The Composition of Worlds E-Book

Philippe Descola

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 430

Beschreibung

In this autobiographical reflection, the distinguished anthropologist Philippe Descola looks back on his intellectual career and examines both the central themes of his work and the key questions that have shaped anthropological debates over the past forty years. A student of Lévi-Strauss, Descola conducted ethnographic research among the Achuar of the upper Amazon in the late 1970s, focusing on how native societies relate to their environment. In this book he sheds fresh light on the evolution of his thinking from structuralism to an anthropology beyond the human, on the critique of the modern separation between nature and society, and above all on the genesis and scope of his major work Beyond Nature and Culture. This synthesis of the ways in which humans view their relationships with non-humans proposes four schemas for the 'composition of worlds' (animism, naturalism, totemism, analogism) that characterize our ways of inhabiting the earth. Presented in the form of an extended conversation with Pierre Charbonnier, this book is both a lucid introduction to the work of one of the most original anthropologists writing today and an impassioned plea for ontologies that are more accommodating of the diversity of beings.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword to the English edition

1 A Taste for Inquiry

Philosophical journeys

Discovering the mind, discovering the world

Among the tribe of anthropologists

Entering the pantheon

Notes

2 An Amazonian Sojourn and the Challenges of Ethnography

The world of the forest

Living and working among the Achuar

The trial of return

Notes

3 The Diversity of Natures

The four corners of the world

Methodological questions

Conceptual reform

Forms of figuration

Notes

4 The Contemporary World in the Light of Anthropology

We moderns

From anthropology to ecology

The politics of anthropology

The museum

Notes

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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The Composition of Worlds

Philippe Descola

Interviews with Pierre Charbonnier

Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in French as La composition des mondes. Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier © Flammarion, Paris, 2014

This English edition © Polity Press, 2024

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5547-5 – hardback

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5548-2 – paperback

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023932762

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

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Foreword to the English edition

Intellectual autobiography is a rather banal genre in the anglophone world, though less so in the dialogical form that it takes here. This calls for a few words of explanation to introduce this book, first published in French in 2014, to its new anglophone readership. When I agreed to engage in a book-long series of interviews with Pierre Charbonnier, as initially suggested by my publisher Flammarion, I had in mind an illustrious predecessor: the interviews of Claude Lévi-Strauss with Georges Charbonnier (no relation to Pierre!), recorded in 1959 for a radio broadcast and published two years later in book form. In these conversations, Lévi-Strauss candidly discussed both classic themes from his work—the status of anthropologists in their own society, the origins of language, the shift from nature to culture—and more contemporary topics of general interest such as modern art, the political responsibility of the scholar, and the ambiguity of progress. Without drawing too strong a parallel between the present book and those earlier interviews of Lévi-Strauss, his example convinced me that this format offered an ideal way to reach beyond the usual readership of scholarly books and to address, in an easy conversational style, both aspects of my contributions to anthropology that I had in mind to clarify and more general reflections on our present that are inspired by the theoretical positions I have taken over the years.

In contrast with the Lévi-Strauss interviews, however, these are more autobiographical. This is not due to any particular inclination to confide, but rather to the desire, shared by Pierre Charbonnier, to locate my anthropological arguments within a broader genealogy, namely within the intellectual, social, and political landscape in which they took shape. This kind of contextualization is often neglected in social science writing. Despite the concern for reflexivity that characterizes these disciplines, despite the recognized need to indicate the historical conditions that inform their conceptual orientations, despite the care taken by scholars to position their work in relation to that of predecessors and contemporaries, it is often the case that readers give in to the illusion of presentism, taking books and articles that were conceived and written decades earlier as if they were works of the current moment. So it is in order to dispel this kind of amnesia, to which even the most gifted students are not always immune, that I agreed to engage in this series of interviews. I have nonetheless removed from the English version all the lengthy passages on the academic institutions with which I have been affiliated throughout my career and on figures who have supported and influenced me at various points in my life, yet are little known outside France. I am confident that any anglophone readers who are interested in these more detailed aspects of the history of ideas will be able to find the relevant information in the French edition.

But this interview between a middle-aged anthropologist and a young philosopher does not deal with a bygone moment of anthropology—far from it. On the contrary, its intention is to show anthropology in the making, and especially that anthropology to which I have contributed during the past few decades. Under the paradoxical rubric “anthropology of nature”—paradoxical because it has resulted in the provincialization of the concept of nature itself—it seeks to incorporate nonhumans into the analysis of social life: not as productive forces, ecological constraints, foundations of symbolic systems, or backdrops to human action but as autonomous agents that provide greater depth and diversity to the kinds of relations that develop between humans and the various elements that compose their worlds. Countless non-European civilizations have invited us to perform such a decentering, and yet it took a long time for anthropology, and for the social sciences as a whole, to draw the full conclusions. This book seeks to highlight the circumstances that gave rise to the intuitions that allowed nonhumans to be brought back into the study of human praxis. Those intuitions were born of the intellectual and political tumult of 1970s and 1980s France, further kindled by ethnographic fieldwork—which was every bit as stimulating—in native Amazonia, whose enigmatic character our generation of anthropologists was just discovering, even while trying to give it intelligible form.

