Descola first graduated in philosophy at the
École normale supérieure de Lyon and later turned to anthropology, and became a student of
Claude Lévi-Strauss (who had followed the same academic path). His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region of
Ecuador began in 1976 and were funded by
CNRS. He lived with the Achuar from 1976 to 1978. His reputation largely arises from these studies. As a professor, he has been invited several times to the Universities of
São Paulo,
Beijing,
Chicago,
Montreal,
London School of Economics,
Cambridge,
St. Petersburg,
Buenos Aires,
Gothenburg,
Uppsala and
Leuven. He has given lectures in over forty universities and academic institutions abroad, including the
Beatrice Blackwood Lecture at
Oxford, the George Lurcy Lecture at Chicago, the Munro Lecture at Edinburgh, the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture at
the British Academy, the Clifford Geertz Memorial Lecture at
Princeton, the Jensen Lecture at Frankfurt and the Victor Goldschmidt Lecture at
Heidelberg. He has chaired the Société des Américanistes since 2002 and the scientific committee of the
Fondation Fyssen from 2001 to 2009, as well as holding memberships in many other scientific committees. He has also be elected
Honorary fellow of the
Royal Anthropological Institute and received in 2015 the
honoris causa doctorate from the
University of Montreal, Canada. From 2000 to 2019, he was chair of
anthropology at the
Collège de France. From his 2005 book
Beyond Nature and Culture he has turned towards a more theoretical anthropology, reviving his philosophical studies to propose a new anthropological epistemology, influenced by the sociological work of his friend
Bruno Latour. This new and controversial trend has been dubbed the "
narrow ontological turn", and has been the subject of a fashion effect between 2014 and 2017, particularly in France. His wife, Anne-Christine Taylor, is an ethnologist, specialist of Amazonian peoples. == Distinctions ==