2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

LECTURES

Transformation transformed
Philippe Descola, Collge de France

The key methodological tool of Lvi-Straussian structural anthropology is the group of

transformation. A structure only acquires an analytical dynamism thanks to its capacity
to organize the transformations between the models of a same group of phenomena. The
paper explores various approaches to this concept and builds on these results to examine
the consequences of apprehending ontological pluralism as a group of transformation.
Keywords: structuralism, Lvi-Strauss, transformation, ontology, the nonhuman

I welcome the opportunity that the invitation to deliver this keynote lecture has of-
fered me to reflect on my own relationship with structuralism, on the part it has
played in the development of my work, and on the influence that one of its key fig-
ures, Claude Lvi-Strauss, has exerted upon me. Lvi-Strauss was my doctoral super-
visor, an ideal one in that he left me entirely free to organize my work as I wished, to
the point that he politely declined to read the manuscript of my dissertationsaying
he had entire confidence in my abilitiesbefore I officially registered it at the cole
des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), so that I had no idea of the type of
critical comments he would make during the formal defense. They mainly concerned
my style, which he found too ornate. I had asked Lvi-Strauss to supervise my thesis
for a variety of reasons. First, because reading Tristes tropiques when I was sixteen or
seventeen was probably the initial shock that finally led me to become an anthropolo-
gist. However, I decided to read philosophy first, but I was among the few students
at the cole Normale Suprieure who did not limit himself to reading Lvi-Strauss
more philosophical works, La pense sauvage or Anthropologie structurale, but also
studied the more technical books, such as Les structures lmentaires de la parent and
the first volumes of Mythologiques. I greatly admired him, and when I finally took it
upon myself to ask his secretary for an appointment to expose my doctoral project I
was as intimidated as if I had gone to visit Kant in Knigsberg. Here at last was a huge

Keynote lecture for the symposium Living Structuralism/Le structuralisme vif, Toronto,
October 13, 2015.

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Philippe Descola.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.005
 Philippe Descola 34

figure of the social sciences, someone who was able to deal with arcane social facts by
showing how they followed a complex logical pattern, and doing this with the clear
and incisive mind of a great philosopher and the elegance and sensibility of a great
writer. Lvi-Strauss was also at the time the only person in Paris qualified to supervise
doctorates on Amazonian Indians, and although he was very close to retirement, this
was among the reasons why I asked him to be my supervisor.
However, both during the time I was struggling to write my dissertation on
the relationship between an Amazonian people and its environment, and for a few
years after, when I began teaching at the EHESS myself, I did not have the impres-
sion that I was a committed structuralist or that I was following a structuralist
method. As was quite common at the time, my theoretical outlook was an improb-
able mixture of Gallic Marxism, semiotics, Husserlian phenomenology, and Lvi-
Straussian structuralism, with small pinches of Sahlins, Douglas, Leach, and more
exotic authors such as Georges-Andr Haudricourt, Gilbert Simondon, or Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen. Within this eclectic combination, I had the impression that
structuralism was just a component and certainly not a driving force. And it was
only when I began to give papers abroad, and when the audience would react to
what I had just said by qualifying it as a structuralist outlook, that I realized how
deeply I had been influenced by Lvi-Strauss and structuralism. I was not unlike
Monsieur Jourdain in Molires Le bourgeois gentilhomme, who, upon learning the
meaning of the word prose, exclaimed: For more than forty years I have been
speaking prose without knowing it! Likewise, for several years I had been a struc-
turalist without being fully aware of it. This lecture will thus have a rather personal
tone, for which I hope to be forgiven, as I will endeavor to make amends for my
initial blindness by trying to state some of the merits of structuralism and explain-
ing how I came to use some of its basic methods and intuitions.
It might be apposite to begin by stating briefly what, in my view, constitutes the
originality of structural anthropology. There is a dual aspect to it: one is a method for
knowing and analyzing certain types of social facts, inspired by structural linguistics,
that Lvi-Strauss and a few others following him have used with great success; but it
is also a particular point of view on the very nature of social facts and on the episte-
mological conditions of getting to know the phenomenal world, which Lvi-Strauss
developed alongside his method, and which came to represent for most observers out-
side anthropology, primarily the philosophers, the heart of his doctrine. Now, one can
take advantage of the method without sharing the whole gamut of moral and philo-
sophical convictions which condition the Lvi-Straussian vision of human experience,
a vision that Lvi-Strauss himself had never any desire to impose upon anyone else.
What does the method consist in? According to Lvi-Strauss, it requires, first,
the isolation of sets of phenomena that are suited for this kind of analysis, essen-
tially those that belong to what he calls the superstructures, that is, elements of the
world that the unconscious activity of the mind reputedly organizes in significant
and systematic sets: the rules of kinship and marriage, classifications, myths, food
norms, or artistic forms. In those systems, one looks for the relations, realized or
potential, which connect elements characterized not by intrinsic properties but by
their position vis--vis one another. The aim is to bring to light in a table of permu-
tations the whole set of possible combinations between these elements. The struc-
tural model which results from this operation does not aim at a faithful description

