For the Amazonian healers and activists with whom Eduardo Kohn has worked over the past decade, the world is a mind-manifesting or psyche-delic forest. It is from this that they develop an ecological ethics and politics, an art of living informed by the ways in which the forest manifests mind. The ‘wild guess’ at the heart of this presentation is that mind-manifestation is central to life, that its living logic can guide us. This requires bringing shamanic and biological understandings of the forest into creative dialogue. This is a kind of ‘diplomacy’. The goal of a diplomat is to bring disparate parties together to recognize common but threatened ground. That ground is forest. The threat is a planet-wide failure to treat it as home.
This lecture is presented by the IHGC Personhoods lab.
*Graduate students are also invited to attend a lunch workshop with Professor Kohn on Friday, January 23rd, during which his chapter, "Directions From a Shape" will be discussed.
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Eduardo Kohn studies the intimate relationships that the indigenous peoples of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon have with one of Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Focusing on how they understand and communicate with rainforest beings has led him to the audacious conclusion that complex living systems manifest “mind” in a variety of ways. From this he develops an empirically robust framework to understand our broader relationship to such mind-like phenomena with the goal of rethinking how to live in the face of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. His book, How Forests Think, won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Award. It is translated into several languages and has inspired the planetary ecological imagination in a surprisingly diverse number of ways ranging from an eponymous symphony premiering at Lincoln Center, to museum exhibits. He teaches Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal.