DALLA NATURA UNIVERSALE ALLE NATURE SINGOLARI

QUALI LEZIONI PER L’ANALISI DELLE CULTURE

Philippe Descola

The reality constructed by the modern social sciences, the way they revealed discontinuities in the world and identified constant relationships in it, their way of distributing entities and phenomena within categories are taken for granted and are acquired as a universal fact of experience. The opposition between Nature and Culture, and that between Culture and the cultures, are prime examples of this phenomenon. They should not be considered as ontological distinctions, but as epistemological ones; they would not lie in things themselves, but would be constructed by the very apparatus that allows to differentiate them. It is with this Eurocentric and anthropocentric conception that a new understanding of the forms of composition of the worlds must have the courage to break. How can we move from a uniform world, ordered according to a great division between Nature and cultures, to different worlds in which human and non-human beings constitute a multitude of assemblages, which represent just alternative cosmopolitics to our way of conceiving the order of the society and the world? One could speak of an ontological deviation to define this approach; this on the condition that we specify that it is not a thesis on what the world is like, but an investigation of the way in which human beings detect certain characteristics of objects that modify their existence, to compose with these elementary bricks differentiated worlds.