 Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to join you and welcome all of you to the Berkeley campus for what's always a wonderful and meaningful event, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. We're honored and humbled to be one of only nine universities from around the world that were selected to host the Distinguished Lecture Series every year. If we're to be judged by the company we keep, we could do far worse than to be joined by Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and Utah. This lectured series was founded in 1978 by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist, Obert Clark Tanner, who was also a member of the faculty of philosophy at the University of Utah and an honorary fellow of the British Academy. It's somehow both sobering and comforting to realize that today, nearly a half century later, the impetus behind the establishment of this lecture series could not be more germane or more important. Tanner's goal in establishing the lectures through the Tanner Philanthropies was to promote the search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values, an objective that could be not more simple to describe or more challenging and complex to achieve. Tanner hoped and believed that the lectures would advance scholarly and scientific learning in the area of human values and thus contribute to the development and enlightenment of our intellectual and moral lives. A cursory review of contemporary headlines and happenings confirms that Tanner's concerns and aspirations are as relevant today as they've been in the past. As a campus community, we share with Obert Clark Tanner a profound interest in and dedication to using education, knowledge, and understandings to support and understand the greater good. We also share his capacious perspective that human values should be defined as broadly as possible, making room for a broad diversity of perspectives and an equally broad participation in this exploration of ourselves, society, and culture. As a result, the Tanner lectures may be chosen from any discipline and the lectureships can and do transcend national, religious, and ideological divides and distinctions. The Tanner lecturers are chosen based not on their particular perspectives, but in recognition of their uncommon achievements and outstanding abilities in the field of human values. The very ethos underlying the process of selection thus conforms beautifully with the underlying values that launched this lecture series. The lectures from all nine universities are published in an annual volume. In addition, Oxford University Press publishes a series of books based on the Berkeley Tanner lectures. The 13th and 14th volumes of this series were published in 2021 and two additional titles are in preparation. Here at Berkeley, the Tanner lecturer is appointed to a faculty committee of which I'm honored to chair, although I've never been to a meeting. I congratulate my colleagues, Professors Jay Wallace, Hannah Ginsberg, Christopher Kudz, Kinch Hoster, Nico Kolodny, Kevis Goodman, Stefan Ludwig-Kaufmann, and Rebecca MacLennan for their brilliant choice of this year's lecturer, Philippe Discola. Now let me call on my distinguished colleague, Professor Rebecca MacLennan, to introduce Philippe Discola and today's commentator. Professor MacLennan will also moderate the discussion that follows. Thank you very much, Chancellor Christ, and also for your ongoing support for an enthusiasm for the Tanner series. And thank you, audience members, for attending this afternoon's lecture on a beautiful day coming inside. Today I have the honor of introducing our distinguished speaker, Professor Philippe Discola. Professor Discola will be delivering the first of two lectures in a series entitled Cosmopolites Before, Behind, and Beyond the State. In the second half of today's session, as Chancellor Christ mentioned, after a brief break, I'll introduce our first learned commentator for this three-day series, Professor Adam Gattachu. One of France's most preeminent intellectuals, Professor Discola is the Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Collège de France and the Director of Studies at the École des autres études en sciences social. He has had a long and unusually broad career. An anthropologist who originally trained as a philosopher, Professor Discola has made groundbreaking contributions not only to the discipline of anthropology, but also to those of ecology, indigenous studies, cognitive science, the history of science, and environmental history. Now I can't do justice here to Professor Discola's oeuvre, which includes some 20 books, literally hundreds of lectures, papers and articles and many discussion panels. But I can say that since the 1970s, he has worked on the relationship between human societies and their natural environments with both particular reference to Western Amazonia and a general concern for human societies as a whole. In his classic work, The Spears of Twilight, Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, published in English in 1996 and a few years earlier in French, he empathetically documents the Atua people's sophisticated understanding of local ecosystems, their sustainable hunting and fishing practices and the ontology through which they see, experience and engage with their world. This concern with ontology or as he sometimes characterizes it, the anthropology of nature has animated much of Professor Discola's subsequent work. In Beyond Nature and Culture, published in 2005, he proposes that societies adhere to one of four main ontological frameworks, animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism, each of which represents a different socially embedded way of understanding the relationships between humans and non-human or other than human, animals, plants and diverse entities. Naturalism is the term he uses to describe and critique the peculiar modern Western ontology through which most modern see and order the world, specifically through dichotomies of nature, culture and human animal that seem well natural and self-evident but are in fact deeply contingent. Detailing the anthropocentric limitations and the potentially planet-endangering properties of this naturalist ontology, Professor Discola proposes an alternative worldview in which beings and objects, humans and other than humans are understood non-dichotomously and through the complex relations and relationships in which they are entangled. This rich body of work has earned Professor Discola numerous prizes and honours, too many to list in detail here. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of his achievements, I'll note that he is the recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, France's highest scientific honour. He is a commander in the French Legion of Honor and an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Finally, Professor Discola is also the recipient of a much newer, younger prize. This is the International Cosmos Prize for 2013, which recognises scholarship that furthers our understanding of the interdependent relationships among all living organisms and the Earth. I would say that from the perspective of our troubled and troubling planet, Professor Discola's 10 lectures could hardly be more opposite or better timed. Thank you, Professor Discola, for agreeing to speak and engage with us. We are honoured and excited. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Philippe Discola. Is that right? Okay. For inviting me to give the tender lecture this year, it's always a great pleasure to be back in Berkeley. The social sciences conquered their autonomy in the 19th century by means of an ontological yalta. Philosophers then realised that it was possible and even necessary to account for the diversity of human practices and institutions and thus for the contingency of the users of the world insofar as the laws describing the physical functioning of the same world guaranteed its homogeneity. Pre-combinising and ordering the shimmering diversity of the ways of being, speaking and producing under the ages of new sciences could not therefore jeopardise the universality of the properties of the world as they had been determined by the natural sciences. Long dissociated from human conventions, the physical universe became the background against which the particularities of civilisations could be more clearly seen. Cultural relativism, that principle of method which holds that the value of one culture cannot serve as a template for another, thus became legitimate and fruitful since it was understood that while each culture had its own view of nature, nature was everywhere made up of the same realities demonstrating a reassuring regularities knowable by proven methods and reducible to imminent laws. Each culture except our own, of course, the one that was begotten by modernity even before we thought of calling it a culture since it had invented science and its condition of possibility, namely natural universalism. Although many still struggle to admit it, this arrangement has outlived its usefulness. It has been gradually realised that the great divine is itself relative, that the division of the world it created as nothing universal or even properly scientific since it results in setting up a historically contingent cosmology, modern naturalism, as a model for all authors. More and more critical voices are expressing their concern that the world that the Europeans have composed has been illegitimately taken for granted as a universal given of experience, its components seeming predetermined by the texture and structure of things. Of course, the social sciences did not consider the non-modern cultures of the past and present as complete analogues of modern culture that would have been very unlikely. They saw them and still see them to a large extent through the prism of only a part of our own cosmology as so many singular expressions of culture as it contrasts with a single universal nature. Very diverse cultures, therefore, but all of them fitting the canon of what we mean by this double abstraction. And because it is rooted in our habits, this ethnocentrism is very difficult to eradicate, even for anthropologists. In their eyes, and until recently, as Roy Wagner has aptly put it, the