carpet, Kashan, Iran, early twentieth century; Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, collection Karl …
Figure 84.1
Head of the god Aia Apaec, Mochica pottery, Peru; Art Institute of Chicago, inv. 1955.2321. © The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA, Kate S. Buckingham Endowment…
Figure 84.2
Detail of the Aia Apaec pottery; Kutscher 1983, fig. 277.
Figure 85
Stag with raptor’s head, art of the steppes, Verkhne-Udinsk, Buryatia, Iron Age; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © AKG images/MPortfolio/Electa. © AKG-images.
Figure 86
Kōla Sanniya mask, Sri Lanka, around 1890; Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, inv. B. 3454. © Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich/Photo Nicolai Kästner.
Figure 87
Staff-god, Rarotonga, Cook Islands, before 1830; Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, inv. L. 900. © Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich/Photo Marianne Franke.
Figure 88
Enguerrand Quarton, altarpiece The Crowning of the Virgin, 1454; Musée Pierre-de-Luxembourg, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.…
Figure 89
Mesa of the curandero Marco Mosquera, Cajamarca, Peru; photograph from Perrin 2007, 108.
Figure 90
Some Hopi Katcinam dolls, Arizona, twentieth century. From top to bottom and from right to left: …
Figure 91
Hopi doll (tihu) figuring WupaMoKatcina, “Katcina-Long-Mouth”; Fewkes 1894, plate VI, …
Figure 92
The Anatomy of Man, or Zodiacal Man, miniature attributed to one of the Limbourg brothers, produced …
Figure 93
Man as Microcosm, illumination in Solomon of Constance, Glossaries; manuscript copied in 1165 at the …
Figure 94
A yogi bearing on his body the signs of correspondences with the macrocosm, anonymous image painted by …
Figure 95
Cosmogram of the path taken by the souls of the dead toward the world above, ink on European paper, Dayaks …
Figure 96.1
Cora votive calabash (jicara), Mexico; Museum für Völkerkunde-Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Konrad …
Figure 96.2
Diagram of the Cora calabash; Preuss 1911, 298.
Figure 97
Cora votive rosette (chánaka), Mexico; Museum für Völkerkunde-Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Konrad …
Figure 98
Boshanlu fragrance burner, bronze inlaid with gold, Western Han Dynasty, second century BCE, found in the tomb of Prince Liu Sheng, …
Figure 99
Map of Lubwe village, Ila region, c. 1905; Smith and Dale 1920, 112.
Figure 100
Fractal model of an Ila village obtained by simulation; Eglash 1999, 27, fig. 2.3.
Figure 101
A Huichol peyotero heading toward the Wirikuta desert, San Luis Potosi, Mexico, carrying a tsikuri in his basket; Edin Alain Martinez …
Figure 102
Huichol calabash made in Tateikie, San Andrés Cohamiata, Mexico; Olivia Kindl Archives.
Figure 103
Motifs from the Huichol calabash; 103.1 star (yellow); 103.2 peyote buds (green); 103.3 stag head (brown).
Figure 104
Statue of the god A’a, Rurutu; collected in 1821; British Museum, London, inv. OC,LMS.19. The British Museum, London, …
Figure 105
U’u club from Marquesas Islands; Musée du quai Branly, Paris, inv. 71.1887.31.1. © RMN-Grand Palais/Patrick Gries/…
Figure 106
Diagram of the u’u club; Steinen 2005 (1925–1928), 163.
Figure 107
Interpretation of the u’u club: 107.1 the etua grasping one side of the club; 107.2 the hands of the etua seen on the other side of the club; …
Chapter 9
Figure 108
José Benítez Sánchez, The Vision of Tatutsi Xuweri Timaiweme, wool yarn nierika glued by beeswax on plywood, 1980; …
Figure 109
Illumination in the Souvigny Bible representing Genesis in the Cluny style, anonymous, late twelfth century; Bibliothèque Municipale, Moulins, …
Figure 110
An episode in the foundation of the Hase-dera temple; painting on paper scroll, anonymous, sixteenth century; Seattle Art Museum, classification no. 57.15.1. …
Figure 111
Autumn in the Yellow River Valley, attributed to Guo Xi, ink and watercolors on silk (section of a scroll), eleventh century; Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, …
Chapter 10
Figure 112
The two Sa’lakwmanawyat Hopi marionettes on a kiva stage surrounded by masked Katcinam, Hotvela, third mesa, Arizona, 1979; Geertz 1982, 176.
