Eduardo Kohn on “sylvan” thinking and talking to forests

I think that yes humans can speak to force and force can speak back the question is what does it mean to speak what does it mean to listen and my book was an attempt to give one kind of an answer to say that there's a kind of thought available to us that that that is that this doesn't quite look like the thought that we usually think of as thought my book how force think is based on ethnographic research I'm an anthropologist in in the Amazon in an area that was equity in the Ecuadorian Amazon living with indigenous people and doing ethnography with them that is spending a lot of time hanging out and attending to attending to what I learned from that hanging out and trying to represent that as best I can through writing and other practices so what I quickly realized when I was doing at Naga with these people is that it wasn't enough to sort of attend to what the people were doing but they were had to recognize that they were relating to all sorts of other beings some of them were visible like animals and plants and some of them were not so visible like spirits and all of these beings were part of the forest and I had to I've tried to very carefully follow how that relationship took place and I realized that the best way to understand that was through understanding these relationships as communicative ones so people obviously talk to them talk them on each other and they use language they obviously another way to say is that people think right they represent the world around them they learn from that experience what's interesting about my ethnic work is that once you do ethnography which with people how people think or represent with each other but also with others animals plants and also spirits then you're in another kind of domain of thought and a lot of my work was about was about just following that often through things like tape recording how is it that people talk amongst each other about for first experiences and then how what happens when some of those forest experiences intrude so sometimes you will be having certain conversations and a certain bird flies over makes a call that call isn't also part of the recording I made and it it's a form of communication that people interpret in different ways and how they interpret it is sometimes like the way the bird communicates sometimes I'm like so I began to realize that that this was a huge problem in in our way of thinking Western ways of thinking academic ways of thinking about things and I decided to say that you know the most important claim it could be summarized in this idea that forests also think that that is other kinds of entities think not just humans so that would be individuals like that you could say individual agouti or a Jaguar thinks a plant thinks but maybe assemblages of entities which we might call a forest thanks and maybe even something more general like spirits think I used Sylvan thinking as a as a way to to talk about those kinds of thinking that are not necessarily simple like and so when we use when we represent through images like filming when we draw when we dream when we gesture we read emotions our metabolism all of those forms of being our product taking in a their representational their parts of living thinking as you're saying but they're not necessarily symbolic Sylvan thinking sort of amps up or makes apparent these elements of thought that I would like to valorize so images it someone thinking amps up the property inherent to all thinking of working through images so what's interesting about images likenesses is that they have a certain kind of relational property so for example if you laugh and I laugh because you're laughing mm your laughter is in me but it's actually not your laughter anymore it's my laughter we are one because of that laughter right we know this I mean that's the essence of all sorts of forms of bonding and human groups and we tend to think that Telos purposes functions are things that we impose we wherever that mind came from we don't know but that we impose on the world and what's interesting about understanding life as semiotic as you can see the emergence of directedness and like means-ends relationships and yet this is not a grantee of the ology it's not cleared there's no sense of where it's going it's going but it's not clear where it's going it's not predetermined and one of the reasons why that is is that part of what people sometimes miss is the specific spaces of disruption of means-ends relationships where that is part of the flourishing and this is play so that's one of the that's why play for me is so important you can see this I work in tropical forests in a sense all of that production of variation is a one massive playing field it's one great production of different thoughts about the world universities are like this to try stuff out see what sticks exactly try stuff out see what sticks and you never know what it's going to stick to right because though the world changes part of what I'm interested in is looking at ways in which that dualism is disrupted and one of those places one of the ways to look at that is to look at things like semiotic life and representation as essentially a moment where in the universe where absence has become more important than presences so you know an organism is not the environment that it represents right we who are alive are indebted to that our ancestors who are dead who are not here we do things you know by virtue of future goals that are not present all of this sort of absentia phenomenon is super important and I think that a lot of the things that when we talk about domains that are religious or divine or God spirits they are amping ups of this kind of absentia dynamics these living dynamics produce generalities semiotic life produces things that we normally locate only in human minds forests great generalities living forms create general the species a lineage the locus of evolution is not of the individual it's in some other slightly larger domain those are generals spirits are generals I think once you can reground symbolic thinking which is not to kill it or to stop it's our particular form of flourishing but once you can reground it then I think that that can help us live in a way that we're less disjointed from the effects we have in the world that's one thing the other thing is that I think that Sylvan thinking can suggest its own form of doing and being it it it it's just another way of acting so what is it like to live in a more absentia way which is I guess it could also be thought of as a Buddhist question what's that like I think that those are things that can be actively thought about by thinking with thinking for us so thinking for us is not just something that is an object to be preserved but it's a it's an it's a form of being to relate with in order to learn another form of relating

Channel: Harvard Divinity School

Views: 5,392

Rating: 4.927928 out of 5

Keywords: Eduardo Kohn, spirit, forests, nature, Amazon jungle

Id: Ynl9XwwKUZ8

Length: 8min 18sec (498 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2018