It is a tragic paradox that the very civilization that invented the idea of nature also became, as its values spread across a large part of the world, the instrument of the destruction of what that idea is meant to represent. For it is in the West, around the Mediterranean basin to begin with, and then in Western Europe, that this extraordinary idea first emerges: that all living beings and the inorganic surroundings in which their existence takes shape form an autonomous whole, from which humans have removed themselves. This idea did not emerge all at once. Ancient Greek sages, philosophers, and physicians had already developed the notion that the cosmos could be explained separately from the decrees of the gods and the effects of human action. They had objectivized, with Aristotle, a field that is made up of all beings that display an order and obey laws. Yet their version of nature was not as comprehensive as that of the moderns. For the advent of modern nature, there had to be a second separation, humans had to become external and superior to nature. It was Christianity that performed this second mutation, imposing, as it spread across Europe, the dual idea of the transcendence of the human being and of a universe extracted from nothingness by divine will. From this, humans derive the right and duty to administer the earth, God having formed them in order to exert control over creation, to organize and arrange it according to his needs. The final stage in the invention of nature took place in seventeenth-century Europe, resulting from a complex process that combined changes in aesthetic sensibilities and pictorial techniques, the discovery of other continents, progress in the mechanical arts, and the greater mastery it afforded over certain environments. The transformations in geometry, mathematical physics, optics, taxonomy, and the theory of the sign emerged from a reorganization of humankind’s relationship with the world and the tools that made it possible, rather than from accumulated discoveries and improved skills. The scientific revolution of the age of reason thus legitimized the idea of a mechanical nature, in which laws accounted both for the behavior of each element in a whole considered to be the sum of its parts and for the interactions between these elements.

The rest is well known. The withdrawal of humans from the world of which they had hitherto been part, and the transformation of that deserted world into a field of investigation and experimentation, into a system of resources and—later and only for a part of it—into a site of aesthetic delectation, all this only consolidated the initial divorce between the human and the nonhuman. The form that this divorce took was a very particular cosmology, naturalism, which has developed in Europe over the past three centuries and, characteristically, affirms the absolute singularity of humans as regards their cognitive and moral attributes—they alone have a soul—and connects them to other beings only where physical attributes are concerned: they are subject to the same material laws. This gave rise to an unprecedented expansion of science and technical know-how, to the pageant of progress that it engendered, and to the unbridled exploitation of nature whose catastrophic consequences are now plain for all to see. This double movement was made possible by the external position that humans had acquired in relation to plants, animals, minerals, rivers, and mountains—now considered soulless objects and factors of production to be exploited. Other civilizations did not experience the same history; and it has been less than a century since some of them adopted the unrestrained mode of development induced by naturalism. It is not that these other cultures had been unaware of the fact that there may be differences and resemblances between the human and the nonhuman, but they did not locate them in the same way as westerners and went on thinking of nature, to borrow the poet Fernando Pessoa’s formulation, as “parts without a whole.”1 A large part of my life as an anthropologist has been devoted to studying and trying to understand forms of worlding that are based on schemas through which certain peoples have identified and systematized continuities and discontinuities between the human and the nonhuman and have thus sought to compose distinct worlds. This book offers a glimpse into the results of these endeavors and the circumstances that have enabled them.

Hence it also has a political dimension. It would surely be absurd to claim that naturalist ontology alone is responsible for global warming, for the massive extinction of species, for the pollution of land, air, and sea—in short, for the accelerated degradation of that portion of the world whose autonomous existence it promoted. Yet it must be admitted that other civilizations, which did not imagine that the fate of humans was separate from that of nonhumans, have a lot to teach us about how we might extricate ourselves from our exorbitant anthropocentrism and mend our severed ties with the many kinds of inhabitants our planet hosts. Joined by the lucid minds who, from within the West itself, perceived the tragic consequences of the withdrawal of humans from nature, these civilizations offer us an opportunity to meditate on mistakes made and on the way forward in attempting to mitigate their consequences. For a true cosmopolitics—one that associates all the world’s occupants—can arise only from the construction of vast networks that bring together human and nonhuman agents, mobilized in anticapitalist struggle at all the geographical levels at which their solidarity can be expressed, in the manner of the diverse beings that native populations have assembled into collectives in order to defend their territories and conditions of life. The “ontological turn” that the present author has contributed to promoting, far from being an escape into a metaphysics of abstraction, offers the possibility of a renewal of political action that makes imaginable hitherto inconceivable alliances between subjects far more diversified than those whose emergence was encouraged by nineteenth and twentieth-century political movements, reformist and revolutionary alike.

