 Okay, welcome everyone to the second day of this year's Berkeley Tanner lecture events. I'm Jay Wallace, Vice-Chair of the Berkeley Tanner Lectures Committee, and I'm delighted to have you all back here for our second lecture with our distinguished speaker, Professor Philippe Daskola. I just want to, before I get any further, I just want to second something that Philippe said yesterday, which was to offer a word of thanks to Jane Fink for her remarkable organization of these events and for making everything happen so smoothly. We're really deeply in your debt, Jay. Great, and without further ado, Philippe was introduced yesterday. Let me invite him to the podium for a second lecture, which will be on forms of assemblage. Let me reiterate my thanks to the Tanner Committee and Professor Jay Wallace for inviting me to deliver the Tanner Lectures in Berkeley, and also my warmest thanks for the discussions who have come sometimes a very long way to be here and discuss my propositions with me. In my first lecture yesterday, I attempted to sketch the program of a political anthropology beyond the human, which would be faithful to the ways according to which the human components of extra-modern cosmopolites conceptualize their own form of assemblage by contrast with the Eurocentric and anthropocentric manner of doing so, which consists in projecting the ontological template of naturalism onto very diverse social-cosmic realities. As I said yesterday, I will limit myself to considering those cosmopolites that belong to an animist regime. First, because they are the ones I know best, and second, because they differ perhaps the most from the forms of collectives to which the sociology of the moderns have accustomed us. Wherever the ontological regime of animism dominates in this discontinuous archipelago that includes the lowlands of South America, the high latitudes of North America and East Asia, and a string of populations of Southeast Asia and Melanesia, the same types of collectives are to be found, but populated by very different beings. For each form of being constitutes a collective of its own, a social species characterized by a particular morphology, type of behavior, and dispositions, a kind of grouping that combines the attributes of a natural species and that of a tribe. In the case of humans, each ethnic group, each tribe, each dialectal group is thus seen as a species whose means of acting on the world and the ways of occupying it are the result of an equipment which is distinctively its own. The tools, the weapons, the language, the ornaments, the dwelling, the techniques of subsistence, the forms of authority, the rules of marriage and descent, all the features that we consider ordinarily in the West as typically cultural are seen in the animist regime as, so to speak, natural attributes intrinsic to the particular species of humans that they characterize and serve to identify in the same way that the shape of the beak, the color of the plumage, the type of nest, the diet, and the sound messages will make it possible to differentiate this or that species of bird. The animist world is thus composed of collectives of humans and collectives of non-humans, mostly animal species, plant species, and races of spirits, including the human dead, all of which are governed by institutions similar to those of the human collective which serves as an interpretive template for the non-human collectives with which it interacts. From this point of view, members of all collectives are deemed to see themselves as human regardless of their generic forms and it is only in the eyes of other collectives that each of them appears with its proper characteristics. In other words, the identity of a collective is only visible under the gaze of others. Its particularities of form and behavior are only apprehended as signs of its singularity by those who belong to other tribe species. A good example of this interlocking of points of view, of how this interlocking of points of view produces differentiated collectives is offered by a Matzigenga myth from the Peruvian Amazon. The myth relates a journey undertaken by some Matzigenga to discover the world, which leads them to visit peoples defined each time by their diet. Each new people seems in every way similar to the Matzigenga visitors. They speak the same language, they have the same type of dwelling, the same type of subsistence techniques and the forest environment they occupy does not differ in any way from that of the Matzigenga. The people they visit first give them fish for dinner and then the next day offer to go fishing with them, but they actually catch poisonous snakes which they call fish and eat as such. Showing their disgust, the Matzigenga visitors are invited by their hosts to go and look for snake meat in the river where they find a quantity of fish that they bring back to the village where they are staying. Each of the two groups seeing the others bring back snakes reproaches them for eating filthy food and each decides to eat separately at nightfall. The hosts consuming their snakes which they see as fish while the Matzigenga consumes their fish which the householders see as snakes. The visits to other villages follow one another. The next village is populated by people who eat coral snakes that they call paka. The paka is a small mammal with a very delicate flesh. The same kind of misunderstanding occurs again. The Matzigenga go to find a paka in its burrow and bring it back for dinner to the great disgust of their hosts who see only a large coral snake while the Matzigenga reproach their hosts for eating coral snakes that they take for paka. The next village is inhabited by people who trap and eat bats that they see as Tongara birds. The next one is populated by people who hunt with bows, fireballs that they see as macaws. From there the Matzigenga go to the home of vulture heaters who see these scavengers as penelopes. Penelope is a species of gallinaceous bird with very fine flesh also and they then decide to return home. So the differences in perspectives between human humans and non-humans that the Matzigenga story highlights are examples of that metaphysics of interspecies relations so common in the Amazon that Eduardo Viveros de Castro has called perspectivism. I recall the canonical definition that Viveros de Castro gave of it. I quote him, humans under normal conditions see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits if they see them as spirits. Animals that is to say animal predators and spirits see humans as animal prey. While animals in the guise of game see humans as spirits or as animal predators. Animals and spirits on the other hand see themselves as humans. They apprehend themselves as or become anthropomorphic when they are in their own villages or homes and live out their own usages and characteristics under the species of culture. Perspectivism is the expression of the idea that any being that occupies a point of reference and is thus placed in the position of a subject apprehends itself under the species of humanity. The bodily forms and usages of humans constituting pronominal attributes are the same type as ethnonomic self-designations. In practice however, perspectivism is neither generalized to the entire animist archipelago nor exclusive to it. One finds striking examples in the populations of Mongolia and Central Asia which seems to oscillate between an analogist and an animist regime depending on where they live. Perspectivism is expressed primarily in myths, in accounts of shamanic experiences and in judgments about the capacity of this or that class of beings so that it must be seen as a kind of epistemic theory of interspecies knowledge or codification of the positional character of certain ontologies, not as a practical code or practical vadimekum of interactions between human and non-human collectives. The register of animism is of the order of speculative philosophy and it is in this direction that Viveiros de Castro has developed perspectivism lately, not in that of everyday sociology on which it has no normative hold. It expresses a logical possibility in a two-position game. If humans see themselves in human form and see non-humans in non-human form, then non-humans who see themselves in human form should see humans in non-human form. But in practice, such an epistemology of mutual knowledge between species would render interactions between humans and non-humans extremely difficult since they are based on a permanent misunderstanding. Humans must either accept in their relations with animals and spirits that there is no coincidence of views which can have very unfortunate consequences for them or they must mentally correct the reversal of perspectives each time to realign them. This is why in most actual interactions between human and non-human collectives, as opposed to the theory of their mutual knowledge, animist populations usually behave as if the non-humans saw them in their human form, not as predatory animals or spirits. Conversely, what the ethnography of the animist archipelago Ampli demonstrates is that the dominant patterns of relationship between human collectives are also those that characterize their relationships between human and non-human collectives. I have highlighted in my book Beyond Nature and Culture that these dominant patterns of relation within and between animist collectives correspond to the three formulas ensuring the potentially reversible movement of any value between two terms having the same ontological status. The first of these formulas exchange is characterized as a symmetrical relation in which any consenting transfer from one entity to another requires a counterpart in return. The other two formulas are asymmetrical. Either an entity A takes a value from an entity B, it can be its life, its body, or its interiority without offering any counterpart and I call predation this negative asymmetry. Or on the contrary, an entity B offers a value to an entity A and it can be itself without expecting any compensation and I call gift this positive asymmetry. If we focus on the obligations that arise from the form of these different types of transfer rather than on the movement of the things transferred, then we obtain a body of normative prescriptions governing the relations between beings belonging to the various collectives, a veritable animist sociology. Let us recall briefly from Amazonian ethnographic examples the different forms that this animist sociology can take governing both human and non-human collectives. A