A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Abstract
On the face of it, the anthropology of nature is something of an oxymoron, since for several centuries in the West, nature has been characterized by the absence of man, and man by what he has been able to overcome within himself. But nature does not exist as a sphere of autonomous realities for all peoples. By postulating a universal distribution of humans and non-humans in two separate ontological domains, we are ill-equipped to analyze all those systems of objectification of the world in which a formal distinction between nature and culture is absent. Moreover, such a distinction seems to run counter to what the evolutionary and life sciences have taught us about the phyletic continuity of organisms. Our singularity in relation to the rest of the existing world is relative, just as our awareness of it is relative.
