Politics of Worlding: An Anthropological Contribution to Cosmopolitics

Philippe Descola is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and Director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. His research has focused on the ethnology of Amerindian societies, Cognitive Anthropology, and on the cross-cultural examination of the relations between humans and non-humans. He has written or edited over twenty books translated into a dozen languages and has been a visiting professor in several prestigious institutions. His book Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence on anthropologists and intellectuals worldwide. Among many awards, Descola was the Recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal in 2012, and is a foreign member of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William F. Hanks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology. His work has focused on the study of communicative practices through sustained fieldwork in Yucatan, Mexico. He has written extensively on spatial orientation and deixis, the language of religious conversion in the colonial history of Yucatan, Mexico, and contemporary shamanism. Former Guggenheim fellow (1996), his books include Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya, Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance and Context, and Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross, which won the 2015 Staley Book Prize and the 2010 Edward Sapir Book Prize. He received the John Gumperz Award for Lifetime Achievement, IPrA.