Operative Intentionality and Comparative Ontology: Descola after Merleau-Ponty

This article examines intentionality's unstable role in Descola's comparative ontology, where it shifts between an antepredicative condition of world-disclosure and a capacity attributed to some beings. It asks whether the interiority–physicality matrix of Par-delà nature et culture can claim relative universality without reinstating the dualism it provincializes. Methodologically, it synchronically reconstructs six functions of intentionality in Par-delà, using Descola's later works and interviews as selective retrospective controls, then tests this architecture through Merleau-Ponty's operative intentionality across the four ontological regimes: naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism. The article argues that phenomenological grounding is unnecessary for the typology's heuristic usefulness but necessary for its antepredicative justification. Because embodied world-openness precedes reflective mental attribution, interiority and physicality dissolve as independent constitutive variables while remaining second-order comparative terms. This non-ranking reformulation proposes no fifth ontology; instead, ethnographic forms of distributed agency provincialize phenomenology's bounded subject, establishing a reciprocal transformation between anthropology and phenomenology.