Leaving the Forest

When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees and fibrewood, fine, that’s your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the top down, and the top, so far, is humans. We’re here, now; and so this world’s going to go our way. Like it or not, it’s a fact you have to face; it happens to be the way things are.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest, 1972

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1972 science fiction novel, The Word for World is Forest, colonization and ecological destruction are intertwined realities.¹ Originally published in response to the Vietnam War, the book imagines a future planet Earth deforested to a degree that its lands resemble “dry beaches”—or, deserts where large animals can no longer dwell. Wood has become a resource more valuable than gold, and it is hauled in from distant jungle planets, which through this pursuit are “cleaned up and cleaned out”—in other words, destroyed, enslaved, and “un-worlded.” Forty years later, Le Guin’s future-fictional projection finds its existential echo in the struggle with the postnatural implications of the Anthropocene. Given such theories as the sixth mass extinction caused by accelerated habitat loss due to human impact, the importance of maintaining forests as enclaves of biodiversity and climatological equilibria couldn’t be more evident. And yet, only a mere twenty percent of the world’s original old-growth forests today remain intact. Of course, changing climates and ecological shifts are characteristic of the planet’s geo-history—many ancient, wild forests have been supplanted by other landscapes through natural causes in the past—but never before have woodlands been cleared so rapidly and in such vast regions as during the past four centuries, since the beginning of modern exploration, imperialism, and industrialization.
   
At the same time, plant growth and forests remain a pillar in the pledged efforts to mitigate climate catastrophes.² In 2014 (in the same week this interview was recorded) the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group once again emphasized the urgency of limiting the rise in global temperatures to no more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels—a boundary that was also intensely fought for during the Paris COP21 climate summit in November 2015.³ At this point, however, when we have reached a permanent state of 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, it is not clear whether even the most radical changes in the energy sector would help to maintain this boundary—and if so, then only within a limited window of time for governments to enforce such drastic changes.⁴ Besides the need to eliminate energy sources that emit carbon dioxide, the IPCC explicitly emphasized the promotion of plants that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as one effective counter-measure. While there is clear evidence that greenhouse gases released through human activity are responsible for the climate fluctuations of the last 200 years, and every schoolchild learns about trees’ ability to soak up carbon emissions, deforestation itself currently causes around fifteen percent of the CO2 set free each year—not to forget the “hidden” greenhouse gas emissions caused when mega dams flood forests.⁵And whereas forest regrowth is occurring in Europe and certain areas of North America, it is the tropical zone—home to the richest ecosystems on earth (with seventy-five to eighty percent of all plant and animal species)—that continues to be exposed to the most severe and probably most irreversible sylvan destruction. To give only one example of recent acceleration, in Myanmar so many trees were logged over the last few decades that the country’s current deforestation rates are estimated to be just behind Brazil and Indonesia, the two countries with the highest annual rates of forest reduction.⁶ But as human agency in the Anthropocene greedily absorbs and deeply transforms nature, the understanding of what it means to be “human” is being deeply challenged, raising a series of ethical questions about future living on this planet. Taking forest as another word for world—an environment that according to botanist and forest savant Diana Beresford-Kroeger “forecasts our future in every breath it takes”— what can we learn from the global forest about human intelligence and the trajectories of these entangled worlds?⁷
   
To discuss these concerns, we spoke with the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, author of How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2014).⁸ Having learned from human-nonhuman interactions in the Ecuadorian rainforest, Kohn tries to “think-with” the tropical rainforest of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, one of the most complex assemblages of organisms on Earth, in order to reconsider the myth of human centrality, and to thus reimagine how we can see the world and its multispecies relations differently. Affirming that life and thought are one and the same, he argues that humans are not the only living entities capable of thinking, even though this deep-rooted and crucial distinction has been used to set humanity apart from other lifeforms.
   