peripheral cultures of the modern West, I like to quote him, do not contrast with our culture or offer counter examples to it as a total system of conceptualization, but rather invite comparisons as other ways of dealing with our own reality. For it is obviously an anthropology that I first felt the damaging consequences of employing a dualistic constitution to describe worlds that are not dualistic. To serve the peoples of Amazonia or New Guinea that their societies are close to nature, as we still read too often, literally makes no sense, since nature does not exist for them as a separate reality, and they do not conceive of the assemblage of humans and non-humans within which they live as a society in the sense that European political philosophy and later sociology and everyday language have gradually given to this notion. It is for this reason that we must constantly deepen the work of criticism and relativization of the concepts used in the social sciences. The key concepts of those disciplines, such as culture, nature, society, history, economy, politics, religion, art, have made it possible to shed light on the collective conditions of Europeans and to put words to some of the realities that were taking on a perceptible autonomy between the beginning of the 18th and the end of the 19th century, a crucial period during which were fought many of the concepts that enabled Europe to define itself reflexively as a collective rooted in a historical process. These concepts are, therefore, anything but trans-historical. They are the product of a very singular social and cultural history that of this peninsula at the extreme west of the Asian continent that we call the West. Intrinsically linked to the sociopolitical destiny of modern Europe, these concepts have nevertheless been reused by the social sciences to describe and explain non-European societies as if their descriptive validity were universal. However, this tranquil conviction that our societies could serve as a template for any form of association was, in fact, linked to the evolutionist ideology dominant in this period, which saw all human groups as destined to go through the same stages and perhaps one day with the help of colonization, of course, become societies similar to those found in Europe with the same kind of institutions, the same kind of separation between economic, political and ideological apparatuses. Meanwhile, they were mainly or merely blurred outlines in which nascent technology could nevertheless discern the still diffused form of their future fulfillment. We face here a constitutive paradox of modern anthropology. The Eurocentrism of the concepts it employs signals an amputation of the principle of relativism that has been implemented by ethnology since the beginning of the 20th century. Relativism understood as a method and not as a moral rule, of course, that the first field ethnographers developed consistently simply in not taking the values and institutions of the observer as a model to calibrate the values and institutions of the observed. And ethnology has quite effectively followed this principle. For example, when describing and analyzing kinship systems and forms of family organizations, types of exchange of goods and services, theories of personhood, or ways of categorizing plants and animals. In all these cases, institutions or concepts such as the European monogamous heterosexual family, the capitalist market, the Cartesian conception of the relationship between the body as res extensa and the mind as res cogitans of the linear classification of natural objects were not taken as anthropological universals. However, this principle of methodological relativism, what it has been efficiently employed in the comparative study of fields such as kinship, the circulation of wealth, ontogeny, or biological knowledge has not been followed to the end. That is to say, to the point of calling into question the general framework within which our own values and institutions have taken shape. And this general framework is the ontology we are familiar with and that I have called naturalism. An ontology whose furniture is composed of beings that hardly surprise us. Society, nature, progress, cultural habits, a clear separation between the social and the economic between things and persons, between scientific knowledge and religious belief, thus making us oblivious to the fact that these kinds of being do not exist in other ontologies. When observing that this naturalist ontology is historically contingent, I do not advocate hyper-relativism on the contrary. My ambition is to develop analytical tools which would be as far as possible liberated from the historical particularisms that the concepts of the social sciences are currently loaded with. Terrestrial attraction, the chemical formula of water or photosynthesis, qualify objects and phenomena with principles of composition and functioning are identical everywhere on our planet. It is entirely different with notions such as society, culture or nature which cut up the fabric of the world according to organizing schemes that are specific to a certain part of the earth and to a certain epoch in short, which are perfectly relative while unduly claiming to be universal. To this day, most anthropological studies of the social-political organization of peoples will remain on the periphery of modernity continue to treat their institutions as if they were exclusively responsible for governing relations between humans on the model of Western civil society. Yet, the considerable difference between non-modern cosmopolitics and modern political operators is that the former are able to integrate non-humans into collectives or to see non-humans as political subjects acting in their own collectives. In other words, the kinds of common beings that result are not the ones we are used to. They are associations of humans and non-humans that can take very different forms and in this sense can also offer us food for thought about the transformation, the needed transformation of our own political institutions. For example, if one examines the components of what anthropologists call a decent group, that is a clan, a lineage, or any other similar unit, not as anthropology usually defines it, that is, as a set of humans descended from a common ancestor, but as the people where such units exist actually conceive them, then one realizes that they contain much more than humans. I will briefly mention a few cases. Among the Wodabe Fulani of the Sahel, the term doodal is normally used by anthropologists to designate a fraction of a lineage, that is, the largest segmentary unit functioning as a corporate group. However, as anthropologist Angelo Bonfilioli has shown, doodal refers to both a lineage of humans and a lineage of Zebu, that the former have selected over generations. A group of humans, the doodal lineage and a group of domesticated animals, the doodal herd, thus form a continuous and interlocking totality that a unique term designates. The same thing can be said of a notion used by the Tuva herders of Siberia, Al-Kodan. Its meaning is even more encompassing that doodal, for Al-Kodan refers at the same time to an encampment, to its human inhabitants, to its dogs and cattle, to its yurts, to its enclosures, and to its neighboring pastures, with the result that humans, non-humans, and land are incorporated, all incorporated in this notion. The solidarity of all members of this ontologically mixed collective ontology, ontologically mixed for ourselves, not for them, is rendered evident in times of crisis. When cattle are plagued by disease, for instance, humans have nightmares, a sure indication that the Al-Kodan is being attacked by malevolent spirits. As a consequence, it is the whole Al-Kodan that must be treated by a shaman. The case of what in the enders is called an ailu is even more striking. The Kichwa term ailu is traditionally defined as a kinship group, a lineage, or an indigenous community with a territorial base that engages in common actions, especially in ritual matters. However, when we look in detail at the ethnography of Indian communities, it is clear that an ailu is much more than the human group. It also includes plants, animals, local spirits, and much more. Let's land an ear to what Kusto Osha, an American from the Kusko region, says about this as reported by the Peruvian anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena. I quote him, ailu is like a weaving and all the beings in the world, people, animals, mountain plants, et cetera, are like the threads. We are a part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone. Just as a thread by itself is not a weaving and weavings are not with threads, a runa, that is a person in Quechua, a runa is always in ailu with other beings. That is ailu. In other words, the clan, the lineage, the totemic group of the ailu always include much more than men, women, and children alive and dead. There are also animals, plants, territories, deities, spirits, shrines, pathogens, images, scales, and a thousand other things necessary for life. And these components are present from the beginning. They are constitutive of the mixed unit that these segments form and are not added afterwards as a suggestive set for the theater of human actions or as mere providers of metaphors to better express the sociality of these actions as the social sciences have tended to treat them. The idea that anthropologist's unit of analysis is provided by humans alone thus constitutes a blockage that has obscured the analysis of the properly political dimensions of collective life elsewhere than in modern societies. There were reasons for this, no doubt, and even good reasons. The anthropocentrism of modernity as its philosophical roots in the struggle against the organic order of the ancien régime, a struggle fueled by the development of individualism, the purported basis of all legitimacy, and which resulted in the promotion of institutions and regimes of existence that made a clean break with the pre-revolutionary assemblages. As a result, the invention of modern collectives involved a radical purification. No humans were removed from the body politics to leave only humans proper subjects of law. The representation that the moderns gave