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

35 Transformation transformed

of any social situation; it is a heuristic device which provides the syntax of the
transformations which allows one to move from one variant to another within a
class of phenomena. This basic principle of structural analysis was aptly defined
by Jean Pouillon when he wrote that structuralism properly speaking begins when
one admits that different sets can be brought together, not in spite, but in virtue of
their differences, that one then tries to order (1975: 122). Strictly speaking, struc-
tural analysis in anthropology amounts to that: it reveals and orders contrastive
features so as to discover the necessary relations organizing certain sectors of so-
cial life, such as the set of culinary techniques or of the ways to exchange potential
spouses between individuals and groups. In sum, it is a very efficient method to
reach the objective which any anthropological analysis should aim at: the detection
and ordering of regularities in statements and practices.
To this general method one must add a point of view which is properly Lvi-
Straussian on the nature of sociality and the purposes of the anthropological in-
quiry, with which one may partially agree or wholly disagree. I may say a few words
about some aspects of it with which I am particularly concerned. The first one is
the marked semiological inflexion of Levi-Strauss approach: for him, social life is
a network of exchange of different kinds of objects which circulate like linguistic
signs. Language provided him initially with a model for the whole of social life and
offered a hope that the study of the latter might one day become as scientific as the
study of the former. Language, and the language-like properties of symbols, is thus
fundamental for him, both in its Saussurean dimension (meaning as arising out of
contrastive features) and in its praxeological dimension (social interaction envi-
sioned as an exchange of linguistic signs). And what Lvi-Strauss sometimes calls
the symbolic function is a language-like ability of humans to give sense to the world
by detecting in it salient features that can be organized in contrastive sets. Now, the
emphasis put on symbolism and symbolic signs presents a problem for anthropolo-
gists like myself whose ambition is to widen the scope of the social sciences, to ac-
commodate in them more nonhuman beings, and thus to shift the focus away from
the sociocentric analysis of conventions and institutions toward the interactions of
humans with (and between) animals, plants, physical processes, artifacts, images,
and other forms of beings. For Lvi-Strauss both anticipates this project and con-
flicts with it. He anticipates it when he assumes, in the Mythologiques, for instance,
that the world is to be seen not as the exclusive playground of humans, but as a vast
array of meaningful differences between qualities and beings that can be system-
atically organized according to these differences. What I see implied there are the
premises upon which I have been working that the sources of the plurality of beings
and of regimes of existence lie at a deeper level than the sociocultural one tradi-
tionally studied by anthropology. This level, which, to borrow from Husserl, may
be called antepredicative, is the one where humans and nonhumans become aware
of each other and develop modes of relating prior to the usual processes of catego-
rization and communication embedded in historically and linguistically contin-
gent frameworks. However, these nonanthropocentric assumptions are at the same
time contradicted by Lvi-Strauss dependency upon the language-like properties
of social life. If one yields to this dependency, one fails to purge anthropology of its
anthropocentrism, because nonhumans, devoid of linguistic abilities and capaci-
ties for symbolism, will always remain the passive objects of human cognition and