Figure 113
Statue of Eizon by Zenshun and assistants, painted wood, c. 1280; Saidaiji Temple (Shingon-risshū Buddhism), Nara, Japan. © Japanese Agency …
Chapter 11
Figure 114
October, by Paul de Limbourg and various other artists, miniature from Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry, first half fifteenth century; Musée …
Figure 115
Pierre Salmon in Discussion with Charles VI, illumination attributed to the Boucicaut Master or the Mazarine Master, c. 1412; Dialogues de Pierre Salmon et Charles …
Figure 116
Portrait of Rudolf IV of Habsburg, anonymous, before 1365; Diözesanmuseum, Vienna.
Figure 117
Anonymous, known as Portrait of Terentius Neo and his Wife; Pompeii-Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. © Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, …
Figure 118
Portrait painted on canvas of a woman named Aline, Hawara, first–second century CE; Ägyptisches Museum-Altes Museum, Berlin, inv. 11411.
Figure 119
Christ and St. John the Apostle, sculpture attributed to Master Heinrich of Constance, convent of Sankt Katherinental, Thurgau, c. 1305; Museum Mayer van den …
Figure 120
Jean Bondol, Bible of Jean de Vaudetar, miniature, 1372; Museum Meermanno-Huis van het Boek, The Hague, ms. 10 B 23 F2r.
Figure 121
Robert Campin, Nativity, between 1418 and 1432; Musée des beaux-arts, Dijon. © Musée des beaux-arts, Dijon, France/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 122
Robert Campin, Annunciation, or Merode Triptych (side panels), between 1425 and 1428; Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, New York. © Metropolitan …
Figure 123
Robert Campin, Portrait of a Stout Man, Robert de Masmines, c. 1425; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Figure 124
Robert Campin, A Man and a Woman, between 1420 and 1438; National Gallery, London. © The National Gallery, Londres, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/…
Figure 125
Jean Fouquet, Self-Portrait, enamel painting on copper, c.1450; Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département d’objets d’art, inv. OA. …
Figure 126
Jan van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, c. 1435; Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département de peintures, inv. 1271. © Musée …
Figure 127
Robert Campin, The Virgin and Child before a Firescreen, between 1425 and 1430, National Gallery, London. © National Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 128
Robert Campin, The Virgin and Child before a Firescreen (detail). © National Gallery, London, UK/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 129
Robert Campin, Nativity (detail). © Musée des beaux-arts, Dijon, France/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 130
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country, fresco (detail), 1339; Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. © Museo Civico, …
Figure 131
Autumn, illumination in Tacuinum sanitatis in medicina, northern Italy, before 1400; Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. © Pictures from …
Figure 132
Joachim Patinir, The Ecstasy of St. Mary Magdalene, c. 1512–1515; Kunsthaus, Zurich. Joachim Patinir und Werkstatt (um 1475–1524), artist Landschaft …
Figure 133
Konrad Witz, The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, 1444; Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva. © Musée d’art et …
Figure 134
Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective of a Dutch Interior Viewed from a Doorway, or The Slippers, 1650; Musée du Louvre, Département des peintures, …
Figure 135
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Peeled Lemon, c. 1650; Musée du Louvre, Département des peintures, inv. 1320. Musée du …
Figure 136
Jan Christiaensz. Micker, Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam, c. 1652; Amsterdam Museum (formerly Amsterdams Historisch Museum). © Amsterdam Museum.
Figure 137
Pieter de Hooch, Drinkers in the Bower, 1658; National Gallery of Scotland, on deposit from private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.
