How Forests Think

Based on its snappy title, I was expecting this to be a study of a particular form of non-western ecological philosophy - but the first chapter claimed the book would be a provincialization of European thought! Not merely other ideas but new ways of having ideas! An ambitious goal! In the end, it was neither.

My (uninformed) idea of an anthropological survey is that a researcher should (attempt to) discover and describe what life is like for a group of people with an open and unbiased mind, with the corollary that lots of bad anthropology comes about because being actually fully open and unbiased is impossible. This book is not that, because the bounds and the influences of the philosophical/ideological framework are clear to see, with clear roots in European continental philosophy. The actual work then becomes using that philosophy to talk about how anthropology could work.

Which is not so bad by itself, but this book becomes significantly more a story of the semiotic framework of Charles Pierce than of life for the Runa. The philosophical work is interesting and kind of up my ally, networks of sign transformers constituting consciousness is neat, but the anthropology is a bit shoe-horned in. In the end the philosophical work doesn't fully persuade (as far as I can tell, an "anthropology beyond the human" is left as a theoretical notion with little potential for having impact on how anthropology is done) and the anthropological side of things is just a series of interesting anecdotes.