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

 Philippe Descola 36

inventiveness, mere bundles of qualities that humans detect and organize in sym-
bolic patterns. If nonhumans are to become agents in their own right, then they
have to be able to escape this symbol-induced passivity.
There are several strategies to circumvent this problem, but I must admit that
none is entirely satisfying. For example, one may focus on nonsymbolic signsim-
ages, for instance and study how the latter behave as iconic agents in the mesh of
social life; this is what I have attempted to do in recent years (see, e.g., Descola 2010).
Or one may adopt an approach in terms of Gibsonian affordances, giving some ac-
tive leeway to the object represented for it to draw the perceiver into its sphere of
influence. Or one may try to avoid altogether the use of the words symbolic and
symbolism, even eschew the very idea of representation, thus hoping that the pro-
cesses they qualify will just disappear as problems by not being referred to; this is
the most common strategy. Another solution, which was propounded recently by
Eduardo Kohn in his book How forests think (2013), is quite attractive but poses
problems of its own. Following Peirces triadic semiology, Kohn argues that iconic
signs (which share likenesses with what they stand for) and indexical signs (which
are in a relation of spatial or temporal contiguity with what they represent) have to
be brought into the anthropological agenda, not only as supplements to symbolic
signs and to enrich humans semiosis, but also because icons and indexes are the
signs that nonhuman organisms use to represent the world and communicate be-
tween life-forms. Their study would thus offer a way to bring together humans and
other living beings within a more embracing semiosis and would provide a founda-
tion for an anthropology which Kohn calls beyond-the-human. In other words,
there is no need to shun representation as if it were a malevolent and Eurocentric
process of dissociation between things and words that impedes a true access to, and
a wholesome experience of, the richness of the world. For there are other forms of
representation than those which use symbols, so that making present something
absent converts all beings who possess this dispositionall organisms, according
to Kohninto selves. The forest that thinks by itself is an interesting way out of
the forest of symbols which has thus far restricted the scope of anthropologyor
perhaps we had better call this new science an ecology of relations; but it is far from
solving all the problems of anthropocentrism. In particular, as I have argued else-
where (Descola 2014), it restricts agency to semiosis and semiosis to organisms, thus
leaving unaccounted for a great number of nonhuman and nonsemiotic agents nev-
ertheless playing an important role in the social field, from artifacts to the climate.
But let us return to Lvi-Strauss. A second matter of concern with his idio-
syncratic view of social life is the enigmatic role played by what he calls the un-
conscious (linconscient). According to him, the unconscious activity of the mind
accounts for the structure and the functioning of symbolic systems, their variable
contents being a contingent effect of the physical and historical environments with-
in which they are deployed. Hence his well-known statement that anthropology is
first of all a psychology. Although I am myself convinced that a considerable part
of our cultural dispositions are acquired, used, and transmitted in a nonconscious
way, I am rather reluctant vis--vis the Lvi-Straussian project of extracting from
the black box of the unconscious little pieces of objectified thought embodied in in-
stitutions so as to deduce from them laws of the operation of the mind. Rather than
deducing these kinds of dispositions from the social expression that they render

