Eduardo Kohn is Associate Professor of

Anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of be ...

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous ...

and winner of the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize. He is best known for the book, ''How Forests Think''.

Work

His 2013 book, ''How Forests Think'', has been described by

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a College town, university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cam ...

Professor of Anthropology Marilyn Strathern as "thought-leaping in the most creative sense," and " supreme artifact of the human skill in symbolic thinking.". The work draws upon four years

ethnographic Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject ...

fieldwork with the Runa in the Upper Amazon in order to challenge the most basic assumptions of anthropological thought. Using the semiotic theory of

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...

, Kohn proposes that all life forms, not only humans, engage in processes of signification and therefore should be considered as able to think and learn. Arguing that selfhood does not solely belong to humans, Kohn proposes that any entity which communicates through the use of signs can be considered a self, leading to a complex 'ecology of selves' of which humans and nonhumans are both a part. Kohn's work builds upon a growing body of literature, from authors such as

Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...

Donna Haraway Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. Sh ...

and

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro (born 1951) is a Brazilian anthropologist and a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published many books and articles which are considered important in anthropol ...

, which seeks to take the social sciences beyond the limits of strictly human relations. ''How Forests Think'' has been criticized for using a very weak definition of "thinking": "Under such a definition, a wide range of things could be said to think. However, this is no revolutionary discovery; it is simply a semantic shift giving the illusion of novelty." Moreover, it has been argued that Kohn's weak definition of thinking does not account for the phenomenon of anthropomorphism and animism discussed by

Philippe Descola Philippe Descola, FBA (born 19 June 1949) is a French anthropologist noted for studies of the Achuar, one of several Jivaroan peoples, and for his contributions to anthropological theory. Background Descola started with an interest in philoso ...

and others. In 2014 HAU included an entire section based on a book symposium discussing ''How Forests Think.'' including contributions from

and

.''All too human (still): A comment on Eduardo Kohn's How forests think''

Publications

''Further Thoughts on Sylvan Thinking''
in Hau vol. 4 No. 2 (2014) * ''How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human'', University of California Press (2013)
''How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement''
in American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 3–24 (2007)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kohn, Eduardo Academic staff of McGill University Canadian anthropologists Living people Year of birth missing (living people)

Work

Publications

Further reading

References