Forms of the Visible

An Anthropology of Figuration
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-5095-6196-4
Verlag: Polity Press

Buch, Englisch, 637 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 1105 g

Imagery and figuration are not just figments of an artist’s imagination. Perception and imagination are always shaped by what habit has taught us to discern. The visual path we spontaneously trace through the world depends on where we are situated in the four regions of the ontological archipelago: animism, naturalism, totemism or analogism. Each of these four regions corresponds to a way of conceiving the objects that make up the world, of perceiving the continuities and discontinuities in the folds of the world and of drawing the dividing lines between humans and nonhumans.

From Alaskan Yup’ik masks and Aboriginal bark paintings to miniature landscapes from the Song dynasty and Dutch Golden Age interior scenes: each image reveals, through what it shows or fails to show, a certain figurative regime, identifiable by the formal means it uses and by the device through which it can unleash its power to act. The figurative regime enables us to grasp – sometimes better than words can – the contrasting ways of living that characterize the human condition and its relation to the nonhuman. By comparing a great diversity of visual images and artworks, Descola masterfully lays the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of figuration.

One of the world’s leading anthropologists, Philippe Descola has developed a comparative anthropology of relations between humans and nonhumans that has revolutionized both the human sciences and our ways of thinking about the great ecological issues of our time. His new book will be of great value to students and scholars of anthropology, visual art and art history and to anyone interested in art, culture and the relations between the human and nonhuman worlds.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Descola, Philippe

Weitere Mitwirkende

Porter, Catherine

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface

1. The Folds of the World
Layers of invisibility
The embodied sign
Ontologies of images
Geometries of figuration
Forms of ostension and powers to act

PART ONE: PRESENCES

2. Embodied Spirits
Animal persons
Think animals
Who's there?
Distinguishing resemblances
Ontological camouflage

3. Multiplying Viewpoints

4. Relational Identities

PART TWO. INDICES

5. Types of Beings and Courses of Life
Figuring the ordering
Figuring the organizer
Figuring the traces of the organizing

6. A Heraldry of Qualities

7. The Power of Traces

Variation 1. Repertoire-Image and Person-Image

PART THREE. CORRESPONDENCES

8. Exercises in Composition Hybrids and chimeras
Pictured bonds
The great world and the small one

9. Conjunctive Spaces

10. Role Playing

PART FOUR: SIMULACRA

11. Facing the World
The conquest of the visible
Painting the soul
Instituting nature
Toward immanence
Impossible objectivity

12. Objectivizing the Subjective

13. Detecting Resemblance

Variation 2. Playing on All Fronts

Conclusion. Image-Making
Ontologies
Forms
Agencies Incarnations
Postscript. Scaffoldings
The quarrel over resemblance
Animating images
Imaged languages
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
List of Tables

Über Autor(innen)

Philippe Descola is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at EHESS, Paris.