How Forests Think tries to present an anthropology beyond the human. It situates itself in writer Eduardo Kohn's years spent among the Runa in Ecuador. The Runa have close linguistic and cultural relationships with the forest creatures and plants surrounding them in the rainforest. Kohn posits that we can learn a more-than-human way of doing anthropology by learning to listen to these relationships.

Although the context is fascinating, and the methodology is urgent, I felt the book never really justified its many claims to be creating an anthropology beyond the human. It still felt for a large part as the voice of a western observer in a non-western culture, and while this is the truth it also feels like maybe it can never work without some other level of collaboration. The writing is also very heavy and does not flow, even though there are poetic moments at the beginning of each chapter. I kept hoping it would unlock something but it kept feeling empty and contradictory, never quite confirming or even properly presenting how the methodology could really work.

The central argument is that semiotics (signs) constitute 'thinking' and that by understanding the complexity of signs means that animals can think as well as humans. Although anecdotal attempts are made to show this, such as how a monkey can understand danger from the creaking of a tree, it is not really well argued. Although it is worth mentioning that authors who have built on Kohn's work like Michael Marder or Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing have managed to show this later, with stronger writing and justification, so this remains an important if imperfect work.

Eduardo Kohn has been praised for trying something new here, and rightly so, yet it too often is either confused or obfuscated, and the end result is a book of interesting moments, mostly those where the Runa take centre stage, but these moments are too few.

@joergr brilliant, thanks for this, I'd never even heard of it. I love 'academic but readable' as a description, the 'but' says so much...