be human in a world that extends beyond us?
Wait. How can I even make this claim that forests think? Shouldn’t we only ask how people think forests think? I’m not doing this. Here, instead, is my provocation. I want to show that the fact that we can make the claim that forests think is in a strange way a product of the fact that forests think. These two things—the claim itself and the claim that we can make the claim—are related: It is because thought extends beyond the human that we can think beyond the human.
This book, then, aims to free our thinking of that excess conceptual baggage that has accumulated as a result of our exclusive attention—to the neglect of everything else—to that which makes us humans exceptional. How Forests Think develops a method for crafting new conceptual tools out of the unexpected properties of the world beyond the human that we discover ethnographically. And in so doing it seeks to liberate us from our own mental enclosures. As we learn to attend ethnographically to that which lies beyond the human, certain strange phenomena suddenly come to the fore, and these strange phenomena amplify, and in the process come to exemplify, some of the general properties of the world in which we live. If through this form of analysis we can find ways to further amplify these phenomena, we can then cultivate them as concepts and mobilize them as tools. By methodologically privileging amplification over, say, comparison or reduction we can create a somewhat different anthropology, one that can help us understand how we might better live in a world we share with other kinds of lives.
The logics of living dynamics, and the sorts of ancillary phenomena these both create and catch up, might at first appear strange and counterintuitive. But, as I hope to show, they also permeate our everyday lives, and they might help us understand our lives differently if we could just learn to listen for them. This emphasis on defamiliarization—coming to see the strange as familiar so that the familiar appears strange—calls to mind a long anthropological tradition that focuses on how an appreciation for context (historical, social, cultural) destabilizes what we take to be natural and immutable modes of being. And yet, when compared to the distance-making practices associated with more traditional liberatory ethnographic or genealogical exercises, seeing the human from somewhat beyond the human does not merely destabilize the taken for granted; it changes the very terms of analysis and comparison.
This reach beyond the human changes our understanding of foundational analytical concepts such as context but also others, such as representation, relation, self, ends, difference, similarity, life, the real, mind, person, thought, form, finitude, future, history, cause, agency, relation, hierarchy, and generality. It changes what we mean by these terms and where we locate the phenomena to which they refer, as well as our understanding of the effects such phenomena have in the living world in which we live.
The final chapter, “The Living Future (and the Imponderable Weight of the Dead),” builds on this way of thinking with forests that I develop in this book as it takes as its focus another enigmatic dream, in this case one of a hunter who is not sure if he is the rapacious predator (who appears here as a white policeman) or the helpless prey of his oneiric prophecy. The interpretive dilemma that this dream poses, and the existential and psychic conflict that it thus lays bare, concerns how to continue as a self and what such continuity might mean in the ecology of selves in which the Runa live—an ecology that is firmly rooted in a forest realm that reaches well beyond the human but which also catches up in its tendrils the detritus of so many all-too-human pasts. This chapter, more broadly, is about survival. That is, it is about the relation of continuity and growth to absence. Ethnographic attention to the problem of survival in the particular colonially inflected ecology of selves in which the Runa live tells us something more general about how we might become new kinds of we, in relation to such absences, and how, in this process, “we” might, to use Haraway’s (2008) term, “flourish.”
Understanding this dream and what it can tell us about survival calls for a shift, not only regarding anthropology’s object—the human—but also regarding its temporal focus. It asks us to recognize more generally how life—human and nonhuman—is not just the product of the weight of the past on the present but how it is also the product of the curious and convoluted ways in which the future comes to bear upon a present.
That is, all semiotic processes are organized around the fact that signs represent a future possible state of affairs. The future matters to living thoughts. It is a constitutive feature of any kind of self. The life of signs is not, then, just in the present but also in a vague and possible future. Signs are oriented toward the ways in which future signs will likely represent their relationship to a likely state of affairs. Selves, then, are characterized by what Peirce calls a “being in futuro” (CP 2.86), or a “living future” (CP 8.194).11 This particular kind of causality, whereby a future comes to affect the present via the mediation of signs, is unique to life.
In the life of signs future is also closely related to absence. All kinds of signs in some way or other re-present what is not present. And every successful representation has another absence at its foundation; it is the product of the history of all the other sign processes that less accurately represented what would be. What one is as a semiotic self, then, is constitutively related to what one is not. One’s future emerges from and in relation to a specific geometry of absent histories. Living futures are always “indebted” to the dead that surround them.
At some level this way in which life creates future in negative but constitutive relation to all its pasts is characteristic of all semiotic processes. But it is a dynamic that is amplified in the tropical forest, with its unprecedented layers of mutually constitutive representational relationships. Runa engagements with this complex ecology of selves create even more future.
Chapter 6, then, is primarily concerned with one particular manifestation of this future: the realm of the afterlife located deep in the forest and inhabited by the dead and the spirit masters that control the forest’s animals. This realm is the product of the relationship that invisible futures have to the painful histories of the dead that make life possible. Around Ávila these dead take the form of were-jaguars, masters, demons, and the specters of so many pre-Hispanic, colonial, and republican pasts; all these continue, in their own ways, to haunt the living forest.
This chapter traces how this ethereal future realm relates to the concrete one of everyday Runa existence. The Runa, living in relation to the forest’s vast ecology of selves, also live their lives with one foot in futuro. That is, they live their lives with one foot in the spirit realm that is the emergent product of the ways in which they engage with the futures and the pasts that the forest comes to harbor in its relational webs. This other kind of “beyond,” this after-life, this super-nature, is not exactly natural (or cultural), but it is nonetheless real. It is its own kind of irreducible real, with its own distinctive properties and its own tangible effects in a future present.
The fractured and yet necessary relationship between the mundane present and the vague future plays out in specific and painful ways in what Lisa Stevenson (2012; see also Butler 1997) might call the psychic life of the Runa self, immersed and informed as it is by the ecology of selves in which it lives. The Runa are both of and alienated from the spirit world, and survival requires cultivating ways to allow something of one’s future self—living tenuously in the spirit realm of the forest masters—to look back on and call out to that more mundane part of oneself that might then hopefully respond. This ethereal realm of continuity and possibility is the emergent product of a whole host of trans-species and transhistorical relations. It is the product of the imponderable weight of the many dead that make a living future possible.
That hunter’s challenge of surviving as an I, as it was revealed in his dream and as it plays out in this ecology of selves, depends on how he is hailed by others—others that may be human or nonhuman, fleshly or virtual. It also depends on how he responds. Is he the white policeman who might turn on his Runa neighbors with a blood thirst that terrifies him? Is he helpless prey? Or might he not be a runa puma, a were-jaguar, capable, even, of returning a jaguar’s gaze?
Let