Figure 138
Gerard ter Borch, The Letter, 1660–1665; Royal Collection, London. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024/Royal Collection Trust. Image RCIN 405532.
Figure 139
Identical PET images illustrating different choices of “pseudo-colors” for the same numerical variables, 1996. Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology, …
Chapter 12
Figure 140
Piet Mondrian, Still Life with Gingerpot I, 1911 (140.1, above), and Still Life with Gingerpot II, 1912 (140.2, below); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Figure 141
Piet Mondrian, Polder Landscape with a Train and a Small Windmill on the Horizon, 1906–1907; Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © …
Figure 142
Piet Mondrian, View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg, 1909; Museum of Modern …
Figure 143
Piet Mondrian, Ocean 5, 1915; Museum of Modern Art, New York
Figure 144
Hendrick Goltzius, Dune Landscape near Haarlem, 1603; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. …
Chapter 13
Figure 145
Claude Monet, Bath at the Grenouillère, 1869; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Variation 2
Figure 146
Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock working on Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950; courtesy Center for …
Figure 147
Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974; action with coyote in the René Block Gallery; photograph …
Figure 148
Gonkar Gyatso, The Shambala in Modern Times, 2008; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inv. 2010.755. © Photograph …
Figure 149
Gonkar Gyatso, The Shambala in Modern Times (detail). Photograph © 2021, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, …
Figure 150
Simon Tookoome, Inuk Imagines Dog Animals, 1981; University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Alberta. © Simon …
Figure 151
Victor Brauner, Force de concentration de Monsieur K, oil on canvas with the incorporation of celluloid dolls, 1934; Centre Pompidou, …
Figure 152
Victor Brauner, Conciliation extrême, 1941; Galerie de la Béraudière, Brussels. © ADAGP, …
Figure 153
Salvador Dalí, Galatea of the Spheres, 1952; Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres. © …
Figure 154
Salvador Dalí, Fifty Abstract Paintings, Which as Seen from Two Yards Change into Three Lenins Masquerading …
Figure 155
Salvador Dali, Portrait of Gala Looking onto the Mediterranean Sea, Which from a Distance of 20 Metres …
Postscript
Figure 156
Sculpted poupou, tukutuku and kowhaiwhai panels inside the porch of the Te Tokanganui-a-Noho house …
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1
The iconic spectrum
Chapter 2
Table 2
Wauja ontogenesis
Table 3
Typology of Wauja masks
Chapter 5
Table 4
Compositional structure of the Djarrakpi paintings
Variation 1
Table 5
Contrasts between animist images and totemic images (Tsimshian)
Conclusion
Table 6
Types of representational geometry according to modes of figuration
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Dedication
In memory of my parents and my grandparents, who taught me to question images
Forms of the Visible
An Anthropology of Figuration
Philippe Descola
Translated by Catherine Porter
polity
Originally published in French as Les formes du visible. Une anthropologie de la figuration© Éditions du Seuil, 2021.
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025.
This work was awarded the Albertine Translation Prize in non-fiction for excellence in publication and translation as part of Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine, and funded by Albertine Books Foundation with the support of Van Cleef & Arpels. This work also received support for excellence in publication and translation from Albertine Translation, a program created by Villa Albertine and funded by Albertine Foundation.
Published with the support of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale/publié avec le soutien du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) et du Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale.
Published with the support of the Jan Michalski Foundation.
