Eduardo Kohn on How Forests Think

A virtual Evenings with an Author hosted by Alice McCrum, Programs Manager at the American Library in Paris, featuring anthropologist and author Eduardo Kohn. (Filmed on Zoom with a live audience on 20/04/2022.)
Can forests think? The driving force (and question) of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think is quickly answered; yes, he writes, and other entities are capable of thought, too. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the Runa people of Amazonian Ecuador, Kohn offers a different approach to anthropology, one that decenters the human from the field of research. Rather, he describes a landscape of relations among different beings-a landscape that at once involves and exceeds humans.
Kohn’s central argument revolves around signs, and the ways that trees and other non-human entities are capable of producing, interpreting, and responding to them. If a forest is capable of communication between trees, how is this communication not thought? What else in the natural world could be viewed as thinking? What anthropocentric biases exist which prevent us from seeing thought in this way? And how might the Runa people’s approach to nature help push anthropology in a more non-human direction? Join Kohn as he wrestles with these questions and with the future of ethnographic research.
About the speakers:
Eduardo Kohn is an author and Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. He was awarded the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize in Anthropology for How Forests Think. He has lectured at the New York Academy of Sciences, arguing for the ecologization of ethics.
Alice McCrum is the head of cultural programming at The American Library in Paris, as well as a student of environmental studies at Sciences Po and host of a podcast about James Joyce’s Ulysses at Shakespeare and Company.
Evenings with an Author is sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.

[@tomryan9412]

Great conversation. So many interesting things to think about from Eduardo Kohn and thoughtful questions asked by the Alice McCrum.

[@Jackofalltrades222]

Can you pls direct me to some resources I can read about how Dualism is present in all language ?

[@dabrupro]

Not sure if it's exactly what you are looking for, but "ABC: Alphabetization of the Popular Mind" by Barry Sanders & Ivan Illich is well worth reading.

[@r3y182]

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[@r3y182]

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[@vangcamps]

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