Note

 1

  From poem XLVII, originally published in 1925, in Fernando Pessoa, 1997.

The Keeper of Sheep

, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, New York: Sheep Meadow Press.

1A Taste for Inquiry

Philosophical journeys

pierre charbonnier One often imagines that the lives of anthropologists must be filled with adventure and that, before becoming an anthropologist, one would need to have developed a strong taste for travel and for the other. What in your background might have led you on to this path?

philippe descola I have sometimes said that anthropologists are ‘professional onlookers’ insofar as they turn a spontaneous curiosity for the spectacle of the world and for observing their fellow creatures into a form of knowledge; such curiosity is a part of their character long before they consider embracing this line of work. Claude Lévi-Strauss has rightly pointed out that, together with mathematics and music, ethnography is one of the few genuine vocations. In my case, this curiosity developed rather early on. It prompted me to travel, of course—and I’ll come back to that—but it was also related to a sneaking feeling I had from childhood of being, in a sense, ill adapted to the world into which the contingency of birth had cast me. Having discussed it with colleagues, I believe that this sense of gentle incongruity is common among anthropologists, and perhaps even among social scientists and philosophers more broadly. In the end, it brings us to doubt that the world in which we live is a given; even if we find a place in it and lead a rather normal life in other respects, we never feel entirely at ease, for we have the feeling that one part of ourselves is always observing another part playing a role on the social stage, with more or less grace and conviction.

This disposition creates a kind of reflexive distance from the scene of our activity that may follow either of two distinct paths. One is that of the writer and novelist and consists in making one’s relationship with others the stuff of fiction; the other is that of the social scientist and entails a permanent questioning of the state of the social world and environment in which one happens to find oneself, of the values it upholds, and of the behavioral norms it deems acceptable—as well as of the part one plays in it as a subject, and as a political subject in particular. This habit of deliberate distancing from oneself and others is an important dimension of the vocation I was referring to; and it is sometimes encouraged by one’s social environment. As has often been pointed out, minorities, for instance, are over-represented in anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, who was otherwise very discreet about his Jewishness, remarked what a paradoxical position he had been put in the first time he was called a “dirty Jew” at the local school, finding himself suddenly excluded from the national community to which he thought he belonged, and thus being made to consider it both from the inside, where he felt he was, and from the outside, where he had been placed. In the United Kingdom, anthropology drew Catholics in higher numbers than average, and the same goes for Protestants in France. There may thus be, owing to the social context in which one grows up, an ingrained habit of considering oneself marginal that hones one’s faculties of observation vis-à-vis the society by which one is not fully accepted. However, this was not at all the case for me, as I happen to come from a bourgeois Catholic family that had been settled in Paris for several generations and from a long line of writers, doctors, and high-level civil servants typical of the French intellectual elite. From this perspective, I have never had the feeling of being apart from the dominant social world, especially not as I was growing up or during my studies, even if in my family we cultivated a suspicion of, and indeed contempt for, money and all those who attached excessive importance to it—probably the legacy of a Jansenist inflection in the family religious tradition. I was thus never put in a position of otherness of any kind and so, in my case, the choice to turn to the study of social realities likely stemmed rather from this aspect of my personal disposition that I have already invoked, of feeling withdrawn, yet also receptive.

The other appeal of this distancing from the common world stemmed from a taste for travel and for manifest difference, which I developed also early on. As a child, I had—and still have—bound volumes of issues of the Le Tour du monde, a kind of French National Geographic of the latter half of the nineteenth century that reported on discoveries and explorations and had been very popular among families like mine. The volumes enjoyed worldwide success at a time when the French language was widely spoken and read. They featured the travel narratives of erudite explorers, geographers, and proto-ethnographers, covering all corners of the world. Prominent illustrators contributed to the magazine, including Gustave Doré and Édouard Riou. The latter had drawn the illustrations for the novels of Jules Verne in the Hetzel collection, which I was fortunate enough to read as a child, the hefty volumes opened wide on the carpet. In the end, there was, to my mind, no major difference between the travel narratives of the likes of Jules Crevaux, who voyaged up the Maroni and Oyapock rivers in Guyana, or Darwin’s journal in the Galapagos, and novels such as Théophile Gautier’s Captain Fracasse or Jules Verne’s In Search of the Castaways. They all belonged to a world of adventure profoundly informed by nineteenth-century travel culture, the images it produced, and the maps that oriented it, still dotted as they were with bits of terra incognita. However seemingly odd for a child growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, my early years were marked by a rather quaint relish for the discoveries and explorations of the end of the previous century; this sentiment was no doubt given further impetus by the absence of television in our home—a fact born not so much of conviction as of indifference. I also had a pronounced fondness for picaresque novels and I remember as a child passionately reading and re-reading Lesage’s Gil Blas over the course of several months; I was delighted with the constant twists in the plot, the complex embedded narrative structure, and the striking portraits of characters from all walks of life who meet in improbable ways. Later I practically lived inside the world of Don Quixote, thanks to a beautiful edition in Spanish illustrated by Doré that my grandfather had given me, and I believe this was how I managed to learn the rudiments of the language even before studying it at school.

