The social sciences concurred their autonomy in
the 19th century. By means of an
ontological Yalta. Philosophers then
realized that it was possible and even
necessary to account for the diversity of human practices and institutions and thus for the contingency of the users of the world, insofar as laws. The laws describing the
physical functioning of the same world, guaranteed
it's homogeneity. Recognizing and ordering
the shimmering diversity of the ways of being, speaking and producing under
the ages of new sciences, could not therefore jeopardize
the universality of the properties of the
world as they had been determined by
the natural sciences. Long dissociated from
human conventions, the physical universe became
the background against which the particularities
of civilizations could be more clearly seen. Cultural relativism, that
principle of method which holds that the value of one
culture cannot serve as a template for another. Thus became legitimate
and fruitful since it was understood that while each culture at its
own view of nature, nature was everywhere made
up of the same realities, demonstrating a
reassuring regularities, knowable proven methods, and
reducible to imminent laws. Each culture, except
our own, of course, the one that was be gotten by modernity even before we thought
of calling it a culture. Since it had invented
science and its condition of possibility, namely
natural universalism. Although many still
struggled to admit it, this arrangement has
outlived its usefulness. It has been gradually
realized that the grid divine is
itself relative, that the division of
the world it created as nothing universal or even
properly scientific, since it results in setting up historically
contingent cosmology, modern naturalism as a
model for all authors. More and more
critical voices are expressing their
concern that the world that the Europeans
have composed as been illegitimately
taken for granted, as a universal given
off experience. It's components
seeming predetermined by the texture and
structure of things. Of course, the social
sciences did not consider the non-modern cultures
of the past and present as complete
analogs of modern culture, that would have
been very unlikely. They saw them and
still see them to a large extent through the prism of only a part
of our own cosmology. As so many singular
expressions of culture as it contrasts with a
single universal nature. Very diverse cultures therefore, but all of them fitting the canon of what we mean
by this double abstraction. Because it is rooted
in our habits, this ethnocentrism is very
difficult to eradicate, even for anthropologists
in their eyes, and until recently, as
Roy Wagner, has put it, the peripheral cultures of
the modern West, I quote him, "Do not contrast with
our culture or offer counter-examples to it as a total system of
conceptualization, but rather invite comparisons as other ways of dealing
with our own reality." For it is obviously in
anthropology that our first felt the damaging consequences
of employing dualistic constitution
to describe worlds that are not realistic. To serve the peoples of
Amazonia or New Guinea, that their societies
are close to nature. As we still read too often, literally makes no sense. Since nature does not exist for them as a separate reality, and they do not conceive of the assemblage of
humans and non-humans within which they
live as a society in the sense that European
political philosophy, and later sociology
and everyday language. Gradually given to this notion. It is for this reason that we must constantly
deepen the work of criticism and relativization of the concepts used in
the social sciences. The key concepts of those
disciplines, such as culture, nature, society,
history, economy, politics, religion, art, have made it possible
to shed light on the collective conditions
of Europeans and to put words to some some the
realities that we're taking on perceptible autonomy
between the beginning of the 1800s and the end
of the 19th century. A crucial period during which were forged many of the
concepts that enabled Europe to define
itself reflexively as a collective rooted in
a historical process. These concepts are therefore anything
but trans-historical. They are the product of a very singular social
and cultural history, that of these Peninsula
at the extreme west of the Asian continent
that we call the West. Intrinsically linked to the sociopolitical
destiny of modern Europe. These concepts have
nevertheless been reused by the social
sciences to describe and explain non-European
societies as if they are descriptive
validity were universal. However, this
tranquil conviction that our societies could
serve as a template for any form of association
was in fact linked to the evolutionist ideology
dominant in this period. Which saw all human groups
as destined to go through the same stages and perhaps one day with the help of
colonization, of course, becomes societies similar
to those found in Europe, with the same institutions, the same separation
between economic, political, and
ideological apparatuses. Meanwhile, they were mainly or merely blurred
outlines in which nascent ethnology could
nevertheless discern the still diffuse form of
their future fulfillment. We face here constitutive
paradox of modern anthropology, the Eurocentrism of the
concepts it employs, signals and amputation
of the principle of relativism that has
been implemented by ethnology since the
beginning of the 20th century. Relativism understood
as a method and not as a moral
rule, of course, that the first
field ethnographers developed consistently
simply in not taking the values
and institutions of the observer as a model to calibrate the values and
institutions of the observed. Ethnology has quite effectively
followed this principle, for example when describing and analyzing kinship systems and forms of family organizations, types of exchange of
goods and services, theories of personhood, or ways of categorizing
plants and animals. In all these cases, institutions are
concepts such as the European monogamous
heterosexual family, the capitalist market, the Cartesian conception of
the relationship between the body as extensor
and the mind as risk cognizance of the Linnaean classification
of natural objects were not taken as
anthropological universals. However, this principle of
methodological relativism, what it has been
efficiently employed in the comparative study of
fields such as kinship, the circulation of
wealth, ontogeny, or biological knowledge has
not been followed to the end. That is to say, to the point
of calling into question the general framework
within which our own values and
institutions have taken shape. This general framework
is the ontology we are familiar with and that
I have called naturalism. Ontology is composed of beings
that oddly surprise us. Society, nature, progress,
cultural habits, clear separation between the
social and the economic, between things and persons, between scientific knowledge
and religious belief, thus making us oblivious
to the fact that these beings do not exist
in other ontologies. When observing that these
naturalist ontology is historically contingent, I do not advocate
hyperrelativism. On the contrary,
my ambition is to develop analytical tools
which will be as far as possible liberated from the
historical particularism that the concepts of the social sciences are
currently loaded with. Terrestrial attraction, the
chemical formula of water, or photosynthesis
qualify objects and phenomena with principles of composition and functioning are identical everywhere
on our planet. It is entirely different
with notions such as society, culture, or nature, which cut up the fabric
of the world according to organizing schemes that are
specific to a certain part of the earth and to a
certain epoch in short, which are perfectly relative, while unduly claiming
to be universal. To this day, most
anthropological studies of the social political
organization of people's will remain on the periphery
of modernity, continue to treat their
institutions as if they were exclusively responsible for governing relations
between humans on the model of Western
civil society yet, the considerable
difference between non-modern cosmopolitics and
modern political operators is that the former are able to integrate
non-humans into collectives or to see non-humans as political subjects acting
in their own collectives. In other words, the
kinds of common beings that results are not
the ones we're used to. They are associations
of humans and non-humans that can take
very different forms. In this sense, can also offer
us food for thought about the needed transformation of our own political institutions. For example, if one examines the components of what anthropologists call
a descent group, that is a clan or lineage
or any other similar unit. Not as anthropology
usually defines it, that is, as a set of humans descended from a
common ancestor, but as the people
where such units exist actually conceive them, then one realizes that they contain much
more than humans. I will briefly
mention a few cases. Among the Wodaabe
Fulani of the Sahel. The term dudal is
normally used by anthropologists to
designate a fraction of a lineage that is, the largest segment of the unit functioning
as a corporate group. However, as anthropologist
[inaudible] has shown, dudal refers to both
lineage of humans and the lineage of zebu that the former F selected
over generations. A group of humans, the dudal lineage, and a group
of domesticated animals, the dudal heard thus form a continuous and
interlocking totality that a unique term designates. The same thing can be
said of a notion used by the Tuva herders of
Siberia alcodana. Its meaning is even more
encompassing that dudal for alcodan refers at the same
time to an incumbent, to its human inhabitants,
to its dogs, and cattle, to its youths,
to its enclosures, and to its neighboring pastures, with the result that
humans, non-humans, and land are all
incorporated in this notion. The solidarity of all members of this ontologically
mixed, collective. Ontologically mixed
for ourselves, not for them, is rendered
evident in times of crisis. When cattle are plagued
by disease, for instance, humans have nightmares
a sure indication that the Alcodan is being
attacked by malevolent spirits. As a consequence, it is the whole Alcodan that must
be treated by a shaman. The case of what
in the Andeans is called an ayllu is
even more striking. The Quechua term ayllu is traditionally defined as
a kinship group, lineage, or an indigenous community with a territorial base that
engages income and actions, especially in ritual matters. However, when we look in detail at the ethnography of
Andean communities, it is clear that an ayllu is much more than
the human group. It also includes plants, animals, local spirits,
and much more. Let's land Andean
to what Kusto Osha, an Amerindian from
the Cuzco region, says about this as reported by the Peruvian
anthropologist, Marisol De La Cadena: "Ayllu is like a weaving and
all the beings in the world, people, animals,
mountain, plants, etc. are like the threads. We are part of the design. The beings in this
world are not alone. Just as a thread
by itself is not a weaving and weavings
are not with threads. Aruna, that is a
person in Quechua, is always in ayllu with other
beings. That is ayllu." In other words, the
clan, the lineage, the totemic group of the ayllu always include much
more than men, women, and children
alive and dead. There are also animals, plants, territories, deities, spirits, shrines, pathogens,
images, skills, and 1,000 other things
necessary for life. These components are
present from the beginning. They are constitutive
of the mixed unit that these segments form and
are not added afterwards as a suggestive set
for the theater of human actions or as mere
providers of metaphors to better express the
sociality of these actions as the social sciences if
tendered to treat them. The idea that
anthropologists' unit of analysis is provided
by humans alone, thus constitutes a blockage that has obscured
the analysis of the properly political
dimensions of collective life elsewhere
than in modern societies. There were reasons for this no doubt and even good reasons. The anthropocentrism
of modernity as its philosophical
roots in the struggle against the organic order
of the Osteon regime. A struggle fueled by the
development of individualism, the purported basis
for legitimacy, and which resulted in the promotion of
institutions and regimes of existence that
made a clean break with the pre-revolutionary
assemblages. As a result, the invention of modern collectives involved
radical purification. Nonhumans were removed
from the body politics to live only humans
proper subjects of law. The representation
that the moderns gave themselves of their form
of political aggregation were then transposed to the analysis of
extra-modern societies, along with a host
of specificities, such as the division
between nature and culture, between belief and knowledge, between fact and value, or more simply the
idea that a clan, lineage, or an ayllu
contains only humans. It is this Eurocentric and anthropocentric
conception of politics that I wish to break with. What is to be done, or can we move from
a uniform world ordered by your major divine between one nature
in many cultures to diversified worlds
in which humans and non-humans make up a
multitude of assemblages? As will be seen later, these assemblages can
nevertheless be reduced to a few types which can be shown to form transformations
of one another. A first step is to go beyond the critique of
this or that notion of the sociological repertoire
and to go back to a deeper level of elaboration
of the common world. In this case, at the level of the detection
of regularities in the world which when systematized have the effect of producing forms
of collectives, conceptions of the subject,
theories of action, which are specific to
large social universes. By proceeding in this way, we no longer consider
societies as already constituted realities, as is customary in
the social sciences. Rather, we seek to understand how singular collectives
are established. Some of which now think of themselves as societies
because they've succeeded in
depriving non-humans of any political agency. One step towards this
reformulation is to attempt to describe the assemblages
of humans and non-humans with the
appropriate terms. Albert Camus famously wrote: "To misname an object is to add to the misfortune
of this world." This is all the truer
when the misnamed object is used to refer to large
segments of the world, such as the concept of
society that I propose to abandon in favor of the
concept of collective, one that I've used repeatedly since the
beginning of this lecture. Contrary to other categories, designating organized
sets of beings, the concept of collective has the huge merit of not
prejudging the content of what is associated nor its mood of assembly using
the notion of collective, thus eliminates any
ontological dissociation between associations of humans and groupings of non-humans. It is not that all
forms of associations are identical,
quite the contrary, but their typology no longer rests on the
principle distinction between humans and
non-humans that founded the regime of modernity. So how do we define
a collective? I borrowed the notion
initially from Bruno Latour, but my use of it is
different from his. For Latour, the collective is the product of literal
action of collecting by means of which
various types of forces and beings
are associated. It is thus a process, even a project
indissociable from the actor-network theory of
which it constitutes one of the principle tools and
which consists in assembling heterogeneous entities
not yet united together in order to test the
relevance of their assembly. The enterprise is experimental and aims at connecting
associations of humans and non-humans were
not separated a priori by the great divide between the domain of nature
and that of society. The Lautorian collective
thus designates a dynamic. At the same time,
epistemic, metaphysical, and political of the
progressive composition of a common world which ignores the two usual attractors of modernity;
nature and society. As a result, no initial
specification is required as to the beings that integrate the collective and as to the
relations that unite them. Ultimately, the collectives is what justifies the work of investigation because its nature and composition are
never known in advance. The Lautorian collective is not a substantive object or even
a principle of composition, but a procedure aiming at reproducing in an analysis
the very movement of recruitment of the sets
of humans and non-humans that the analysts have given themselves as objects of study. We must acknowledge
the great relevance of a notion that accounts for real assemblages
of beings without making any ontological
discrimination within them. However, it seems to me that to reduce the collective
to the sole process of collecting undertaken
by the moderns in order to overcome their
divided condition, is to deprive ourselves of all of all that the extra-moderns can teach
to us in this matter. For it is only surprising for anthropologists to consider that humans and non-humans
are associated in totalities governed by
unitary principles or that mono-specific assemblages
of humans interact with mono-specific assemblages
of non-humans by obeying identical
rules of sociability, or that mixed groups of humans and non-humans cooperate
in all aspect of social life while remaining ontologically different
from each other. These kinds of collectives are
the usual form under which extra-moderns have presented
themselves to us in all the imaginative diversity
of their institutions. This is why it is also necessary to recognize that collectives do not only take shape as the product of an analyst's
process of collecting, but that they also, and
perhaps first and foremost, exist in stabilized,
even canonical forms, which social and political
anthropology has certainly described in the fragmentary
and anthropocentric way, but which it is not
impossible to restore in all the richness and complexity
of their architecture. In short, a collective in the sense in which
I understand it, is a stabilized form
of association between beings that can be ontologically homogeneous
