In How Forests Think I seek to contribute to these posthuman critiques of the ways in which we have treated humans as exceptional—and thus as fundamentally separate from the rest of the world—by developing a more robust analytic for understanding human relations to nonhuman beings. I do so by reflecting on what it might mean to say that forests think. I do so, that is, by working out the connection between representational processes (which form the basis for all thought) and living ones as this is revealed through ethnographic attention to that which lies beyond the human. I use the insights thus gained to rethink our assumptions about the nature of representation, and I then explore how this rethinking changes our anthropological concepts. I call this approach an “anthropology beyond the human.” This book is an attempt to encounter an encounter, to look back at these looking-backs, to face that which the runa puma asks of us, and to formulate a response. That response is—to adopt a title from one of the books that Peirce never completed (Peirce 1992b)—my “guess at the riddle” that the Sphinx posed. It is my sense of what we can learn when we attend ethnographically to how the Sphinx’s question might reconfigure the human. Making claims about and beyond the human in anthropology is dangerous business; we are experts at undermining arguments through appeals to hidden contexts. This is the analytical trump card that every well-trained anthropologist has up her sleeve. In this sense, then, this is an unusual project, and it requires of you, the reader, a modicum of goodwill, patience, and the willingness to struggle to allow the work done here to work itself through you. This book will not immediately plunge you into the messy entangled, “natural-cultural” worlds (Latour 1993) whose witnessing has come to be the hallmark of anthropological approaches to nonhumans. Rather, it seeks a gentler immersion in a kind of thinking that grows. It begins with very simple matters so that complexity, context, and entanglement can themselves become the objects of ethnographic analysis rather than the unquestioned conditions for it. Throughout this book I have sought ways to account for difference and novelty despite continuity. Emergence is a technical term I used to trace linkages across disjuncture; beyond is a broader, more general, one. That beyond human language lies semiosis reminds us that language is connected to the semiosis of the living world, which extends beyond it. That there are selves beyond the human draws attention to the fact that some of the attributes of our human selfhood are continuous with theirs. That there is a death beyond every life gestures toward the ways we might continue, thanks to the spaces opened up by all the absent dead who make us what we are. That form extends beyond life draws our attention to the effortless propagation of pattern that runs through our lives. And, finally, that spirits are a real part of an afterlife that extends beyond life tells us something about the continuity and generality intrinsic to life itself. I hope to have provided here, in traversing this selva selvaggia, this wild “dense” and “difficult” forest where words so often fail us, some intimation of how it is that forests think. This thinking is amplified in a dense ecology of selves and certain historically contingent Runa ways of attending to that ecology. Runa ways of attending to this forest ecology of selves are (in part) the product of an all-too-human marginalization from the national economy that might otherwise more equitably link rural communities like Ávila to some of Ecuador’s growing wealth. Greater integration into national networks will certainly offer much more secure forms of sustenance, ones that would make the more onerous and riskier search for food in the forest obsolete and largely irrelevant. And things are moving in this direction. Quito is—through the nationwide expansion of roads, advances in health care, education, infrastructure, and so on—finally, after all these centuries, coming to the forest.