themselves of their form of political aggregation was then transposed to the analysis of extra modern societies, along with a host of specificities, such as the division between nature and culture, between belief and knowledge, between fact and value, or more simply the idea that a clan, a lineage, or an ilu, contains only humans. It is this Eurocentric and anthropocentric conception of politics that I wish to break with. So what is to be done? Or can we move from a uniform world ordered by a major divide between one nature and many cultures to diversified worlds in which humans and non-humans make up a multitude of assemblages? As we'll be seeing later, these assemblages can nevertheless be reduced to a few types which can be shown to form transformations of one another. The first step is to go beyond the critique of this or that notion of the sociological repertoire and to go back to a deeper level of elaboration of the common world. In this case, at the level of the detection of regularities in the world, which, when systematized, have the effect of producing forms of collectives, conceptions of the subject, theories of action, which are specific to large social universes. By proceeding in this way, we no longer consider societies as already constituted realities as is customary in the social sciences. Rather, we seek to understand how singular collectives are established, some of which now think of themselves as societies because they have succeeded in depriving non-humans of any political agency. One step towards this reformulation is to attempt to describe the assemblages of humans and non-humans with the appropriate terms. Albert Camus famously wrote, I quote him, to misname an object is to add to the misfortune of this world. This is all the truer when the misnamed object is used to refer to large segments of the world such as the concept of society, that I propose to abandon in favor of the concept of collective, one that I've used repeatedly since the beginning of this lecture. Contrary to other categories, designating organized states of beings, the concept of collective has the huge merit of not prejudging the content of what is associated nor its mode of assembly. Using the notion of collective thus eliminates any ontological dissociation between associations of humans and groupings of non-humans. It is not that all forms of associations are identical, quite the contrary, but their typology no longer rests on the principle distinction between humans and non-humans that founded the regime of modernity. So how do we define a collective? I borrowed the notion initially from Brinolatur but my use of it is different from his. For Brinolatur the collective is the product of a literal action of collecting by means of which various types of forces and beings are associated. It is thus a process, even a project indissociable from the actor network theory of which it constitutes one of the principle tools and which consists in assembling heterogeneous entities not yet united together in order to test the relevance of their assembly. The enterprise is experimental and aims at connecting associations of humans and non-humans who are not separated a priori by the grid divide between the domain of nature and that of society. The Latterian collective thus designates a dynamic at the same time epistemic, metaphysical, and political of the progressive composition of a common world which ignores the two usual attractors of modernity, nature and society. As a result, no initial specification is required as to the beings that integrate the collective and as to the relations that unite them. Ultimately, the collective is what justifies the work of investigation because its nature and composition are never known in advance. So the Latterian collective is not a substantive object or even a principle of composition but a procedure aiming at reproducing in an analysis the very movement of recruitment of the sets of humans and non-humans that the analysts have given themselves as objects of study. We must acknowledge the great relevance of a notion that accounts for real assemblages of beings without making any ontological discrimination within them. However, it seems to me that to reduce the collective to the sole process of collecting undertaken by the moderns in order to overcome their divided condition is to deprive ourselves of all the extra modern, of all that the extra moderns can teach to us in this matter. For it is highly surprising for anthropologists to consider that humans and non-humans are associated in totalities governed by unitary principles or that monospecific assemblages of humans interact with monospecific assemblages of non-humans by obeying identical rules of sociability or that mixed groups of humans and non-humans cooperate in all aspect of social life while remaining ontologically different from each other. These kinds of collectives are the usual form under which extra moderns have presented themselves to us in all the imaginative diversity of their institutions. This is why it is also necessary to recognize that collectives do not only take shape as the product of an analyst's process of collecting but that they also and perhaps first and foremost exist in stabilized even canonical forms which social and political anthropology has certainly described in a fragmentary and anthropocentric way but which it is not impossible to restore in all the richness and complexity of their architecture. In short, a collective in the sense in which I understand it is a stabilized form of association between beings that can be ontologically homogeneous or heterogeneous and with compositional principles as well as the modes of relation between the components are specifiable and susceptible of being reflectively assessed by human members of these assemblages, notably when it comes to qualifying relations with neighboring collectives with these principles and these modes do not hold. From the foregoing, it will be seen that for me the collective does not take on the appearance of a letterion network nor is it homologous to the usual sociological categories designating associations to which one would have added a few non-humans for the sake of completeness. The society plus its environment and ethnic group plus its ancestors, the civilization plus its deities, a social professional category plus the tools and materials it uses. One hardly sees in this case the gain in intelligibility that could be obtained since the non-humans would continue to be only an embellishment added to a massively anthropocentric block. This is why I have argued that the principles of compositions of a collective, that is to say what determines the nature of the beings it associates and the possible links they can maintain ultimately depend on what I have called modes of identification. I will summarize in a few words what I mean by this. The general idea is that one must consider the apparent diversity of what we loosely call cultural habits as the product of differentiated processes of worlding. That is to say of ways of actualizing the multitude of qualities, phenomena, beings and relations that can be objectified by humans by means of the ontological filters that they use to discriminate between everything that their environment and their imagination afford to their apprehension. I've called these ontological filters that structure the process of worlding modes of identification, taking up the idea put forth by Marcel Mosse that I quote Mosse, man identifies himself with things and identifies things with themselves by having both a sense of the difference and similarities he establishes. One should treat these modes of identification as cognitive and sensory motor patterns embodied and developed during the socialization in a physical and social milieu, patterns which function as devices of schematization of our practices, intuitions and perceptions without mobilizing a discursive knowledge. It is this kind of mechanism that allows us to recognize certain objects as significant and to ignore others, to link sequences of actions and reflexively to interpret events and statements to channel our inferences about the properties of objects in our environment. Now, despite the diversity of qualities that we can detect in beings and things, or that we can infer from clues offered by the appearance and behavior, it is plausible to think that the ways in which these qualities are organized are not infinite. Our judgments of identity that is the recognition of similarities and differences between objects or events cannot depend on analytical comparisons made term by term. For reasons of cognitive economy, they must be made quickly and non-consciously by induction from shared schemas that are devices for structuring perceived qualities and organizing behavior. So starting from a rather simple thought experiment, I have therefore hypothesized that there are no more than four elementary modes of identification that is ways of systematizing ontological inferences, each one being based on the kinds of continuity and discontinuity that humans detect between themselves and non-humans on a double plane, physical and moral. When faced with any other being, human or non-human, I can assume either that it has elements of physicality and interiority identical to mine, and I have called this totemism, or that their interiority and physicality are distinct from mine, and I have called this analogism, or that we have similar interiorities and heterogeneous physicalities, and I call this animism, or finally, that our interiorities are different and our physicality is analogous, and I call that naturalism. I will not go into the detail of these modes of identification, the characteristics of which I have described in several of my books. I have endeavored in recent years to test the relevance of these schemes by examining their analytical purchase in accounting for structural variations in very diverse fields of practice and representation. It is with this objective in mind that I have become interested lately in an inquiry into the way in which each of the modes of identification conditions forms of association bringing together humans and non-humans in swiganerist assemblages. For that purpose, I consider how animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism are instituted as in ontologies with privilege. Such or such of these modes as principle of organizing the regime of beings and how each of these ontologies in turn prefigures a kind of collective more particularly appropriate to the gathering in a common project of the types of being which it distinguishes into the complementary expression of their properties in practical life. The expression ontological turn has sometimes been used to qualify this kind of approach, although I have hardly used it myself. And this dabbling is no doubt appropriate, provided one specifies that it does not amount to a thesis on what the world is or should be but consists in an inquiry into the ways in which humans detect such and such features of the real or imaginary objects that affect their existence in order to compose basic bricks of differentiated worlds with these elements. And it is because these primary modalities of identification of the world are distinct that the forms of collective that humans will imagine may also differ. There will be immersed in political configurations, types of exchange and types of relationship between themselves and with non-humans that vary widely and that undergo historical transformations. So the objective pursuit is thus to bring down to a very elementary level the critical aim of the social sciences to make them capable of grasping the general form of interaction between beings. From this point of view, moreover, it is no longer just a question of social sciences since the social here is an effect rather than a cause. It is a question of a general science of beings and relations. The science still to come that pioneering minds like Gregory Bateson have called for into which anthropology and philosophy as well as ethologies, sociology, psychology, ecology, cybernetics, linguistics and the historical sciences would contribute. If some anthropologists, including the present speaker, have placed this undertaking under the sign of ontology, it is in no way to claim an annexation by anthropology of a domain formerly reserved for philosophy. It is above all to insist on the fact that the level at which anthropological analysis should be situated is more elementary than the one at which it has operated until now. The system of differences in the specifically human ways of inhabiting the world cannot be explained by considering these differences as the byproduct of this or that type of institution, economic organization, technical infrastructure, value system, worldview, in short of all these, those aspects of the collectives apostasized in instances by the social sciences in order to highlight determinations. All these aspects are on the contrary, the stabilized results of more fundamental intuitions about what the world contains and about the relations between its human and non-human components. So the world ontology seems appropriate to designate this analytical level which could be called pre-predictive in the language of Usserlian phenomenology but which is above all a requirement of conceptual hygiene. The roots of the diversity among humans must be sought at a deeper level than that and this deeper level is that of the differences in the basic inferences they make according to situations about the kinds of beings that inhabit the world and the ways in which these beings relate to one another. From this derive the kinds of collectives within which common life takes place and the nature of the composition from this derive forms of subjectivation and objectivation from this derive regimes of temporality and forms of figuration from this derive in fact the whole richness of social and cultural life. Don't finish. You have to endure a little bit more. But for this I need my voice. As can be seen, this project is frankly ontological. Contrary to Durkheim's approach, the most common was still today in the social sciences. It is not the dominant categories of social life, class, decent groups, political and economic hierarchies, race, gender that serve here as templates for conceptualizing the world according to the famous formula religion is society transfigured. On the contrary, it is the organizing principles of cosmologies, the nature of the beings that populate them and of the relation that they weave between them that will define the singular form taken by these exclusive assemblages of humans that we moderns call societies. To escape the circular explanation in which the already constituted social morphology would be at the origin of the categories that constitute it. It is preferable to admit that more elementary principles analytically prior to social categories are the source that generate the assemblages of humans and nonhumans that I call collectives. And that condition the characteristics of the latter. In short, it is the ontological and cosmological level that determines and explain the sociological level not the other way around. How do we proceed to study this? How do we apprehend collectives not by making them fit into the prochristian bed of the moderns sociology, but according to the ways they are conceptualized and experienced by those who compose them? First of all, through empirical investigations. The sociological question is first and foremost a question of inventory, and as it was formerly called of social physics. Which being is associated with which other or on the contrary separated from it? In what way, but what time of flink for what motive and to carry out in common what type of action? But however indispensable they may be, empirical studies alone are not sufficient to distinguish guidelines in the way collectives are composed. As I've already said, the hypothesis I've put forth is that the principle of composition of a collective depends ultimately on the modes of identification and this is why I conduct this inquiry by focusing on the forms of collective in which different types of ontology find expression. Being aware of the extreme diversity of these forms when one approaches them from the point of view of the institutions which stabilize them from systems of political organization to systems of kinship and marriage through the kinds of ritual mediation reputed necessary to the ominous functioning of the cosmos, I've chosen to devote my attention in particular to the organization of space. That is to say to the ways of inhabiting places and taking advantage of them to the type of cohabitation with nonhumans to which these places lend themselves in short to the relationship to the land understood in the more general sense. Focusing on the manner of inhabiting, space also makes it possible to avoid an overly anthropocentric approach. Since almost all the beings admitted into a collective are dependent on more or less identified and circumscribed places, plants, animals, deities, rivers, volcanoes, spirits, the dead totems are all located in sites, domains, biomes, geological formations that stabilize them in their relationship to the other existing beings with whom they share a living environment. In short, unlike other dimensions of common life in which the components of a collective can be more or less involved from the point of view of places, humans and nonhumans are all in the same boat, they are all situated. If a collective is always situated, then the best way to apprehend it is through a cosmopolitical analysis. Of course, this is not cosmopolitex in the Kantian sense, where it stands as the optimal condition for conditions in the plural, for a project of world peace when implying universal rules under which humans, wherever they are on earth, could lead a civilized life. Nor even in the sense made popular by Ulrich Beck where cosmopolitanism become the consciousness of a shared destiny uniting peoples everywhere in their exposure to the same risk. Although cosmopolitanism in that sense rightly implies that sociologists should conduct their studies beyond the confine of the nation state, it is nevertheless a notion built on an impoverished and normative world much like the Kantian cosmos, everywhere identical for everyone. By contrast, in the new cosmopolitics advocated for by the likes of Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, the cosmos is neither either universal one of Kant or Beck, nor any particular cosmos as a local tradition may conceive it. It is rather a project referring to the possibility of setting on an equal footing a multiplicity of worlds, a project that would steer the politics of scientific knowledge in an entirely new direction from the one that it has followed to the present. However, I use the cosmopolitics in a somewhat different sense, perhaps more downward and certainly more faithful to the etymology of the term, which is as the name for the operators that relate worlds and manage to bring together and to articulate things and beings that otherwise would seem to exist on different ontological planes. Now these operators differ widely according to the principles that organize the variety of assemblages of human and non-humans documented by ethnography and history. The view from afar, brought by anthropologists, is thus simply the perspective that they are able to take when they try to make sense of the bewildering diversity of ontological regimes under which all classes of beings are associated. Cosmopolitics are the concrete forms that these cosmopolitical associations take. And the purpose of my lectures is to give an idea of some of their building blocks and to sketch their architectural principles so as to provide the basis for an alternative way of dealing with the diversity of human and non-human manners of dwelling in the world. In the last part of this lecture, I would like to briefly examine what the kinds of cosmopolitics that form the framework within which each ontological regime can flourish look like. I will devote the next lecture tomorrow to the anthropological and political consequences that can be drawn from this cosmopolitical pluralism using a few detailed ethnographic examples so as to better... so as better to contrast on features of extra-modern collectives with those of modern ones. First, however, I want to recall the definition of the four systems of qualities that can be detected in the objects of the world, each of which can be embodied in an ontology that synthesizes its elementary properties in an ostensible way. Animism is characterized by inferring a moral continuity between humans and non-humans and a discontinuity in their physical dimensions. Naturalism is inferring a moral discontinuity and a physical continuity. Totemism by inferring a dual continuity, moral and physical, but divided into discontinuous blocks of humans and non-humans. And analogism by inferring a double discontinuity, physical and moral, which networks of correspondences strive in vain to make continuous. Animism is well represented by the ontologies of Amazonian Indians or native, native Siberians. Totemism by the ontology of the Australian Aboriginals. Naturalism by neo-Kansian epistemology or analogism by the ontology of the Meso-Armican Indians, medieval Europeans or West African populations. Quite often, however, these systems of qualities exist only as tendencies or in partial overlap, rather than considering them as closed and compartmentalized cosmologies or cultures in the classical sense. We must therefore pre-end them as the phenomenal consequences or four distinct types of inferences about the identity of beings existing around us or that we like to imagine. Any human is capable of mobilizing one or the other of these types of inference according to the circumstances. But the recurrent identity judgment that he or she will tend to produce such or such an existence belong to such and such a category and can be classified with such and such another existence with more, most of the time follow the kind of inference privileged by the collective within which he or she has been socialized. What consequences do the system of animist inference, for instance, have on the form of the collective, of the collectors where these inferences dominate? First of all, let me emphasize that this kind of collective is different in every respect from what a society is for us since the combination that it operates between humans and non-humans does not take the customary form the naturalist ontology has made familiar to us. In an animist ontology, most non-humans have an interiority analogous to that of humans which make them social subjects in their own right. But each form of life is also endowed with particular physical dispositions. It can only have access to this form of life to the segment of the world that it is predisposed by its nature to inhabit, to use, and to actualize. Each form of being does constitute a specific collective. A social species characterized by a morphology, aptitudes, and a type of behavior, a kind of association which combines the attributes of a natural species and that of a tribe. Tribe species, especially animal ones, are said to live in collectives with identical structures and properties. They are full-scale societies with leaders, shamans, rituals, dwellings, techniques, artifacts which assemble and quarrel, provide for themselves and marry according to rules. By species, one should not understand here humans, animals, and plants only because in the animist regime, almost all beings have a social life. In the whole animist archipelago in Amazonia, in subartic America, in Siberia, in parts of Southeast Asia and Melanesia, the members of each tribe species first share the same physical appearance, the same habitat, the same food and sexual behavior, and are, in principle, endogamous. It should be noted that the criteria of differences in form, disposition, and behavior that distinguish non-human collectives from one another are also used to distinguish various human collectives from one another. In animist ontology, indeed, the idea of humanity as a separate moral species makes little sense. Thus, each class of humans that is differentiated from the others by its appearance and ways of doing things is conceived as a particular tribe species. The distinctive attributes of human groups that modern see as cultural, hairstyle, costume, ornaments, weapons, tools, dwellings, and even language are instead perceived in the animist archipelago as physical dispositions, analogous to those that allow animal species to lead different kinds of lives, as beaks, clothes, fins, wings, leaves, rhizomes, and modes of sonic or postural communication. Moreover, if the affiliation to which collective is indeed based on a species-based corporality, that is to say on the fact of showing the same physical appearance, the same habitat, or same feeding behavior, the very identity of the collective is only definable by the fact that it is apprehended according to the point of view of other tribe species. What the moderns have taken to qualify as nature, super-nature, and society is thus for the animists a world populated by social collectives with which the human collectives establish relations according to norms deemed common to all. What about totemic collectives as illustrated by the Austrian case? Humans and non-humans are distributed jointly in hybrid, isomorphic, and complementary collectives, the totemic classes, in contrast to animism, where humans and non-humans are distributed separately in collectives, also isomorphic, the tribe species, but autonomous from each other. If the structure and the properties of the animist collectives thus derive undoubtedly from those lent to the human collectives, the structure of totemic collectives is defined by the differential gaps between bundles of physical and moral attributes that some non-humans denote appropriately, generally animals invested with the totemic function because they illustrate in an exemplary manner those bundles of attributes. Whereas the properties acknowledged as typical of the members of those collectives do not derive directly from either humans or non-humans, but from a prototypical class of predicates that pre-exist them. In Australia, this class of predicate is called the beings of the dream time. In contrast to animism, which sets up a tribe species of humans as a paradigm of collectives, totemism thus operates an original fusion by mixing in hybrid assemblages humans and non-humans who use each other to produce social bonding, generic identity, attachment to places, material resources, and generational continuity. But totemism does so by fragmenting the constituents, the constituent units in such a way that the properties of each are complementary and their assembly is dependent on the differential gaps they present. Just such a system is governed neither by a classificatory logic, a la Livistros, nor by a sociocentric logic, a la Durkheim, but by a principle that may be called cosmogenic. Just as animism is anthropogenic because it borrows from humans the minimum necessary for non-humans to be treated as humans, that is human institutions, totemism is cosmogenic because it's six in groups of cosmic attributes that is not referred to a particular biological species, everything that is required for humans and non-humans to be included in the same collective. Let us see now how analogist collectives are construed as diverse as the morphology of the assemblage of humans and non-humans that the analogist mode of identification allows in ancient Europe, in the Far East, in most of Africa, or in Andean and Mesoamerican collectives. These assemblages nevertheless always present themselves as constitutive units of a much faster collective since it is coexistent with co-extensive with the world. Cosmos and society are here almost undistinguishable whatever the types of internal segmentation that such an extended whole requires to remain operative. This kind of collective is indeed cut to the measures of the world cosmos but also partitioned into interdependent constituent units that are structured by a logic of segmentary nesting, lineages, moieties, casts, various kinds of descent groups, stretch the connections of the humans with other beings from the underworld to the Empyreanian, to the Empyrean. Moreover, analogist collectives are not necessarily empath or state formations and some of them are very modest human numbers that ignore power stratification and wealth disparities. Yet, they all have in common that their constituent parts are hierarchical if only at a symbolic level devoid of any direct economic or political effect. The configuration of beings that analogism renders possible thus present some remarkable features in contrast to multiple and equestratuary, equestratutory collectives of humans and nonhumans having either a homogeneous composition, the tribe's species of animism or heterogeneous one, the totemic classes, but relating in both cases with units of the same kind. The analogist collective is unique, divided into hierarchical segments and in exclusive relation with itself. It is thus self-sufficient in that it contains within itself all the relations and determinations necessary to its existence and functioning unlike the totemic group which is autonomous on the level of its ontological identity but which requires collectives of the same type as its own in order to become operative. In an analogist collective, indeed the hierarchy of the constituent units is contrastive, that is to say only definable by reciprocal positions. And it is for that reasons that the segments do not form independent collective of the same nature as the totemic classes which draw in themselves insights and prototypical precursors which are proper to them the physical and moral foundations of their distinctiveness. The segments of an analogist collective are thus heteronomical. They acquire a meaning and a function only in relation to the autonomous world that they jointly form. Quit finally of the sociological formula of naturalism. I will not dwell on it for two reasons. First because it is the kind of assemblage with which we are more familiar. The one that moderns mistakenly believe is universal no matter where they live. Humans are distributed within collectives differentiated by their language and customs, cultures excluding non-human nature. The paradigm of collectives here is human society in contrast to an anomic nature. In short, everything that is not natural is social. It is true that the naturalist constitution is beginning to be undermined by the need to take into account phenomena such as global warming or the increasingly vigorous expression of extra modern