or heterogeneous, and with compositional
principles, as well as the modes
of relation between the competence are
specifiable and susceptible of
being reflectively assessed by human members
of these assemblages, notably when it comes to
qualifying relations with neighboring collectives
where these principles and these modes do not hold. From the foregoing, it
will be seen that for me, the collective does not take on the appearance of
literary on network, nor is it homologous to the
usual sociological categories designating associations
to which one would have added few non-humans for
the sake of completeness, the society plus
its environment, and ethnic group
plus its ancestors, the civilization plus
its deities, social, professional category
plus the tools and materials it uses. One hardly sees in this case, the gain in intelligibility that could be obtained
since the non-humans would continue to be
only an embellishment added to a massively
anthropocentric block. This is why I have argued
that the principles of compositions of a
collective, that is to say, what determines the
nature of the beings it associates and the possible
links they can maintain, ultimately depend on what I've called modes of identification. I will summarize in a few words, what I mean by this. The general idea
is that one must consider the apparent
diversity of what we loosely call cultural habits
as the product of differentiated
processes of worlding. That is to say, of ways of actualizing the multitude of qualities,
phenomena, beings, and relations that
can be objectified by humans by means of the
ontological filters that they use to discriminate
between everything that their environment and
their imagination afford to their apprehension. I have called these
ontological filters that structure the process of worlding, modes of
identification. Taking up the idea put forth by Marcel Mauss that I quote Mauss, "Man identifies himself with things and identify things with themselves by having
both a sense of the difference and
similarities he establishes." One should treat these
modes of identification as cognitive and sensory-motor
patterns embodied and developed during the
socialization in a physical and social media, patterns which function as devices of schematization
of our practices, intuitions, and
perceptions without mobilizing a
discursive knowledge. It is this mechanism
that allows us to recognize certain objects as significant and
to ignore others, to link sequences of
actions reflexively, to interpret events
and statements, to channel our inferences about the properties of objects
in our environment. Now, despite the diversity of qualities that we can
detect in beings and things or that we can infer from clues offered by
the appearance and behavior, it is plausible to think
that the ways in which these policies are
organized are not infinite. Our judgments of identity, that is the recognition
of similarities and differences between
objects or events, cannot depend on
analytical comparisons made term by term. For reasons of
cognitive economy, they must be made quickly
and non-consciously by induction from shared schemas that are devices
for structuring, perceived qualities, and
organizing behavior. Starting from a rather
simple thought experiment, I have therefore
hypothesized that there are no more than four elementary
modes of identification. That is, ways of systematizing
ontological inferences, each one being based
on the kinds of continuity and
discontinuity that humans detect between
themselves and non-humans on the double
plane; physical and moral. When faced with any other
being, human or non-human, I can assume either
that it has elements of physicality and interiority
identical to mine, and I've called this totemism. Or that their interiority and physicality are
distinct from mine, and I've called this analogism. Or that we have
similar interiorities and heterogeneous physicalities, and I call this animism. Or finally, that our
interiorities are different and our
physicality is analogous, and I call that naturalism. I will not go into the detail of these modes of
identification, the characteristics of which I've described in
several of my books. I have endeavored in
recent years to test the relevance of these
schemes by examining their analytical purchase
in accounting for structural variations
in very diverse fields of practice and representation. It is with this objective in mind that I've become
interested lately in an inquiry into the way in which each of the modes
of identification, conditions, forms
of association, bringing together humans and non-humans in sui
generis assemblages. For that purpose, I consider how animism,
totimism, naturalism, and analogism are instituted as in ontologies with privilege, such of these modes
as principal of organizing the
regime of beings and how each of these ontologies in turn prefigures collective more particularly appropriate
to the gathering in a common project
of the types of being which it distinguishes into the complimentary expression of their properties
in practical life. The expression ontological turn, sometimes being used to
qualify this approach, although I have hardly
used it myself. This leveling is no doubt
appropriate provided one specifies that it
does not amount to a thesis on what the
world is or should be, but consists in an
inquiry into the ways in which humans detect such
and such features of the real or imaginary objects that affect their
existence in order to compose basic bricks of differentiated worlds
with these elements. It is because these
primary modalities of identification
of the world are distinct that the
forms of collective that humans will imagine
may also differ. They will be immersed in political configurations,
types of exchange, and types of
relationship between themselves and with
non-humans that vary widely and that undergo
historical transformations. The objective pursued
is thus to bring down to a very elementary
level the critical aim of the social sciences to
make them capable of grasping the general form of
interaction between beings. From this point of
view, moreover, it is no longer just a question
of social sciences since the social here is an
effect rather than a cause. It is a question of a general science of
beings and relations, the science still to come that pioneering minds like Gregory
Bateson if called for, and to which anthropology
and philosophy, as well as the
ethology, sociology, psychology, ecology,
cybernetics, linguistics, and the historical sciences
would contribute. If some anthropologists,
including the present speaker, have placed this undertaking
under the sign of ontology, it is in no way to
claim an annexation by anthropology of a domain formerly reserved
for philosophy. It is above all to insist on the fact that the level at which anthropological analysis
should be situated is more elementary than the one at which it has
operated until now. The system of differences in the specifically human ways of inhabiting the world cannot be explained by considering
these differences as the by-product of that
type of institution, economic organization,
technical infrastructure, value system,
worldview, in short, of all those aspects of
the collectives poster sized in instances by
the social sciences in order to highlight
determinations. All these aspects
are, on the contrary, the stabilized results of more fundamental
intuitions about what the world contains and
about the relations between its human and
non-human components. The word ontology seems appropriate to designate
this analytical level, which could be called
pre-predicative in the language of
Husserlian phenomenology, but which is above all a requirement of
conceptual hygiene. The roots of the diversity among humans must be sought
at a deeper level, that of the differences in the basic inferences
they make according to situations about the kinds
of beings that inhabit the world and the ways in which these beings relate
to one another. From this, derive the kinds
of collectives within which common life takes place and the nature of
the composition, from this derive forms of subjectivation
and objectivation, from this derive regimes of temporality and
forms of figuration, from this derive, in fact, the whole richness of
social and cultural life. As can be seen, this project is
frankly ontological. Contrary to the
[inaudible] approach, the most common words still today in the social sciences, it is not the dominant
categories of social life, class, descent groups, political and
economic hierarchies, race, gender, that serve
here as templates for conceptualizing the
world according to the famous formula, religion is society
transfigured. On the contrary, it is the organizing principles
of cosmologies, the nature of the beings
that populate them, and of the relation
that they weave between them that will define the singular form taken by
this exclusive assemblages of humans that we moderns
call societies. To escape the secular
explanation in which the already constituted
social morphology would be at the origin of the
categories that constituted. It is preferable to admit that more
elementary principles, analytically prior
to social categories are the source that generate the