Published with the support of the Collège de France/publié avec le soutien du Collège de France.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6197-1
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Preface
The proper essence [le propre] of the visible is to have a layer [doublure] of invisibility in the strict sense, which makes it present as a certain absence.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty1
This book is the result of a series of experiments linked circumstantially. Experiments that were also lived experiences: first of all, a more theoretical one that took me in the mid-1970s to the Achuar people in the upper Amazon region in order to study how they related to their environment. At the end of that study, I was forced to conclude that none of the descriptive categories I had brought in my ethnologist’s tool kit had proved adequate for describing what my hosts were doing and saying. I had sought in vain among the Achuar something that resembled nature or culture, history or religion, ecological knowledge clearly distinguishable from practices of magic, or systems of resource exploitation governed by technical effectiveness alone. The very concept of society, that hypostasis with reference to which our so singular sciences identify themselves, was a quite poor descriptor of a gathering of humans, animals, plants, and spirits whose everyday interactions flouted the barrier between species and the differences in capabilities among beings. All the analytic levels I had been taught to distinguish were mingled here – economic activities were religious from beginning to end, political organization appeared only in rites and vendettas, and an evanescent ethnic identity depended essentially on the memory of conflicts – so much so that I had to imagine a mode of description that did justice and gave coherence to the ethnographic jumble without taking the usual paths.2
This first experiment, inductive and reflexive, gave rise to a second, more theoretical one that kept me occupied for a long time. The Achuar had made me aware that the intellectual tools of the social sciences called upon a quite particular type of cosmological and epistemological configuration that had grown out of Enlightenment philosophy – a universal nature of which each of the myriad cultures was its own limited version. This configuration corresponded hardly at all to what I had observed on the ground or to what other ethnographers had reported from other regions of the world, nor did it correspond to what historians have described for other periods of human history. So, I launched into a comparative study of the various ways of detecting and stabilizing the continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans that had been attested by ethnographic and historical documents, with the goal of bringing to light what might be called forms of “worlding.”
Taking the opposite tack from the classic idea in anthropology and in history, according to which there is only one world, a sort of self-sufficient totality awaiting representation from different vantage points, I thought it was more appropriate – and more respectful of those whose ways of acting and being I was struggling to describe – to consider the diversity of customs as a diversity of worlding processes.3 By this I mean the ways of actualizing the myriad qualities, phenomena, beings, and relations that can be objectivized by humans by means of the ontological filters they use to discriminate among everything their environment allows them to apprehend. Consequently, when the movement of worlding is initiated for a human, that is, at the moment of birth, it does not produce a “vision of the world,” that is, one version among others of a transcendent reality to which only Science, or God, could have integral access; it produces a world in the proper sense of the word, a world saturated with meanings and swarming with multiple causalities, one that, around its edges, straddles other worlds of the same kind that have been actualized by other humans in analogous circumstances. And it is the relative coincidence of some of these worlds, the common reference points, and the shared experiences to which they attest, that give rise to what is ordinarily called a culture.
Taking up Marcel Mauss’s idea that “humans identify themselves with things and identify things with themselves, while having at the same time a sense of the differences and the resemblances that they are establishing,”4 I have called these ontological filters that structure worlding “modes of identification.” They can be seen as cognitive and sensory-motor schemas that are incorporated during socialization into a particular physical and social milieu; they function as framing arrangements for our practices, our intuitions, and our perceptions without mobilizing any propositional knowledge. In other words, it is this type of mechanism that allows us to recognize some things as meaningful and to ignore others, to link sequences of actions without having to think about them, to interpret events and utterances in a certain way, to channel our inferences about the properties of objects present in our environment. In short, these schemas encompass everything that goes without saying and everything that people say unthinkingly.