Very early on, these books ignited in me a desire to enter, so to speak, into the world of these illustrations, to find myself inside a picture of Samarkand, or of the Amazonian rainforest, or of an inn on the English Channel. I thus began traveling at an early age. This was facilitated by my father, Jean Descola, who was a historian of Spain and Latin America. On several occasions he took me with him on professional trips, and I began accompanying my parents abroad rather early—especially to Spain, but also to the United Kingdom and Canada. I probably travelled more often than most young people of my age at the time. And as my father was a Hispanist, Spanish was often spoken in my family, in a slightly playful manner. I should add that my grandfather was a humanist doctor of the old school, an austere and cultivated man, who read half a dozen modern languages and three or four dead ones, and who was also an amateur botanist and avid hiker, as was my father. My father’s family was from the Pyrenees, and we thus regularly walked in the mountains. During these rambles, my grandfather would move seamlessly between identifying plants we found along the path and narrating Greek myths that featured them. At night he taught me constellations and their history. Thus, from very early on, I was imbued with a combination of classical knowledge and taste for the spectacle of the world and, more precisely, for the beauty of nature. I must admit that I grew up in a family that venerated knowledge and I was always surrounded by books and paintings, my grandmother and her father being both artists. My father was a brilliant conversationalist and wit, as well as a workaholic, and I remember him spending most of his time writing or correcting manuscripts and proofs when he was at home or on holiday. Indeed, my parents let me read more or less anything I wanted, and I devoured the entire family library indiscriminately, from Virgil’s Aeneid to the novels of Victor Margueritte. There was a forbidden section, of course, which included Pierre Louÿs together with Brantôme’s Book of the Ladies; but it was not very difficult to access. I quickly developed a lively interest in writing, which remained my only academic talent for a long time. In short, there was little doubt in my mind that I was going to inhabit a world that straddled the pleasure of language and curiosity for unknown places and practices.

My first real childhood experience of travel was rather particular: my parents had had the brilliant idea of sending me to a boarding school in England for the final quarter of each school year. It was my English teacher at Lycée Condorcet who had suggested the idea, probably finding my accent appalling. Since the English school year ended later than the French one, I would spend the months of May, June and July in what was known in England as a minor public school. It was housed in a medieval manor in Gloucestershire, which was somewhat rundown but not lacking in majesty. Come to think of it, this was my first direct confrontation with exoticism. For a young French boy aged twelve, finding himself at a British boarding school—which was in every way the polar opposite of a school in the French system—required a not inconsiderable capacity for adaptation. My schoolmates were for the most part children of British expatriates—in the waning years of the British Empire—as well as children of British subjects from the colonies, that is to say, primarily of Kenyan and Indian merchants. Amid this rather motley mix I learned to speak English and to play cricket, and I even became a rather ardent Anglophile.