assemblages of humans and non-humans that
I call collectives, and that condition the
characteristics of the latter. In short, it is the ontological and
cosmological level that determines and explain
the sociological level, not the other way around. How do we proceed to study this? How do we apprehend collectives? Not by making them fit into the Procrustean bed of
the moderns sociology, but according to
the ways they are conceptualized and experience
by those who compose them. First of all, through
empirical investigations. The sociological question is first and foremost the
question of inventory. As it was formerly called,
of social physics, which being is associated
with which other, or on the contrary,
separated from it? In what way? But what time of link? For what motive and to carry out in common what
type of action? But however indispensable
they may be, empirical studies alone are not sufficient to
distinguish guidelines in the way collectives
are composed. As I've already said, the hypothesis I've put forth is that the principle
of composition of a collective depends ultimately on the modes of identification, and this is why I conduct
this inquiry by focusing on the forms of collective in which different types of
ontology find expression. Being aware of the
extreme diversity of these forms when one approaches them from
the point of view of the institutions
which stabilize them, from systems of
political organization to systems of kinship
and marriage, through the kinds
of ritual negation, reputed necessary to the ominous functioning
of the cosmos. I've chosen to devote my attention in particular to
the organization of space, that is to say to the ways of inhabiting places and
taking advantage of them to the type of cohabitation with non-humans to which displacer [FOREIGN]
s land themselves, in short, to the relationship to the land understood in
the more general sense. Focusing on the manner of inhabiting space also
makes it possible to avoid an overly
anthropocentric approach since almost all
the beings admitted into a collective
are dependent on more or less identified and
the second scrubs places, plants, animals, dieties, rivers, volcanoes,
spirits, the dead, totems are all located in
sites, domains, biomes, geological formations
that stabilize them in their relationship to the other existing beings with whom they share a
living environment. In short, unlike
other dimensions of common life in which the components of a collective can be more or less involved, from the point of
view of places, humans and non-humans are all in the same boat,
they're all situated. If a collective is
always situated, then the best way to apprehend it is through a
cosmopolitical analysis. Of course, this is
not cosmopolitics in the Kantian sense, where it stands as the
optimal condition, for conditions in the plural, for a project of world peace, one implying universal
rules under which humans, wherever they are on earth, could lead a civilized life. Nor even in the sense made
popular by Ulrich Beck. Where cosmopolitanism
become the consciousness of a shared destiny, uniting peoples everywhere in their exposure to the same risk. Although cosmopolitanism,
in that sense, rightly implies that
sociologists should conduct their studies beyond the
confines of the nation-state. It is nevertheless a notion bit on an impoverished
and normative world, much like the Kantian cosmos, everywhere identical
for everyone. By contrast, in the
new cosmopolitics advocated for by the likes of
Isabel Stengers and Bruno Latour. The cosmos is neither the universal one of Count or Beck, nor any particular cosmos as a local tradition
may conceive it. It is rather a project referring to the possibility of
setting on an equal footing a multiplicity of worlds project that would
steer the politics of scientific knowledge in
an entirely new direction from the one that it has
followed to the present. However, I use the cosmopolitics in a
somewhat different sense. Perhaps more down to
earth and certainly more faithful to the
etymology of the term, which is as the name for the operators that relate
worlds and managed to bring together and to articulate
things and beings that otherwise would seem to exist on different
ontological planes. Now these operators differ widely according to the
principles that organize the variety of assemblages
of humans and non-humans documented by
ethnography and history. The view from afar brought by anthropologists is this
simply the perspective that they are able to take when
they try to make sense of the bewildering diversity
of ontological regimes under which all clusters
of beings are associated. Cosmopolitics are
the concrete forms these cosmopolitical
associations take. The purpose of my lectures is to give an idea of some of their building
blocks and to sketch the architectural principles so as to provide the basis for an alternative way
of dealing with the diversity of human
and non-human manners of dwelling in the world. In the last part
of this lecture, I would like to
briefly examine what the cosmopolitics that
form the framework within which each
ontological regime can flourish look like. I will devote the
next lecture tomorrow to the anthropological and
political consequences that can be drawn from this cosmopolitical
pluralism using a few detailed ethnographic
examples so as better to contrast some features of extra modern collectives
with those of modern ones. First, however, I want to recall the definition
of the four systems of qualities that can be detected in the
objects of the world, each of which can be embodied
in an anthology that synthesizes its
elementary properties in an ostensible way. Animism is characterized
by inferring moral continuity
between humans and non-humans and a discontinuity in their physical dimensions. Naturalism is inferring
a moral discontinuity and a physical continuity. Totamism by inferring
a dual continuity, moral and physical, but divided into
discontinuous blocks of humans and non-humans. Anallogism by inferring
double discontinuity, physical and moral, which networks of
correspondences strive in vain to
make continuous. Animism is well represented
by the ontologies of Amazonian Indians or
Native Siberians. Totamism by the ontology of
the Australian Aborigines. Naturalism by new
Kantian epistemology, or anallogism by the ontology of the MesoAmerican Indians, Medieval Europeans, or
West African populations. Quite often, however, these systems of
qualities exist only as tendencies or in
partial overlap. Rather than considering
them as closed and compartmentalized
cosmologies or cultures in the classical sense, we must therefore prion them as the phenomenal consequences
or four distinct types of inferences about the identity of beings existing around us, or that we like to imagine. Any human is capable of mobilizing one or the other of these types of inference according
to the circumstances. But the recurrent
identity judgment that he or she will
tend to produce such or such an existence belong to
such and such a category and can be classified with such
and such and other existent will most of the time follow the inference privilege by the collectives within which he or she has been socialized. What consequences do the system of animist inference,
for instance, have on the form of the collectors where these
inferences dominate? First of all, let
me emphasize that this collective is different in every respect from what a society is for us since
the combination that it operates between humans and
non-humans does not take the customary forms the
naturalist ontology has made familiar to us. In animist ontology, most non-humans
have an interiority analogous to that of humans, which makes them social
subjects in their own right. But each form of life is also endowed with particular
physical dispositions. It can only have access
to this form of life, to the segment of
the world that it is predisposed by its
nature to inhabit, to use, and to actualize. Each form of being thus
constitute a specific collective. Social species characterized by your morphology, aptitudes, and a type of
behavior association which combines the attributes of a natural species
and that of a tribe. Tribe species,
especially animal ones, are set to live in collective with identical
structures and properties. They are full-scale
societies with leaders, shamans, rituals, dwellings, techniques, artifacts,
which assembling quarrel provide for themselves and marry according to rules. By species, one should not
understand here humans, animals, and plants only. Because in the animist regime, almost all beings
have a social life. In the whole animist
archipelago, in Amazonia, in subarctic
America, in Siberia, in parts of Southeast
Asia and Melanesia. The members of
each tribe species thus share the same
physical appearance, the same habitat, the same
food and sexual behavior, and are in principle endogamous. It should be noted
that the criteria of differences in
form, disposition, and behavior that distinguish non-human collectives from one another are also used to distinguish values human
collectives from one another. In anatomist ontology, indeed, the idea of humanity as a separate moral species
