Life

The way life thinks

BARBARA J. KING

Eduardo Kohn
HOW FORESTS THINK
Toward an anthropology beyond the human
288pp. University of Chicago Press. £48.95 
(paperback, £19.95); US $70 (paperback, $29.95).
978 0 520 27610 9

Published: 23 April 2014

Living in the Upper Amazonian forest around the village of Ávila, Ecuador, are jaguars, monkeys, white-lipped peccaries, giant anteaters, tapirs, and a variety of birds including cuckoos and antbirds. The Runa people living in Ávila hunt some of these animals for food. Yet they also understand them as beings with souls who make up a forest that teems with thoughts and meaning.

Eduardo Kohn, an anthropologist at McGill University in Canada, who conducted fieldwork among the Runa there from 1996–2000, describes, in How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human, the surrounding forest as inhabited by “unparalleled kinds and quantities of living selves”. “Tropical forests”, Kohn writes, “amplify and thus can make more apparent to us, the ways life thinks.”

Kohn’s central concern in this often brilliant book is not to take up the role of ethnographer, describing from afar to the world’s curious scrutiny an exotic system of thought among the Runa. Instead, his aim is to invite all of us to see, as he himself learns how to see, what he has come to understand as the forest’s real nature. Kohn coaxes us to strip away the anthropocentric layers of our own, symbol-based systems of understanding, in order to consider that forest creatures without language do think, represent the world, and make meaning on their own.

Semiosis is at the centre of Kohn’s framework for explaining how the forest “thinks”. Kohn relies heavily on Charles Peirce’s notion that signs should be defined broadly to include those with and those without linguistic properties. Peirce’s tripartite division of signs is well known. Icons are signs of likeness, reflecting the properties of that to which they refer, in the way that a photograph is – or as the sound tsupu does, representing a peccary who slips into a pool of water in the forest. (Kohn writes: “Once I tell people what tsupu means, they often experience a sudden feel for its meaning: ‘Oh, of course, tsupu!’”) Indices, by contrast, point to something else, as when a palm tree crashes down in the forest and a monkey understands that something dangerous may be happening and that it needs to move. All life, for Kohn, participates in icons and indices, whereas the third type of sign – symbols – involve convention and are unique to humans. When we link signs with all of life, we break out beyond “the conflation of representation with language” that characterizes most of anthropology and even “posthuman approaches that seek to dissolve the boundaries that have been erected to construe humans as separate from the rest of the world”.

The semiotic framework grounds Kohn’s conclusion that thinking goes on not only where there is language, which, following the anthropologist Terence Deacon, is “an emergent dynamic” but one that deserves no special privilege. The forest around Ávila “thinks”, and not because of human agency: “The world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans”, Kohn argues. “Rather mean-ings – means-end relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance – emerge in a world of living thoughts . . . . These forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate with, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think.”

The Runa use aspects of weather, fruiting patterns, and insect dynamics as signs to consult

This perspective carries with it enormous power, not only for anthropology and other disciplines whose practitioners relentlessly privilege human representation, but also for any society that wants to break out of the solipsism of considering linguistic mediation of the world as a sort of evolutionary pinnacle. Would we preserve forests with greater care if we understood them – and all their residents – to be thinkers in the ways Kohn means? Is this question fanciful? Perhaps. Yet Kohn stresses his certainty that of all thinking creatures, only humans are moral. This distinction – if indeed we accept that a sense of morality and ethics is emergent only from linguistic representation – implicates us uniquely in a web of responsibility towards the living world. Whatever else it may be, then, my question is a hopeful one, a potential window on a newly respectful approach to thinking life.

Precisely how forests think becomes clear through the examples that Kohn offers. A straightforward one involves the once-a-year mating flight through the air of plump and ready-to-eat leafcutter ants, a delicacy for a number of forest species ranging from felines and frogs to snakes and bats, and to the Runa, too. The flight’s timing, on a morning just before daybreak, is a matter of exquisite precision, Kohn tells us: each colony in the region disgorges the ants within a matter of a few minutes. There’s no single variable that the varied ant predators can use to predict the day of the flights, however. It’s a matter of working out certain seasonal regularities and – in a beautiful phrase of Kohn’s – “an orchestration among different, competing, and interpreting species”.

The Runa use aspects of weather, fruiting patterns, and insect dynamics as signs to consult in making their predictions. As the suspected day draws near, Runa scouts will visit nearby ant nests at intervals through the night, to see, for instance, if the guard ants have begun to prepare the exits for those who will fly out. But it isn’t only people who attend to and think about the signs they see. Other animals watch the ants and the other waiting predators too, in a sort of multi-species, semiosis-driven monitoring party.

When dynamics are more complicated, what happens in the forest is sometimes less straightforwardly relatable to the book’s central framework of semiosis; Kohn might have offered his readers more guidance in this regard. The interplay among the Runa, their dogs and other forest creatures nonetheless makes for fascinating reading. The relationship of the Runa with their dogs mixes a hands-off quality with a certain intimacy: the dogs aren’t often fed, but “just as they advise a child on how to live correctly, people counsel their dogs”. Dogs should not be lazy, violent or devote too much energy to sex. These principles are “communicated” to the dogs – who are also understood as ensouled creatures – by giving them hallucinogenic substances in special rituals.

Dogs may also relate to beings other than people: indeed, they may become quite like jaguars when they exhibit certain pronounced carnivorous tendencies. And jaguars’ identities may also be layered. They are predators, but they are also seen by the Runa as dogs of the spirit masters who control the forest animals and who are part of everyday Runa life.

When they see wild birds, they believe that they are encountering the spirit masters’ chickens

Kohn’s treatment of this people-dog-jaguar-spirit masters nexus underscores his skill at weaving into his story the colonialist history in which the Runa have been enmeshed. “Dogs are submissive to their human masters in the same way that the Runa, historically, have been forced to be submissive to white estate owners, government officials, and priests”, he explains. The spirit masters are key players. While the Runa see the animals they hunt as wild, they understand that in reality these same animals are domesticates – tame animals that belong to the spirit masters. When they see wild birds, they believe that they are encountering the spirit masters’ chickens.

Kohn’s thesis is theoretically dense, and at times his writing style is thick with jargon. Sometimes this is rewarding, as when he describes the forest as “an emergent and expanding multilayered cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living, and growing thoughts”. It’s less enjoyable when one has to plough through dense passages that repeatedly strain comprehension. Kohn explains that in the Quichua language, Runa means person. He continues: “It is used as a kind of pronominal marker of the subject position – for all selves see themselves as persons – and it is only hypostasized as ethnonym in objectifying practices such as ethnography, racial discrimination, and identity politics”. Translation: Only in certain formal contexts is “Runa” used to mark these particular people out as a concrete group. Kohn’s core ideas are so forceful, fresh and forward-looking that the labour required of the reader is worth it. Even so, I wish that scholars at the forefront of anthropological theory could write more accessibly.

In the end, what’s so welcome about Kohn’s approach is that he walks a tightrope with perfect balance: never losing sight of the unique aspects of being human, while refusing to force those aspects into separating us from the rest of the abundantly thinking world. Pushes to broaden anthropology beyond the human, Eduardo Kohn rightly stresses, must always include the human. And on the larger canvas of making right the destruction our species has wrought on the natural world, it is only we who can cultivate fresh “ways of thinking with and like forests”.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. Her books include Being with Animals: Why we are obsessed with the furry, scaly, feathered creatures who populate our world, 2010, and, most recently, How Animals Grieve, which appeared last year.