Transcending human sociality: eco-cosmological relationships between entities in the ecosphere

Abstract

Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies’ whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, reciprocity, social cohesion, and exchange can be understood as material and immaterial interrelationships between entities of a more than a corporeal world. I argue, then, that to go beyond the mere anthropocentric conceptualisation of sociality in a nature good to think, we need to holistically conceive the interconnected levels of trophic, socio-structural and socio-cosmic relationships and exchanges between human and non-human beings in the ecosystem.