cosmopoletics when they come into conflict with the naturalist logic of state and globalized capitalism. But they still concern only a minority of citizens of the world with their thoughts to deflect the advance of the modernization front remains marginalized. In order to give some substance to the proposals put forward in today's lecture, I will devote tomorrow's lecture to examining the epistemological and political consequences of approaching the analysis of extra modern cosmopolities in the light of the ontological principles that structure them. And since the task would be disproportionate, if I set myself the goal of treating as a whole the thousand of cosmopolities documented by historical and ethnographic records, I will limit myself to considering those that belong to an animist regime. First, because they are the ones that I know best. And second, because they differ perhaps the most from the forms of collectives to which the sociology of the moderns has accustomed us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Descola. Chancellor Christ, I hope you're not about to abolish the social sciences. At any rate, we're gonna take a brief break. We'll come back in 10 minutes and hear from our commentator, Adam Getachau. Thank you. I am absolutely delighted to introduce our first commentator, Professor Adam Getachau. She's a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire and post-colonial political theory. And Professor Getachau comes to us from the University of Chicago, where she is the Neubauer family assistant professor of political science in the college. She completed a joint PhD in political science and African-American studies at Yale in 2015, where she worked with a raft of other eminent Tanner lecturers and commentators, including Shayla Benhabib, her advisor, and Hazel Carby. Her first prize-winning book, World Making After Empire, The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, published by Princeton University Press in 2019, critiques the conventional historical view that decolonization was an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations. And she shows instead that black Atlantic thinkers and statesmen thought and acted across national boundaries to challenge global racial hierarchies and to realize alternative transnational visions of an egalitarian post-imperial world. Professor Getachau's other works include an anthology of W. E. B. Du Bois' International Writings, which was, I believe, just published in November of last year by Cambridge University Press, as well as multiple articles, book chapters, and review essays. She is the recipient of over a dozen awards and fellowships and serves on the faculty board of the Posen Family Center for Human Rights, among others. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Adam Getachau. Okay, afternoon, everybody. First, I just want to thank the Tanner Lecture Committee for this great honor of being able to serve as a discussant today. I also want to thank Professor Descola for that brilliant first lecture. Rebecca McLennan for that introduction, and Jane Fink for all the work she did to make us to get us here today. Professor Philip Descola's opening lecture today sets the stage for a non-anthropocentric construction of political action and society, in part by offering us genealogies of the concepts and ways of seeing that have blinded our collective thinking. At the core of his intervention is a genealogical reconsideration of the development and codification of the nature and culture divide. A particular interest here, as he started off with, is the central role of the social sciences which emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The human sciences relied on and further deepened this division, demarcating the social and cultural as a distinctly human sphere, subject to anthropological and sociological study. Although the nature cultural divide was one that distinguished humans as distinctly cultural beings, this divide was of course always involved in the hierarchical ordering of humanity itself. That is, the nature and culture divide has always produced a differentiation of human societies in which some were closer to nature and thus the world of animals. I'll be saying much more about this on Friday, but as Professor Descola puts it, to say if the peoples of the Amazonia or New Guinea, that their societies are close to nature makes no sense from their own perspective because their cosmological orientation, there is no such thing as nature separated from society. Yet we know, as we know, this hierarchical ordering of humans in which they were viewed as closer to nature was central to the violent projects of empire, the expropriation, modernization, governance to which such communities were and are subject. In many ways then, we might think of the human nature or the nature culture divide and the human non-human divide that corresponds to it as also a division between what Sylvia Winter, the Jamaican literary theorist and philosopher calls a division between man and human. That is that European man came to stand in for the human. One of Professor Descola's aims in these lectures is as he puts it to subject the concepts of the social sciences to a radical real relativization, to show us that their presumed universality is just that presumed. His strategy for doing this is to detail the ways in which the nature culture divide arrives very belatedly to the modern world. Elsewhere, Professor Descola has argued that the bifurcation of nature culture, which we now take as simply a fact of our world, is in fact of recent vintage, so much so that it would have been unfamiliar to our own great grandparents. We might also add that this historically determined way of ordering the world is not only recent, but that it also only came to dominance in a struggle with other cosmologies, that it superseded and the West and that it encountered during the course of Europe's imperial expansion. In a recent article, the intellectual historian Geely Cleger describes this long history of confrontation through an engagement with the work of 19th century Protestant missionaries whose encounters in Oceania and North America engendered a deep crisis for them about the untranslatability of God as creator, faced with cosmologies in which the idea of a singular omnipotent deity was unavailable, missionary struggle to articulate their image of God through languages and idioms in which spiritual power was diffuse and imminent rather than personified. The effort to translate, to subsume the untranslatable forms of power into the image of the Christian God, she argues, was deeply connected to the very struggles over sovereignty of the period. As the settler revolution of the 19th century wore on, the deep epistemic challenges and ruptures posed by indigenous cosmologies would be domesticated and sublimated into the very construction of the nature culture divide. As I read him, part of Professor de Skola's argument is that although in the struggle, the Western world would become politically and economically dominant, its naturalism has never superseded in supplanting other cosmological, cosmopolitical practices. We might also notice the ways in which those very social scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century sublimated the terms that they encountered out and through the world into their own understandings of European society. So again, to draw on Geely Kleeger's work, the language of mana, which would be one of the names for the imminent forms of spiritual power would come to be reproduced in early sociology as a way of speaking about the energetics of society, the effervescences of society itself. I think one question we might also ask is given the forms and structures of domination through which the nature and culture divide came to be produced, what do we make then of the ways, the kind of remnants vestiges of extra modern societies? How is it that they persist? How is it that they relate to this form of subsumption or dominance? And again, I'll return to that question on Friday. So the theorization of cosmopolitics that we've received today and that we'll hear more about tomorrow is of course also linked to another term, cosmopolitanism, that we might subject to a similar genealogical procedure, not unlike that, which reveals the provincial character of the nature, culture divide. Professor Doscola notes that his account of cosmopolitics stands in sharp contrast to a neo-continent cosmopolitanism, whether that of liberal or left persuasion. Cosmopolitanism too, we might note, has a specific history. One also tied to Europe's reflexive self-definition, which has always been connected to Europe's encounters with the extra European world. According, again, drawing on a lot of people here, but according to the intellectual historian and political theorist, Anthony Pagdon, the early modern revival of interest in the stoic idea of cosmopolitanism coincided with the age of discovery. The universalism associated with cosmopolitanism was then and perhaps is still now difficult to separate from the civilizing or humanizing dimensions of imperial projects, which entailed extending particular attributes to humanity as a whole. The transformation of the ancient idea of hospitality from a custom to a right and then duty during the period of Europe's imperial expansion to the Americas is a case of in point. For writers ranging from Francisco de Vittoria to Emera Vattel and Emmanuel Kant, who took this idea up, the exchange and communication associated with hospitality came to be viewed as an expression of shared humanity and the means of realizing the cosmopolis. The identification of shared and minimal rights and attributes of humanity envisioned cosmopolitanism on the scale of the world, but also always was connected to that higher archized vision of humanity itself. Cosmopolitan and thinking has of course waxed and waned since its high point in the 18th century. We might be at a particularly low point. It's a lure though, including to those of us alive to, who are alive to its Eurocentrism, has remained the ways in which its scalar imagination opens up critical and political space beyond the entrapments of the local, of the nation, of the state. Professor de Scola's account and