most remarkable illustration of the scheme of predation is provided by the group of speakers of Ainz Chitjam, which is the new name under which people formerly known as Hevarro are now called. They live in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon. Headdunting between the tribes of this linguistic group and the vendetta within each of them constituted the main mechanism for structuring individual destinies and bonds of solidarity as well as the most visible expression of a central value, namely the obligation to acquire from others the individuals, substances and principles of identity deemed necessary for the perpetration of the self. It has been common in anthropology to interpret war and vendetta as an exchange of deaths regulated by so-called negative reciprocity. However, if we take seriously both what the speakers of Ainz Chitjam do and the commentary they propose on their actions and if we also admit that the necessary condition of exchange is obtaining a counterpart, then it is impossible to characterize war among and within this set of tribes as an exchange of deaths. Indeed, if headdunting and vendetta usually generate reprisals, they're obviously not sought as a counterpart to which one is entitled as a result of the death inflicted on others and people instead take all measures to escape their consequences. So the violent and reciprocal appropriation of others within the set of Ainz Chitjam speakers is thus the product of a negation of peaceful exchange, not the deliberately sought-after result of an exchange of human lives through a bellicose interaction. The relationship of the speakers of Ainz Chitjam with non-human collectives are also structured by the pattern of predation. Many plants and animals, however, I considered to share certain ontological attributes with humans with whom they are linked by relationship of consanguinity and affinity. In spite of this, non-humans are not integrated into a network of exchange with humans and no counterpart is given to them when their lives are taken in subsistence activities. As with humans in their relations with other humans, non-humans even tend to seek revenge for the predation to which they are subjected as illustrated by the case of Manioc. This plant, which constitutes the staple food, is reputed to suck the blood of the women who cultivate it and that of their young children through their lives. So the capture of real or virtual people among close or distant enemies, the appropriation of game without compensation and the daily guerrilla warfare with cannibal Manioc thus express in different domains an identical refusal of exchange in relations with others, human or non-human. I hasten to add that such an attitude is not peculiar to the speakers of Ainz Chitjam. Many other examples of generalized predation can be found in the animist archipelago in Amazonia and Southeast Asia also. Cases where exchange is a dominant pattern are also very common in the Amazon. For example among the Tucano and Karib speaking populations of the northwestern part of the region who form an integrated multi-ethnic group. The imperative obligation of exchange between human collectives is manifested first of all in a spectacular way by the linguistic exogamy that commands each local group to obtain its wives from groups that speak a language other than its own. Other factors contribute to the interweaving of the peoples of the Amazonian northwest in an inclusive regional organization notably the regional division of the production of artifacts which confer on each tribe a reputation of excellency and therefore exclusivity in the making of a type of object necessary to the daily life of all. This specialization which is an artificial specialization contributes to a generalized circulation of artifact that accentuates the feeling of consensual dependence of everyone on everyone. Finally the bonds of dependence are reinforced by the systematic practice of long-term visits and regular drinking parties. So in spite of the diversity of languages each longhouse, each design group, each Tucano linguistic group is thus conscious of owing its material and ideal durability to regulated exchanges with the other parts of the whole. In the relationship with the animal world it is also a logic of parity in compensation that governs interactions since any animal killed in the hunt must be compensated by a counterpart provided by humans to the master spirits of the game which may even sometime take the form take the form of the soul of a deceased human who will be transformed into an animal destined to be hunted. A final pattern of relations characteristic of the animist collectives is that of gift or sharing in which the transfer of a value does not call for counter transfer. In the Amazon this pattern of relationship is well illustrated by the Arawak speaking populations of the foothills of the central landers of Peru, a multi-ethnic group to which the Metsigenga belong whose perspectivist myths I mentioned a moment ago. Among this group generosity, solidarity and the predominance of the common good over the interests of the parties have been elevated to the rank of the supreme canon of behavior. The game animals and their masters are essentially a race of spirits called our people or our conspecifics who are deemed to be well disposed towards humans. Most hunted birds are themselves embodiments of spirits and their killing is a mere simulacrum. After the hunter has asked for its clothing the bird offers its fleshy envelope to the arrow out of compassion for the hungry hunter while preserving its immaterial interiority which is reincarnated into an identical body or regains its invisible human appearance. Therefore incurs no damage and this act of benevolence does not call for any compensation. This kindness is explained by the fact that the spirits, their animal transformations and the species they command are ontologically identical to humans. The Arawak people regard them as very close relatives and the gift of their remains is a simple token of the duty of generosity that must prevail between people of the same kin. The altruism and prodigality shown by the animal spirits in the donation of their remains is in fact an echo of in the relations between humans, human and non-human collectives of the internal relations of human collectives on the scale of the subandion Arawak linguistic set, relations characterized by an ethos in which trust, generosity and the horror of constraint are privileged. These peoples have indeed pushed very far the will to ward off dissension and otherness or alterity within themselves by reducing to a minimum these gaps between individuals which are indispensable for a relation of reciprocity or predation to be established. They are particularly known for the strong censorship they exercised against internal violence, the source of lasting resentment and a factor in the disintegration of the social bound. The ideal of giving and sharing as the dominant pattern of relations between collectives has been described in many other regions of the animist archipelago. For example, in the Algonquian tribes of northern North America, further north among the Inuit or again far away among the Chewang of Malaysia and the Buid of the Philippines. The terms are used to describe the characteristic relations of animist sociology, predation, exchange and gift are obviously anthropological abstractions that are not formulated as such by the human collectives that implement them. These three major regimes of relations simply synthesize each of the forms of obligations that are imposed or not on the human and non-human terms of the relation. The obligation to give back in exchange or on the contrary the right to take without giving back a right that is considered to you in the gift or that one claims for oneself in predation. But in the vocabulary of the local institutions of animism these forms of relationships are formulated in the words of relationship between humans. The obligations of exchange are expressed in the vocabulary of relationships between affines. The gift is expressed in the vocabulary of obligations between close relatives, for example the sharing of food, while the predatory relationship to game is expressed in the terminology proper to war or sexuality. However the widespread use throughout the animist archipelago of a vocabulary denoting relations between humans to also designate relations between collectives of human persons and collective of non-human person does not imply that the latter should be reduced to a metaphorical projection of the former. This is an important point. It is indeed the case that relations between humans are in general better specified than relations between non-humans. That the categories of humans are less numerous than the categories of non-humans and that the behavior to be followed between humans are better prescribed and codified than the others. Moreover, and this is particularly the case in the animist archipelago, the normativity of prescribed attitudes for example between types of parents is reinforced by their repetition. It is by conforming to relationships of familiarity or avoidance of respect of banter with this or that parent that the legitimacy and normality of their prospective character will emerge. But it is also because relations between humans allow for wider variations than observable interactions between non-humans, notably because their differences in instituted expressions become more apparent when one's own are compared with the critical eye to the forms they take in neighboring societies. It is enough to observe that the behavior of husbands toward their wives or the way parents treat their children is very different in the tribe next door than one visits from time to time and that therefore the relationship between humans that it qualifies appears as a discrete relationship that can take several expressions. Relationships between spouses or relationships between parents and children are not just categories isolated by anthropologists. They provide all those who experience them with the material for reflexive comments and evaluative judgments that give these relationships sufficient consistency to be used for purposes other than the qualification of the relationships they originally characterize. So relations between humans appear as abstract schemes that are easily memorized and easier to mobilize for a wider use than the relations between non-humans detectable in an ecosystem. This is why the various expressions in human institutions of what are qualified as predation, exchange or gift can function in animist ontologies as cognitive frameworks for conceiving and qualifying not only the relations of humans to all beings to whom they impute an interiority analogous to their own but also the relations between these beings themselves. It is therefore in no way a metaphorical usage. It's rather the use of a label borrowed from the field of relations between humans to designate a more encompassing relation. But animist cosmopolites are not only composed of beings organized in monospecific collectives and of the various relations woven between them. They also need a material support so that the elements that compose them, human and non-human, can deploy their existence. They must therefore organize themselves in order to share territories and the resources they contain. Now a fairly common characteristic of the territoriality of monospecific collectives is the difference in the form it takes depending on whether one is dealing with human or with non-human collectors. With the exception of special cases such as the Maku hunter-gatherers and Tucano horticulturist of the northwestern Amazonia whose used areas are intermingled, human and tribe species, human tribe species generally occupy territories that they do not share with other human tribe species. While non-human tribe species, most often use the same spaces as human tribe species and other non-human tribe species. In other words, the territories of humans, which in the animist world generally exploit the same resources on the regional scale and thus relate to the same type of non-humans are largely exclusive and organized in a concentric pattern with a decreasing gradient of control relative to habitat sites. Whereas the territories of non-humans, especially those of animals, are structured in a complementary manner on the model of the ecological niche where different tribe species cohabit either to exploit different resources in the same space or to exploit the same resources at different times or to share the resource under the regime of commensality when it is abundant. As a result, the relationship to the land of human tribe species may be quite distinct from that of non-human tribe species. I will examine one modality in Melanesia that is instantiated by the Cassua of the Mount Bozavi region in the heart of the islands of Papua New Guinea to whom Florence Brunois devoted remarkable monographs a few years ago. This is a very original work since the author treats in a completely symmetrical way as so many components of the same status cohabiting in the forest cosmos, the Cassua clan and the spirit races, the animals and the plants, the techniques and the narratives about them. The focus of her study is the dense network of links of interdependency between humans and non-humans in this biogeographic region with the highest biodiversity in New Guinea. A study that has the rare merit of not approaching humans and non-humans as if they were entities a priori confined to separate spheres but taking them as elements within a single sociocosmic space. Brunois thus uses the same descriptive and analytical grid to assess the properties and relational forms of the various occupants of the Cassua cosmos whether they are humans, spirits or animals. The richness of an ethnographic description makes synthesis difficult so I will limit myself to giving a brief overview of the human and non-human collectives as seen from their relationship to the territory. The ecological zone currently occupied by the Cassua, a population of just under 600 people, is a tropical rainforest extending over 2000 square kilometers. A habitat that offers a great diversity of biomes and that the Cassua do not share with any other human population. They display unquestionable animal characteristics thus animals are seen as processing an interiority of the same nature as humans, each species being distinguished from the others by its own physical and behavioral characteristics, dispositions and cultural traits if you wish. In addition and I will come back to this later, the spirits who perceive themselves as humans in the invisible world perceive the spirit doubles of humans as game animals which is a classic case of course of animist perspectivism very common in this region of New Guinea. The most characteristic aspect of the collectives making up the Cassua cosmos is the fact that they are not only highly territorialized but also and above all defined primarily by the habitat they occupy. Let us begin with the animal collectives. The Cassua distinguish eight major super-generic categories whose name can be substituted for that of the identified species. The one that interests us here, Abelay, includes 51 species of mammals and the two species of cassowaries. In fact Abelay is both a super-generic taxon and a functional category since the term primarily refers to game animals. Within this category animals are classified by their ecological niche, the mountain, the places where there are nests that is tree cavities burrows or nests and the base of trees. Similarly the birds Anima are distributed according to the level they frequent from the ground-dwelling species to the birds of the sky and because of the longitudinal layering of the Cassua cosmos it is not unexpected that the 400 or so animal species that occupy it are distributed in a mosaic of ecological niche each of which has each of which has a territory that is recognized as a distinctive living space. In the same way that there is no super-generic term for animals in Cassua which does not allow at least on the semantic level to isolate them within the forest cosmos as a macro category of beings independent of the territory they occupy though there is no super-generic term that would that would distinguish humans as an exclusive group. The closest term ole et tolu can be translated as those below or the lineages below and is it is logically opposed to those above wabeli et tolu namely the spirits both sets being defined specially rather than ontologically. Let us see how the human collective is defined. The Cassua are divided in 13 named exogamous patrilineal clans which are above all highly territorialized. Each clan is singularized by the fact that its members share the same blood consubstantiality that is the basis for the prescription of exogamous marriages but which must also in order to be truly visible be expressed in a special language. Consanguinity can only be thought of territorially. Since the last migrations stabilized several generations ago in the current clan territories which are generally clearly delimited by rivers these have hardly changed. They are varying size and located at different altitudes so that each of them constitutes a sort of singular ecological niche providing the clan that occupies it with a set of animal and plant resources that is specific to it. This association between a clan and its territory conceived as an ecological niche is sanctioned by a series of prohibition. This trans-specific territorialization also affects the territories of spirits, those above. The latter are usually invisible and are mainly distinguished from humans, those below, in that their place of residence is in the forest canopy. They are subdivided into three tribe species. The gulu han are doubles of the human dead, the sosu and the isanesi each composed of individuals of both sexes and of different generations who perceive themselves as humans. What differentiates each of these tribe species of spirits is not appearance but the social, elementary and especially territorial behavior of each of them. The sosu spirits are warriors and cannibals and they are confined to the upper slopes of the Mount Bozavi while the isanesi are composed of a hundred or so individuals each identified by a name and they are distributed throughout the territory and lead a social and ritual life quite similar to that of the kaswa. As for the gulu han spirits, the doubles of the dead, they form a singular tribe species since its members are not born as such but become so. These transformed humans live in a specific place near the Ululu waterfall in a large house. Now all these tribe species of spirits that remain invisible in normal times have the capacity to intervene in the visible world primarily by occasionally borrowing the envelope of any animal but which will be chosen from the ecological niche that each spirit community occupies. Thus the sosu spirits manifest themselves in the form of the characteristic animals of their habitat that is the high altitude ecosystem of Mount Bozavi while the isanesi spirits are divided into territorialized collectives corresponding to each of the clan territories of the kaswa and they therefore take the form of the characteristic animals of the biomes corresponding to each of these territories. Within each territory of isanesi spirits they occupy precisely located habitat sites most often trees, hills, caves and waterfalls and in these sites the isanesi manifest themselves through concrete signs for instance prints of the pigs that they have tamed that stop at the base of the sagu tree where they live or domestic noises such as a door being closed or firewood being cut with an axe. The kaswa take great care not to disrupt the spirits for example not to disturb the sites where the isanesi live or to speak among themselves the special language of the sosu when they go into their territory. Otherwise the spirits desert the area or become furious scaring away games and attacking humans. So the rules of cohabitation in the Bozavi forest cosmos are very strict the sharing of the same ecological niche forming a territory for human clan for groups of spirits and for animal and plant species requires the maintenance of equitable exchange relationships between all these communities. Thus in each kaswa clan territory there's a special overlap of the milios of many tribe species which must therefore find accommodations between each other. The coexistence in an animist regime of different type of territories according to the human and non-human collectives that occupy them raises complex questions notably for the establishment of legal guarantees protecting these territories within the frame of nation states. How to reconcile the interests of humans who in most cases claim human claim exclusive use of the milieu they occupy with other humans. How to reconcile these interests with the interest of various categories of non-humans. Among them on the one hand plants and animals that