makes little sense. Thus, each class of humans that is differentiated
from the others by its appearance and ways
of doing things is conceived as a particular
tribe species. The distinctive attributes of human groups that modern see as cultural hairstyle, costume,
ornaments, weapons, tools, dwellings, and
even language, instead, perceived in the
enemies archipelago as physical dispositions, analogous to those that allow animal species to
lead different lives, as beaks, close, fins,
wings, leaves, resumes, and modes of sonic
postural communication. Moreover, if the affiliation
which collective is indeed based on the species
based corporeality, that is to say on the fact of sharing the same
physical appearance, the same habitat, or
same feeding behavior. The very identity of the
collective is only definable by the fact it is apprehended according to the point
of view of other tribes, species, but the moderns
have taken to qualify as super nature and society
is thus for the animist. The World populated by social collectives with
which the human collectives, established relations
according to norms deemed common to all. What about totemic collective as illustrated by
the Australian case? Humans and non-humans,
distributed jointly in hybrid, isomorphic and
complimentary collectives the totemic classes, in contrast to animism, where humans and non-humans are distributed separately
in collectives, also isomorphic
the tribe species, but autonomous from each other. If the structure and the properties of the
animistic collective, those derive undoubtedly from those lent to the
human collectives. The structure of
totemic collectives is defined by the
differential gaps between bundles of physical
and moral attributes that some non-humans
denote appropriately. Generally, animals invested with a totemic function because they illustrate in an
exemplary manner those bundles of attributes. Whereas the properties
acknowledged as typical of the members of those collectives do not derive directly from other
humans or non-humans, but from a prototypical class of predicates that
pre-exist them. In Australia, this class of predicate is called The
Beings of the Dream Time. In contrast to animism, which sets up a tribe
species of humans, as a paradigm of
collectives totemism, thus operates an origin or
fusion by mixing in hybrid assemblages humans
and non-humans will use each other to
produce social bonding, generic identity,
attachment to places, material resources, and
generational contiguity. But totemism does
so by fragmenting the constituent units in such a way that the properties
of each are complimentary and their assembly
is dependent on the differential
gaps, they present. Such a system is governed neither by classification logic, allele viscose, nor by
your sociocentric logic [inaudible] but by a principle that may be called Cosmogenic. Just as animism is anthropogenic
because it borrows from humans the minimum necessary for non-humans
to be treated as humans. That is, human institutions. Totemism is cosmogenic because
it's sits in groups of cosmic attributes that is not referred to a particular
boundary called species, everything that is
required for humans and non-humans to be included
in the same collective. Let us see now how analogist collectives
construed as diverse as the morphology of the
assemblage of humans and non-humans that
the analogist mode of identification allows. You mentioned Europe,
in the Far East, in most of Africa, or in Andean and
Mesoamerican collectives. This assemblages nevertheless
always present themselves as constitutive units of
a much vaster collective, since it is coexistence with
co-extensive with the world. Cosmos and society are here,
almost undistinguishable. Whatever other types of
internal segmentation that's such an extended whole
requires to remain operative. This collective is indeed cut to the measures of
the world cosmos, but also partitioned into interdependent constituent
units that are structured by a logic
of segmentary nesting. Lineages, moieties, costs, various descent groups stretch the connections of the
humans with other beings, from the underworld
to the Emperion. Moreover, analogist
collectives are not necessarily impasse, or state formations
and some of them have very modest human numbers that ignore power stratification
and wealth disparities, yet they all have in common that their constituent
parts are hierarchical, if only at a symbolic level, devoid of any direct economic,
or political effect. The configuration of beings that analogism renders possible, thus present some
remarkable features. In contrast to multiple
aqueous statutory collectives of humans and non-humans having either
homogeneous composition. The tribes, species of animism, or heterogeneous one
the totemic classes, but relating in both cases
with units of the same kind. The analogist
collective is unique, divided into
hierarchical segments, and in exclusive
relation with itself. It is thus self-sufficient in that it contains
within itself all the relations and
determinations necessary to its existence and functioning
unlike the totemic group, which is autonomous on the level of its ontological identity, but which requires
collectives of the same type as its own in order
to become operative. In an analogist collective. Indeed, the hierarchy of the constituent units is
contrastive, that is to say, only definable by
reciprocal positions and it is for that reasons that the segments do not
form independent collective of the same nature
as the totemic classes, which draw in
themselves insights and typical precursors which
are proper to them, the physical and
moral foundations of their distinctiveness. The segments of an analogies collective, others
heteronomical. They acquire meaning
under function only in relation to the
autonomous world that they gently form. Quid finally on the sociological
formula of naturalism. I will not dwell on
it for two reasons. First, because it is a assemblage with which
we're more familiar. The one that moderns
mistakenly believe is universal no matter
where they live. Humans are distributed within collectives
differentiated by their language and cultures,
excluding non-human nature. The paradigm of
collectives here is human society in contrast
to an anomic nature. In short, everything that
is not natural is social. It is true that the
naturalists constitution is beginning to be
undermined by the need to take into account phenomena
such as global warming or the increasingly
vigorous expression of extra modern cosmopolitics
when they come into conflict with the naturalists logic of state and globalized capitalism. But they still concerns only a minority of citizens
of the world was if thoughts deflect the advance of the modernization front
remains marginalized. In order to give
some substance to the proposals put forward
in today's lecture, I will devote
tomorrow's lecture to examining the epistemological and
political consequences of approaching the analysis of
extra modern cosmopolitics in the light of the ontological principles
that structure them. Since the task would be disproportionate if I
set myself the goal of treating as a whole the
thousands of cosmopolitics documented by historical
and ethnographic records, I will limit myself
to considering those that belong to
an animist regime. First because they are the
ones that I know best, and second because they differ perhaps the most
from the forms of collectives to which the sociology of the moderns
as accustomed us. Thank you [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much
Professor De Scala. I am absolutely
delighted to introduce our first commentator,
Professor Adom Getachew. She's a political theorist with research interests in the
history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and post-colonial
political theory. Professor Getachew comes to us from the University
of Chicago, where she is the NOI bow
family assistant professor of political science
in the college. She completed a joint PhD
in political science and African-American Studies
at Yale in 2015, where she worked with a raft of other eminent 10 electrons
and commentators, including Shayla Ben Habib, her advisor, and Hazel Cabbie. Her first prize winning book, Worldmaking After Empire, The Rise and Fall of
self-determination, published by Princeton
University Press in 2019, critiques the conventional
historical view that decolonization was an inevitable transition from a world of empires
to one of nations. She shows instead that black atlantic thinkers and statesmen thought
and acted across national boundaries to challenge global racial hierarchies
and to realize alternative
transnational visions of an egalitarian post
imperial world. Professor Getachew other
works include an anthology of WEB Du Boise's international
writings, which was, I believe just published in November of last year by
Cambridge University Press, as well as multiple articles, book chapters and review essays. She is the recipient of over a dozen awards and
fellowships and serves on the faculty
board of the pose and Families Center for Human
Rights among others. Please join me in giving
a warm welcome to Professor Adom
Getachew [APPLAUSE] Afternoon everybody. First I just want to thank the Tanner Lecture Committee for this great honor of being able to serve as a