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

37 Transformation transformed

possible, as Lvi-Strauss does,1 I find it more reasonable to give cautious credit to

what cognitive psychology has begun to teach us about the mechanisms allowing
the acquisition and stabilization of nonpropositional knowledge. Finally, I share
with Lvi-Strauss a general monist gnoseology which is marked both by a rejection
of the Cartesian type of cognitive realism and by the assumption that there exists a
physical continuity between, as he says, the states of subjectivity and the proper-
ties of the cosmos, although I find such an epistemological outlook among other
authors too: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francisco Varela, James Gibson, or even, as
Lvi-Strauss himself acknowledges, Spinoza.
If we leave aside Lvi-Strauss personal views on the nature of social life and on
the philosophy of knowledge, and return to the method of structural anthropology,
what the latter brings, compared to other great interpretive models of social phe-
nomena such as historical determinism or functionalism, is the idea that no human
phenomenon has a meaning in itself, that it only becomes relevant when it is con-
trasted with other phenomena of a similar kinda system of marriage with other
systems of marriage, a variant of a myth with other variants of a myth; so that the
object of the inquiry is less the description of the phenomenon than the logic of its
contrasts. This method often proved to be highly productive, in particular because
it demoted the question of causalitywhether environmental, cognitive, technical,
functional, economic, political, or ideologicalwhich has long vitiated all attempts
at explaining social facts. Instead it gives preeminence to the conditions of compo-
sition of common worlds, that is, the principles which govern the compatibility and
incompatibility between institutions, practices, ideological systems, sets of values,
techniques, forms of exchange. It is thus more faithful to the mission of anthropol-
ogy as I understand it. This mission is to bring to light these principles of compo-
sition, to understand why, in given circumstances, some elements have coalesced
in a certain way to create polities of a certain kind; it is also to explain why these
relations of compatibility and incompatibility recur under similar forms in very
different parts of the world, why certain features do or do not mix harmoniously
with others. Structural anthropology is a very efficient tool for revealing the laws of
coalescence of these aggregates, precisely because it is attentive to the systematics of
differences and because it eventually allows the integration within a unified model
of local structures elicited from different fields of practice.
Technically, structural anthropology achieves the ends I have just sketched
thanks to a very original tool which I have also used myself with profit: transforma-
tion. According to Lvi-Strauss himself, transformation is the keystone of the type
of analysis which he practices and it is also what I find most fertile in his approach.
He borrows from linguistics the notion of structure, understood as a system of
contrastive oppositions, but he endows it with an analytical dynamism which re-
sults from the capacity of the structure to account for the ordered transformations
between models of the same group, that is, models which are applied to the same
set of phenomena. A structure is not a system. For a structure to exist there must
be between the elements and the relations of various sets invariant relations which

1. For instance, the three cognitive imperatives that Lvi-Strauss elicits out of the working
of marriage systems: the necessity of rule, the notion of reciprocity, and the synthetic
character of the gift (Lvi-Strauss [1949] 1967: 98).

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

 Philippe Descola 38

allow moving from one set to another by the means of a transformation. Now Lvi-
Strauss uses the operative tool of transformation in two quite distinct ways, which
relate to two different morphogenetic traditions, that of the biologist DArcy Went-
worth Thompson, whom he claims to follow, and that of Goethe, to whom he pays
lip service;2 it is the latter which directly inspired me.
The Goethean type of transformation is the one that Lvi-Strauss implements
in Les Structures lmentaires de la parent, although he does not say so himself, but
states instead that he was inspired in that book by DArcy Thompson.3 In the analy-
sis of marriage systems the invariant relation is the exchange of women as an ex-
pression of the principle of reciprocity, itself the positive form of incest prohibition:
the men abstain from the women of their own group and give them to the men of
another group so as to obtain spouses in exchange. All the forms of matrimonial
exchange that Lvi-Strauss analyses are as many transformations of this original
principle, forms that he studies as a function of the growing complexity they exhib-
it in relation to the simplest sociological form that the principle of reciprocity can
take on; this is the dualist organization where a society is divided into two classes
who exchange women according to the rule of exogamy. This elementary form,
known as restricted exchange, is the absolute minimal organization of reciproc-
ity below which no social life is possible. From there a series of transformations
follow which develop the possibilities of the initial invariant: the generalized ex-
change of the Australian marriage systems with four and eight sections, which are
developments of the logical possibilities of the initial reciprocity invariant when the
groups of wife givers and wife receivers are subdivided according to their place of
residence; then the system of the Kachin of Highland Burma, in which generalized
exchange is combined with bride purchase so that women circulate between groups
in one direction while bridewealth circulates in the opposite direction; and finally a
series of combinations of restricted and generalized exchanges in China and India,
which are complex transformations of the original structure of reciprocity, with
China combining restricted exchange in the peasantry and generalized exchange in
the aristocracy, while India undergoes a dual evolution from generalized exchange
toward hypergamy in the higher castes, and toward the closure of the lower castes
within a system of restricted exchange.
This arborescence of the forms of marriage bears a strong resemblance to the
methodical variations of an Urform in Goethes sense, the original form being in
that case the exchange of women ruled by the principle of reciprocity, of which
Lvi-Strauss unfolds all the logical consequences in as many morphological types
of marriage alliances. Just as Goethe (1790) entertained the hope of discovering
one day the Urpflanz, the original plant, the prototype from which could be de-
rived by transformation the whole set of characteristics of all vegetal species, both