are deemed to behave like humans and that share their territories with the humans in the form of complementary ecological niche and the on the other hand other types of non-humans generally more or less vindictive spirits whose territories are a little completely or not at all coincident with those of humans who are nevertheless dependent in many ways on the actions of these generally invisible mediators with whom one must therefore not lose contact. Cosmopolitics becomes here a diplomatic exercise between tribe species. In an ordinary situation that is to say without external pressure on the territories of humans and non-humans alike the human tribe species generally manages in these embryo situations with the ordinary means of animist collectives from the direct or indirect control of human demography to the prudential rules in hunting and fishing and to ritual mediations with the spirits protecting the plants and the animals but the situation is no longer ordinary and animist collectives are now exposed in the front line of the great movement of territorial plundering that is devouring their milieu. Forced to protect their territories again extractive multinationals or agricultural colonization they must adapt the territorial layering and the modernities of cohabitation between humans and non-humans that I have just described to a logic of exclusive and specially delimited appropriation characteristic of the modern ontology. In the Amazon for example and in contrast to the two-dimensional cartographic scheme of territoriality the indigenous conception is based on an organized scheme in which the territory is a large living body that feeds reproducers and with links with other bodies. It is not indifferent in that in the sense that the collective house in some parts of amazonia is often described as a body that maintains relationships with other body houses. The territory is the home where this organism deploys its appetite by using other organisms that it consumes or with which it composes. It thus takes the form of a network of relationships with decreasing density rather than a polygon bounded by fixed borders. This implies that the territory cannot be reduced to a vast enclosure seen from the sky delimited according to the point of view of Sirius and cut into layers of information specifying the characteristics of the area of which it is composed but that it must be apprehended from within at the level of the psychological exchanges and according to the point of view of one of its components which interacts with the others without imposing its totalizing perspective on them. The problem with this conception is that it does not land itself easily to the identification and demarcation processes by which native reservations and protected areas are enshrined in the low of nation states. Where does the milieu necessary for the existence of these body territory end? What exactly does it contain? And at what point will the disappearance of some of its components make its survival impossible? These are crucial questions that all those who have had to intervene in the legal definition of native territories have had to confront. First and foremost of course the indigenous people themselves in which in the present state of the modern concept of appropriation can only lead to compromises. I will give a brief example in conclusion. In the Ecuadorian Amazon lives a Quechua from population known under the generic name of Sacharuna, people of the forest in Quechua. They enjoy village life and organize themselves into communities named after the main settlement site often grouped around a chapel that is occasionally visited by a Dominican priest. There are no significant cultural, social or linguistic differences between these Quechua from village communities scattered along the rivers of Ecuador's central lowlands, but each tends to conceive of itself as an autonomous collective with its own identity. One of these communities located on the middle course of the Bobonasa River is called Sarayaku after the large village that forms its main habitat. Sarayaku has gained some international notoriety due to its activism in defending its land rights and due also to the militant role of French NGO that supports it. A delegation of Sarayaku was present at the COP 21 taking place near Paris in 2015 and presented there a very interesting document entitled Kausak Sacha, the living forest, proposal of the original people in the face of climate change. The document calls for the recognition of the territory that this American collective shares with the host of non-humans and the creation of an entirely new protected area category that would be at the generic name of Kausak Sacha, living forest in Quechua. The definition given to this term is not very different from the one I propose for animism, I call them. Kausak Sacha means that the forest is entirely composed of living beings and the communicative relationships that these beings maintain. All these beings from the smallest plant to the protective spirits of the forest are persons, runa in Quechua who live in community and develop their existence in a manner analogous to that of humans. This is why, still the quotation, the objective is not only to preserve the territories of the first nations but also the material and spiritual relationship that these peoples weave with the other beings that inhabit the living forest. The important thing here as can be seen is the definition of territory as a form of singular relationship between humans and non-humans that unfold in a milieu not as a delimited space containing resources to be protected or exploited. However, at the same time that the leaders of Sarayaku have taken the decision to define the milieu which shelters their collective as an open space of relations between humans and non-humans, they have also taken the initiative of delimiting them this milieu in the form of a classic territory by planting trees with contrasting flowers at its edge which will thus form a visible boundary seen from the sky. The idea is certainly quite original and biophilic at first sight but we see that it end up producing a vestifalian mini territory that is a large quadrilateral of exclusive use and with intangible limits recognizable only when seen from above which of course is never the case for the inhabitants of this milieu and extracted from the milieu it forms and the relationships that constitute it in perfect contradiction with the definition of the kaosak satcha as a living forest. This amazonian example shows how for the purposes of legal recognition two conceptions of territory come into conflict a non-real conception in which territory is seen and practiced as a form of singular relationship between humans and non-humans unfolding in a milieu assimilated to a kind of mega organism and a vestifalian conception imposed by nation states in which territory is seen as a strictly bounded space of exclusive use containing resources to be exploited or protected solely for the benefit of humans. The examination of these few cases of animist cosmopolitis and without of course prejudging what examples of analogist and totemic cosmopolitis could teach us shows with clarity that there are as many cosmopolitis as there are types of cosmos and that the universal political regime based on the transposition of modern state institutions is a fiction that does violence to the way extra modern human collectives conceive themselves. What form do animist cosmopolitis take? Since almost all beings are persons each one free and independent within the collective in which its existence takes place it is not human individuals who constitute political subjects nor even the autonomous assemblages within which beings of each species associate with their conspecifics in order to exist sovereignly. No the real political subjects are the relations between the collectives relations of seduction exchange of services predation or taming variable according to the circumstances and to the communities but which all have the characteristic of treating the alter ego as a person of equal status the person who is killed or adopted eaten or fed helped to reproduce or treated like a child depending on whether it is a friend or an enemy a hunted animal or the young of the of the game that is taken in a cultivated plant or wild plant an evil spirit or a protective spirit it is in these very diverse relations from person to person between humans as well as with non-humans that what Jacques Rancière calls relations of world of worlds crystallize it is these relations that according to him form the texture of politics much more than the relations of power for as he writes I quote him a political subject is not a group that becomes aware of itself gives itself a voice imposes its weight in society it is an operator that joins and disjoins the regions the identities the functions the capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience in this sense any operator human or not is able to become a political agent if it manages to assemble beings that did not have intrinsic connections initially notably because they belong in appearance to different ontological regimes the amazonian hunter who addresses a mental incantation to the soul of the woolly monkey he pursues is a political agent because he connects by this means two communities of persons who live in different physical worlds as for the the woolly monkey he also becomes a political agent and for the same reason when he previously visited the same hunter in a dream to give him a rendezvous in the forest everywhere on our planet these relations of worlds appear before our naturalist eyes without us always knowing how to death to decipher them as political expressions for example and in a register fra removes from animism when an anti-envolcano threatened by a mining company is defended by native communities not as a resource to be protected but rather as a full member of the mixed collective of which humans form a park along with the mountains the the herds the lakes and the potato fields or when the Maori obtain recognition of the legal personality of the Wanganui river from the new zealand parliament not so much as a means to of preserving their ancestral used rights over it but because again it belongs to a larger collective of which humans are only one component instead of seeing in the claims of the natives of Sarayaku of the region of Cusco or of the banks of the gun Wanganui river manifestations of folkloric or childish superstitions a condescending