Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola (b. 1949) is a French anthropologist whose work has profoundly reshaped understandings of the nature–culture divide. In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005/2013 in English), Descola proposed four “ontologies” through which societies conceptualize relations between humans and non-humans: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. Unlike the Western tradition of naturalism, which separates human subjectivity from an inert natural world, other ontologies recognize varying degrees of continuity or correspondence between beings. Descola’s comparative framework challenges the universality of the nature–culture dualism, positioning it as a cultural construction rather than an ontological truth. His notion of relative universalism seeks to account for both shared and divergent ways of world-making across societies. For landscape architecture, Descola’s work invites rethinking design through plural ontologies that foreground entanglement and interdependency.

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