Portraying the forest as both “beyond” and “sustaining” the human, Kohn argues that even if verbal symbolic language is indeed a distinctly human mode of sense making, there are other forms of representation that sustain nonhuman life and their relational webs. That animals—and perhaps even entire forests—think is a reality conditioned by continuities among multispecies life-worlds that are variously connected through intertwined semiotic systems. In order for the human to “become a little more ‘worldly’,” Kohn urges us to attempt to think beyond our “all-too-human” worlds—a defamiliarization that situates human life back within a more general and diverse network of other lifeforms. He suggests that by imagining how we can understand concepts like kind, context, difference, self, relation, and form differently, new possibilities for flourishing emerge. While the postnatural regime of the industrialized forest turns a complex ecosystem into an object measured, parsed, and standardized for human purposes on a grand scale, the animated forest mediated by Kohn reminds us that other worlds are not only possible, but that they already exist.  

E T
Let’s start with your distinction between ontology and culture, which you emphasize several times in How Forests Think. Can we begin with a discussion of what’s at stake in this separation?

E K
I use the term ontology in a particular, perhaps idiosyncratic, way, one that I don’t necessarily share with other anthropologists. Basically, a lot of my work has emerged from a dissatisfaction with the dominant analytical framework in our field (and more broadly in the social sciences and humanities). We are very good at talking about one kind of reality, a human one, which in very broad strokes you could call a “cultural” reality. By this I mean anything that’s historically or socially constructed, or the product of systems or institutions of knowledge, or meaning, or technology—that sort of thing. These sorts of “circular systems” may bring in nonhuman elements like computers or microbes, but they nonetheless have a conventional circularity to them that is the hallmark of what I call symbolic thinking. Anthropology and related fields have been very good at exposing this kind of reality, and this has had important political implications. Franz Boas was really fighting against scientific racism in his celebration of historical context and culture.⁹Boas was quite nuanced in his treatment of biology and environmental context. Today, however, this contextual approach has gotten to the point where it has become very difficult to say anything about that which lies outside of contexts that exhibit the formal properties of culture. One of the goals of my work has been to find ways to explore these domains beyond culture. In the areas where I work people have to deal with nonhuman beings all the time, and they can’t manage these interactions through human culture alone. Culture as an analytical concept—I mean culture very broadly here—breaks down as a tool.
   
So my goal has been to try to understand how to speak to something beyond culture. You could think of that “beyond” as ontology. I’m not saying that culture isn’t ontological, but rather that ontology itself is a kind of reality that’s sometimes discontinuous with our experience of it, and in that sense it’s a reality beyond us as humans. I’m not really committed to the term “ontology”; I’m just trying to get at a sense of reality that is beyond what’s analytically familiar to us.

A S
Is this a position you share with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro?¹⁰ I’m thinking that there’s a certain figure/ground inversion in both of your projects, which, in a way, transforms what could be considered the backdrop or ground of human reality into a figure of its own, an agency, or an ecology.

E K
In my case there are certain kinds of formal properties that are not always context-specific, where the idea of figure and ground doesn’t really apply. Not that there isn’t historical context in the environmental sense, and not that there isn’t historical context in the human sense, and not that those don’t interact—but when we turn to explanations of context or of figure/ground, we often project assumptions of context from the human onto the nonhuman.

A S
Obviously, you’re not making an argument for some kind of geographical determinism. But can you be more specific about why it’s important in your work to shift the cut, or to move the assumed boundary, between the human and the nonhuman?

E K
Well, I think we first need to be precise about what exactly culture and the symbolic are. Once you can see language as taking part of a much broader semiotic field (for example, language as a special form of representation that’s nested within a broader one) then you can see the relationship between this thing that is distinctively human and other things that are not.

A S
Then what happens to the transcendence often implied by human ideation?

E K
Basically, we’re forced to make a choice. Transcendence, we are told, is bad. We want to get rid of a “God figure” that dictates everything, or a “Nature figure” that grounds everything. The only alternative, it seems, is immanence. But immanence exhibits many of the properties of culture—you have a relational system wherein everything is produced by that system
of relations.
   