All this led me to take off. I had learned life in novels; I unlearned it in travels. I thought I knew all there was to know about the roar of passion, the nobility of the soul, and the calculations of interest and I discovered the pulsing beat of the world and sweet surprise. My first big trip, when I was about seventeen, took me to Canada and the United States; I arrived via the Great Lakes, working on a small cargo ship. The following year I went to Turkey and northern Syria. A bit later I visited Iran. It was rather common in my generation to go backpacking in the East. Even in the most remote villages of Anatolia and the Fars Plateau, a few words of Turkish or Farsi earned one a warm welcome. And you could go far on very little money. It may also have been true that we unconsciously reproduced a bit of the colonial mindset, which made it quite natural to feel at home anywhere in the world. It was on those excursions that I saw the Tour du monde illustrations come to life. In those days you would still come across dromedary caravans and mud-brick caravanserais, nomadic horsemen kitted out with antique rifles, and country wedding feasts spread out on carpets in the shade of a willow tree. This is how, little by little, I formed the idea that observing the habits, mores, and practices of the world could be more than a pleasant pastime that required merely letting go of a part of yourself and drifting into the lives of other people; it might also become a genuine occupation. I knew what an anthropologist was because I had read Tristes tropiques very early on, at the age of sixteen or seventeen. But it was the figure of Lévi-Strauss himself, more than his profession, that had struck me most and elicited my admiration, and in any case the latter seemed to be something that emanated from him rather than something he had embraced. At that age, how could I not identify with this refined and discerning savant, who wrote, in turns, like Rousseau and Chateaubriand, led a life of adventure while being well versed in Rabelais and Debussy, and had brought the scraps of humanity he found in the depths of Brazilian forests to the pinnacle of literature and philosophy? Surely, this was the kind of man one should aspire to be. And, since he was an anthropologist, that must be a worthy occupation!

pc One of the essential aspects of your work is the question of the relationship to nature. Can this interest be explained by anything in your biography? What elements in your background led you to this issue?

pd I have already mentioned the mountain hikes I went on with my parents and my grandfather. This is probably how my taste for landscapes developed, as well as my liking for the kind of solitude that only large, unpopulated areas can provide. I do not remember my grandfather’s botanical lessons very well, but I am always awestruck when I come across a marten running along the edge of a wood or a heron pecking at a frog, calmly ignoring my presence as if I were the last human being. In these moments I feel a sense of plenitude, as if I had become a minute drop of water in the great flow of nature, losing all sense of self. Yet it is in the most isolated places—in the desert, as we used to say—that this sentiment is best expressed. I remember, for instance, the exaltation that came over me one day in Amazonia, as I was floating on a pirogue with some Achuar. We had to go over rapids and then push the canoe across some shallows. It was a very beautiful afternoon, the river was broad and littered with sand shoals on which white egrets paced ceremoniously, and I realized that we were about fifty kilometers from the closest Achuar settlements in either direction, upstream or downstream. I then felt fully like a particle of the world, but on its outer fringes, in a universe that had hardly been touched by humans. This is a sentiment that is, of course, nourished by romantic literature and art, and I would have had a very difficult time explaining it to my Achuar companions. But I have experienced this sense of plenitude on several occasions, in different corners of the planet, where it is still possible to feel like a very small particle in an immense macrocosm. My taste for nature developed in this way, drawn to the sublime, so to speak, rather than to the agrestic.

And yet I also appreciate the ordered landscapes of our temperate regions—the patina of integrated layers, burnished over generations of economic and social history, a technical system, and a particular ecosystem. It was in fact while doing fieldwork in Amazonia that I came to understand this, that I felt vividly what I missed most in my own culture, what really mattered to me. Until then, I saw myself as a citizen of the world, footloose, a cosmopolitan taking advantage of everything the planet had to offer. And then, suddenly, I found myself profoundly nostalgic for the apparently trivial things I no longer had; chief among them were the rural landscapes of Europe, especially those of Southern France, which had been periodic settings of happy childhood memories. But there was just nothing sublime about these landscapes; they were not “nature” in the ordinary meaning of the word. I appreciated them for other reasons, namely because they made glaringly visible a very ancient and comforting alliance between human and natural history, multiplying the diversity of one by the diversity of the other and thus enabling the identification of something familiar in ever renewing novelty. In fact I have always been attuned to my environment in a broad sense. In adolescence I explored every corner of Paris before taking to walking in the countryside, drawn to new scenes and landscapes, my gaze always alert to the rich happenings of everyday life. This is why the question of nature, before becoming an intellectual matter, was a central element in the formation of my power of discernment and my sensibility. And it is for this reason that, noting the social sciences’ relative lack of interest in this question, I realized that it deserved more attention than it was receiving at the time.

Discovering the mind, discovering the world

pc So, it was a combination of experiences and a particular relationship with knowledge that determined your path. How did this inclination for travel turn into a scholarly vocation?

pd In the last two years of secondary school I developed an interest in politics, especially through the Student Action Committees that were protesting the war in Vietnam; for many of my generation, this was the starting point of political awareness. Indeed, opposition to that war was for us the catalyst of a broader movement, which combined loathing for the moral order and its hypocrisy, a rejection of political structures that seemed fossilized in an antiquated conservatism, struggle against imperialism and neocolonialism, and—perhaps especially—an enthusiasm for the counterculture, mostly the American counterculture, in its most exuberant forms, from music to cinema to comics. In its spirited, disorderly, and relatively under-politicized variant, this tendency culminated in the May ’68 movement, in which I readily took part, with a touch of dandyism.