Still, despite the great diversity of qualities that can be detected in beings and things, or that can be inferred on the basis of indices offered by appearances and behaviors, one can plausibly think that the ways in which these qualities are organized are not very numerous. Our judgments of identity, that is, the recognition of similarities among objects or singular events, cannot depend on a series of analytic comparisons carried out one term at a time. For reasons of cognitive economy, they have to be able to be carried out rapidly and unconsciously by induction on the basis of shared schemas, arrangements that allow us to structure the qualities perceived and to organize behaviors. On the basis of a fairly simple thought experiment, I have thus hypothesized that there are no more than four modes of identification, that is, four ways of systematizing ontological inferences, each being based on the types of resemblance and difference that humans detect between themselves and nonhumans on a double plane, physical and moral. Relying in part on a conventional terminology, I have called these four contrasting ways of detecting continuities and discontinuities in the folds of the world animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism.5
Animism, which I had discovered in the course of my conversations with the Achuar, is the imputation to nonhumans of an interiority of the human type – the assumption that most beings have a “soul” – combined with the observation that every class of existents, every kind of thing, is supplied with a body of its own that gives it access to a particular world that it inhabits in its own way. The world of a butterfly is not the same as that of a catfish, which is not the same as that of a human, either, or of a palm tree, or of a blowgun, or of the race of spirits that protects monkeys, for each of these worlds is at once the condition for and the result of the actualization of singular physical functions that the other forms of existence do not possess. By shaking up my complacent certainties, by bringing me the revelation that other worlds could unfold on the margins of the one in which I had felt comfortable, animism triggered the study of which this book is one stage. By contrast, it was in the texts, in the great monographs about the Australian Aborigines from early in the last century, that I began to glimpse what totemism was, and with great astonishment. For, quite unlike ordinary intuition, totemic identification consists in basing the resemblance of humans, animals, and plants belonging to the same totemic class not on the similarity of their appearances but on the sharing of a set of physical and moral qualities that the totemic prototype – generally designated by an animal name – transmits generation after generation to the human and nonhuman individuals making up the group that bears its name. Thus, the human and nonhuman members of the eagle class do not resemble eagles and do not descend from them as from ancestors; rather, they share properties with eagles – speed, decisiveness, distance vision, combativeness, endurance – that are more manifest in eagles than in any other being, but whose effective source derives from one of the totemic beings that once gave the world order and meaning.
In the course of my readings, a third mode of identification had arisen from the fortuitous intersection between Chinese thought as seen by Marcel Granet, Renaissance thought as seen by Michel Foucault, and Aztec thought as seen by Alfredo López Austin. Despite the cultural abyss that seemed to separate these civilizations, all three were obsessed with analogy as a way of reducing the burgeoning of differences among the world’s objects: their constitutive elements, the states, situations, and qualities that describe them, and the properties with which they are endowed when they are connected in broadened networks of correspondences.6 In “analogist” ontologies, everything is meaningful, everything refers to everything else: no singularity is left aside on the interpretive pathways that make it possible to graft a color onto a moral quality, a day of the year onto a constellation, or a mental state onto a social function. As for the last form of worlding, the one in which I was brought up, I have labeled it – not very imaginatively – as “naturalist.”
A distinguishing feature of the naturalist form is that it reverses the animist formula. Its practitioners are of course unaware of this, because they do not imagine that formulas other than their own exist: it is by their minds, not their bodies, that humans differentiate themselves from nonhumans, and it is also through this imperceptible inclination that they differentiate themselves from other humans, in clusters, thanks to the diversity of realizations that their collective interiority authorizes as it is expressed in distinct languages and cultures. As for bodies, they are all subject to the same decrees of nature and do not allow any singularization based on forms of life, as was the case in animism, since the diversity internal to humans is wholly a function of their ways of thinking. Even though this ontology has made possible the unprecedented development of sciences and technologies, it has also had not only the effect of “disenchanting” the world, but also and especially that of making forms of worlding based on different principles hard to understand. For many of the concepts by means of which we conceive of modern cosmology – nature, culture, society, history, art, economy, progress – are actually as recent as the realities they designate, having been forged only a few centuries ago in order to account for the upheavals undergone by European societies, or to bring those societies into being; they are hardly pertinent to efforts to account for civilizations that did not go through the same historical trajectory and thus do not perceive the boundaries between humans and nonhumans in those places where we ourselves have established them.