The point I want to make by using the concept of “emergence” is that transcendence and immanence aren’t the only choices. With emergence you have a way of integrating nested phenomena: some are of a higher logical order than others in the sense that you need to have certain things in place before others can follow. To have symbols, for instance, you need to have indices. But you don’t need symbols to have indices. That kind of logical distinction creates a very different kind of topology, and I use the term “hierarchy” in my book as a provocation regarding this topology.

A S
Is your work an intervention in or a critique of Latour’s flat ontology, then? All agents have agency, but they aren’t all equally positioned to have influence.

E K
Bruno Latour has been reading my book and we’ve been having great conversations about it. He’s the one person whom I explicitly criticize in the book, but he’s also thinking seriously with me. One of the places he’s pushing me—and it’s a serious political problem—is on the kind of ontological claims I’m making. Mine is a “this is how the world is” ontology, so to speak—this is how forests think—and Latour suggests that this kind of claim necessarily excludes other possibilities.  
   
Elizabeth Povinelli, an anthropologist who is part of this conversation, has also criticized me for insisting on a formal definition of what “selves” are, implying that I basically shut out Aboriginal Australian, even Amazonian worlds where rocks, for example, may also be selves. I admit that this is really problematic, and I haven’t resolved the problem. But instead of becoming defensive, I want to sit with it. Both Latour and Povinelli have pushed me on this. I don’t want to back down or patch it over, but I do recognize that it’s a problem.
   
Here’s my take on ontology. Imagine that you’re a surfer. You can have many different ideas of what a wave is like, but if you want to ride a wave, you have to harness it. That’s really what interests me about ontology. I’m interested in what we can harness within the world; part of that is being right about what the world is.

A S
Which would also include a spirit world and what it is as well?

E K
Yes, spirits have a reality whose generality can be accessed in many different ways.

E T
Can you say a bit more about the “living thought,” and about your use of C.S. Peirce to narrate this problem philosophically?

E K
Peirce came after; the ethnography came first. I think that’s the wonderful thing about anthropology. It’s a particular method for getting into an experiential world. That’s what has informed everything I do. I don’t think I’d read any Peirce before I went to the field. I went to the particular village where I eventually did the bulk of my fieldwork, first in 1992 and then again in 1994. I was listening to people telling stories about hunting—I spoke some Quichua already—and I realized that they were using an imitative language and creating simulations of forest experience. I said: “This is really weird; this form of speaking isn’t really inside language or culture and this is what I want to focus on.” I was very much into the problem of nature and culture, but I was really dissatisfied with the anthropological frameworks that I knew. At the time, there was fascinating work being done by both anthropologists and geographers, especially in the Amazon, on the anthropogenic forest, which inspired me. Basically, they would go to “virgin” forests and find that trees were growing in rows because there used to be a garden there. I was very much taken by these studies, and I was always documenting things that were planted, looking for deep histories. But the way these studies are taken up in anthropology was always the same: “See, there’s no nature. It’s all culture.” I think this is the completely wrong way to do it! Actually, these forests are places where all sorts of nonhuman logics dominate in certain, less obvious ways. Not that there aren’t people doing things there. But humans often operate on the forest’s terms, or on terms that are not properly human.

A S
You mean that just because humans have made their mark, their logics don’t necessarily dictate the dynamics?

E K
Right, and I realized that this onomatopoeic language was another kind of bizarre entry into that nonhuman logic. I saw that the people were simulating experiences, but that these practices couldn’t be entirely cultural because imitation doesn’t quite work that way. So I had some sense of the nonhuman at play here, but I didn’t have a conceptual framework to support any of this, except for some articles on poetics. [Roman] Jakobson had some essays I’d been reading. Also, there was a really interesting dissertation—it’s since become a book—by Janis Nuckolls on imitative language in lowland Quichua.¹¹It was only later when I was doing a postdoc at Berkeley that I started to read Peirce and realized how helpful he would be for me.

A S
As we were reading How Forests Think, we talked about how carefully you must have decided which events to write about in order to show the processes through which thought can be understood as nonhuman, as opposed to other events you must have decided to exclude. In fact, absence—by way of the not-yet and the not anymore, but also the unnoticeable—is an important concept for you. The walking-stick insect you describe, for example, embodies an existence at the threshold of presence and absence. Could you talk about what makes absence so important regarding the evolution of selves and their various relationships to difference and differing, and, perhaps, deferring?

