Eduardo Kohn | Come pensano le foreste, traduzione di Alessandro Lucera, Alessandro Palmieri, prefazione di Emanuele Coccia, Milano, Nottetempo, 2021, pp. 439 (ed. or., How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human, 2013, Berkeley, University of California Press, pp. 280).

The volume here reviewed, entitled “Come pensano le foreste” (How Forests Think), has become a reference text for those who deal with environmental anthropology, anthropology of nature, non-human living, Ontological Turn, and the Amazon. The review tries to make accessible a text very complex and difficult to interpret, retracing its central themes and trying to place it in a significant panorama also for Italian studies. Kohn’s book is based on the semiotics of Ch. Peirce, investigating beyond the human, with political purposes of dialogue and coexistence between humans and non-humans, in post-colonial environments and in times of climate crisis. Identifying living with active thinking, Kohn speaks of the extended mind, of concrete thinking, of the three stages of semiosis that produce communication. He speaks of evolutionary adaptation and of the psychedelic mode of thinking of the forest, thus implying anthropological action, beyond shamanic, in the relationship with the forest.