Philippe Descola - Biography#
Philippe Descola is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Collège de France and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Initially trained in philosophy at the École normale supérieure, he completed his doctorate in anthropology in 1983 under the supervision of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
From 1976 onwards, Descola conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Achuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon. This research formed the basis of a comparative anthropology of relations between humans and non-humans that has profoundly reshaped anthropological theory. He served as Professor at EHESS (1989–2019), Director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (2000–2013), and held the Chair of Anthropology of Nature at the Collège de France from 2000 to 2019.
Descola has published over twenty authored or co-authored books, more than one hundred book chapters, and over one hundred peer-reviewed articles. His major monographs include La Nature domestique (1986; revised ed. 2019), Les lances du crépuscule (1993), Par-delà nature et culture (2005), L’écologie des autres (2011), Les Formes du visible. Une anthropologie de la figuration (2021), and Politiques du faire-monde (2025). His work introduced a comparative framework of ontological pluralism (animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism) and has been widely translated and debated across anthropology, philosophy, art history, and the environmental humanities.
He has played a major role in scholarly leadership and service. He has served on or chaired the scientific boards of numerous institutions, including the Société des Américanistes (President, 2002 - 2021), the Fondation Fyssen (Chair), the Musée du quai Branly, and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, and has been a member of France’s Conseil Stratégique de la Recherche. He is a founding member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and the Association pour la Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has served on the editorial boards of seven international journals. He is series editor of Cahiers d’Anthropologie Sociale (L’Herne) and Ethnologiques (Éditions Mimésis).
In 2010 - 2011, Descola curated the major exhibition “La Fabrique des images” at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, a landmark intervention connecting anthropology, art history, and museum practice.
He has delivered over forty invited named and plenary lectures and held visiting professorships across Europe, North and South America, and Asia. His distinctions include the Gold Medal of the CNRS (2012), the International Cosmos Prize (2014), major prizes of the French Academy (2022), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Montreal (2015). He is a Foreign Fellow of the British Academy and a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