E K
It’s interesting to see how indebted post-structuralism is to structuralism. In post-structuralism, “difference” seems to be such an important concept. But for someone like Peirce, difference is a secondary piece of the puzzle, not the starting point. He has a nondualistic framework in which dualism fits, although it’s not primary. A lot of the humanistic approaches that I’m struggling against assume a kind of dualistic metaphysics—resistance as agency for Latour, the equation of semiosis with difference in Saussurian semiotics—all of this is part of a dualistic tradition, even for these people who are trying to escape dualism.

A S
And what about absence?

E K
I resist saying that my idea of absence comes from any particular theory because I’m hoping to think with the world. Having said that, it is strongly influenced by Terrence Deacon; absence is at the heart of his theory in Incomplete Nature.¹² Basically, for him, what life riffs on time and again is incompleteness. Life is always unfolding in reference to something that it is not; it has an absential feature, whether you think of it in terms of  telos, or future, or a sign re-presenting an object, or the self related to the other it is not. This absential logic requires its own analytics.
   
But, as I said above about Pierce, ethnography came first. The point of my book is that there’s something special about this field site in the Amazon. You have a place that is teeming with life—tons of it. In order to get something out of that complex environment, you have to get into the logic that structures that tangle. In temperate agriculture, by contrast, you can radically simplify an ecosystem and effectively extract things from it. Here, however, the thoughts or the properties of the forest are a demanding, thinking logic, and if you want to do something with the forest you have to get into that logic. This stuff—the absential features, the semiosis, the living thoughts—bubbles up and comes out. So the idea is that this stuff is actually thinking itselfthrough those who are, for whatever reason, forced to engage the forest on its own terms.

A S
The dominant tendency, even today, is still to anthropomorphize nonhuman practices. How does your writing work with images to prevent the reader from projecting human agency onto the nonhuman agents you describe?

E K
There’s a kind of thinking in pictures going on in my book. I think in images. Philosophers often do this as well. For example, there’s Wittgenstein’s lion, or Derrida’s cat. These images act as productive kernels that are brought into play, over and over again. That’s what I was doing. My first example is the jaguar looking back: don’t put yourself in the position where you can’t look back, or else the jaguar won’t see you as another self.
   
I was giving a talk at a university and someone challenged me, saying, “Well, isn’t this all just a cultural system?” My response was, “Oh, you think that how people see the jaguar seeing the world is a cultural product? Well, go out in the forest. When you’re out in the forest, you have to get how the jaguar sees the world right, or else…” This example gets at something. In the field, I was often taken by the way that certain images stuck with me; I don’t always know why some made it into the book and others didn’t. Images become important thought registers for my work. But other images are still with me, and their potential isn’t yet exhausted.

E T
This reminds me of Deleuze’s pursuit,  particularly in Difference and Repetition, of a thought-without-image, which is the result of his extensive critique of the so-called image of thought in Western philosophy.¹³ But he does not end there. Later, with Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, images proliferate, and become serial, generative, immersive, almost kaleidoscopic.¹⁴ I’m curious about how the image relates to your call for the decolonization of thought. How do you go about decolonizing thought when you’re operating within such a colonial discipline? What images are available to pursue this work?

E K
In part, Viveiros de Castro, when calling for the decolonization of thought, is saying that there are other kinds of worlds. And these other alterworlds generate concepts. We have to be constantly attuned to how our established Western concepts interact with the concepts that come from those worlds. So, for him, a “cannibal metaphysics” is both the metaphysics of so-called “cannibals,” which credits these “cannibals” with having a sophisticated metaphysics, but it’s also a way of breaking up and cannibalizing our Western metaphysical thinking…¹⁵