This situation elicited a paradoxical reaction, from me as well as from many of my comrades at the time: rather than moving into the factories and trying to convert workers to the revolution, as renowned intellectuals encouraged us to do from the perch of their university chairs, we convinced ourselves that it was essential to continue to pursue the path of knowledge, for it was absolutely clear to us that we needed to acquire the intellectual tools necessary for thinking through the contemporary political situation. And, given the complexity of the moral and political crisis we were going through, these tools could be acquired only through long and arduous study. We thought that, to be effectively engaged in politics, we needed to master critical discourse; and these tools could be acquired only through the discipline of knowledge. This was reinforced by our attraction to a form of intellectual challenge that could be met only by undertaking demanding academic research. Unlike in the populist myth, which sees “68ers” as lazy pleasure-seekers, many of us were stimulated by a somewhat grandiose sense of the need to demonstrate an intelligence equal to the situation. Hence my decision to prepare for the selective entrance exams to the École Normale Supérieure, where I was admitted in 1970 with the intention of studying philosophy.

Our generation had a voracious appetite for new ideas and, in retrospect, I feel—probably erroneously—that there were many more to be had then than now. Our relish for new ideas, our drive to explore the world of thought went hand in hand with our discovery of the real world. We read everything we could lay our hands on, without necessarily always having the tools to understand it, but at least we read, and we had a penchant for what seemed to us the most difficult texts. In other words, the intellectual baggage of the young man of that time was a total hybrid; it had great diversity even if Marxism held a preeminent place within it, given the project of reform, if not revolution, that we all had. In a sense, we simply accepted the contradictions that we found between the great authors we read, for example between Husserl and Marx. We thought deep down that there were points of agreement between them, which was probably very naïve on our part. We convinced ourselves for instance that Husserl’s Krisis was a profoundly political text, because it recast the progress of the West as a descent into the abyss. Husserl indeed showed in that book that the 1930s political crisis in Europe had been first and foremost a crisis of reason, except that, unlike Marx, he did not base this analysis on social and economic considerations.

My interest in anthropology began at the École Normale Supérieure, where I attended the seminar of Maurice Godelier, himself an alumnus of the École fifteen years earlier. Initially also a student of philosophy, Godelier became Lévi-Strauss’ assistant, and subsequently decided to do anthropological fieldwork himself, with the Baruyas of New Guinea. Not long before that, he had published Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, simultaneously offering a critique of the concepts and methods of classical political economy and a reading of Marx’s Capital; and his seminar was on that theme. We were very engrossed in the reading of Marx’s economic texts at the time, especially Capital, which provided one of the major intellectual reference points for my whole generation. Godelier’s interpretation was rather distinct from the one offered earlier by Althusser and Balibar in Reading Capital, especially insofar as it contrasted political economy with “primitive” and “pre-capitalist” economic forms, in which production and exchange did not obey market principles. This dimension caught my attention, as it offered an opening onto non-modern societies while retaining some of the tools Marx had developed to analyze the capitalist system.

It was Godelier who convinced me that I could make something of my somewhat abstract interest in anthropology. In the meantime, that interest had grown, nourished by reading Lévi-Strauss, and especially some of his more technical works, which philosophy students hardly ever read, such as The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Philosophers would often take an interest in the first chapters of the book, which are the most philosophical, but rarely in what follows these general considerations on the nature–culture divide and the incest taboo, namely the discussions of the Australian and Chinese matrimonial rules, which were less accessible. I had of course read The Savage Mind—one of the great works of philosophy of the twentieth century, since it tackled, in a novel and very concrete way, the central question of the transition from sensibility to intelligibility. But I had also learned to appreciate classic anthropological monographs, especially those of the English tradition, for example Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer and the Azande, or Leach on the Kachin. These works showed me the ways in which concepts can emerge from the fabric of things and from observing them, without forcing it, so to speak. I have always found that dimension of ethnographic work quite compelling: to bring out a form of native thought that is radically different from our own and to do so by small strokes, simply through description, without injecting a philosophy that is foreign to it. This is how anthropology gradually impressed itself upon me, even while I was still in my early twenties.

