Philippe Descola

Philippe Descola is a French anthropologist, born in 1949, whose scholarly reputation grew out of fieldwork among the Achuar people of Ecuador's Amazon region from 1976 to 1978, conducted under the supervision of Claude Levi-Strauss. He is best known for proposing a framework of four ontologies, animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism, that challenges the Western distinction between nature and culture, developed across works including In the Society of Nature (1994), The Spears of Twilight (1996) and Beyond Nature and Culture (2005). From 2000 to 2019 he held the chair of anthropology at the College de France and has lectured at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago and Princeton. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/