E T
In the way that you would cannibalize a car, for example, for spare parts…

E K
Exactly. I think that’s a really productive thing. But thinking with alterity is complicated in our field. Basically, anthropology as you note, has in many ways been complicit in colonial projects. Nostalgically mourning a past that we—the West—have destroyed is also part of a modernization project. I take that kind of critique launched against those anthropologists still interested in alterity seriously, and it’s important. But it doesn’t mean that anthropology, as a project, is totally bankrupt. Anthropology still provides a special method—ethnography—for being “made over” by different worlds. In any case, one of the ways this critique was taken up was to say, “Okay, well, anthropology’s focus on otherness is problematic because we can never get at the Other. The moment we engage this otherness, we change it, and so this otherness is either a construction or we have no right to engage with it.” Meanwhile, there’s been a move to push anthropology away from otherness and toward “ourselves,” whatever that means. But the effect of this latter move is to actually push colonization to its logical limits. Killing off whatever alterity may remain is a Final Solution of sorts.

E T
So, following again from Viveiros de Castro, what do you see as the possibility for decolonizing thought?

E K
My take on the decolonization of thought is that there’s something inherently human in a form of thinking that makes everything human-like, or language-like. Everyone does it—the Runa do it, just as I do.¹⁶ In some ways, what I’m arguing for are ways of thinking that mitigate this humanizing tendency. You know, I try to be precise about my terminology but in this case I’m using a strategic openness, and in my book I wanted to retain both of these meanings of decolonization—decolonizing thought as with Viveiros de Castro and decolonizing thought as moving beyond the human.

E T
Doesn’t this rather inevitably lead us back to Claude Lévi-Strauss and his concept of a “savage thought”? Is there a danger in anthropology of, say, self-colonization?

E K
Lévi-Strauss lends himself to a wonderful variety of readings, so I highlight certain things in La pensée sauvage that interest me, such as thought-runwild, or thought that exceeds the human in various ways because it isn’t governed by means-ends relations.¹⁷ It’s related to this paradox that we are constantly, as you say, self-colonizing by the way that we think, and yet we also have this potential for thought that is unfettered or undomesticated. How is this kind of thought given dignity? In this respect at least, Viveiros de Castro is operating in a Lévi-Straussian vein by focusing on non-Western concepts. I would add that we are generating concepts in relation to the world while we’re being made over by the world insofar as thoughts are part of the world.

E T
I’d like to ask, for a moment, about the work of Georges Bataille, because you are especially interested in the concept of generality.¹⁸In your book, you insist that generality is a decisive character, or quality, for thinking with the forest; in fact, you claim that generality is a constituent feature of reality. Can you elaborate on this remark?

E K
Of course we humans categorize things, but it’s not just humans who do this. Semiotic life is doing this all the time; it’s creating “kinds.” It’s producing “generals.” But the further claim—the Peircean claim—is that generality is a basic property of the world itself. I use this concept because I can see it so clearly both ethnographically and in terms of natural history.

A S
That idea also connects to some questions I have about collecting and curation. How do these practices of collecting, clearly a significant part of your work, unfold from this concept of generality?

E K
I did tons of collecting for this book. I have over 1,500 specimens of plants, which are now in various museums. There’s something really interesting about collecting because it gets at something that isn’t just culture. I mean, it is of course, but it’s also really its own kind of thing. In the field I generally avoided asking structured questions, like “tell me about spirits, or tell me myths.” However, one structured thing I did do was to go into the forest and collect. What I like about collecting is that it jumps contexts in interesting ways. I’m aware that collecting produces a particular form of knowledge; you’re trying to get a grid, to get some samples, and soon on. It was of course very comforting for me to find the established literatures and nomenclatures for the beings of the forest. I was very aware that I was engaging in my own attempt to stabilize or domesticate knowledge, and yet it still allowed me to link all sorts of things in ways that don’t necessarily have to pass through one human context.

A S
A major question for me, given my research, is how to decolonize the forest from the perspectives and the practices of those living in the city.

