Rethinking the Nature/Culture Divide

Lecture

Philippe DESCOLA (Professor at Collège de France, Chair in Anthropology of Nature) will close the lecture series of the academic seminar “Societies and Environments in Southeast Asia”, with a public lecture at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand).

Discussants :

• Dr. Yukti MUKDAWIJITRA (Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University)
• Thanes WONGYANNAWA (Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University)

Watch the video

Notions such as ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ are the product of a particular historical process and express the specific distribution of ontological properties to beings in the world that the Moderns have devised. Other civilizations have adopted other systems of distribution, resulting in ontologies and principles of association between humans and non humans that differ widely from the one which emerged in Europe a few centuries ago. The challenge for the social sciences is to acknowledge this diversity, while retaining the ambition to explain it in non Eurocentric terms.

Friday, November 10, 2017
Saranitet Conference Room, 2nd floor, Main Auditorium, Chulalongkorn University