“Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies” —animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. “A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might go—and what we might imagine in its place.” —Somatosphere “The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale.” —Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “Descola’s challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

One Girl, One Boy, One Book Against the Forces of Evil Maya is on a train from New York to Boston, and a woman drops a book in her messenger bag. She realizes the woman is being stalked by a grim-faced man, whom Maya dubs "the man who didn't smile." He desperately wants that book―the Book of Everything. Maya and the book make it safely to Boston and then by bus to Maine, but the man who didn't smile is in close pursuit. The Book of Everything comes from a place called the Great Library. The book can do unusual things: its pages are seemingly endless, and it can zip people back and forth in time. Unfortunately, there is another book―the Book of Cinnial―sent to Earth by a group of adversarial librarians, whose purpose is to stop the Book of Everything. They do this by spreading lies and by trying to capture the book. Andy is a boy from the past, and Maya meets him when the Book of Everything whisks her back to Andy's time in the 1970s. Soon, he and Maya travel to another world―Ilyria―and become embroiled with another Book of Everything, a deposed duke, warring brothers, a magical forest, and a toad queen. Will Maya and Andy be able to save both Books of Everything? Will truth or lies prevail? And what, exactly, is the Great Library?