2. Lvi-Strauss acknowledges in passing that the morphogenetic tradition of which struc-

turalism can be seen as one of the offshoots can be traced back to Goethe (Lvi-Strauss
1958: 354). In his article on the morphogenetic origins of structuralism, Jean Petitot
(1999) reviews some of the sources that were relevant for Lvi-Strauss in this domain,
but without contrasting the ways he used them, as I am attempting to do here.
3. This is the claim he made in a book of interviews with Didier Eribon (Lvi-Strauss and
Eribon 1988: 159).

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

39 Transformation transformed

actual and logically possible, Lvi-Strauss sees in the principle of reciprocity the
original form of all possible types of marriage alliance, of which he propounded the
law of development. And just as Goethe opposed Linnaeus in botany because he
rejected the idea of a static table of attributes, exhaustive though it may be, in favor
of the deduction of a principle of transformation of biological forms from a com-
plex initial combination, in the same way Lvi-Strauss opposes Radcliffe-Brown in
the domain of social morphology when he considers as initial the structure which
develops on the widest scale the logical possibilities of the principle of reciproc-
ity, rather than retain as a point of departure the simplest forms of marriage from
which the more complex would be derived.
By contrast with this conception of the variation as development of a complex
prototype, in the analysis of myths Lvi-Strauss adopts an entirely different ap-
proach to variation which he claims to have borrowed also from DArcy Thompson.4
In his magnum opus On growth and form (1917), the latter propounds to use a geo-
metrical grid of transformation to move from the form of an organism to the form
of another organism by a process of continuous deformation and without resorting
to some complex initial form out of which all the other forms of organisms would
be derivable. Independently of any evolutionary lineage, one can thus move from
the skull of an extinct species of rhinoceros to the skull of a contemporary species
of tapir, and from this to the skull of a horse. Lvi-Strauss adapts this method to
the analysis of myths. A mythical transformation is the group constituted, on the
one hand, by the set of variants of a myth that keep the same structure, including
by inverting it, and, on the other hand, by the set of myths, often originating from
neighboring societies, that can be shown to transform each other by mutually bor-
rowing episodeswhich Lvi-Strauss calls mythemesthe motives of which they
will invert or the function of which they will swap. The transformation of organic
forms and the transformation of mythemes thus proceed in the same way, by a
continuous series of small variations within a group.
However, as Lvi-Strauss himself acknowledges, there exists a major difference
between myths and organisms: while the specific or generic differences between
organisms depend in the end on discontinuities introduced by the genetic code,
the group of transformation within which myths are contrasted constitutes a vir-
tual continuum upon which the analyst performs arbitrary cuts (Lvi-Strauss 1971:
6034). It is the analyst who chooses, according to his or her knowledge and his
imagination, from the huge mass of myths and variants of myths, the mythemes
which will yield the highest contrastive and semantic output. From this point of
view, the variants of a myth do not carry by themselves a principle of discontinuity.
In other words, the transformation by continuous variation that DArcy Thompson
operates on the morphology of organisms requires that stable forms be given as
templates both at the starting pointthe rhinocerosand at the end pointthe
horse; this is necessary for bringing to light the physico-mathematical principles
which allow movement from one form to the other by a deformation without loss