elaboration of the cosmopolitics of the extra European world is a provocative and powerful challenge to the scalar imaginary of cosmopolitanism. If the cosmopolitan imagines the world as outside and beyond our particular local and national attachments and envisions an imaginative and political practice of scaling up to send to the level of the world, the cosmopolitics we have encountered today rearranges our political scales. The world is not out there beyond us, but it is brought down to earth. Rather than a scaling up, a transcending of the local and particular, cosmopolitics involves as I understand it, a form of what we might call imminent scale making. The world is already embedded in every day, in the local, the particular. From this location too, the world is not one, but multiple. So instead of the construction of one world, the practice of cosmopolitics involved the setting of worlds on equal footing. More specifically, it involves to quote Professor de Scola's words, operators that relate worlds and manage to bring together and to articulate things and beings that otherwise would seem to exist on different ontological planes. Articulation here, as I understand it, is a practice that does not dissolve that difference, but conjoins and coheres across difference in ways that remain partial and incomplete. So this reshuffling of scale to me that cosmopolitics introduces is a really important challenge to the allure of the cosmopolitan's Promethean leap, a leap beyond the particular, the local, the national. But I want to ask whether we are ready or want to give up the world of the cosmopolitan. And I just, and I wanna ask this perhaps in two kinds of ways. The first is that it goes back to the story I've been telling about the ways in which the imperial expansion produced a certain kind of dominance, right? So modernity, however born it is out of a particular place, the place that is the western part of the Asian continent as Professor de Scola provocatively puts it, is one that has come to shape the world as we know it. It has produced, I would argue one world, differentiated yes, unequal yes, violently pulled together yes, but one world nonetheless. And it seems to me that theorizing or thinking from that space of an unequally produced world, a differentiated but yet one world seems important to the kind of challenges of climate change, of global warming with which the lecture ended today. And I'll return to that. I think the second part of the cosmopolitan image that we might wanna hold onto has less to do with the world-building character of cosmopolitanism than with the skepticism and refusal that is at the core of the cosmopolitan tradition. In a recent essay, another political theorist, Marad Idris, reminds us that while the cosmopolitan tradition has been swallowed up by a positive project of constructing new forms of affiliation on the scale of humanity or the world, in its initial articulation by Diogenes the cynic, the refusal to claim citizenship in a Greek city-state was not a clearing of space to authorize a new enlarged form of affiliation but to question the very grounds of authorization itself. According to Idris, as an interrogative project then, cosmopolitanism asks, what is the perspective from which the disagreement between competing investments in the world can be adjudicated? This skepticism and refusal shares the interruption staged by the reconstruction of extra-modern cosmopolitics. It also raises the question for me of how the cosmopolitics of extra-modern societies might transform the practices of modern social and political theory. One upshot of this reconstruction of the multiplicity of cosmopolitical worlds is to chasten the moderns by engendering in us an epistemic humility, recognizing our naturalism as just one way of relating to the world and seeing it in fact as impoverished and limiting. We give up the conceit that it is universal. This provincializing move might be contrasted to another scalar positioning, that of the planetary, which similarly seeks to engender a relativization of our standpoint. Elaborated by Depeche-Chakrabarti, the planetary asks us to contend with the fact that because humans constitute, and this is a quote, because humans constitute a particular kind of species, they can in the process of dominating other species acquire the status of a geological force. Humans in other words, he argues, have become a natural condition at least today. So from the perspective of the planetary, the nature culture divide is irrelevant because humans and earth systems are now co-actors in the drama of global warming. And I think there's again, a really important difference of scale. So where the planetary relativizes our naturalism and rejects our anthropocentrism from the perspective of the earth, the cosmopolitical perspective introduced here reveals the range of possible collectives in which humans and non-humans are enmeshed long before something like the Anthropocene arrived and the practices by which such collectives are held together. And this seems to me a different kind of answer to the existential crisis of climate change. And I'd invite Professor Dascola to say more. While this crisis might require us to see ourselves anew as geological agents in the way that Professor Chakrabarty argues, the human and non-human modalities of agency, we glimpse in the cosmopolitics of the extra modern world might give us a richer set of resources to think through our alternative configurations of our relationship to the earth. As I understand it, attention to the range of cosmopolitan practices, or sorry, cosmopolitical practices involves more than cutting naturalism down to size. To stop at parochalizing our nature culture divide might be to embrace the hyper-relativism that Professor Dascola rejects. More ambitiously, he seeks to, quote, develop analytical tools which should be as far as possible liberated from the historical particularisms that the concepts of social sciences are currently loaded with. To be sure, a kind of epistemic humility would be needed here. It is at least a first step. But it might also involve the innovation of new concepts. And we heard perhaps glimpses of that, operators, collectives as one, as at least a set of concepts to begin with. And these concepts might not be just that they better capture the cosmopolitics of the extra modern world, but also reveal our own modern world anew. Beneath the facade of our naturalism may lie processes and practices that evade, undo, or otherwise hybridize the nature culture divide. Might the examination of extra modern cosmopolitics where practices of articulation can join worlds across ontological difference produce an analytical practice that allows us to cognize why, when, and how we have developed our own mutations and hybrids of nature culture. I pose this question not from an investment in bootstrapping a universal social science which forced to abandon the nature culture divide now looks for commensurable cosmopolitics everywhere. Instead, it is posed from the view that the nature culture divide has not only outlived its utility in understanding societies, but also that its anthropocentrism is implicated in the existential crisis we now all inhabit. If this is the case, then it seems to me we need not only to relativize our naturalism, but be capable of advancing processes of worlding that might suggest a path out of our deadly bifurcation of nature culture, human, non-human. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Professor Gattachu. Wonderful comments. I'm gonna invite Professor Descola back up to the podium to respond about 10 minutes or so. I'm sure there's a lot more to be said but we'll resume again tomorrow. Yeah. Thank you, Professor Gattachu, for these comments. In fact, I'll answer on a specific question that you posed. But they're all articulated, in fact. The question is that naturalism never managed to eradicate other forms of cosmopolitanism. And in fact, the global warming and the... What Bruno Latour called the new climatic regime we've entered into calls to the forefront, the fact that naturalism has not only outlived its intellectual purchase on the world, but also its political purchase. And what I want to talk about for now is that I've been involved in the past years, not so much as an observer, but rather as a militant or companion de route with a movement in France called the zone à défense, zone to be defended, and which are places where small numbers of militants have decided to fight against the major transformation in the rural parts of France. Great projects such as one of the better known is the project of an airport in the western France. And these people have settled answering first the invitation to come and help local inhabitants that wanted to resist this project of a huge airport in this part of rural France. And they have managed to resist and prevent the construction of this airport. So there are several cases in different parts of France and in other parts of Europe also. But the one I'm most familiar with is called Notre-Dame des Landes. And in the process, these people have settled there and have found a profound identification with the place they wanted to defend, ecologically in particular. They have developed an identification with the aspects of the milieu with plants and animals. And in fact, one of the results of this identification is that they have gone away from a naturalist perspective towards something new, which is a form of hybrid, hard to define, and which is synthesized with a slogan they used in the demonstration, which is, we are not defending nature. We are nature defending itself. So this form, this mutation, this transformation seems to be very important in this move towards not only provincializing modernity or Europe or whatever, or naturalism, but also as a political move. You are thinking the epistemic humidity implies new concepts. But these concepts are also invented on the spot by political practice now. And I speak now in a situation where I was involved in this and publicly defined as an territorial terrorist by the Minister of the Interior in France for siding with these young people who were fighting, among other things, for the constitution of huge water reserve by agro-industrial agricultors