A Review of Phillipe Descola. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd, foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres Voytek Lapinski, 2013 (Revised Jul 2020), University of Melbourne Originally published in French in 2005, the entry of this book into the anglophone literature promises to establish an influential theoretical direction for an anthropology hoping to respond to critiques of the culture-nature duality as a construct associated with the particularities of Western modernity. This bifurcation of reality is arguably at the very heart of the anthropological project, and becomes particularly clearly expressed through its centrality within the structuralist canon. Attempts to chart a course beyond the ethnocentrism which this entails have thus been a focus of debate in the discipline for some time. However, such attempts becomes particularly urgent in attempts to come to grips with the mutual interconnections between the spheres of the non-human and human that are cast in such sharp relief by the widespread ecological crises that the planet now faces. In his attempt to navigate this theroetical terrain, Descola’s system strives to avoid both naturalist or materialist determinisms, and the constructivist fluidity that would place determining power exclusively within the cultural or social realms. Rather than avoiding the question through an exclusive emphasis on ethnographic particularity however, Descola confronts the dillema head-on. The theoretical system outlined in Beyond Culture and Nature thus attempts instead to establish a deeper basis for the comparision of different ways of perceiving and being in the world, through an attempt to to grasp more fundamental ontological distinctions which themselves give rise to the dualism between culture and nature itself. The book begins with an elaboration of the anthropological critique of the culture-nature duality through a demonstration of its lack of applicability to a number of contexts. Here, as in much of the book, Descola begins with the Amazonian worlds with which he is most intimately familiar. In addition however, he also brings in contemporary ethnographic data from across the globe, as well as utilising the historical record and philosophical literature to document the ontologies, for example, of ancient Greece and the medieval Germanic world. Against this background, Descola is able to position the emergence of the modern Western ontology in it's specificity. It is his erudition and ability to weave together the literatures of anthropology, philosophy, history, and archeology, as well as foraying even further afield into ethology and cognitive psychology, that allows Descola to reach towards a “relative universalism” (p.305), deep enough to fully include and systematically relate, without doing violence to, the worlds of others. Descola’s concern with elaborating an analytic totality within which anthropology can 1 of 4