During his seminar at the École Normale, Maurice Godelier helped me see that it was possible to do anthropology, that this was not the reserve of a few exceptional figures, but also that it was necessary to do fieldwork. This is when I decided—it must have been sometime in late 1971—to pursue a degree in anthropology at the University of Nanterre, then the best undergraduate program in the discipline, at the same time as a master’s in philosophy, which was in fact a master’s in anthropology in disguise. My work on the Incas was supervised nominally by Georges Labica, who was then professor at Nanterre, but in actual fact by Godelier. The project focused on the nature of Inca ideology and was itself a hybrid; it used the notion of ideology, as Althusser had developed it in his analysis of the state ideological apparatuses; and it also drew on Pierre Bourdieu’s work, in particular Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, and structural anthropology, for that was the moment of the first structuralist studies on the Andes. I have in mind texts such as Nathan Wachtel’s The Vision of the Vanquished and Tom Zuidema’s writings on ceques, a highly complex sociospatial organizational system of the Inca Empire. The result was thus a rather strange combination of neo-Marxist and neo-structuralist interpretations of a social reality I knew only through the ethnohistorical documents on which I had worked. In short, this master’s thesis marked the decisive tipping point toward anthropology.

pc How did your transition from philosophy to anthropology come about? What were its initial stages, and how did it resonate with your political concerns?

pd First of all, I decided to do fieldwork that combined political and environmental anthropology. I thus enrolled as a doctoral student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and, in the summer of 1973, together with my partner Anne-Christine Taylor, who was herself also an anthropology student, I went to southern Chiapas in Mexico to conduct preliminary fieldwork research. I was interested in interethnic relations between two native populations, the Lacandon and the Tzeltal, and in the differences between their respective relationships with the common environment—the tropical rainforest. We thus settled for three months in the Lacandon rainforest, in Taniperla, a small settler colony of the Tzeltal that had fled its traditional highland habitat years earlier, pushed out by large landowners. The two populations spoke Mayan languages and had a few common traits, but the Lacandon had long inhabited the forest ecosystem, whereas the Tzeltal had only recently begun trying to adapt to it. The situation was rather tense and, in retrospect, one might even say prerevolutionary, since it was in that lowland region that the Zapatista movement began mobilizing Amerindians only a decade and a half later. The Tzeltal seemed to suffer as a result of having been uprooted, even though they had had earlier experience of migration to the lowlands, going there on a regular basis to work for the lumber companies. In the 1930s Bruno Traven had written March to Caobaland, an extraordinary novel about this grim saga. However, if the Tzeltal were used to going down to the forest, it was only as peons, forced through a form of indenture to work under inhuman conditions, not as permanent residents among the communities already present.

Compelled to leave the highlands, the Tzeltal had tried to rebuild a world that closely resembled the one they had left, but in a radically different environment; and this proved most difficult. First of all, for ecological reasons: apart from a few residual pine stands on the mountainsides, the highlands are already divided up into hedged fields, interspersed with ceremonial sites related to social and cosmic segments that combined humans and nonhumans. These hierarchized units, called kalpul, functioned as legal entities that controlled the distribution of farmland and the rites each segment performed for the sacred places and the divinities they host. When there were only two sections, which was the most common occurrence, their division followed a line perpendicular to the slope of the terrain shared by the community, at the level of the village, generally across its central square, sometimes running the length of the church nave. In the forest ecosystem into which they were displaced, the Tzeltal no longer found any such bearings and obsessively sought to re-create the physical and symbolic landscape they had lost, as well as the social logic that went with it.

At the time, Taniperla could be reached only by foot, after a week-long trek from the highlands, or by a single-engine plane that landed on a small strip. The Tzeltal had turned this strip into the axis of separation between the two moieties of the village, but in the end this did not work very well. Indeed, in the highlands, the moiety that had ritual, symbolic, and demographic preeminence was located in the upper part, being associated with the mountains and the deities that inhabit them, so that its patron saint was that of the community as a whole, whereas the lower moiety was linked to warm lands, agricultural abundance, and the world of demons and non-Indians. Now it was the entire village that was de facto in the lowlands. I thus witnessed the permanent struggle of the inhabitants against an environment that was unfamiliar to them and the strategies they deployed as they tried to tame it. One of these, for example, was to envelope the village in a permanent “civilized” soundscape in order to keep the disquieting otherness of the forest and its inhabitants at bay. There was a small shop selling next to nothing—rice, black beans, tins of tuna, candles—that had a loudspeaker mounted on a pole. All day long it played rancheras and Mexican popular music. Between songs, the shopkeeper would announce that such and such family had requested this song to be played for some other family, as if to re-create the reciprocal relations between social segments; and this music would be constantly blaring until the middle of the night, when the electric generator ran out of fuel. It was also as if they were trying to create a proper Mexican environment, perhaps so as to make a new start, at an equal distance from the traditionalism of highland Indians and the strange ways of forest Indians. This appeared obvious to me when we went with a few village men to visit a Lacandon who lived three or four hours away by foot, and I was struck by how different their worlds were. This was also my first foray into the depth of the forest, and I was immediately seduced by the staggering hustle and bustle of the tropical forest, that overflow of life that is often not very agreeable but always endlessly diverse. In short, I was not in tune with the Tzeltal. Little by little, their difficulties in re-creating an acceptable living environment insidiously contaminated my mood and I thought to myself that it would be preferable to “do my fieldwork” among people who felt at ease in the forest. This is how I came to Amazonia.

