Anthropologist Philippe Descola has won the 2014 International Cosmos Prize, a Japanese award, for his study of the isolated Jivaroan Achuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Their lives had previously been unknown to the wider world.
"It was an eye-opening discovery when I witnessed their activities in interacting with nature, completely different from the Western view of nature that dichotomizes humans and nature," the 65-year-old professor at the College de France in Paris said during a visit to Tokyo.
Descola, who studied under renowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, lived in Achuar communities from 1976 to 1979 as he conducted ethnographic fieldwork on their coexistence with nature.