discussion today. I also want to thank Professor De Scala for that
brilliant first lecture, Rebecca McLellan for
that introduction, and Jane Fink for
all the work she did to make us to
get us here today. Professor Philip De Scala's
opening lecture today sets the stage for a non
anthropocentric construction of political action in society in part by
offering as genealogies of the concepts and ways of seeing that have blinded our
collective thinking. At the core of his
intervention is a genealogical
reconsideration of the development and codification of the nature and
culture divide. A particular interest here, as he started off with, is the central role of
the social sciences which emerged in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. The human sciences relied on and further deepen
this division, demarcating the social
and cultural as a distinctly human
sphere subject to anthropological and
sociological study. Although the nature cultural
divide was one that distinguished humans as
distinctly cultural beings, this divide was of course
always involved in the hierarchical ordering
of humanity itself. That is, the nature and culture divide has always produced a differentiation of human
societies in which some were closer to nature and
thus the world of animals. I'll be saying much more
about this on Friday, but as Professor De
Scala puts it to say if the peoples of the Amazonian or New Guinea that their societies
are close to nature makes no sense from their
own perspective because their
cosmological orientation, there is no such thing as
nature separated from society. As we know, this
hierarchical ordering of humans in which they were viewed as closer to nature was central to the violin
projects of empire, the expropriation,
modernization, governance to which such communities
were and are subject. In many ways then, we might think of the
nature culture divide and the human non-human divide
that corresponds to it as also a division
between what Sylvia Winter, the Jamaican literary
theorist and philosopher calls a division
between man and human. That is that European man came
to stand in for the human. One of Professor
De Scala's aims in these lectures is as
he puts it to subject the concepts of the
social sciences to a radical relativization. To show us that they're
presumed universality is just that presumed. His strategy for
doing this is to detail the ways in which
the nature culture divide, arrive is very belatedly
to the modern world. Elsewhere, professor
De Scala has argued that the bifurcation
of nature culture, which we now take as simply
a fact of our world, is in fact a recent vintage, so much so that it
would have been unfamiliar to our own
great grandparents. We might also add that this historically
determined way of ordering the world
is not only recent, but that it also only
came to dominance in a struggle with other
cosmologies that it's superseded in
the West and that it encountered during the course of Europe's imperial expansion. In a recent article, the intellectual
historian Gilly Clicker describes this long history
of confrontation through an engagement with the work of 19th century protestant
missionaries who encounters in Oceania and North America engendered
a deep crisis for them about the untranslated
ability of God as creator. Faced with cosmologies
in which the idea of a singular omnipotent
deity was unavailable, missionaries struggle to
articulate their image of God through
languages and idioms in which spiritual
power was diffuse and eminent rather
than personified. The effort to subsume the untranslatable forms of power into the image
of the Christian God, she argues, was
deeply connected to the various struggles over
sovereignty of the period. As the settler revolution of
the 19th century were on, the deep epistemic
challenges and ruptures posed by
indigenous cosmologies would be domesticated
and sublimated into the very construction of
the nature culture divide. As I read him part of Professor De Scala's argument is that although
in this struggle, the Western world would become politically and
economically dominant, it's naturalism has
never superseded in supplanting other
cosmopolitical practices. We might also notice
the ways in which those very social scientists
of the late 19th and early 20th century sublimated
the terms that they encountered out in the world into their own understandings
of European society. Again, to draw on
Gilly Clicker's work, the language of Mona, which would be one
of the names for the imminent forms
of spiritual power, would come to be reproduced in early sociology as a way of speaking about the energetics of the effervescence
of society itself. I think one question
we might also ask is, given the forms and structures
of domination through which the nature and culture
divide came to be produced, what do we make
them of the ways, the remnants, vestiges of
extra modern societies? How is it that they persist? How is it that they relate to this form of subsumption
or dominance? Again, I'll return to
that question on Friday. The theorization
of cosmopolitics that we've received
today and that we'll hear more
about tomorrow is of course also linked
to another term, cosmopolitanism, that we might subject to a similar
genealogical procedure, not unlike that, which reveals the provincial character of
the nature culture divide. Professor Dascola notes that
his account of cosmopolitics stands in sharp contrast to a NEO content cosmopolitanism, whether that of liberal
or left persuasion. Cosmopolitanism
too we might note, has a specific history. One also tied to Europe's
reflexive self-definition, which has always
been connected to Europe's encounters with
the extra European world. Again, drawing on a lot of
people here but according to the intellectual historian and political theorist
Anthony Pagden, the early modern revival of
interest in the Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism coincided
with the age of discovery. The universalism associated with cosmopolitanism was then, and perhaps it's still now
difficult to separate from the civilizing or
humanizing dimensions of imperial projects, which entailed extending
particular attributes to humanity as a whole. The transformation of
the ancient idea of hospitality from
accustomed to a write and then duty during the period of Europe's imperial expansion to the Americas is a case in point. For writers ranging from Francisco de Vitoria to Amir
Patel and Emmanuel Kant, who took this idea up the exchange and
communication associated with hospitality came to be
viewed as an expression of shared humanity and the means of realizing the cosmopolis. The identification of shared and minimal
rights and attributes of humanity envisioned
cosmopolitanism on the scale of the world, but also always was connected to that hierarchized vision
of humanity itself. Cosmopolitan and
thinking has of course, weight waxed and waned since its high point in
the 1800s century, we might be at a
particularly low point. It's a lure though, including to those
of us who are alive to its eurocentrism has
remained the ways in which it's scalar
imagination opens up critical and political space beyond the entrapment
of the local, of the nation, of the State. Professor Dascola's account and elaboration of the
cosmopolitics of the extra European world is a provocative and
powerful challenge to the scalar imaginary
of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan imagines
the world as outside and beyond our particular local
and national attachments and envisions an imaginative
and political practice of scaling up to ascend to
the level of the world, the cosmopolitics
we have encountered today rearranges our
political scales. The world is not out
there beyond us, but it is brought down to earth. Rather than a scaling up
a transcending of the local and particular
cosmopolitics involves, as I understand it, a form of what we might
call imminent scale making. The world is already embedded
in every day and the local, the particular
from this location to the world is not
one but multiple. Instead of the
construction of one world, the practice of cosmopolitics
involved the setting of worlds on equal footing
more specifically, it involves to quote
Professor Dascola's words, "Operators that relate worlds and managed to bring
together and to articulate things and beings
that otherwise would seem to exist on different
ontological planes." Articulation here,
as I understand it, is a practice that does not
dissolve that difference, but conjoins and coheres across difference in ways that remain
partial and incomplete. This reshuffling of scale to me that cosmopolitics
introduces is a really important
challenge to the allure of the Cosmopolitans Promethean a leap beyond the particular, the local, the national. But I want to ask whether we're ready or want to give
up the world of the cosmopolitan and I want to
ask this perhaps in two ways. The first is it goes back to the story I've been
telling you about the ways in which the imperial expansion produced a certain dominance. Modernity, however, born it is out of a
particular place, the place that is the western part of