That experience was thus a detour, but probably a necessary one. While not fully admitting it to myself, I had long been drawn to Amazonia, but I thought that going there for fieldwork was impossibly romantic and petit bourgeois. It would probably have been my spontaneous choice, influenced as I was by both Lévi-Strauss and my childhood reading. But spending time with the Amazonian Amerindians was to give in to a form of consumerism of the exotic, to an outdated love of mystery and adventure, entirely disconnected from my politics, whereas going to Chiapas, the heart of colonial domination, was a worthy challenge. Those few months in Taniperla convinced me that I needed to let go of these qualms and head for Amazonia. It so happened that, at that time, the situation in Amazonia was not a particularly happy one either. At a conference held in Barbados in 1971, a group of mostly Latin American anthropologists issued a solemn declaration that publicly denounced the massacre of Amerindian populations, the invasion of their territories, the violation of their rights, and their effective “lobotomization” by missionaries—all of which was little known at the time. The Amazonian peoples were high up on that somber list of dispossessed and abused indigenous populations, which served to permanently orient Americanist anthropology toward a more critical and politically engaged position. It was indeed at this moment that Robert Jaulin introduced the concept of “ethnocide” in France. As a result, Amazonia became a new front of political resistance, and to conduct one’s anthropological fieldwork there no longer necessarily implied giving in to nostalgia for a paradise lost. This was more or less how gradual adjustments led me to choose Amazonia for my fieldwork.

pc What was the transition period like between your status as a philosophy professor-to-be and your aspiration to become an anthropologist?

pd You would think that such a situation might induce a kind of schizophrenia, but I did not experience anything of the sort. Following the abortive ethnographic work in Mexico, I successfully passed the exam for the philosophy professorate and even taught philosophy for a year, at secondary school level. At the same time, I decided to ask Claude Lévi-Strauss if he would agree to supervise my work on an Amazonian society, and I managed to obtain a leave of absence from the Ministry of Education that allowed me to return to fieldwork. I proposed to Lévi-Strauss a study of the Achuar Jivaros, who live in the Ecuadorian Amazon and on whom I had begun to do a bit of research. Much to my surprise, he agreed to supervise my doctoral thesis, which led me away from the teaching of philosophy for good, since my entire career followed from that second and, this time, successful ethnographic venture.

pc The circumstances that determine the choice of site of one’s anthropological fieldwork are very complex, various factors coming into play. Could you describe how all this happened in your case?

pd It was a combination of chance and personal inclination. I very much admire anthropologists, and I know quite a few, who conduct their fieldwork under extremely difficult conditions—among utterly destitute populations, sometimes dealing with highly precarious situations, profoundly degraded environments, or intense violence—which make the pursuit of scholarly objectives and the attempt to make sense of these situations very complicated. Some anthropologists work in refugee camps, with homeless people or urban gangs, in regions where civil war is raging. Fieldwork under such conditions, in my view, amounts to a form of heroism. While I would not want to champion anything like an ethnographic hedonism, it seems to me that we must be able to identify with the people we observe in other ways than through compassion or a desire to lend assistance. To fully share the flavor of daily life, to enjoy the thousands of small discoveries offered by a new world, to appreciate the wisdom or humor of one’s interlocutor—all this is made easier if one is not constantly having to assess the chances of survival of one’s hosts. Even if fieldwork in Amazonia was not without its difficulties, to which I shall return later, it remained a very different experience from work with communities subjected to unbearably oppressive conditions, plunged into distress and despair.

The choice of site for one’s fieldwork is also influenced by the affinities one may or may not feel with the various ways of life already described in the ethnographic literature. As a result, at least for those of my generation, the choice of fieldwork site was often informed by a prior attraction for the region. To the contrary, I never had any spontaneous affinity with Asia, for instance, especially not the Asia of the great civilizations, which is a very complex world as a result of its multiple cultural layers, languages, religions, and exchanges among neighboring civilizations. All these great movements that crisscrossed that immense continent, and the resulting sediments, make Asia the exact opposite of Amazonia, where, given the lack of written records, one may entertain the fantasy of an archipelago of isolated peoples. This is of course an illusion, as we know, and in fact a process of interethnic mixing and exchange unfolded there over tens of millennia, crowned by the cataclysm of the conquest. As Lévi-Strauss put it, Amazonia confronts the observer with a “a kind of Middle Ages which lacked a Rome,”1