Philippe Descola didn’t set out to destabilize modernity. He simply followed the evidence and found, to his mild surprise and our collective disorientation, that the Western way of carving up the world - that neat split between humans and everything else - is not a default setting but a historical quirk. His four ontologies are less a taxonomy and more a metaphysical mood board, a reminder that people across the globe have been inventing radically different ways of cohabiting existence long before European thought started congratulating itself for discovering nature.
If Viveiros de Castro cracks open the notion of perspective, Descola cracks open the notion of reality’s architecture itself.
What the Four Ontologies Actually Are
Descola proposes four primary ontological regimes - naturalism, animism, analogism, and totemism - each describing how beings are sorted according to physical and interior qualities.
Naturalism will feel familiar. It’s the modern West’s home turf: humans alone have interiority (mind, consciousness, intention), while all beings share a physical nature. Hence our comfort with MRI machines and pet psychics existing in the same society, albeit with different Yelp ratings.
Animism does the opposite. Many Indigenous societies in the Amazon and elsewhere attribute shared interiority across humans, animals, and sometimes features of the landscape, while bodies differ. A spirit-rich cosmos where personhood is distributed rather than monopolized.
Totemism aligns physical and interior qualities within specific collectives. Think of beings - human and nonhuman - sharing forms of identity because they descend from a common prototype or ancestor. It is less about symbolic animals on sports jerseys and more about kinship as a metaphysical fact.
Analogism, the most baroque of the four, takes the world as a splintered mosaic of singular entities connected through intricate correspondences. Medieval Europe, traditional China, and many Indigenous cosmologies operate here. Everything is different, yet everything rhymes.
Why the Framework Stings
What makes Descola irritating in the productive sense is his deadpan clarity. He tells the West: naturalism is not universal. It is simply one way of organizing the furniture of reality. The world is not a museum waiting for scientific labels; it is a negotiation of ontological commitments.
Here’s where you might feel that familiar cognitive twinge - the suspicion that the Western separation of nature and culture has been doing more ideological work than descriptive work. Descola isn’t attacking science. He’s just asking why one ontology gets to pretend it’s not an ontology at all.
Everyday Symptoms of Ontological Drift
The fun part is noticing how naturalism is fraying at the edges. Think of how easily people attribute agency to algorithms, how wellness culture resurrects analogistic correspondences, how pets slide into quasi personhood, how climate activism treats the Earth less as an object and more as a subject with moods. The four ontologies are not historical boxes; they are active scripts. You probably toggle between them before breakfast.
I once caught myself negotiating with a stubborn smart speaker as if it were an animist entity, then googling CO2 data like a naturalist, then feeling guilty toward a houseplant with all the analogistic intensity of a medieval monk. This is not hypocrisy. It is ontological pluralism leaking into everyday life.
The Takeaway
Descola offers a vocabulary for something you already sense: the Western world picture is wobbling. Not collapsing, but losing its monopoly. His four ontologies do not rank or reconcile anything. They simply hold up a mirror and say: choose your commitments carefully. Reality has always been more than one thing, and the sooner we drop the myth of Western exceptionalism, the better our chances of building a world that can survive its own complexity.
See also: Turning Ontological: Critical Paths in the Ontological Turn
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Perspectivism and the Anthropologist Who Broke Reality