position that is equally shared by the laissez-faire liberalism as by the Promethean left it is more judicious judicious to focus on what it offers us a formidable stimulation to think anew the kind of political action and way and ways of living together in a world where nature and society are no longer irremediably divorced thank you thank you very much Philippe for that extremely stimulating lecture let's take a seven and a half minute break and reconvene here at five twenty five for comments okay welcome back everyone somehow despite my attempts to impose Prussian order on these proceedings ten minutes have elapsed not seven and a half but yeah I need a gong anyway welcome back we have two commentators on today's lecture our first commentator is Timothy McCain who's professor of history at Montana State University professor McCain is a wide-ranging scholar who's penetrating and influential contributions have grappled with important issues in environmental history and the history of technology his first book mass destruction from 2009 is a study of giant open-pit copper mines in the american west which contributed centrally to the electrification of the united states while wreaking havoc on the natural environment the book was widely reviewed and won the 2010 award for book of the year from the american society for environmental history professor McCain's most recent book is the matter of history how things create the past published in 2017 by cambridge university press this work develops a new approach to understanding the relation between the biological and cultural lives of humans and the material conditions in which they operate the central idea is that material objects and processes shape and determine human life and culture as much as they are shaped by it professor McCain has has drawn on this new materialist humanism framework in subsequent reflections on topics such as the pandemic and the idea that we're now living in a new environmental era the anthropocene professor McCain suggests provocatively that the current moment might better be thought of as the carbocene quote an age of powerful carbon-based fuels that have helped to create ways of thinking and acting that humans now find exceedingly difficult to escape his interrogations of the relations between humans and the material objects and biological organisms with which they share the world make them a natural commentator on philip das colas lectures and we're eager to hear what he has to say about them so please join me in welcoming tim lacane all right well thank you jay very much for that nice introduction and i want to thank jane as well and my co-commiters at home and uh and david for their contributions i think we've had an interesting conversation and we'll continue to um so it is really a genuine honor to be here with you this evening um especially since as you've just heard i'm neither an anthropologist nor a philosopher but rather a historian and a particularly peculiar type of historian of that an environmental historian but then i suppose that just goes to confirm the wide influence and importance of professor des colas work certainly his book beyond nature and culture has a big has had a big impact on my thinking and it is the kind of book i frequently recommend to colleagues and students with the words you've got to read so i approached my comments tonight and for tomorrow from the perspective of a of a humanist and a historian with a long-standing interest in questions of nature and environment animals and materialities culture and politics professor des colas provocative papers inspired many thoughts but i ultimately managed to distill these down to two basic themes which i hope to build usefully um on some of his ideas more than perhaps offer a critique the second of these which i'll discuss tomorrow regards what i'm calling a collective humanism but for today i want to for today i want to explore a related though narrower idea the topic of animism ethology and evolution now here fuel indulge me for just a few minutes i thought a brief personal story might be helpful some years back when i was much younger i was walking through a sharp sloped densely wooded drainage in the bridger mountains of southwestern montana i'd been hunting grouse all afternoon but the birds had elected not to show themselves that day now it was early evening and i was heading back down the canyon in late september night falls fast in the woods and the shadows were already growing deep in the brushy undergrowth i grew up in montana my father began bringing me along on hunting trips when i was about 10 he never said much about hunting i mostly learned by watching the need to walk slowly soundlessly the need to watch to listen that evening as the darkness descended i carried a remington semi-automatic shotgun a gun my father had given me when i turned 16 in which his own father had given to him the remington was loaded with four shells each filled with small lead shot designed to take down a flying grouse without destroying the meat now a few seconds later this became a matter of some importance when i heard the sound of something a lot bigger than a grouse crashing through the undergrowth i looked up to the slope on my left and there was wet at least in that moment seemed to me to be a very large bear not more than 20 feet away without thinking i began to raise the barrel of the shotgun if the bear chose to attack i supposed that i might have a few seconds to fire once maybe twice provided the old gun didn't jam which it often did regardless i doubted that a small bird shot would do much more than annoy any bear that was really bent on punishing me for a long moment that bear and i stared at each other it was the first and the last time that i've ever looked into the eyes of a bear who was not safely caged in a zoo i thought of that moment during our discussions yesterday and earlier when i was reading professor descola's most admirable papers i wondered if that encounter that was both deeply visceral and emotional but also strangely intellectual and scientific might help us to imagine new ways of escaping modernist naturalism one that would begin to bridge to build bridges to animus collectives at least in part by shifting our attention from instrumentalist ecological questions to the more affective emergent and ontological questions of ethology and evolution not that i am in the least opposed to ecological thinking yet it wouldn't be the first i wouldn't be the first to point out that at least some environmentalists have been a bit too quick to see an animism a sort of proto ecological way of thinking or a confirmation of james lovelluck's well-known guia thesis that the earth is literally an organism indeed at the very least the animus cosmology does seem to harmonize with the environmentalist exhortation to respect the non-human world both for its own sake and because those non because these non-human actors and systems are vital to our survival what some identify with the somewhat instrumentalist term ecosystem services i don't doubt that these efforts are well-meaning however as professor discolas examples today demonstrate the animus world view is both far more profound and profoundly different than such facile ecologically rooted parallels might suggest while a concept like ecosystem services with its human subjects literally play state center as you can see here might well seem entirely nonsensical to them in my own in my own work in the northern rockies i found that similarly quasi-animistic ecological views of charismatic wildlife run into oddly similar problems for example i've not infrequently encountered environmentalists who compare their appreciation of the critical role of the gray wolf and the restoration of ecological balance in yellowstone national park with animus ideas yet i suspect that few of these admirers of the wolf understand or embrace the deeper animistic belief that these animals possess a possible interiority similar to our own much less consider wolves to be literal relatives akin to uncles or aunts likewise even as the tourist paparazzi jostled to glimpse grand titan's famous bear three nine nine who is often celebrated in very human terms as an excellent mother and wise teacher of her cubs i wonder how many would go beyond this affectionate anthropomorphism to embrace grizzly three nine nine or any other bear is ontologically equivalent to themselves now we might just dismiss this as an unfortunate but mostly harmless misunderstanding we're not that these shallow animistic ideas about so-called wild nature and the closely related and highly profitable business of wilderness tourism continue to reflect related and continue to reflect and reinforce the very naturalistic dichotomies that professor descola argues we must escape indeed the potential threat of big predators like grizzlies is often used to reinforce and commodify this persistent idea of wild nature red in tooth and claw yellowstone in this framing is worth paying a great deal of money to visit because it is one of the few remaining places on the planet where there is a small but not insignificant chance that a visitor might be attacked and even eaten by a top predator however i would submit to you this is not an engagement with another animal so much as a plein air version of a horror ride something you might find a dizzy land or universal studios ironically well now considered to be ecologically and ethically backwards earlier part policies once celebrated a more intimate human-bear interaction then may have offered more opportunities to transcend the naturalistic world view although it's worth bearing in mind that bears who cross some ill-defined boundary to become a threat to tourists were often killed despite such misunderstandings as professor descola points out modernists and animists have occasionally succeeded in developing some productive alliances as he was just saying when the Maori famously secured recognition of the legal personate personhood of the wanganui river from the government of new zealand in 2017 he tells us their goal was less to preserve their ancestors rights to use the river than it was to secure official recognition of the river's indispensable ontological role in generating the human non-human collective that is the Maori now i don't know how many non-Mauri New Zealanders who supported that legislation fully understood or embraced this crucial ontological dynamic regardless many likely welcome the designation simply because it also aligned with their own more modernist