the Asian continent, as Professor Dascola
provocatively puts it, is one that has come to shape
the world as we know it. It has produced, I would argue, one world differentiated, yes unequal yes violently
pulled together, yes but one world nonetheless. It seems to me that, that theorizing or thinking from that space of an
unequally produced world, a differentiated but
yet one world seems important to the challenges
of climate change, of global warming, with which
the lecture ended today. I'll return to that I think. The second part of the cosmopolitan image that we might want to hold
onto has less to do with the world-building character
of cosmopolitanism then with the skepticism
and refusal that is at the core of the
cosmopolitan tradition. A recent essay and other
political theorists, Morad Idris reminds
us that while the cosmopolitan tradition
has been swallowed up by as positive project of constructing new forms of affiliation
on the scale of humanity or the world in its initial articulation
by Diogenes the cynic, the refusal to claim citizenship in a Greek city-state was not a clearing of space to authorize a new enlarged form
of affiliation, but to question the very grounds
of authorization itself. According to Idris as an interrogative project
then cosmopolitanism asks, what is the perspective from which the disagreement between competing investments in the
world can be adjudicated? The skepticism and refusal
shares the interruption staged by the reconstruction of extra modern cosmopolitics. It also raises the question for me of how the cosmopolitics of extra modern societies might transform the practices of modern social and
political theory. One upshot of this
reconstruction of the multiplicity of
cosmopolitical worlds, is to chase in the moderns by engendering in us and
epistemic humility. Recognizing our naturalism as just one way of
relating to the world, and seeing it in fact as
impoverished and limiting. We give up the conceit
that it is universal. This provincialism move might be contrasted to another
scalar positioning, that of the planetary, which similarly seeks to engender a relativisation
of our standpoint, elaborated by
Dipesh Chakrabarty, the planetary asks us to
contend with the fact that because humans
constitute, this is a quote, because humans constitute
a particular species, they can in the process of
dominating other species, acquire the status of
a geological force. Humans in other
words, he argues, have become a natural
condition at least today. From the perspective
of the planetary, the nature culture divide is irrelevant because humans and earth systems are now co-actors in the drama
of global warming. I think there's again a really important difference of scale. While the planetary
relativize is our naturalism and rejects our anthropocentrism from the
perspective of the Earth, the cosmopolitical
perspective introduced here reveals the range of
possible collectives in which humans and non-humans
are enmeshed long before something like
the Anthropocene arrived, and the practices by which such collectives
are held together. This seems to me a
different answer to the existential crisis
of climate change. I invite Professor
Descola to say more. While this crisis might require
us to see ourselves and knew as geological agents in the way that professor
Chakrabarty argues, the human and non-human
modalities of agency, we glimpse in the
cosmopolitics of the extra modern world might
give us a richer set of resources to think through our alternative
configurations of our relationship to the Earth. As I understand it, attention to the range of cosmopolitical practices involves more than
cutting naturalism down to size to stop at
localizing our nature culture divide might be to embrace the hyper relativism that
Professor Descola rejects. More ambitiously, he seeks to "Develop analytical
tools which should be as far as possible liberated from the historical
particularism that the concepts of social sciences are currently loaded with." To be sure a epistemic
humility would be needed here. It is at least a first step, but it might also involve the innervation of new concepts. We heard perhaps the
glimpses of that operators, collectives as one, as at least a set of
concepts to begin with. These concepts might not
be just that they better capture the cosmopolitics
of the extra modern world, but also reveal our own
modern world and new. Beneath the facade of
our naturalism may lie processes and
practices that evade, undo or otherwise hybridized
the nature culture divide. May the examination of extra
modern cosmopolitics where practices of
articulation can join worlds across
ontological difference, produce an analytical practice that allows us to cognize why, when, and how we have developed our own mutations and
hybrids of nature culture. I pose this question not
from an investment in bootstrapping a
universal social science which forced to abandon the
nature of cultural divide now looks for commensurable
cosmopolitics everywhere. Instead, it is posed
from the view that the nature culture
divide has not only outlived it's utility and
understanding societies, but also that it's
anthropocentrism is implicated in the existential
crisis we now all inhabit. If this is the case, then it seems to me
we need not only to relativize our naturalism, but be capable of advancing processes of welding
that might suggest that path out of our
deadly bifurcation of nature, culture, human, non-human. Thank you [APPLAUSE]. Thank you very much,
Professor Getachew. Wonderful comments. I'm going to invite
Professor Descola back up to the podium to respond
about 10 minutes or so. I'm sure there's a
lot more to be said, but will resume again tomorrow. Thank you, Professor
Getachew for these comments. I'll answer on the specific
question that you posed. But they're all articulated. In fact the question is that naturalism never managed to eradicate or other
forms of cosmopolitics. In fact the global warming and what to call the new
climatic regime we've entered into goes
to the forefront. The fact that
naturalism has not only outlived it's intellectual
touches on the world, but also it's
political purchase. What I want to talk about
for now is that I've been involved in past years, not so much as an observer, but rather as a militant
or companion on the hood with a movement in
France called the [FOREIGN], zone to be defended. Which are places where small
numbers of militants have decided to fight against the major transformation
in rural parts of France. Great projects such as, and one of the better known as the project of an airport
in the Western France. These people have settled, answering first the invitation to come and help local
inhabitants that wanted to resist this
project of a huge airport in this world of rural France. They have managed to resist and prevent the
construction of this airport. There are several cases in
different parts of France and other parts of Europe also. But the one I'm most familiar with is called
Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In the process, these people
have settled there and have found profound
identification with the place they
wanted to defend, ecologically in particular,
they've developed an identification
with the aspects of the Emilio with
plants and animals. In fact, one of the results of this
identification is that they have gone away from a naturalist perspective
towards something new, which is form of
hybrid, hard to define, and which is synthesized with a slogan they used in
the demonstration. Which is we're not
defending nature. We are nature defending itself. This form, this mutation, this transformation
seems to be very important in this
move towards not only provincializing
modernity or Europe or whatever
or naturalism, but also as a political mover. You are thinking the
epistemic humility implies new concepts. But these concepts
are also invented on the spot by political
practice now. I speak now as in a situation where I was
involved in this and a publicly defined as
an iterative control terrorist by the Minister of the Interior in France for siding with these
young people who were fighting among all those
things for the constitution of huge water reserve by agro-industrial
agriculture who were pumping the water and in
fact pursuing in a way, a very old movement in Europe, starting with the enclosures
of privatizing and transforming into
commodities, common goods. The process goes on. This process, of course, is now publicly rejected
by a greater number of young people who
fight these projects of privatizing common goods with more and more
energy than before, but and also trying to
define ways of doing it which are not naturalists
in the traditional sense or even corresponding to standard
political procedures. They're not Leninist in
the classical sense. They are inventing a new
form of being together. Because in these places
which are called Asad, they tried to invent a
form of direct democracy, communal democracy based
on sharing everything, banning private property, etc. It's a very interesting
movements because, of course it reminds one of
the community or anarchist or communes that have flourished in Europe or in the
Americas at one time. But with a completely