Such were the results of my second experiment. Unlike the first, in which I was testing on myself, as it were, the validity of my own interpretations, the second took on the feel of an inquiry aimed at verifying hypotheses. It led to a general model of the systems of qualities discernible in the objects of the world, a model that offered a range of combinations, each capable of being embodied in an ontology that synthesized its basic principles in a manifest way. These combinations can be spelled out as follows: (1) moral continuity among humans and nonhumans, and discontinuity in their physical dimensions (animism); (2) moral discontinuity and physical continuity (naturalism); (3) both moral and physical continuity, but divided into discontinuous blocs of humans and nonhumans (totemism); and finally (4) both physical and moral discontinuity, which networks of correspondence have sought in vain to make continuous (analogism). From this standpoint, for example, one can say that animism is well represented by the ontology of the Amazonian Achuar, totemism by the ontology of the Australian Aborigines, naturalism by neo-Kantian epistemology, and analogism by the ontology of the Mesoamerican Amerindians. Fairly often, though, these systems of qualities exist only as tendencies, or they overlap to a certain extent; rather than considering them as closed and compartmentalized cosmologies or cultures in the classic sense, it is better to grasp them as the phenomenal consequences of four distinct types of inference regarding the identity of the existing beings that surround us or that we like to imagine. Every human is capable of mobilizing one type of inference or another according to the circumstances, but the recurrent judgments of identity that a given human has a tendency to produce (such-and-such an existent belongs to such-and-such a category and can be categorized alongside such-and-such other existents) will most often follow the type of inference privileged by the community within which he or she has been socialized.
Now this second experiment was carried out with the usual instruments of comparative anthropology, that is, by taking written or reported discourse as my material: ethnographic studies focused on representations of the human person, on rituals, or on classification of plants and animals, on philosophical or medical treatises, philological analyses, collections of myths and etiological narratives, and many other types of texts as well. Only a little audacity was required to establish relations among them. This led to the idea for a third experiment that culminated in this book. If the modes of identification whose existence I had postulated really possess the structuring role that I attribute to them, if they are at the origin of forms of worlding shared by human collectivities, then one ought to be able to detect them as well in the images that these collectivities have produced. For one can only depict what one perceives or imagines, and one imagines and perceives only what habit has taught us to snip out from within the warp and woof of our daydreams and to discern within the flow of sensory impressions. We have known for a long time that, as Leonardo da Vinci saw it, painting is a mental thing, literally a view of the mind. And many artists and philosophers have endlessly insisted that figuration is not an imitation of reality, a copy of what is, a reproduction of the visible; it is rather an evocation of what ought to be, a way of making perceptible the qualities, situations, and beings that matter to us or whose existence we sense but that our senses and our words grasp only imperfectly.7
An image can thus be seen as an ostension – an act or process of making visible – of the ontological properties that its author’s gaze has identified in the texture of things or in the nooks and crannies of his or her inner being, either because custom has shaped him or her for this practice – the most common case – or because figuration, by freeing the image-maker from the linear constraints of speech, allows these “seeing” brothers or sisters who give body to the visible to make perceptible something no one has ever seen before.8 They accomplish this feat by means of a prodigious sleight of hand: they manage to impose as self-evident the perfect equivalence between what they disclose and the glimpsed referent that one would have liked to produce oneself if only one were talented enough. Indeed, images are the only means at our disposal for seeing what others see, for testing on ourselves the greater or lesser coincidence between the visual pathway that our education, our sensitivity, and our biography have gotten us used to tracing along certain folds of the world, and the pathway that others – in other places, at other times, according to other figurative codes – have themselves learned to follow, along other just as plausible folds.
A modest talent for drawing, a line of painters on my father’s side, and an amateur’s taste for art history did not spare me from some initial naivety. As was predictable, and probably inevitable, I had begun this experiment by compiling a catalog of images corresponding to the concrete ontologies that I had used to specify the characteristics of each mode of identification. Amazonian masks, Inuit effigies in walrus ivory, or Siberian drums for animism, Aboriginal paintings on bark or canvas for totemism, European paintings and photographs for naturalism, and, in the case of analogism, a disparate cluster of figurations from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, from pictures made with colored threads by the Huichols in Mexico and amulet aprons from the Ivory Coast to Chinese scroll paintings. I had thus fallen into the trap from which art historians themselves do not always escape: I was treating iconic representations as if they were illustrations of symbolic and discursive systems that justified them and made them comprehensible. To be sure, I was not about to look for the key to the images in treatises on aesthetics or morality, in painters’ correspondence or in studios’ financial records, as specialists in European painting do; I was interpreting the images as an anthropologist through what they expressed of the ontological frameworks that I had earlier brought to light on the basis of the verbal representations I had pondered. In each case, however, the iconology ended up depending on what had been said and written about the figurations in question rather than on simple consideration of the aspect of the things that the images revealed or, on the contrary, what they failed to depict. Nevertheless, the exercise was not useless. It taught me little by little to look at the images for what they showed, not for what I expected them to make visible. By setting them in series indexed according to a type of ontology, that is, without regard to their epoch or their provenance, and by examining the visual choices that made certain series homogeneous, I was beginning to distinguish the recurrent mechanisms of figuration that reveal “the invisible layer” or lining proper to each mode of identification.
