Anthropology beyond Anthropos: A Historical Insight into French Contributions to Environmental Anthropology
Résumé
More than a translation, this article is the adaptation for an international audience, of a book chapter published in Humanités environnementales, Enquêtes et contre-enquêtes (Blanc, Demeulenaere and Feuerhahn, 2017). The book explores how different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have thematised and problematised environmental issues. The text deals specifically with anthropology, with a dual focus on the contribution of French anthropology, and on its somewhat forgotten margins (i.e. cultural technology, ethno-ecology), overshadowed by the intellectual and institutional prestige of Descola's anthropology of nature - discussed abroad under the label 'French philosophical anthropology'.
Based on an historical investigation, it challenges the common claim that the opening up of anthropology beyond the anthropos is something new. Instead, in a nod to the provocative Latour, I argue that “anthropology has never been modern”, in the sense that most of its research traditions have not taken for granted, and have never drawn on, the divide between nature and culture.
In the end, this text is a call for a better recognition of the polyphony of academic traditions that have historically dealt with the relationship between societies and their environmental, in order to enrich today’s environmental anthropology and make it more relevant to face contemporary ecological challenges.
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