goals of preserving the river for ecological recreational cultural or other ecosystem services such uneasy alliances are surely not a bad thing if they can help us to say threatened organisms and ecosystems professor descola's excellent point about the impossibility of such borders from the perspective of the animus notwithstanding i would like to hope that most new zealanders were sincere in their support for the Maori and their animus views even if they did not fully understand or embrace these regardless it seems clear to me that professor descola is asking for more than a sympathetic tolerance for an accommodation of animism rather he is asking us to turn to animism here i quote as a formidable solution or sorry a formidable stimulation to think anew the kinds of political actions and ways of living in a world where nature and society are no longer irremediably divorced so with the minutes i have left i wanted to strike a surprising note of optimism and suggest that perhaps the divorce parties are already beginning to reconcile but in a surprising way indeed it seems to me that we are today witnessing a matter of new scientific thinking that offers a powerful challenge to modernist anthropocentrism and arrogance by revealing the extraordinary intelligence creativity and culture of non-human animals consider for example the long-standing modernist conceit that humans alone use language yet it's been decades since the western lowline lowland gorilla koko showed that she could indeed understand spoken english and communicate with sign language we also long assumed that a defining trait of homo sapiens was their ability to make and use tools yet in 2002 the new caledonian crow betty was famously caught on tape bending a wire into a hook to snare an otherwise unreachable treat even the lowly white lab rat now appears capable of empathy and altruism as it will delay its own opportunity for a tasty chocolate treat to first rescue a fellow rat from an unpleasant swim now to be sure none of this work is without its critics nonetheless in concert with countless other examples that i could tell you about surely these new insights raise an important realization if many traits once considered uniquely human now appear to be fairly common in other animals albeit in attenuated forms then these traits clearly must be evolutionarily advantageous further if this is true then perhaps it is not the science of ecology and ecosystem services that provide the most promising potential for dialogue with animus thinkers but rather the science of ethology and evolution put differently i wondered what professor disco law would think about the idea that maybe the ontology of evolution offers a useful bridge to the ontology of animism now quickly i must stress of course it's not my intent to suggest that these new scientific insights into non-human animals should in any sense supersede the intimate place-based knowledge of the extra modern people's professor disco law has told us about rather i would hope this potential bridge between animism and evolution and perhaps also between ethnology and ethology could offer a useful means of productive engagement between these diverse contemporary collectives and so to return to that bear and me as we stood there together in the fast fading light my gun half raised staring into each other's eyes across the chasm that seemingly separates humans and animals culture and nature i'd like to tell you that i saw some flicker of mutual understanding in that bear's dark eyes some shared ontological affinity but i did not but really how could i have seen such a thing unlike an animus hunter of the amazon jungles i only occasionally visited the forest i'd spend 99 percent of my life in a city living in a warm house where the darkness disappears with a flick of a switch but the thing is that didn't matter and the reason it didn't matter was because countless other people wildlife biologists ethologists and other scientists had dedicated much of their lives to doing just that studying learning from the bears like this one the creativity the collectivity of the bears and because of them i knew this was a black bear not a grizzly bear and the black bears rarely attack unless provoked because of them i knew black bear mothers typically give birth in the winter if this bear happened to have cubs they would be older and less threatened because of them i knew that black bears in early fall must gorge on food to prepare for a hibernation i noticed on the way up the canyon that this slope was covered with huckleberry bushes so i lowered my gun with an ambiguous grunt the bear turned around and raced back up the steep hillside with breathtaking speed i stood there for a long time and then it last headed home it was a moment that offered to once more quote professor deskalaw wise words a formidable stimulation to think anew thank you yes i'm delighted now to introduce our second commentator today who is uh david wengrow professor of comparative archaeology in the institute of archaeology at university college london uh professor wengrow is no doubt well known to virtually all of us as the co-author with david graver of a remarkably ambitious and provocative rethinking of human cultural and political history which carries the modest title the dawn of everything a new history of humanity this book was an instant sensation i remember i went down the first day of publication to pick up a copy at mose and it was already sold out had to put my name on the list for the second shipment that they were expecting and it seemed you know as soon as it appeared it seemed everyone had a copy and was thinking about its extremely interesting arguments the book challenges the russoian narrative of the arc of human development as a movement from the egalitarianism of hunter gatherer communities to the inequality and hierarchy associated with the emergence of agriculture and the concomitant rise of cities professor wengrow and david graver contend that this narrative overlooks evidence of much more egalitarian forms of urban life in areas ranging from meso america to ukraine and modova evidence that challenges the assumption that urbanized life is inevitably accompanied by inequality political hierarchy and the loss of freedom the book was an immediate bestseller and has been translated into at least 30 different languages if the dawn of everything is professor wengrow's most famous book at hardly it's hardly as only significant contribution he's conducted archaeological excavations in africa and the middle east and his research has resulted in numerous publications including three other books the archaeology of early egypt social transformations in northeast africa uh circa 10 000 to uh 26 50 bc uh what makes civilization the ancient near east in the future of the west and the origins of monsters imaging cognition in the first age of mechanical reproduction from 2013 he's held visiting professor positions at and fryborg uh cologne Auckland and at new york university and he's delivered numerous prestigious lectures at institutions around the world in 2021 he and david graver were ranked number 10 on art reviews power 100 ranking of the most influential uh contemporary contemporary contributors to the arts very impressive uh we're uh extremely pleased to have a professor wengrow in berkeley for these events and look forward with great interest to engaging with his reflections on philippe's tanner lectures uh jane oh okay yeah sorry thanks jane thank you so much uh for the invitation um and for your hospitality um i'm really grateful for this opportunity to continue a dialogue um with the work of professor descola i tried to calculate how far back that dialogue goes which i reckon now is getting on for at least 12 years or so to the time when philippe uh and an christine taylor mounted their exhibition at the musée du cabron ly uh oops i seem to have done that uh an exhibition called la fabrique des images the making of images that exhibition presented an installation of objects and images from diverse cultural traditions and periods of history which illustrate the four major modes of identification which also turn out to be ways of seeing as john berger might have had it that we heard about in these tanner lectures animism totemism analogism and naturalism as it happened i visited philippe and and christine on the final day of the exhibition and they took me around very generously and uh you may remember this we stopped to inspect the visitors book uh where an enthusiastic member of the public had written a message along the lines of a wonderful exhibition a thousand new ways to see the world to which philippe reacted with mild irritation no you you've completely missed the point there's only four no i mean it's funny of course but it also encapsulates the the kind of intuitive tendencies that he actually addressed at the very start of his first tanner lecture in particular the tendency to polarize our understanding of culture into competing extremes of hyper relativism or species wide universalism by trying to find a middle ground between these extremes comparative anthropology of the classical thought pursued in these lectures is perhaps a counter intuitive thing but it's one that i've always been attracted to speaking as an archaeologist who has collaborated with social anthropologists who share a common interest in preserving the comparative foundations of our two disciplines what i've learned from these collaborations i think is that the reunification of archaeology and anthropology after some generations now of mutual estrangement is both powerful and necessary to overcome certain prejudices in the nature of our evidence which are a direct result of 500 years of empire colonialism and genocide the problem is well illustrated i think by previous anthropological attempts to dislodge the kind of stubborn evolutionary social evolutionary not biological evolutionary social evolutionary assumptions which philippe referred to in his first lecture and i'll quote him directly whereby all human groups are destined to go through the same stages and perhaps one day with the help of colonization become societies similar to those found in europe with the same kind of separation between economic political and ideological apparatuses earlier attempts to disrupt that teleological caste of mind include classic studies from the 1960s and 70s by marshall salons and pierre claustre and although claustre is not mentioned explicitly in these tana lectures it's difficult for me not to