Philippe Descola is a French anthropologist noted for studies of the Achuar

Achuar

The Achuar are an Amazonian community of some 18,500 individuals along either side of the border in between Ecuador and Peru. As of the early 1970s, the Achuar were one of the last of the Jivaroan groups still to be spared the effects of western contact....

, one of several Jivaroan peoples

Jivaroan peoples

Jivaroan peoples refers to groups of indigenous peoples in the headwaters of the Marañon River, and its tributaries in northern Peru and eastern Ecuador...

.

Background

He started with an interest in philosophy and later became a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....

. His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region began in 1976 and was funded by CNRS. He lived with the Shuar or Achuar from 1976 to 1978. His reputation largely arises from these studies. He is currently chair of anthropology at the Collège de France

Collège de France

The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...

. His wife, Anne-Christine Taylor, is an ethnologist.

Partial bibliography

• In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia Cambridge, 1994
• The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon jungle

External links

• Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale (Official site)
• Research
• Collège de France Chaire d'Anthropologie de la nature
• Radio France Article
• Who owns nature ?, by Philippe Descola, La Vie des idées, 21 janvier 2008.