The desire to see embodied in images the ontological schemas that I had theorized on the basis of texts also led me, in a first phase, to envisage figuration as a too narrowly mimetic operation. For images do not simply bring to light continuities and discontinuities among existents, dividing lines along which the furnishings that make up a world can be reconstituted; they also have the disconcerting capacity to signal in another sense, through the agency with which some of them are endowed. Like an icon of the Virgin reflecting her gold in candlelight or the Hindu divinities that are paraded before immense crowds, this type of image may well figure what it represents in a recognizable fashion, but it is less significant through the symbolism with which it is burdened than through the power with which it is credited. Putting into imagery is inseparable from the staging of images, that is, from the pragmatic conditions of their effectiveness as agents of social life that appear to share many of the properties of ordinary humans. Here again, I had to step aside from the traditions of art history and remain faithful to the often crude but exceedingly powerful images on which anthropologists focus.
I had also underestimated the possibility that images could exist in a mode of identification independent of the one that historical and ethnographic documentation allows us to depict; thus, I was not attending closely enough to their capacity to prefigure the ontological and cosmological upheavals that the transformation of the visual culture makes apparent but whose reflexive expression does not appear in the texts until much later. In what is, for the most part, the absence of confirming testimony, the lag between the figurative regime and the discursive regime is not always easy to establish. It is delineated clearly, however, in certain well-documented examples to which we shall return later in this book. This is most notably the case in Europe, where we can see representations of the naturalist ontology emerging in painting well before that ontology began to be thematized in the writings of scholars and philosophers. It is not only the projective geometry of the seventeenth century that was, as Panofsky put it, “a product of the artist’s workshop”;9 it is more likely the totality of the epistemic reconfiguration attested in the writings of Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes that can be envisioned as the result of a new way of regarding and of depicting humans and things that had appeared two centuries earlier.
The experience I evoked at the beginning of this preface was thus truly experimental in nature. Venturing onto terrain – the comparative anthropology of figuration – that was new to me and little trod by others, I did a lot of groping, came up against dead ends, and kept adding experiments. An exhibit I organized on this theme at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in 2010–2011 even turned out to be an experiment within an experiment, since it gave me the opportunity to test on museum visitors the plausibility of the visual schemas that I discerned in the images – an all the more precious test in that the public involved was generally ignorant of the figurative traditions of the civilizations whose objects I had put on display, and untouched by scholarly prejudices about the ways works are expected to be grouped in a museum.10 This lengthy wandering in the labyrinth of images was doubtless indispensable for me. Beyond the fact that it reproduced, in the inquiry into figuration, the experimental attitude that those who do the figuring often adopt, it bore witness to the fact that an image, even more than a text or a situation, always surpasses by far what can be said about it, for it makes present and enduring the synthetic composite of an object that the linearity of our words struggles to enclose within analytic discourse.11
Notes
1.
Merleau-Ponty 1964 (1961), 187.
2.
See Descola 2019 (1986); 1993b.
3.
Descola 2014a.
4.
Mauss 1974 (1934).
Translator’s note
: unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are my own.
5.
Descola 2013 (2005).
6.
Granet 1967 (1934); Foucault 1971 (1966); López Austin 1988.
7.
