2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (3): 401–409 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Christina Toren.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. I am glad to contribute to this symposium on Philippe Descola’s Beyond nature and culture because I find the book so fascinating in its synthetic reach and I am all for the idea that we should be able to make structuralism take new analytical forms. Whether or not, however, the twenty-four configurations (i.e., integrating sche-mas) made possible by Descola’s combination of four modes of identification and six relational modes exhaust human ontological-cum-epistemological possibilities is an empirical question—one that opens up probably inexhaustible new realms for investigation. It is not, however, the route I wish to follow in the present contribu-tion; rather I want to consider how we conceive of schemas and their formation. Descola devotes part two, “The structures of experiences, ” to exploring the idea of the schema because it is fundamental to his attempt to go beyond nature and culture—an endeavor with which I am entirely in sympathy, but for all its careful characterization, his schema cannot get free of this very distinction. My intention here is to focus on the schema and how we are to conceive of it because it seem