How Forests Think. Eduardo Kohn
my sense of anxious alienation dissipated the moment the bird came into sharp focus provides some insights into the conditions under which symbolic thought can become so radically separate from the world, as well as those under which it can fall back into place. I do not, by any means, wish to romanticize tropical nature or privilege anyone’s connection to it. This sort of regrounding can happen anywhere. Nonetheless, sighting that tanager in the bush at the messy edge of town taught me something about how immersion in this particularly dense ecology amplifies and makes visible a larger semiotic field beyond that which is exceptionally human, one in which we are all—usually—emplaced. Seeing that tanager made me sane by allowing me to situate the feeling of radical separation within something broader. It resituated me in a larger world “beyond” the human. My mind could return to being part of a larger mind. My thoughts about the world could once again become part of the thoughts of the world. An anthropology beyond the human strives to grasp the importance of these sorts of connections while appreciating why we humans are so apt to lose sight of them.
NOVELTY OUT OF CONTINUITY
Thinking about panic in this way has led me to question more broadly how best to theorize the separation that symbolic thought creates. We tend to assume that because something like the symbolic is exceptionally human and thus novel (at least as far as earthly life is concerned) it must also be radically separate from that from which it comes. This is the Durkheimian legacy we inherit: social facts have their own kind of novel reality, which can only be understood in terms of other such social facts and not in terms of anything—be it psychological, biological, or physical—prior to them (see Durkheim 1972: 69–73). But the sense of radical separation that I experienced is psychically untenable—even life negating in some sense. And this leads me to suspect that there is something the matter with any analytical approach that would take such a separation as its starting point.
If, as I claim, our distinctively human thoughts stand in continuity with the forest’s thoughts insofar as both are in some way or other the products of the semiosis that is intrinsic to life (see chapter 2), then an anthropology beyond the human must find a way to account for the distinctive qualities of human thought without losing sight of its relation to these more pervasive semiotic logics. Accounting conceptually for the relation this novel dynamic has to that from which it comes can help us better understand the relationship between what we take to be distinctively human and that which lies beyond us. In this regard I want to think here about what panic, and especially its resolution, has taught me. To do so I draw on a series of Amazonian examples to trace the ways in which iconic, indexical, and symbolic processes are nested within each other. Symbols depend on indices for their being and indices depend on icons. This allows us to appreciate what makes each of these unique without losing sight of how they also stand in a relation of continuity with each other.
Following Deacon (1997), I begin with a counterintuitive example at the very margins of semiosis. Consider the cryptically camouflaged Amazonian insect known as the walking stick in English because its elongated torso looks so much like a twig. Its Quichua name is shanga. Entomologists call it, appropriately, a phasmid—as in phantom—placing it in the order Phasmida and the family Phasmidae. This name is fitting. What makes these creatures so distinctive is their lack of distinction: they disappear like a phantom into the background. How did they come to be so phantasmic? The evolution of such creatures reveals important things about some of the “phantomlike” logical properties of semiosis that can, in turn, help us understand some of the counterintuitive properties of life “itself”—properties that are amplified in the Amazon and Runa ways of living there. For this reason, I will return to this example throughout the book. Here I want to focus on it with an eye to understanding how the different semiotic modalities—the iconic, the indexical, the symbolic—have their own unique properties at the same time that they stand in a relation of nested continuity to each other.
How did walking sticks come to be so invisible, so phantomlike? That such a phasmid looks like a twig does not depend on anyone noticing this resemblance—our usual understanding of how likeness works. Rather, its likeness is the product of the fact that the ancestors of its potential predators did not notice its ancestors. These potential predators failed to notice the differences between these ancestors and actual twigs. Over evolutionary time those lineages of walking sticks that were least noticed survived. Thanks to all the proto–walking sticks that were noticed—and eaten—because they differed from their environments walking sticks came to be more like the world of twigs around them.19
How walking sticks came to be so invisible reveals important properties of iconicity. Iconicity, the most basic kind of sign process, is highly counterintuitive because it involves a process by which two things are not distinguished. We tend to think of icons as signs that point to the similarities among things we know to be different. We know, for example, that the iconic stick figure of the man on the bathroom door resembles but is not the same as the person who might walk through that door. But there is something deeper about iconicity that is missed when we focus on this sort of example. Semiosis does not begin with the recognition of any intrinsic similarity or difference. Rather, it begins with not noticing difference. It begins with indistinction. For this reason iconicity occupies a space at the very margins of semiosis (for there is nothing semiotic about never noticing anything at all). It marks the beginning and end of thought. With icons new interpretants—subsequent signs that would further specify something about their objects—are no longer produced (Deacon 1997: 76, 77); with icons thought is at rest. Understanding something, however provisional that understanding may be, involves an icon. It involves a thought that is like its object. It involves an image that is a likeness of that object. For this reason all semiosis ultimately relies on the transformation of more complex signs into icons (Peirce CP 2.278).
Signs, of course, provide information. They tell us something new. They tell us about a difference. That is their reason for being. Semiosis must then involve something other than likeness. It must also involve a semiotic logic that points to something else—a logic that is indexical. How do the semiotic logics of likeness and difference relate to each other? Again, following Deacon (1997), consider the following schematic explanation of how that woolly monkey that Hilario and Lucio were trying to frighten out of her hidden canopy perch might learn to interpret a crashing palm as a sign of danger.20 The thundering crash she heard would iconically call to mind past experiences of similar crashes. These past experiences of crashing sounds share with each other additional similarities, such as their co-occurrence with something dangerous—say, a branch breaking or a predator approaching. The monkey would in addition iconically link these past dangers to each other. That the sound made by a crashing tree might indicate danger is, then, the product of, on the one hand, iconic associations of loud noises with other loud noises, and, on the other, iconic associations of dangerous events with other dangerous events. That these two sets of iconic associations are repeatedly linked to each other encourages the current experience of a sudden loud noise to be seen as linked to them. But now this association is also something more than a likeness. It impels the monkey to “guess” that the crash must be linked to something other than itself, something different. Just as a wind vane, as an index, is interpreted as pointing to something other than itself, namely, the direction in which the wind is blowing, so this loud noise is interpreted as pointing to something more than just a noise; it points to something dangerous.
Indexicality, then, involves something more than iconicity. And yet it emerges as a result of a complex hierarchical set of associations among icons. The logical relationship between icons and indices is unidirectional. Indices are the products of a special layered relation among icons but not the other way around. Indexical reference, such as that involved in the monkey’s take on the crashing tree, is a higher-order product of a special relationship among three icons: crashes bring to mind other crashes; dangers associated with such crashes bring to mind other such associations; and these, in turn, are associated with the current crash. Because of this special configuration of icons the current crash now points to something not immediately present: a danger. In this way an index emerges from iconic associations. This special relationship among icons results in a form of reference with unique properties that derive from but are not shared with the iconic associational logics with which they are continuous. Indices provide information; they tell us something new about something not immediately present.
Symbols,