4. The most explicit reference to DArcy Thompson is at the end of Lhomme nu (Lvi-
Strauss 1971: 6046) and explains how transformation is central to the structural
analysis of myths; there are also two passing mentions of DArcy Thompson, one in
Anthropologie structurale (1958: 358), the other in Du miel aux cendres (1966: 74n).

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

 Philippe Descola 40

of continuity. There is no such thing in the structural analysis of myths: each ana-
lyst will trace the path of transformation which his or her fancy will suggest to
follow. While the mythical transformation introduces discontinuity by the means
of contrastive operations upon a set of phenomenal properties relating to aspects
of the world that can be shown to have common semantic properties, the anatomi-
cal transformation introduces continuity by the means of deformations exercised
upon a set of phenomenologically dissimilar forms between which affinities are
hypothesized.
Whether it concerns organisms, images, social types, or the semantic units of
certain kinds of statements, the transformation of one form into another can thus
be undertaken either in a Goethean regime or in a Thompsonian regime. In the
former case, the transformation is the development in different forms of a kind of
initial blueprint itself constructed by comparing empirical objects pertaining to the
same set. In the latter case, transformation is a deformation by continuous varia-
tion in a space of coordinates that applies to forms that are already given. The first
method, which Lvi-Strauss follows in Les Structures lmentaires de la parent, is
also the one which inspired my own approach when I undertook to organize the
diverse forms of continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans
out of an initial relation between interiority and physicality (Descola 2013). I will
take the liberty of recalling the guiding lines of my own reasoning as an illustra-
tion of the very theme of the symposium: keeping structuralism alive (and keeping
thought alive with structuralism).
Simply stated, the ontological group of transformation that I developed in
Beyond nature and culture purports to contrast modes of identification, that is,
framing devices that regulate habitus, guide inferences, filter perceptions, and are
largely the products of the affordances which the world offers to the specifically
human dispositions. A fundamental function of these framing devices is to ascribe
identities by lumping together, or dissociating, elements of the lived world that ap-
pear to have similar or dissimilar qualities. My argument is that one of the universal
features of the cognitive process in which such dispositions are rooted is the aware-
ness of a duality of planes between material processes (which I call physicality)
and mental states (which I call interiority). By using this universal grid, humans
are in a position to emphasize or minimize continuity and difference between hu-
mans and nonhumans. This results in a fourfold schema of ontologies, that is, of
contrastive qualities and beings detected in human surroundings and organized
into systems, which I have labeled animism, totemism, naturalism, and anal-
ogism, thus giving new meanings to well-worn anthropological concepts.
The range of identifications based on the interplay of interiority and physicality
is in fact limited: when confronted with an as yet unspecified aliud,5 whether hu-
man or nonhuman, a human cognizant subject can surmise either that this object
has a similar interiority and a different physicality, and this I call animism; or
that the object is devoid of interiority but possesses a kind of physicality similar
to that of the subject, and this is what I call naturalism; or that this object shares
with other humans and nonhumans elements of physicality and interiority that are

5. Aliud, a concept denoting an undetermined alter, that is, one which has not been speci-
fied yet by a relation, is borrowed from Descombes (1989: 89).