different attitude towards non-humans
precisely that is being invented on the spot. Reminds one, especially
an anthropologist of forms of political protest against a land grabbing by native communities in
different parts of the world. The arguments that are
being used and put forth by the young people in Europe are interesting in the
sense that they precisely, they eliminate the old dualism and try to create new forms
of living which would. In fact they associate
themselves also with the, there was a delegation
of the Zapatistas from Mexico visiting the
Zan not long ago. There's a very
intimate relationship between people who were
at the forefront of these epistemic humility
you mentioned with other forms of native struggle against land grabbing elsewhere. Based on arguments
that are no more the usual arguments that
we've known before that is, of course it's
fighting pollution, is fighting appropriation. It's fighting things like that. But it's more than that. It's also having a different
relationship with the land. I think this parallelism between the movement in France
is that which I was expecting to be dissolved on the Council of
Minister today, but it hasn't been
dissolved because precisely there was
such an upsurge. This movement is called the
Uprisings of the Earth. There has been
such a reaction in the past weeks that
the Minister of Interior has not yet
dissolved the movement. No, [LAUGHTER] which means that political action
is still possible. I think it's very comforting
idea in our world now. Let's finish with that. [APPLAUSE]. Thank you again, we do have
time for a few questions. Jane Fink is going to hand
the microphone around. Jane right here,
please. Thank you. Thank you for your
vigorous talk. Nothing less expected from you. My question is, what political protests do you
think can take shape, which does not make a
concession to modern science? I come from the
same space as you in overcoming the nature
culture division. It works in the
premodern register, but in assembling diverse
species in modernity, Donna Haraway, for instance, advocates mutual flourishing. Yet what is the specificity
of a biological species? Reproduction. Elephants
and horses cannot mate. Haraway is forced to talk of feelings of loving,
caring, meeting, touching. Evans Pritchard
Squibb for Margaret, meet its wind in the palm trees anthropology
comes to mind. The scientists says, I validate that
you love your dog, you love your parakeet. Now let me build computers, nuclear weapons,
satellite communication. Our resistance, by our, I mean, anthropological
resistance, becomes a utopian
romantic longing. Therefore I ask you, how do you envisage a
political protest in the modern world that does not make a concession
to science? [LAUGHTER]. Very tricky question
to say the least. An interesting aspect of these struggles that I mentioned in the
Zad, for instance, was that it was sparked
by groups of people who define themselves as naturalists in the
traditional sense. They were interested in nature, in the diversity
of species, etc. They saw that this grid
projects as destroying nature. One element that
they used was to make a complete inventory
of all forms of life in the place that was subjected
to this project in order to emphasize the fact that
many species there were in fact protected species and so the project could not proceed. There are some alliances of
this type between science in the naturalist tradition and political projects of this
kind in the sense that, these people were
naturalists in both senses, became something different at the same time that they retain their interests in
alien forms of life. In fact, I think, that being attuned to the specificity
of an ecosystem, of a specific system of relation between
humans and non-humans, implies having a good
knowledge of non-humans, whatever the knowledge
is based upon. Being interested
in different forms of relationship between
humans and non-humans does not mean saturalicing nature
or transforming non-humans into a form of
Neo-anthropoiliths. But in that, meeting their radical authority, and knowing this
authority for what it is. That it's based on
knowledge and appreciating the flavor of the world we live in means being aware of
exactly what it's made of, and science can
contribute to that. It's a certain type
of science, yes. I guess, I'm just intrigued
by your comments about the resistance
movement in France, and speaking defending nature
or speaking for nature in some sense as a conception of
what the movement is about. It's somewhat evocative
of pastoralists, mid-20th century environmentalism
in certain ways. I have a site worry
about it, which is that, it can be mobilized for
a variety of causes. Which raise the
question of who is really speaking for nature here, especially in the era
of climate change, if we're really going to protect the other organisms with which we interact in the
natural world, we need to decarbonize,
and so on. That's going to
involve some amount of development
closer to transit, and transmission lines to get electricity from windmills to where people are
living, and so on. But I could easily imagine
there's going to be disruption of natural relationships and ecosystems by some
of that development. I can equally imagine, in fact, there is some
of this that goes on, groups of people fighting this land appropriation, again, out of a conception that the
local ecosystems need to be protected from
the development. But unless the
development takes place, the climate changes just
never going to be reined in. Anyway, is there
anything in that, that you could say to help me understand
which resistance are authentic or in which kinds are false consciousness
or something like that? I think that lately this resistance has
to go on two fronts. One is the one I
mentioned before. Now, there's a small
groups of people who try to change the
way they live together and they live with non-humans
in specific places. The other is a more general
political agenda of transforming our states
to make them more sober, and more democratic
in the sense of replacing representative democracy by
participative democracy. That is forms of interactions
between citizens that resulted in
their being heard. Which is, in fact, which was an important aspect of the all initial
French revolution, for that matter, the
Bolshevik Revolution also emphasized this aspect now. I think the political agenda implies to follow
these two directions. What I found interesting, I don't mean that
the alternative form of territorial adjustment of communities is the only way, but I find it very interesting
as an anthropologist, because I see the possibility
of profoundly transforming political institutions
at the local level with just by practice in a way. These people, although
they are well-read, and they read
anthropology in fact, [LAUGHTER] but at the same time, they've made up the
collective reform by experimenting different
solution possibilities, forms of interaction, etc, ad so it's a cosmopolitan
in the making, which I found very interesting. I'm less interested, as an anthropologist, in the basic and necessary
general transformation of the kind of
states we live in. I think the two are important. Especially this is something that David Wagro
knows quite well, because he he dealt with that in the book with Debbie Grabher. It's the relationship
between states and non-state societies that has been quite common in most of
the history of the world, and is still common in a way in Southeast Asia,
for instance, now. I envision a system where
there would be, hopefully, sober and democratic states with surrounded by or interspersed with alternative communities that would be places where
people could escape in a way in some conditions, and that would exert pressure. Obviously, it exerts a
pressure on the state, if I judge with what is
happening now in France. Exert a pressure on the state, and from a pressure valve for the governments not to over exceed their power. [LAUGHTER] I think, the two fronts are
unnecessary, politically. We got time for
one more question. If there is a question. We see that many associations outside of the state in the United States are
taking extreme power. How do these same ideas that
you're talking about avoid the traps that we've seen with the failures of communes
in the 19th century, and the problem of
privatization as extra state entities seizing
power in a democracy? There's no guarantee. [LAUGHTER] I tend to see the future not necessarily
as a desirable state, very much similar to what was Italy in the 13th century, no. The combination
of free communes, aristocratic communes, states, multinationals
like Genoa or Venice, etc, each trying to assert
its power in specific places. I think we are going towards a world that is probably going to look very much
like that perhaps, it's true that history does
repeat itself, but stutters. In that case, there's no discernible
solution in the short-term. In the long-term? In the long-term, I
could do hope so. Yes. [LAUGHTER] It's
going to be conflictual, and you have to fight for it. [LAUGHTER] Well, on that note,
fighting for it, please join me in thanking
[APPLAUSE] Professor Descola, and good afternoon [MUSIC]
