Critical review of Eduardo Kohn´s chapters: “The Living Thought” and “Soul Blindness”, in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human

Eduardo Kohn, “The Living Thought” and “Soul Blindness”, in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, (Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2013).

Critical Review

After introducing the semiotic theory by Peirce applied to anthropology and his fieldwork in Ávila, in Chapters 2 and 3 of How Forests Think: Toward and Anthropology Beyond the Human, Kohn goes on to explain in depth how semiotics work, as different interpreters give meaning to a variety of signs in the forest of Ávila. In order to explain his theory that the forests think Kohn has to first show that non-human beings have a self and therefore think. Later this leads him to talk about self hood and soul blindness.  

In the first part of chapter 2, Kohn defines thinking as “learning by experience” inspired by Peirce’s concept of  “scientific intelligence”. To better illustrate his point, Kohn uses the example of the anteater that by thinking and interpreting the sign of the tunnel has been able to adapt his stout to better suit the environment and survive. Therefore here the sign has been the tunnel and the interpretation of the anteater of it is passed on to later generations through “memory”, this is to say, the memory of what the experience has taught them is passed on to later generations. By developing this argument Kohn draws on Lamarck’s evolutionary theory rather than on Darwin’s as according to Kohn it seems that evolution is not about the survival of the fittest as Darwin claimed and as generally accepted by the scientific community but a being can make itself fit to survive.

 Peirce is also the basis for Kohn’s definition of sign as something that “stands for something in relation to somebody”, this is to say, the meaning of a sign is determined by the interpreter and their perspective. This takes him to his concept of perspectivism and how understanding the view point of another being can be very practical as for example in the case of the encounter of a human being with a jaguar where by knowing how the jaguar would interpret one’s behavior one is able to survive an attack whereas if not one can be condemned to death.

Thinking is also what gives a being a self and all the thinking beings part of what Kohn calls “ecology of selves”. However, Kohn’s “self” is not “necessarily or exclusively inside a body”(p.105) , this is to say, it’s not localized but it is somehow in a body and beyond it at the same time.  When a disembodiment takes place, what is left is the aya which Kohn defines as “the inanimate corpse” (p.112) and at the same time “the wandering ghost of the dead, bereft of both body and soul”(p.112). Beings become soul-blind when they become unable to “be aware of and relate to other soul-possessing selves in this ecology of selves”(p.117) this is to say by death or by being hunted as a prey which are things that make a being soul-blind a being loses its selfhood and it’s no longer able to empathize with other beings as it is blind to them.  Soul-blindness implies “an intimation of a world devoid of the enchantment of life”(p.128). By claiming so, Kohn seems to be implying the modern world is soul blind as he says “If modern forms of knowledge and ways of manipulating the nonhuman world are characterized by an understanding of the world as mechanism, then disenchantment is an obvious consequence”.  He rejects the modern scientific rationalism, which makes his influence by the Lamarckian evolutionary theory not surprising, as the modern scientific community does not accept this theory as correct anymore.

Kohn’s argument provides an innovative approach to anthropology that gives up anthropocentrism and is able to think beyond the human. It provides a good standpoint from which to argue against the mistreatment of nature and especially the Amazonian forests that are being heavily damaged by humans. Usually when someone wants to play down the importance of nature or animals in order to mistreat them, the argument given is that they don’t suffer and don’t have feelings. Kohn, by showing that nature thinks, provides a good reason for humans to consider its importance and therefore give up their abuses on the environment. By stressing the importance of understanding the other’s perspective he also contributes to emphasize that in anthropology one has to understand how the other thinks in order to understand their interpretation of signs and not to create preconceived ideas based on one’s own interpretations.

However, even though Kohn advocates for an anthropology that is centered in understanding the community by extending one’s thinking by engaging with their perspective, he himself seems to be doing the opposite. The community oriented research promoted by scholars such as Speed seems to be inverted by the fact that instead of first collecting ethnographic data and later developing a theory based upon those data, Kohn seems to be trying to demonstrate that the life in the community of Avila fits his semiotic theory and his argument that non-human beings think.