E K
My book is, in the Latourian sense, a product of purification, insofar as I went to a particular place where certain qualities get amplified.¹⁹ There are many Runa, living elsewhere, who are no longer subsistence hunters; I just went with the ones who are so that I could see the forest in a particular way. And, just to reveal my own naturalistic tendencies, I do think the world would be better off with more rainforests. But, in the epilogue of the book I ask how we can continue to think like a forest even when we’re not in the forest. This is a question that I think is addressed very eloquently at UC Santa Cruz—by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway especially—and the solution is to sit with a messy world of “blasted landscapes,” in Tsing’s words, or in the “mud,” in Haraway’s words.²⁰ It’s about being honest about these sordid histories and entanglements between humans and nonhumans. I totally agree with this position, but I think that what happens when you do this, analytically, is that entanglement and history achieve a kind of superiority which colonizes our thinking and keeps us from seeing things that could stand out if they were freed from the standard logical constraints of historical or cultural analysis. This is what I’m trying to capacitate, and it’s sometimes easier to see in places where you’re forced to see it.
   
The thing about this project is that I’m developing these concepts through ethnography, and giving some sense to the kinds of political possibilities at stake. I’m very much interested in how to mobilize some of this stuff for the times we are calling the Anthropocene. I want to try to figure this out ethnographically. Once I start getting too much into the abstract world thinking loses traction for me. I’m trying to think about what an ecological ethics for the Anthropocene might look like, and I’m developing this with people in Ecuador who are thinking politically with forests.

E T
Yates McKee has suggested that survival is the art of inhabiting the future.²¹ I believe you trace the contours of this future, or these futures, through a kind of morphodynamics. For example, you suggest that form follows practice, and that the efficacy of form is not a result of intentionality, but the coproduction of practices.

E K
Practice is a word that is loaded with intentionality. Form for me gets at a logic that isn’t necessarily alive, semiotic, or intentional. And life is constantly harnessing this logic, or this formal “self-organizing” quality where patterns just fall out—“self”-organizing is a bit of a misnomer because there is no self here. I was trying to isolate moments where this kind of thing happens, but it’s complicated. You can’t just say that structures come out of practices, or that practice is form. Crystals crystallize and snowflakes form patterns without any kind of intention or practice, and it’s in this kind of falling-into-place, where form “falls out,” that we find a seemingly effortless logic, which people and other beings of the forest are harnessing.
   
While I was writing this book I was practicing Aikido. I can’t say I was great at it, but I got enough of it to feel how to do things with form: How do you enter into someone else’s structure or allow them to destabilize themselves so that their structure becomes part of your structure? When you do this right, it’s effortless and elegant. Humans are involved in this structure-play all the time. We’re always harnessing form. That’s what I’m trying to get at. Form doesn’t necessarily come from us. It’s something that we find our way into.

A S
But humans find their way into certain materialist assemblages that are extremely violent. We can, of course, celebrate a kind of materialist poetics, but if we take your example of rubber plantations, there’s an extreme violence that accompanies these logics.

E K
The formal properties of rubber get amplified when you have to engage with it on its own terms. Now we’ve pulled out the rubber; it can now be monocultured in Southeast Asia, so you can have a completely different engagement with it.²² You don’t need to engage it through a natural, complicated ecology that amplifies a certain kind of form. By changing the context, humans can better exploit the properties they want. This was done by cutting out the complex interaction between the rubber trees and parasites. At one point the entire rubber economy had to have a forest-like logic to it. But once you can find a way to get the rubber out of that form and into another configuration you no longer need to think with the forest. Of course, I’m not saying that the previous, more complicated ecology entailed any less violence; in fact, the rubber boom was a period of extreme violence in the Amazon that directly affected many people from Ávila.²³

A S
As a final question, how does your work move among the forest as a “site,” its various human (and nonhuman) inhabitants, and those of us reading your work in other places?

E K
What’s so special about ways of living with complex Amazonian forest ecologies is that it requires a kind of thinking with forests. This may be out of necessity and it may not be part of an ethical or political project, but thinking with the forest can be a source for an ecological ethics for these times we are calling the Anthropocene. My current work in the Amazon is a collaborative attempt to hold open spaces where this is happening.