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).

[1] His ethnographic studies in the Amazon region of Ecuador began in 1976 and were funded by CNRS.

As a professor, he has been invited several times to the University of São Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Montreal, London School of Economics, Cambridge, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Gothenburg, Uppsala and Leuven.

[3] 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.

This new and controversial trend has been dubbed the "narrow ontological turn",[5] and has been the subject of a fashion effect between 2014 and 2017, particularly in France.