PHILIPPE DESCOLA  There are the self-proclaimed heirs and then there are those classified as heirs. I wouldn’t like to say I’m Lévi-Strauss’s heir. I was his student, I place myself in the structuralist tradition and it’s true that I continue his work in a very particular direction, but not as his heir.

PD  But not a detour from the methods. Lévi-Strauss used the opposition between nature and culture, underlining that it was a methodological, not an ontological opposition. I believed that it was possible and necessary to stop using these classificatory tools, so that we could imagine other ways to thematise and organise the discontinuities between humans and non-humans. From this point of view, I take a step sideways, but the method that I use is the structural method, which even within the order of phenomena consists in focusing on the differences, not the similarities.

PD  You’re right, but the tools that I use were forged by Lévi-Strauss. It’s a big change, without a doubt. The concept of ‘nature’ is central to Western metaphysics because it allows us to qualify, by default, all the notions this concept is opposed to: nature and art, nature and history, nature and religion, nature and consciousness, etc. But the concept itself is imprecise and can lend itself to numerous forms of alternation and opposition regarding other concepts. It plays a fundamental role in Western metaphysics. And the moderns, the only ones who believe in the existence of nature and culture, are also the only ones who have done it. What we see as a positive singularity and a legacy of Enlightenment philosophy, the difference between nature and culture, actually keeps us from being universal, since we are the only ones who think this way. Our dualistic cosmology is completely singular in the history of humanity, although it took some time for it to take on its current form, with successive iterations since Greek philosophy, including Christianity and the scientific revolution. The question that I ask is the following: how can these concepts that arose from a singular historical path (and which characterises a very singular cosmology) be used, as we do in the social sciences and in our everyday lives, to treat phenomena in a universal fashion? In this way, I draw attention to the false universalism of modernity.

PD  In the first part of my book Par-delà nature et culture I used as an epigraph a poem by Fernando Pessoa, by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro to be more precise, which says that there are trees, weeds, flowers, hills, but no nature, [I saw there’s no Nature, / Nature doesn’t exist, / There are hills, valleys, plains, / There are trees, flowers, weeds, / There are rivers and stones, / But there isn’t a whole all this belongs to, / And a real and true wholeness / Is a sickness of our ideas. // Nature is parts without a whole / This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.] Therefore, a poet of the calibre of Pessoa had already reached this conclusion. I don’t have his poetic ability, but I have the ethnographic experience with the Achuar, in the Amazon, which made me realise that what we called ‘nature’ and ‘society’ made no sense, since there wasn’t nature, on the one hand, and society, on the other. On the contrary, there was a relationship of profound continuity, because for the Achuar, plants and animals are endowed with a spirit, a soul. In fact, they are social partners, not an external nature. Realising this, on the ground, led me to extend my research beyond the Achuar, in the Amazon, to other regions of the world, developing a comparative anthropology and using the texts of my colleagues. This is how I understood that the opposition between nature and society was an absolute singularity of the moderns. Since I don’t have the clear-sightedness of a poet such as Pessoa, it was an ethnographic shock that caused me to call into question the universality of the opposition between nature and culture.

PD  It’s paradoxical and provocative. It’s an oxymoron…