detect the critique of his thinking which goes back in professor disco la's work i think at least to an essay published in the 1980s on the characterization of amerindian chiefs what all those critiques shared was an exclusive reliance on comparative ethnography combining sources in amazonia australia africa and elsewhere with a little recourse to the archaeological record which in fairness probably wasn't much up to the task back then as a result claustres society against the state and salons original affluent society blended back all too easily into the older structures of thought a universal age of freedom freedom from the state freedom from materialism freedom from onerous labor regimes followed inevitably by some sort of fall from grace the strength of an archaeological perspective which i assume is the reason for my presence here in berkeley this week is that today does someone need to take a call got it is that today archaeology really can complement the kind of analysis provided by professor disco la in some important ways none of which i should add involve the use of analogy strictly speaking in other words we're not or at least i i feel we should not be seeking analogies among ethnographic data to fill gaps in the historical record rather by extracting a clearly defined grid of relational schema from a dazzling wealth of ethnographic studies professor disco la offers an analytical framework for asking new questions of the deeper past as well so what can archaeology offer in return perhaps it is simply the possibility of freeing these categories of analysis from the tyranny of the present which really is a tyrannical present that consigns animus systems of knowledge for example to a marginal role on the world stage which is as philippe was saying also often a role of active resistance against global capitalism and against the predatory incursions of the nation state and of business however and if i understand you correctly professor disco la also argues that by characterizing such systems of thought primarily as so many cases of societies against the state in classrooms sense we fail to understand their truly political nature or rather we reduce it to a kind of negative reflection of our own dominant institutional forms and so smuggle the state back in as a telos of history just by the back door in effect as isael arado villan has put it the state wins twice first with the sword then with the pen these tana lectures have highlighted for us something of the enormous richness of indigenous intellectual and political life that is rendered illegible by such a move a deeper historical perspective i suggest allows us to further challenge that form of circular argumentation which keeps these alternate or alternative systems of thought safely contained in the realm of small-scale societies and at the same time isolates our own values and systems of knowledge from the challenge they pose in fact much of what archaeologists have been doing for the last few decades especially i feel in the americas is or maybe should be complementary to professor discolors project of unmasking and querying the many subtle ways in which the model of the westphalian nation state smuggles itself into places and periods of history where it really has no business residing it's been clear for some time that the americas before european conquest offer many cases of expansive civilizations the unity of which is most consistently expressed not in traces of administrative or military power the tools of westphalian sovereignty but rather in the use of images to activate links between local groups and superordinate networks these links may be predatory or complementary or more usually some complex mixture of both but until the rise of the aztec and inka they rarely coalesced into anything resembling the european notion of empire i am thinking of such notable examples as javin de juan tar ohio hopuel cahokia about which i'm going to say a bit more tomorrow and almec mexico to the initial astonishment of european discoverers and commentators it turned out that regional polities of this kind often covering geographies as large and as diverse as those of much later empires could in fact mobilize labor to produce monuments of precise dimensions and spatial orientation stone carvings ceremonial ball courts or figurative earthworks on a scale more typically associated with the literate polities of ancient egypt mesopotamia and china slotting cases like these into a framework of social evolution based on eurasian principles of state formation has proved difficult because such frameworks assume from the outset that power resides in ownership of landed estates and other clearly demarcated resources and in the capacity to administer and defend them still worse in national museums and at world heritage sites and in scholarly publications we are routinely presented with images of these ancient polities that are in complete conformity with westphalian notions of sovereignty just as they are completely at odds with indigenous conceptions of political space like this one for example chavin moche almec and so on appear as clearly demarcated territories with hard borders superimposed onto the maps of modern nation states i suspect we would do a lot better to think of these ancient polities along the lines suggested by professor discola which means finding ways to represent them in time and space that go beyond the two-dimensional logic of cartographic schemes or polygons framed by fixed borders and more closely approximate his description and i quote again of complex and dynamic networks of relationships taking concentric forms with decreasing density from particular centers or foci which are themselves always on the move and shifting in that way we might yet learn how to decipher them as expressions of political relations before behind and beyond the state but nevertheless governing relations among tens of thousands of human beings as well as assembling patchwork ecologies into regional systems of formidable scale much of this i think we can safely assume took place under the sign of a cosmo politics whose gestures towards and compacts with a host of other beings non-human and meta-human are still there just about for all to see criss-crossing the landscapes of modern states in the form of geoglyphs petroglyphs rock paintings and figural earthworks which these same states now claim as part of their national patrimony a case of broken contracts or you've been framed as with these effigy mounds of the upper mississippi at times violent and terrifying at times seductive or diplomatic such monumental gestures and compacts are often fully visible only from above a god's eye view much like those tree plantations of the sacha runa which now look upwards to a godless sky but to conclude i must also confess some doubts which i expect us to be chewing on well into tomorrow's discussions and these are really questions to myself as much as to philippe and there are basically two of them with particular reference to amazonia i wonder have we been too quick to celebrate the archaeological discovery of ancient urban civilizations or maybe galactic polities in stanley tambia's sense below the canopy of the rainforest without really acknowledging the challenge that this poses to our very definition of all those words ancient urban civilization polity and following on from this are we perhaps in danger even of slipping back into assumptions of a social evolutionary kind the brazilian anthropologist louise costa reminded me recently of claude levi stross's comment which comes in the overture to mythology that historians should think of the ancient americas as something akin to a middle ages which lacked a roam now i think you can understand this in various ways for me it raises the question if chavin de juanta and its successor polities were not some kind of roam of the andes then what were they and what kinds of power did they express what did resistance to such forms of power look like how did it flourish in those enormous free spaces the kind of mega zomias beyond the centers of power and how did such processes unfolding over a period of two and a half millennia shape the cosmopolitics of sub andian populations that would eventually confront and be confronted by european invaders europeans of course who were not yet moderns in the sense that philippe i think means the term and i'll say a bit more about that tomorrow as well pierre claustre may have been completely wrong in reifying the state as a trans-historical principle of political organization but given the deep and turbulent history of center periphery dynamics now revealed by the archaeology of the americas was he perhaps asking the right sorts of questions after all questions about systems of domination and resistance centralization and peripheralization and more to the point as the anthropologist order simpson argues in her remarkable book mohawk interruptus could modes of identification and modes of political resistance be ultimately two sides of the same coin thank you very much okay the concluding part of today's session will be um some brief responses about 15 minutes by philippe to the two sets of comments i just want to say in advance we're not going to have time for discussion today but this is just a compelling reason for all of you to come back tomorrow where a seminar style uh discussion amongst our uh our four um invitees will open up into a general discussion with the audience so come back tomorrow with your questions please philippe well let me thank first the uh the two discussions for the the wealth of um uh analysis that deployed in in in uh responding to my um propositions um the the the anecdote that thievery evoked of the encounter with the beer is a very interesting one in the sense that it shows uh as that um the encounters with the deeply different forms of life uh can be um successful only if one is at the same time knowledgeable about this deeply different form of life and what kind of behavior it will develop in that case in the meeting of a human and at the same time uh being convinced of the uh radical austerity of the uh the the the non-human that one encounters and this is this you mentioned by reference to uh anthropocentrism which i think is is quite classical uh of naturalism anthropocentrism is an attempt which is quite clear for instance in the narrative register of of uh uh folk stories for instance uh which means that uh wide animals have to uh evidence some qualities that make them recognizable as a sort of humans