In so doing, he uses translations of terms such as aya in a dubious way in order to suit his argument as he later does with amo, a strategy used by other scholars in order to make their argument more solid. It’s an aspect of Anderson’s theory about nationalisms that Claudio Lomnitz criticized because Anderson instead of resorting to the historical usage of the term “nation”, builds his own definition of it as a cultural construct. As Lomnitiz says: “Anderson’s definition of nation does not always coincide with the historical usage of the term, even in place and time that Anderson identifies as the site of its invention” (Lomnitz, p.333). This strategy has been also used to construct historical facts such as in the case of the Spanish conquest history in which by the wrong definition of the term viracocha as God instead of god-like, a myth that the Indians perceived the Spaniards as Gods has been built.

However poorly applied to the community of Ávila, Kohn's insistence on approaching anthropology through semiotics provides a useful lens through which to view anthropology. If applied to Weld’s ethnographic study of the archives of Guatemala, the semiotic theory could be a good way to understand how the police and the project workers interpret signs in a different way but are at the same time part of the same semiotic system. When the project workers and the police started to understand that they had something in common is as if they stopped being soul-blind and became able to recognize the other’s selfhood and their way of interpreting signs and therefore to build certain affection with them. Therefore Weld’s concept of “archival thinking” equals in a way Kohn’s perspectivism as by thinking archivistically the documents had to be organized according to the police’s logic in order to understand how the institution worked. Also the concept of memory seems to present certain parallelisms with the Guatemalan case as the archives now form part of the memory of the country which can be used for later generations to learn and try to change things in the future using the knowledge that they contain, similarly to the anteater that stores in its memory an experience that will help later generations to remember errors from the past and adapt to a coming future.

In the case of the inhabitants of Bolivian barrio described by Goldstein in Outlawed, sometimes they struggle when interpreting signs that point to someone being ratero. They are not able to grasp the perspective of the ratero and therefore they don’t understand them almost in the same way as Kohn claims humans are not able to understand non-humans. Indeed, the inhabitants of the barrio consider rateros non-human in a way.  The barrio residents create meanings by interpreting certain physical features that point to the fact that someone is a ratero, making of them indexical signs: for example, rateros are said to have scars on their face, hands and torso and depending on the amount of scars they have they will be considered less or more dangerous. However, as Goldstein affirms a ratero doesn’t always look like that and therefore it creates confusion: “such signs can be deceptive”(Goldstein, p.127). Therefore what Kohn would probably say is that in order to survive the inhabitants of the barrio must try to see beyond themselves and try to understand the ratero rather than classify it as inhuman and therefore not being able to predict their moves. Similarly, if the inhabitants of Ávila didn’t understand the perspective of the parakeet they wouldn’t be able to construct the right scarecrow to make them go and protect their crops.

The application of semiotics to anthropology as we can see is really useful and provides a framework through which one can try to understand a community, a culture or a historical process. Kohn isn’t the only one who draws on Peirce’s semiotics in anthropology; Collins also tries to present the situation of the Brazilian Bahia drawing on Pierce. As said before Kohn’s approach is innovative and useful but in a sense he himself takes the meaning of some signs for granted in order to make his arguments work and therefore his representation of the community of Ávila probably needs to be reviewed by someone who approaches it with a more community oriented attitude.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eduardo Kohn, “The Living Thought” and “Soul Blindness”, in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.

Goldstein, Daniel M. Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

Weld, Kirsten. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Lomnitz, Claudio. 2001. “Nationalism as a Practical System: Benedict Anderson’s Theory of Nationalism from the Vantage Point of Spanish America.”  In The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, edited by Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 329-359.

Speed, Shannon. 2006. “At the Crossroads of Human Rights and Anthropology: Toward a Critically Engaged Activist Research.” American Anthropologist 25(3): 452-470.