who were pumping the water. And in fact, pursuing, in a way, a very old movement in Europe, starting with the enclosures of privatizing and transforming into commodities, common goods. And the process goes on. And this process, of course, is now publicly rejected by a greater number of young people who fight these projects of privatizing common goods with more and more energy than before, and also trying to define ways of doing it, which are not naturalist in the traditional sense, or even corresponding to standard political procedures. They are not linearists in the classical sense. They are inventing a new form of being together. Because in these places, which are called the ZAD, they try to invent a form of direct democracy, communal democracy, based on sharing everything, banning private property, et cetera. So it's a very interesting movement because, of course, it reminds one of the commune de Paris or anarchist communes that have flourished in Europe or in the Americas at one time, but with a completely different attitude towards non-humans, precisely, that is being invented on the spot and reminds one, especially an anthropologist, of forms of political protest against land grabbing by native communities in different parts of the world. And the arguments that are being used and put forth by the young people in Europe are interesting in the sense that they precisely eliminate the old realism and try to create new forms of living, which would, and in fact, they associate themselves also with there was a delegation of the zapatistas from Mexico visiting the ZAD not long ago. So there's a very intimate relationship between people at the forefront of this epistemic humidity you mentioned with all the forms of native struggle against land grabbing elsewhere and based on arguments that are no more the usual arguments that we've known before, that is, of course, it's fighting pollution, it's fighting appropriation, it's fighting things like that. But it's more than that. It's also having a different relationship with the land. And I think this parallelism between the movement in France is that which I was expecting to be dissolved on the Council of Ministers today, but it hasn't been dissolved because precisely there was such an upsurge. This movement is called the uprisings of the earth. And there's been such a reaction in the past weeks that the Minister of Interior has not yet dissolved the movement, which means that political action is still possible. And I think it's a very comforting idea in our world now. Glad to finish with that. Thank you again. We do have time for a few questions. And Jane Fink is going to hand the microphone around. So Jane, right here, please. Thank you. Thank you for your vigorous talk. Nothing less expected from you. My question is, what kind of political protest do you think can take shape which does not make a concession to modern science? I come from the same space as you in overcoming the nature culture division. It works in the pre-modern register. But in assembling diverse species in modernity, Donna Haraway, for instance, advocates mutual flourishing. Yet what is the specificity of a biological species? Reproduction. Elephants and horses cannot mate. And so Haraway is forced to talk of feelings of loving, caring, meeting, touching. Evans-Prichard's quip for Margaret Meath, its wind in the palm trees kind of anthropology, comes to mind. And so the scientist says, I validate that you love your dog. You love your parakeet. And now let me build computers, nuclear weapons, satellite communication. And so our resistance, by our I mean anthropological resistance, becomes a kind of utopian romantic longing. And so therefore I ask you, how do you envisage a political protest in the modern world that does not make a concession to science? A very tricky question, to say the least. An interesting aspect of these struggles that I mentioned in the ZAD, for instance, was that it was sparked by groups of people who define themselves as naturalists in the traditional sense. They were interested in nature, in the diversity of species, et cetera. And they saw that these great projects as destroying nature. And so one element that they used was to make a complete inventory of all forms of life in the place that was subjected to this project in order to emphasize the fact that many species there were, in fact, protected species. And so the project could not proceed. So there are some kind of alliances of this type between science in the naturalist tradition and political projects of this kind in the sense that these people were naturalists in both senses became something different at the same time that they retained their interest in alien forms of life. And in fact, I think that being attuned to the specificity of an ecosystem, of a specific system of relation between humans and nonhumans implies having a good knowledge of nonhumans, whatever the knowledge is based on or is based upon. And being interested in different forms of relationship between humans and nonhumans does not mean sacralizing nature or transforming nonhumans into a form of neo-antropoids, no? But in admitting the radical alterity and knowing this alterity for what it is, that is, it's based on knowledge and appreciating the flavor of the world we live in means being aware of exactly what it's made of. And science can contribute to that. It's a certain type of science, yes. I guess I'm just intrigued by your comments about this resistance movement in France and defending nature or speaking for nature in some sense as a conception of what the movement's about. It's somewhat evocative of pastoralist mid-20th century environmentalism in certain ways. And I have a slight worry about it, which is that it can be mobilized for a variety of causes, which raised the question of who is really speaking for nature here, especially in the era of climate change if we're really going to protect the other organisms with which we interact in the natural world, we need to decarbonize and so on. And that's going to involve some amount of development closer to transit and transmission lines to get electricity from windmills to where people are living and so on. But I could easily imagine there's going to be disruption of natural relationships and ecosystems by some of that development. And I can equally imagine, and in fact, there is some of this that goes on, groups of people fighting this kind of land appropriation, again, out of a conception that the local ecosystems need to be protected from this sort of development. But unless the development takes place, climate change is just never going to be reined in. Anyway, is there anything in that that you could say to help me understand which kinds of resistance are authentic and which kinds are sort of false consciousness or something like that? I think that this resistance has to go on two fronts. One is the one I mentioned before. No, these small groups of people who try to change the way they live together and they live with non-humans in specific places. And the other is a more general political agenda of transforming our states to make them more sober and more democratic in the sense of replacing representative democracy by participative democracy, that is forms of interactions between citizens that result in their being heard and which is, in fact, which was an important aspect of the initial French Revolution or for that matter, the Bolshevik Revolution also emphasized this aspect now. So I think the political agenda implies to follow these two directions. What I found interesting, I don't mean that the alternative form of territorial adjustment or communities is the only way. But I find it very interesting as an anthropologist because I see there the possibility of profoundly transforming political institutions at a local level just by practice, in a way. No, these people, although they are well-read and they read anthropology, in fact, but at the same time, they made up the kind of collective form by experimenting different solution possibilities, forms of interaction, et cetera. And so it's a cosmopolitanism in the making, which I found very interesting. And I'm less interested, as an anthropologist, in the basic and necessary general transformation of the kind of states we live in. I think the two are important. And especially, this is something that Devin Weigl knows quite well. It's because he dealt with that in the book with David Greber. It's the relationship between states and non-state societies that has been quite common in most of the history of the world and is still common in a way in Southeast Asia, for instance. And so I envision a system where there would be, hopefully, sober and democratic states with surrounded by or interspersed with alternative communities that would be places where people could escape in a way in some conditions, and that would exert a sort of pressure. And obviously, it exerts a pressure on the state if I judge, but what is happening now in France, exert a pressure on the state. And from a sort of pressure valve for the governments not to over exceed their power. So I think the two fronts are necessary, politically. We have time for one more question. There is a question. We see that many associations outside of the state in the United States are taking extreme power. How do these same ideas that you're talking about avoid the traps that we've seen with the failures of communes in the 19th century and the problem of privatization as extra state entities seizing power in a democracy? There is no guarantee. I tend to see the future not necessarily as a desirable state very much similar to what was itedly in the 13th century. The combination of free communes, aristocratic communes, states, multinationals like Genoa or Venice, et cetera, et cetera, each trying to assert its power in specific places. And I think we are going towards a world that is probably going to look very much like that perhaps in the, it's true that history doesn't repeat itself, but stutters. In that case, there is no discernible solution in the short term. In the long term? In the long term, I do hope so. Yes, it will be conflictual. And you have to fight for it. Well, on that note, fighting for it, please join me in thanking Professor Descola and Gita.