© C. Hélie Gallimard

ANTHROPOLOGIST

France

BiographY

 Philippe Descola was born in Paris in 1949. He first studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud before moving on to ethnology at the University of Paris X and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) (6th section). Appointed project director by the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), he undertook an ethnographic study from 1976 to 1979 with the Jivaros Achuar indigenous people in Ecuadorian Amazon. His special focus was the environment, and his research became the topic of a doctoral thesis in ethnology under the supervision of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which he defended in
1983. After teaching at the University of Quito, he became a visiting scholar at King’s College in Cambridge as well as research associate with the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. He then joined the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) as lecturer in 1984, and later director of studies in 1989. During
his weekly seminars and over a period of many years, he developed a new approach to comparative anthropology based on the relations between humans and non-humans.