Join Evenings with an Author (online) to discuss

How Forests Think

with anthropologist and author Eduardo Kohn

Click here to RSVP

Can forests think? The driving force (and question) of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think is quickly answered; yes, he writes, and other entities are capable of thought, too. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the Runa people of Amazonian Ecuador, Kohn offers a different approach to anthropology, one that decenters the human from the field of research. Rather, he describes a landscape of relations among different beings–a landscape that at once involves and exceeds humans.

Kohn’s central argument revolves around signs, and the ways that trees and other non-human entities are capable of producing, interpreting, and responding to them. If a forest is capable of communication between trees, how is this communication not thought? What else in the natural world could be viewed as thinking? What anthropocentric biases exist which prevent us from seeing thought in this way? And how might the Runa people’s approach to nature help push anthropology in a more non-human direction? Join Kohn as he wrestles with these questions and with the future of ethnographic research.

Click here to RSVP

About the speaker:

Eduardo Kohn is an author and Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. He was awarded the 2014 Gregory Bateson Prize in Anthropology for How Forests Think. He has lectured at the New York Academy of Sciences, arguing for the ecologization of ethics.

Registration required. Free and open to the public.

Click here to RSVP