What is ?

For this last lecture at the Collège de France, we wanted to address what undoubtedly gives anthropology its distinctive character, and what has in any case been one of the guiding axes of the professor's research and teaching since the beginning of his career : the exercise of comparison. And as the forms of comparison he has practised have varied over time, it was inevitable that this last lecture should also focus, through a reflexive analysis of the type of comparatism he now applies, on the kind of anthropology he favours and whose merits he has tried to illustrate at the Collège de France. Broadly speaking, it could be said that in the space of some forty years he has gone from a naive, intuitive comparatism, driven by wonder at his discovery in Amazonia of ways of doing and thinking that were for him radically original, to a broader, more methodical comparatism, marked by the conviction that it is not a single people, or even a single regional way of life, but rather a knowledge of the plurality of social and cultural forms of expression, provided we know how to draw from the contrasts these forms present the sparks of a less conventional way of thinking about the way in which human beings associate with each other and with other beings. This is also the condition for conceiving other forms of association, which have never been inventoried by ethnologists or historians, but which the present state of the world urgently demands that we try to imagine.