which is entirely different from animism in that respect um and uh i uh i was struck by that by discussing with an art historian who specializes in representations of animals in the 19th century and she pointed out very clearly that painters there's one in France who was quite famous a woman called Rosa Bonheur uh was painted both uh domestic animals and also uh wild animals and the reaction that's these paintings usually elicit is uh or they they have a gaze like a human and precisely it's trying to make these animals look like humans in their gaze is something which an animist would never do uh animism is treating a radically different form of life as an alter ego but not as a projection of oneself and this is the the the great difference and so this brings me to uh the uh the remarks you made about the the fact that the divide between humans and non-humans have been progressively uh uh uh uh uh dissolved by uh ethology in particular uh by the the study of systems of science among animals by the fact that humans are not homophobic anymore since many animal species are able to produce and transmit techniques that vary according also to local uh variations which are not ecological this has been shown quite well uh and so um what does that means it means that um in terms of uh the way we uh we treat uh non-human uh animals uh there is there has been a tendency in moral philosophy in particular uh to uh consider them as uh uh having some rights that are uh that should be uh uh approximate to those of humans uh i'm thinking about the greed a project for instance uh because they show uh cognitive and technical capacities or a possibility uh to experiment sensible uh sensible experience that are closer to that of to those of humans um and so uh the idea would be that to open up the club uh of humans and grant two uh forms of life that share with humans some uh characteristics uh uh to grant them the status which is different from the one uh that is uh uh most common now I think uh it's uh it's it doesn't allow us to uh jump out of naturalism in the sense that it's only an expansion of uh the uh individualist uh philosophy uh whereby uh uh uh specific uh rights are granted to uh the human species uh because it has a specific nature and this specific nature can be discerned in a blurred way among species of animals and so the that the the the club of political subjects could be expanded I think it's this which has received a great deal of attention and interest and uh militant actions also is less interesting than the other option that you mentioned of the Wanganui River and other types of media elsewhere in the world which have received uh a legal personality uh in the sense that uh it it it's it's an intellectual revolution that is much broader and with far more uh radical consequences than the fact of granting personal rights to certain species of animals um why is that so because uh the fact that the media is an owner of itself and that uh it has legal rights in that respect which is based on the possessive individualism of moral philosophy uh implies that the the direction of appropriation which has which has been uh one sided for a long time from individual or collective humans towards land or resources reverts to uh uh the fact which is for anthropologists is very common I mean in in anthropological literature there are scores of uh quotations where people say we do not own the land the land owns us and the the idea that a milieu is the owner of the forms of life that are deployed in this milieu would imply a complete reversal of the attitude of humans towards a word of certain humans not all humans of certain humans especially uh since the uh since the development of the enclosures uh towards uh towards the land and I think this uh this movement which is taking uh uh a certain amplitude uh in many parts of the world uh is an interesting sign that naturalism if not is not if not crumbling is at least not as as strong as as it was uh before uh as a matter of fact as I was saying I've been invited in June to participate to a session uh where people are trying to give legal personality to the Loire River in in in France which is the uh at the same time the largest uh uh river if I remember correctly and the the wildest also uh uh in the country and there are several cases in in Europe one was not long ago the Marménor in Andalucía in southern Spain which is a Laguna that was given legal personality there are cases in Canada cases in Colombia they are not until now complete in the sense that um the the there's there's no conflict of appropriation in the sense that uh uh the it's not stated that the Wanganui River or the Atrato River in Colombia owns itself which which would mean that it could sue humans uh who would appropriate it uh wrongly or in in a destructive manner but I think it may come because the the legal the the legal base is there for that and so it all depends on the jurisprudence so uh uh and I think that even politically it's interesting because it's uh it's not a right that is being being granted but a right that one has to fight for as all the cases that we know where legal rights were given to a media uh uh they proceeded from uh struggle uh led by local people who wanted this media precisely to become a political subject in a way so thank you for mentioning this dimension um I'll turn to uh David's comments uh you may remember that among the the remarks in the in the golden book the there was one which I really enjoyed a lot uh and it was obviously a little girl who wrote it and they said it said when I'm uh older I want to be anonymous and when I saw that I said well the the the exhibition is uh made its point no uh um it's uh the the just before coming here uh was uh co-writing an article that we are submitting to science uh on uh uh with uh uh uh colleagues archaeologists on the series of uh uh mounds or earth earthworks in uh in uh in uh in the amazon uh in the Ecuadorian part of the amazon which is a huge uh uh setting uh which has been the this well the way we it it an archaeologist colleague of mine uh worked on that uh some 10 years ago but thanks to Lida now uh we have an idea of the density of the mounds there and so we did we were discussing whether uh it was appropriate to call it urban precisely uh of course the idea of calling of calling it urban is is uh is a way to um to push uh and you mentioned that quite clearly uh uh uh against the primitivism of amazonian uh of the vision of amazonian indians who were unable to uh uh extract themselves from uh hunting and gathering and uh and uh uh uh unable to uh construct uh build uh large uh uh settlements but uh in fact it's a reaction and it's an understand understandable as a reaction but it doesn't give us any idea of what it was uh nor do we have any idea of what uh these uh politics like the chavin de huancar uh where and so it's uh it's true the question you pose at the end uh that uh claus was i i i share the i i i absolutely share your conclusion the i think class was wrong but at the same time that he pointed to an important problem without being completely aware of it he was wrong because uh you cannot uh i mean he was complete he had a transcendental conception of the society you know society against the state so you have two entities and society uh as i try to show in these lectures do not exist in the sense in the dark amian sense uh in the amazon uh it's not something which is transcendental which is uh uh and hypostasis that is more than the sum of its of its components that would act as a sort of transcendental subject in order to uh eliminate the risk of uh uh domination by uh a single person so in that respect he was extremely the the camion and and it's it's uh but at the same time uh his endeavor was to try to conceive politics in a different way than the one we are used to and uh so he he had to use the state but at the same time he posed uh uh a right question what what is it that drives people if it is not a sort of common rejection of the state that would be uh which is a bizarre system that society has an institution to get something which does not exist but is a is a threat but at the same time he he tried to um uh uh understand what politics were in a non-state society and in in that respect i think that very few people have done that uh since also in many respects you know um and so i think he posed the the right questions or he gave he gave he gave a wrong answer to a right question which he did not formulate in a way but which you did formulate yourself uh and it is uh uh how do we consider uh sociologically uh these formations which appear to be uh uh uh state-like uh and which have an entertained relationship with uh uh with uh uh obviously non-state societies uh uh for our collectives for many years uh and christen tello and i have surmised that the the what we are formally known as the hiva or the ant's teaching uh where uh uh in fact expanding this is a uh uh technical question but i think it's important uh from the coast to the the southern sierra fecudo and the forest so in fact it was it was a huge linguistic group uh and uh it was obviously not state-like formation but uh it used many different ecosystems and was based on what you mentioned that is local groups that tend to be articulated by your superordinates something what was this something we have no idea and it's very difficult to imagine it now um so i think yes uh archaeology and uh anthropology are again in cahoot and trying uh uh to uh uh in this uh comparative endeavor that we share because i think that's comparative endeavors are very important and it is uh uh i i i bring us a staunch uh advocate for comparatism uh it's the only way to escape uh what i call from time to time ethnographism that is the the it's it's not naval gazing but it's the naval gazing of your own subjectivity uh in a specific fieldwork uh and uh of course it leads to nothing uh it leads only to uh satisfaction of being someone uh with a uh a keen observer and is um uh in a uh warm uh in a warm relationship with the people who have given him or her uh access to the world uh but comparatism goes much beyond that of course and comparatism is necessary to try to understand uh the complexity of the world precisely uh not to infer from how the way we see things uh uh the the the the ways that other people uh see things so comparison is the best antidote to ethnocentrism in that respect thank you okay thank you everyone um thanks for coming today and come back tomorrow uh look forward to seeing you then