Politics of Worlding

The Politics of Worldling presents Philippe Descola's Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered in 2023 at the University of California, Berkeley. It offers a highly readable précis of some of the central ideas that animate Descola's work, and an excellent gateway into a new vision of anthropology developed by one of its most distinguished practitioners. The lectures draw heavily on Descola's research among Achuar peoples (formerly known as Jivaro) of the Upper Amazon, and on his erudite knowledge of the comparative literature in anthropology. He presents evidence that people in different societies construe the relation between nature and culture in fundamentally different ways, according to how they view human beings versus other-than-human beings.

Philippe Descola is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. His research has focused on the ethnology of Amerindian societies, Cognitive Anthropology, and on the cross-cultural examination of the relations between humans and non-humans. He has written or edited over twenty books translated into a dozen languages and has been a visiting professor in several prestigious institutions. His book Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence on anthropologists and intellectuals worldwide. Among many awards, Descola was the Recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal in 2012, and is a foreign member of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
William F. Hanks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology. His work has focused on the study of communicative practices through
sustained fieldwork in Yucatan, Mexico. He has written extensively on spatial orientation and deixis, the language of religious conversion in the colonial history of Yucatan, Mexico, and contemporary shamanism. Former Guggenheim fellow (1996), his books include Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya, Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance and Context, and Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross, which won the 2015 Staley Book Prize and the 2010 Edward Sapir Book Prize. He received the John Gumperz Award for Lifetime Achievement, IPrA.