The most famous formulation of this characteristic of figuration comes from Paul Klee’s “Creative Credo” (1920): “Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.”
8.
Translator’s note
:
Les frères voyants
is the title of an anthology of texts on art published by Paul Eluard.
9.
Panofsky 1991 (1927), 58.
10.
Descola 2010.
11.
As Michel Foucault put it so well, “it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax” (Foucault 1971 [1966], 33).
1The Folds of the World
Any and every representation of the universe necessarily is based on a selection of significant elements.
Pierre Francastel, Medieval Painting1
Of the myriad images produced by humans since the point at least eighty thousand years ago when they began to make figures, only a tiny fraction belongs to art and its history.2 Art historians themselves – some of them, at least – have not hesitated to acknowledge this. From Gottfried Semper through Aloïs Riegl and Aby Warburg to Carl Schuster, some have been able to deal with all images on an equal basis – images that emerge in ornamental art, decorative motifs, and cult objects of tribal populations as well as those found in the canonized masterpieces of Antiquity and Western civilization. Whether they take the form of effigies, masks, cave paintings, paintings on skin or bark, motifs in basketwork, or drawings in sand, most of the images from “before the era of art”3 were not intended to imitate an object faithfully, to satisfy an ideal of beauty, to transmit an edifying message, or to depict a salient event. Their function was to make visible and enduring a divinity, a spirit, a site, an animal, a dead being; in short, to bring about the presence of something or someone absent. Still, as Leon Battista Alberti indicated several centuries ago, that absent entity also had to be identifiable by some sign that could be seen in the image. “Painting certainly has in itself a truly divine power, not only because, as they say of friendship, a painting lets the absent be present, but also because it shows [to] the living, after long centuries, the dead, so that [these] become recognized.”4
So, it is hardly new, among theorists of art, this sense that the evocative power of images, their aptitude for embodying beings as if they were alive, proceeds from a “divine force,” a mysterious talent that is able to connect with our affects and that the intellect struggles to elucidate.
However, while here and there in texts from the European tradition we may find some allusions to this disconcerting dimension of painting, it has been taken seriously only lately. The reason for this is perhaps that to acknowledge straight away the power to act that images possess would have downgraded the connoisseurs and scholars whose numbers have been multiplied by the art market since the Renaissance: all those cultivated people with good taste, skilled at deciphering symbols in paintings and at recognizing the historical scenes they depict can have nothing in common with primitive worshippers of fetishes or credulous peasants looking for the message conveyed by a statue of the Virgin. For the most part, the history of art since the work of pioneering eighteenth-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann has become a science of circumstances and signs: its ambition is to analyze the meaning of artworks, to identify the perceptible or hidden symbols scattered within them, to identify the characters and the scenes represented, to retrace the influence of philosophical, political, literary and aesthetic ideas on the development of motifs, styles, and compositions, to detect the genealogies, borrowings, and ruptures among schools, countries, and genres, to evaluate the influence of the market, the patrons, and the dominant tastes upon artists’ production. Works of art are treated as iconic signs and clusters of symbols: a work of art represents an object for a viewer capable of recognizing it as such and giving it a meaning.
Starting in the late twentieth century, breaking with this principally semiotic approach to works of art, a few historians and anthropologists undertook to examine images in a different way, treating them as agents in their own right, agents that act on the social and affective lives of those who look at them, rather than seeing them as aggregates of signs, codes, and narratives that a contextual study would make it possible to decipher.5 From David Freedberg and Hans Belting to Alfred Gell and Horst Bredekamp, over the last thirty years or so these pioneers have managed to make less outrageous the idea that images dispose of a form of autonomy in relation to humans, that they have a tendency to exercise the kind of intentional effects that English-language authors since the eighteenth century have been calling agency.6 The present book belongs to this trend, without abandoning the idea that images are also signs of a particular sort that make some aspect of the world visible while transfiguring it. For, if works of art have now emerged from their frames and come down from their pedestals to lead an autonomous existence; if they are partly freed from the nets
