analysis of human attempts to understand and be understood by their dogs. For example, people in Ávila struggle to interpret their dogs’ dreams, and they even give their dogs hallucinogens in order to be able to give them advice—in the process shifting to a sort of trans-species pidgin with unexpected properties.
The human-dog relation is special in part because of the way it links up to other relations. With and through their dogs people connect both to the broader forest ecology of selves and to an all-too-human social world that stretches beyond Ávila and its surrounding forests and that also catches up layers of colonial legacies. This chapter and the two that follow consider relationality in this expanded sense. They are concerned not just with how the Runa relate to the forest’s living creatures but also with how the Runa relate to its spirits as well as to the many powerful human beings who have left their traces on the landscape.
How the Runa relate to their dogs, to the living creatures of the forest, to its ethereal but real spirits, and to the various other figures—the estate bosses, the priests, the colonists—that over the course of time have come to people their world cannot be distentangled. They are all part of this ecology that makes the Runa who they are. Nonetheless, I resist the temptation to treat this relational knot as an irreducible complexity. There is something we can learn about all these relations—and relationality more broadly—by paying careful attention to the specific modalities through which communication is attempted with different kinds of beings. These struggles to communicate reveal certain formal properties of relation—a certain logic of association, a set of constraints—that are neither the contingent products of earthly biologies nor those of human histories but which are instantiated in, and thus give shape to, both.
The property that most interests me here is hierarchy. The life of signs is characterized by a host of unidirectional and nested logical properties—properties that are consummately hierarchical. And yet, in the hopeful politics we seek to cultivate, we privilege heterarchy over hierarchy, the rhizomatic over the arborescent, and we celebrate the fact that such horizontal processes—lateral gene transfer, symbiosis, commensalism, and the like—can be found in the nonhuman living world. I believe this is the wrong way to ground politics. Morality, like the symbolic, emerges within—not beyond—the human. Projecting our morality, which rightfully privileges equality, on a relational landscape composed in part of nested and unidirectional associations of a logical and ontological, but not a moral, nature is a form of anthropocentric narcissism that renders us blind to some of the properties of that world beyond the human. As a consequence it makes us incapable of harnessing them politically. Part of the interest of this chapter, then, lies in charting how such nested relations get caught up and deployed in moral worlds without themselves being the products of those moral worlds.
The fifth chapter, “Form’s Effortless Efficacy,” is the place where I flesh out this account—to which I have heretofore been alluding—of the anthropological significance of form. That is, it is about how specific configurations of limits on possibility emerge in this world, the peculiar manner in which these redundancies propagate, and the ways in which they come to matter to lives, human and otherwise, in the forests around Ávila.
Form is difficult to treat anthropologically. Neither mind nor mechanism, it doesn’t easily fit the dualistic metaphysics we inherit from the Enlightenment—a metaphysics that even today, in ways we may not necessarily always notice, steers us toward seeing cause in terms either of mechanistic pushes and pulls or of the meanings, purposes, and desires that we have generally come to relegate to the realm of the human. Much of the book so far has been concerned with dismantling some of the more persistent legacies of this dualism by tracing the implications of recognizing that meaning, broadly defined, is part and parcel of the living world beyond the human. This chapter, by contrast, seeks to further this endeavor by going beyond not only the human but also life. It is about the strange properties of pattern propagation that exceed life despite the fact that such patterns are harnessed, nurtured, and amplified by life. In a tropical forest teeming with so many forms of life these patterns proliferate to an unprecedented degree. To engage with the forest on its terms, to enter its relational logic, to think with its thoughts, one must become attuned to these.
By “form” here, I’m not, then, referring to the conceptual structures—innate or learned—through which we humans apprehend the world, nor am I referring to an ideal Platonic realm. Rather, I am referring to a strange but nonetheless worldly process of pattern production and propagation, a process Deacon (2006, 2012) characterizes as “morphodynamic”—one whose peculiar generative logic necessarily comes to permeate living beings (human and nonhuman) as they harness it.
Even though form is not mind it is not thinglike either. Another difficulty for anthropology is that form lacks the tangible otherness of a standard ethnographic object. When one is inside it there is nothing against which to push; it cannot be defined by the way it resists. It is not amenable to this kind of palpation, to this way of knowing. It is also fragile and ephemeral. Like the vortices of the whirlpools that sometimes form in the swift-flowing Amazonian headwaters, it simply vanishes when the special geometry of constraints that sustains it disappears. It thus remains largely hidden from our standard modes of analysis.
Through the examination of a variety of ethnographic, historical, and biological examples summoned together in an attempt to make sense of a puzzling dream I had about my relation to some of the animals of the forest and the spirit masters that control them, this chapter tries to understand some of the peculiar properties of form. It tries to understand the ways form does something to cause-and-effect temporality and the ways it comes to exhibit its own kind of “effortless efficacy” as it propagates itself through us. I am particularly interested here in how the logic of form affects the logic of living thoughts. What happens to thought when it is freed from its own intentions, when, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, we ask of it no return (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 219)? What kinds of ecologies does it sound, and, in the process, what new kinds of relations does it make possible?
This chapter is also, nonetheless, concerned with the very practical problem of getting inside form and doing something with it. The wealth of the forest—be it game or extractive commodities—accumulates in a patterned way. Accessing it requires finding ways to enter the logic of these patterns. Accordingly, this chapter also charts the various techniques, shamanic and otherwise, used to do this, and it also attends to the painful sense of alienation the Runa feel when they are unable to enter the many new forms that have come over time to serve as the reservoirs for so much power and wealth.
Rethinking cause through form forces us to rethink agency as well. What is this strange way of getting something done without doing anything at all? What kinds of politics can come into being through this particular way of creating associations? Grasping how form emerges and propagates in the forest and in the lives of those who relate to it—be they river dolphins, hunters, or rubber bosses—and understanding something about form’s effortless efficacy is central to developing an anthropology that can attend to those many processes central to life, human and nonhuman, which are not built from quanta of difference.
How Forests Think is a book, ultimately, about thought. It is, to quote Viveiros de Castro, a call to make anthropology a practice for “la décolonisation permanente de la pensée” (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 4). My argument is that we are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality. We can only imagine the ways in which selves and thoughts might form associations through our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. And then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.
So, how should we think with forests? How should we allow the thoughts in and of the nonhuman world to liberate our thinking? Forests are good to think because they themselves think. Forests think. I want to take this seriously, and I want to ask, What
