Philippe Descola's Anthropology of Figuration

Philippe Descola, anthropologist and professor at the Collège de France, has developed a framework of four ontologies—animism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism—based on distinctions between interiority and physicality. These ontologies shape how humans and non-humans are identified and figured. Descola distinguishes his 'anthropology of figuration' from traditional anthropology of art, focusing on iconic images that manifest ontological properties rather than Western art categories. He critiques the Quai Branly museum's presentation of ethnographic objects as art, arguing that such objects are ritual mediators. Descola identifies four morphological preferences corresponding to each ontology: commutation (animism, e.g., Yup'ik masks), resemblance (naturalism, e.g., Van Eyck's portraits), ordering (totemism, e.g., Aboriginal X-ray paintings), and connectivity (analogism, e.g., Chinese landscape painting or Huichol nierika). He contends that contemporary art movements like land art, arte povera, and body art remain within naturalist paradigms, despite their counter-cultural critiques. Descola plans an exhibition at Quai Branly to visually demonstrate his theories.