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

41 Transformation transformed

similar but which altogether differ from those that other humans share with other
nonhumans, and this I call totemism; or, finally, that this objects interiority and
physicality are entirely distinct from the subjects own, even though they display
small enough differences to allow for relations of correspondence, and this I call
analogism. Each of these combinations affords a glimpse on a more general prin-
ciple governing the distribution of the continuities and discontinuities between
any human subject and the objects of its environment. Each of these modes of
identification serves, moreover, as a touchstone for singular configurations of cos-
mological systems, of conceptions of the social link and theories of otherness that
are as many instituted expressions of more entrenched mechanisms of recognition
of the other.
Now this ontological group of transformation bears a resemblance to what
Lvi-Strauss sometimes calls the order of orders (1958: 347), namely the upper
level of structural articulation of the various systems composing social life. With
the slight difference that the articulation here is not a function of an integration of
levels already analytically defined, but results from a hypothesis as to what comes
first in the experience of the world: namely discerning qualities in the objects that
surround us and inferring the kind of relations that they afford. However, the ma-
trix of identification does not work as a philosophical prime mover; rather it func-
tions as a sort of experimental device that allows me to capturethus to bring
to existenceand to classifythus to combinecertain phenomena to highlight
the syntax of their differences. But there is more. By adopting this device, I want-
ed above all to remain faithful to this basic principle of structural analysis which
holds that each variant is a variant of the other variants and not of any of them in
particular which would be privileged. For if I gave the ontological matrix a funda-
mental position, on the other hand, none of the variants that it allows (animism,
naturalism, totemism, analogism) and none of the variants detectable in other sys-
tems, which are as many transformations of the matrixin the sociological, praxe-
ological, epistemic, cosmological, spatiotemporal, or representational orderscan
claim to predominate over any other variants. This was a requirement which I had
set myself from the start so as to produce a model of intelligibility of social and cul-
tural facts that would remain as neutral as possible in relation to our own ontology,
naturalism. And this is why naturalism is only one of the four ontological variants
in the matrix.
Structuralism in general thus provides the fairest form of symmetrization
that anthropology can afford. By symmetrization I mean an attempt, proper to
anthropology and one of its main claims to distinction, to render compatible on
an equal footing the cultural features of the observer and those of the observed.
For it became clear to all lucid anthropologists early on in the development of
the discipline that ethnological comparativism, whether implicit or explicit, always
presupposed in one way or another that the point of view of the analyst doing the
comparison encompassed the point of view of the members of the societies that
were being compared, or at least set a convenient point of reference for its evalu-
ation. To redress this imbalance, a number of forms of symmetrization have been
devised, the most common apart from structural analysis being to generalize the
range either of a local concepttotem, mana, taboo, shaman, or hauor of a local
epistemic stanceDumonts idea of the hierarchical encompassment or Marilyn

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

 Philippe Descola 42

Stratherns notion of the person as an objectification of relationsand thus confer

to the knowledge of the observed an equal, even competing, status to that of the
observer. Another form of symmetrization is to transform an account of a native
way of thinking into a more or less systematized corpus similar to a philosophi-
cal doctrine, at least in its mode of presentation. This is also an ancient tendency
in the West, and one that even predates the former type of symmetrization, since
it has been a characteristic feature over several centuries of a certain type of mis-
sionary anthropology.6 More recent cases are the famous Philosophie bantoue of
Father Placide Tempels (1945), which triggered a heated debate among African
philosophers, or even Eduardo Viveiros de Castros latest version of perspectivism
(2014). All these forms of symmetrization are wanting for reasons that it would
take too long to develop here, but the cardinal one is that they remain an idiosyn-
cratic exegesis which upsets, and bypasses, the pragmatic conditions of utterance
and of reception of the propositions which reputedly provide the operationality
of the practice or norm transformed into an analytical concept or a philosophical
doctrine.
The kind of symmetrization which structural analysis practices does not pur-
port to generalize the range of a local concept or epistemic stance, or to offer a
philosophical countermodel inspired from a local way of thinking, but to compose
a combinatorial matrix that would account for all the states of a set of phenomena
by bringing to light the systematic differences which oppose its elements. Why is
it a symmetrization? Because, in accordance with standard structuralist procedure,
the totalization is never given ab initio, as the starting point from which the Sirius
of anthropology might structure the world under his imperial gaze, but results
from the always uncompleted operation by the means of which cultural features,
norms, institutions, qualities, propositions, are constituted as variants of one an-
other within a set. And this set may not only be reconfigured differently if new
elements are added; it has no other raison dtre than to subsume the variations for
which it provides the encompassing framework. Far from being the intellectual
ideology, and the immanent logic, of a new, technocratic totalitarianism,7 this type
of symmetrization is in no way claiming a universalist position of detachment; for
it is entirely dependent upon the multiple properties that people detect here and
there in phenomena, and it thus requires nothing more in terms of an overhang-
ing epistemic point of view than acquiring some knowledge on the diversity of the
objects one deals with, a modest claim for what is after all a scholarly undertaking.
Nevertheless, I have no qualms in admitting that the combinatorial option is as
wanting as the two other forms of symmetrization, and for reasons that are alto-
gether different: it requires a general knowledge of the institutions and ways of life
of other peoples that only the West has been until now in a position to produce.

