The composition of worlds or the return of Humboldt. Around the work of Philippe Descola

Abstract

Philippe Descola 's work has caused one of the major theoretical upheavals in the human sciences in recent decades. By denaturalizing the very idea of nature by highlighting the plurality of ontologies ordering relations between humans and non-humans, and thus provincializing the great anthropocentric division constitutive of the European notion of " modernity ", Philippe Descola's work has not only clarified the contours of " the anti-myth " of our societies. In a Humboldtian vein, it has reopened the space of descriptive possibilities by restoring to the narrative of the historian and ethnologist those beings who, through the interplay of (in)differences, had been banished from it. Philippe Descola's " anthropologie de la nature " thus invites us to describe better, i.e. to describe " plus " : to multiply the presences that stir our histories - - not in the form of fixed identities, but as labile entities whose properties are only those fleetingly assigned to them by their interweaving. It is in this narrative and descriptive perspective that the exchange between historians and anthropologists can be revived.