Book Review: How Forests Think

How Forests Think is a remarkable book. Eduardo Kohn uses language that captures your attention and makes you want to say “no” until, sometimes reluctantly, you will see what he wants you to see. Do forests think? No, of course not. And yet, in the way that this ethnography unpacks what that question means, the reader comes to understand that they do.

The best way to understand what the book accomplishes is to begin with the observation that in the Amazon life is precarious and survival depends upon an intimate understanding of the natural world. There has been a lot of discussion among anthropologists about “perspectivism” and “the ontological turn.” The achievement of the book is to provide the ethnographic context in which these debates make sense.

That context is that life in this setting is terrifying. It is not only terrifying, of course: social life is rich and full of kindness. The book has a wonderful description of the experience of sleep: “Sleeping in Avila is not the consolidated, solitary, sensorially deprived endeavor it is for us. . . . [it is] continually interspersed with wakefulness . . . thanks to these continuous disruptions, dreams spill into wakefulness and wakefulness into dreams in a way that entangles them both” (p. 13). But it is a world in which people often die in the dense jungle. Their feet slip, they fall into a stream, and their bodies are only discovered weeks later. Dogs die because they encounter a jaguar that mauls them. Jaguars maul humans, too. More than most ethnographies of the Amazon, this one gives a sense of the fragility of human life under the canopy. Kohn describes his own panic attack when on route to his village. A landslide halted his bus, and another blocked the return route. As he sat there among the chattering and, to his mind, clueless tourists, he realized that landslides could crush the bus entirely and bury them all, and he was paralyzed. “This is steep, unstable and dangerous terrain. The landslides reawakened in me a jumble of disturbing images from a decade of traveling this road: a snake frantically tracing figure eights in an immense mudflow that had washed over the road minutes before we had gotten there; a steel bridge buckled in half like a crushed soda can by a slurry of rocks let loose as the mountain above it came down; a cliff splattered with yellow paint, the only sign left of the delivery truck that had careened into the ravine the night before” (p. 46).

In this world, food is hunted, grown, and gathered, not purchased. Survival depends on reading the weather and on knowing which animals have passed by recently and what their movements might mean. As a result, it really matters that humans know the forest well. “This intimacy in large part involves eating and also the real risk of being eaten” (p. 3).

So humans become intensely interested in understanding how predators think. That is why people develop such elaborate ideas about predators and other animals and think of them as being like themselves, only seeing the world from a different perspective. “When the food was brought out the man saw piles of freshly cooked, steaming-hot armadillo meat. [The Lord of the Armadillos] saw this same food as cooked squash” (p. 121). Being predator or prey is a relative position; one can shift. Being human or jaguar is also an unstable position. But when the human imagines the jaguar’s experience, the human imagines that the jaguar has the equivalent of beer and other human food.

Kohn is not trying to argue that that all settings in which people are vulnerable to natural danger will develop perspectivism. He just shows that this complicated switching of perspectives as humans imagine the lives of predators is the way in which Amazonians have come to make sense of their world.

Kohn also does not push the strong version of the ontological argument: that different people live in worlds constituted of ontologically different stuff. Instead, he emphasizes the intense interdependency of all life. In the way that he formulates it, this interdependency is both true of all living ecosystems and particularly true among the Runa, who have elaborated ideas about persons being made through interaction. The theoretical apparatus Kohn uses to build this argument about an interdependency that unfolds over time is sufficiently open (a critic might say, vague) to leave a range of interpretive possibilities available to the reader. To this reader, Kohn seemed to be inviting his readers to understand coevolution from the inside. That is, he presents an account of the ways that animals and plants have evolved together and in response to each other as if he is describing the subjective experience of that process, drawing on the work of C. S. Pierce and Terrence Deacon. It is an account of how to think about thinking, as well as about the ways that different models of thinking about thinking emerge out of the intense and precarious interdependency of the forest world and become culture.