6. The Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espaa, compiled in Nahuatl by Bernardino
de Sahagn in the sixteenth century, is probably the earliest example of this trend, while
the Lettres difiantes et curieuses written by the Jesuits from China are their most cel-
ebrated expressions, if only because of the role they played in the formation of Leibnizs
ideas.
7. For structuralism, epitomized in Lvi-Strauss, is the intellectual ideology, and the
immanent logic, of a new, technocratic totalitarianism (Diamond 1974: 297).

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

43 Transformation transformed

As such, the structural-ontological approach depends upon a project of knowledge

which is quite particular, not so much because of its universalist goalfor there
were numerous systems of knowledge elsewhere which purported to account for
everythingbut because of the requirement of worldwide exhaustiveness of the
empirical data upon which it rests.

References
Descola, Philippe, ed. 2010. La Fabrique des images: Visions du monde et formes de la
reprsentation. Paris: Somogy/muse du quai Branly.
. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
.2014. All too human (still): A comment on Eduardo Kohns How forests think. Hau:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (2): 26773.
Descombes, Vincent. 1989. Philosophie par gros temps. Paris: ditions de Minuit.
Diamond, Stanley. 1974. In search of the primitive: A critique of civilization. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1790. Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklren.
Gotha: C.W. Ettinger.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. (1949) 1967. Les structures lmentaires de la parent. Paris: Mouton
& Co.
.1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.
. Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon.
. 1971. Mythologiques, IV. Lhomme nu. Paris: Plon.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, and Didier Eribon. 1988. De prs et de loin. Paris: ditions Odile Jacob.
Petitot, Jean. 1999. La gnalogie morphologique du structuralisme. Critique 6201:
97122.
Pouillon, Jean. 1975. Ftiches sans ftichisme. Paris: Franois Maspero.
Tempels, Placide. 1945. La Philosophie bantoue. Translated by A. Rubbens. lisabethville
(Lubumbashi): Lovania diteur.
Thompson, DArcy Wentworth. 1917. On growth and form. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish. Min-
neapolis: Univocal.

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344

 Philippe Descola 44

La transformation transforme
Rsum : La cl de vote mthodologique de lanthropologie structuraliste lvi-
straussienne est la notion de groupe de transformation. Une structure acquiert un
dynamisme analytique seulement si elle possde la capacit dorganiser ces trans-
formations grce aux modles dun mme groupe de phnomne. Cet essai explore
diffrentes approches de ce concept et sappuie sur leurs rsultats pour examiner les
consquences de lapprhension du pluralisme ontologique comme un groupe de
transformation.

Philippe Descola is chair of the anthropology of nature at the Collge de France

and professor at the cole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Following exten-
sive research in Amazonia, Descola developed a comparative approach to relations
between humans and nonhumans, and now studies the anthropology of images,
non-Western and Western.
 Philippe Descola
 Collge de France
 52, rue du Cardinal-Lemoine
 F-75005, Paris, France
descola@ehess.fr

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (3): 3344