Phenomenology and anthropology: Philippe Descola's ontological pluralism and its philosophical implications

pluralismo ontológico em Philippe Descola e suas implicações filosóficas

Abstract

Recent developments in cultural anthropology have challenged the assumption that nature and culture are universal concepts capable of explaining the constitution of collective behavior. Rather than universal categories, they are understood as local conceptual variations situated alongside other equally legitimate ways of composing and experiencing the world. In the work of Philippe Descola, this critique has led to a radical reconceptualization of the social and human sciences in terms of ontological regimes, a reconceptualization that draws on key elements of the phenomenological tradition. This paper develops a phenomenological reading of Descola’s anthropology in order to clarify how our relation to the world can be understood beyond the nature– culture divide. The paper is divided into three sections. In the first, I present the central theses of Descola’s position, which he describes as “relative universalism,” and introduce two criticisms of this project: the possible conflation of his ontological framework with aspects of modern naturalism, and the risk of reifying cultural determinations as ontological properties. In the second section, I address the first criticism by showing how the universalist claim underlying Descola’s anthropology—namely, that collective experience is organized through the duality of physicality and interiority—can be elucidated through Husserl’s analysis of embodied experience, thereby avoiding its assimilation to the naturalist regime. Finally, I argue that the anthropological idea of a plurality of ontological regimes can be clarified phenomenologically through an analysis of two layers of world constitution: the primordial experience of the lived body and the intersubjective process of communalization.