The lecture constituted the second part of a cycle begun the previous year, the aim of which is to reconceptualize certain notions by means of which anthropology describes and analyzes the modalities and institutions of living-together in non-modern collectives. The aim is to problematize anew the study of areas of collective life that are ordinarily compartmentalized under specialized headings, in order to take better account of the diversity of ontological regimes under which humans and non-humans are assembled, and the form of their assembly, i.e. their singular cosmopolitics. The first phase of this program, the one that occupied last year's lecture and that this year's lecture has continued, consists in taking up a foundation of living-together, the relationship to the land, in particular the concrete modalities of the use of places and the ways in which these are conceptualized and used.
How can we approach the cosmopolitics of the land without falling into a Eurocentric bias? First, by noting that the main difference between non-modern cosmopolitics and modern political institutions lies in the fact that the former are able to integrate non-humans into collectives, or to see non-humans as political subjects acting within their own collectives, while the latter confine non-humans to the function of entourage, resource or support for symbolic activity. The kinds of beings that result from non-modern cosmopolitics are therefore not those that the social sciences are accustomed to taking into account. For example, if we examine without prejudice the components of what ethnologists call "a kinship group" - not as they define it, i.e. "a group of humans descended from a common ancestor", but as a people conceives it, where such units exist - then we realize that these rarely stop at the frontiers of humanity. For in the clan, the lineage or the totemic group, there is always more than just men and women; there are also all kinds of non-humans who make up the mixed unity formed by these classes of beings, and who are not added as an afterthought as a set for the theater of human actions, or as mere purveyors of metaphors to better express the sociality of these actions. The idea that anthropology's unit of analysis is provided by humans alone is thus a blockage that has obscured analysis of the properly political dimensions of communal life elsewhere than in modern collectives. For the invention of modern societies involved a purification process: non-humans were removed from the city, leaving only humans, the sole subjects of law. The representation that the moderns forged of their form of association, society, was then transposed to the analysis of non-modern collectives, along with a host of specificities, such as the division between nature and culture, between belief and knowledge, between fact and value, or the idea that a clan or lineage contains only humans. We need to break with this Eurocentric and anthropocentric conception of politics.