1 How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human A review of Eduardo Kohn‟s book on „representational forms that go beyond language” (2013) Pavel Borecký Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Tallinn University Introduction There is a popular meme circulating via social networks. It shows Batman slapping Robin for his attempt to say something elemental about our being in the world (“but human nature…”). The apprentice is fiercely punished since, in the opinion of the morally superior hero, there is nothing to be said after all (“social construct!”). There has been a time when the meme gave me a good laugh and I enthusiastically shared it with fellow undergraduates. Altogether we have been literally summoning the power of the image. Sharing the simple truth enchanted in the scene gave us a sense of justification because reviving any essentialist arguments about human beings that are, naturally, suspended in socially constructed “webs of significance” (Geertz 1973) known as cultures, we deemed to be hopeless and potentially dangerous. For us there has been basically too much of a comprehensive post-WWII theorization that has created solid intellectual resources for relativisation of the lures of totalitarian ideologies. Overlaying this vast network of thoughts on human liberation thus seemed to be inconceivable for us. Yet, wandering under the canopies of Ecuador‟s Upper Amazon, attending to life of Quichua-speaking Runa people and experiencing many encounters such endeavor promises, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn sketches the paradigm which, to a certain extent, attempts to do just that; to challenge the self- confidence of the masked arbiter and frame the anthropology willing “to make general claims about the way the world is” (2014). On Selves, Forms and Hierarchy In Kohn‟s instant Amazon classic (see Descola 2014, Kohn 2014, Latour 2014) the reader is drawn into the forest of symbiotically interacting thoughts that attend to nothing smaller than propensities of life itself. Step by step the author offers ethnographic vignettes on how Runa people reconcile latent paradoxes of predation, propagation of self and future becomings within the living environment. Their sense of being in the world is described as timeless immersion in “ecology of selves” that is, consequently, identified as “us” and territory of prey. To elucidate the intimate interdependency of human-animal-plant relations, Kohn (ibid.) disentangles theory of semiosis while redefining iconic, indexical and symbolic modalities of representation that pervade the living world. Doing so he possesses the first foundational axiom of anthropology beyond human: “life is constitutively semiotic… „someone‟ emerges as a result of this process as a locus of living dynamic.”