Dr Laura Rival

Projects

Nature and society in native Amazonian cultures

Amazonian ‘ontologies’ have played an important role in recent anthropological theoretical efforts to reach beyond the dualisms of central tropes of Western modernity, such as nature and society, and biology and culture. They have inspired studies of shared relational frames of interaction involving symmetrically humans and other-than-humans. Studies of ‘ontological animism’ have converged towards a peculiar form of theoretical consensus that shuns scientific and objective attempts to understand the world. However, material facts are not the mere products of human intentionality, or the simple effects of human agency. The heterogeneity of human knowledge must thus be taken seriously.

This on-going project investigates the continuing importance of treating ecology and culture as interdependent variables when theorizing nature as locally produced in Amazonian settings. It seeks to renew anthropology’s thinking about ‘nature’ and ‘life’ without treating biology over-simplistically as a body of objectivist scientific knowledge predicated on a binary opposition between nature and culture. Empirical explorations of human-plant relationships in Native Amazonia will enrich Amazonianist anthropology, while an ambition to theorise the very specific ways in which ecology is relational will add to contemporary anthropology’s quest for a better understanding of relationality.