Preface

The proper essence [le propre] of the visible is to have a layer [doublure] of invisibility in the strict sense, which makes it present as a certain absence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty1

This book is the result of a series of experiments linked circumstantially. Experiments that were also lived experiences: first of all, a more theoretical one that took me in the mid-1970s to the Achuar people in the upper Amazon region in order to study how they related to their environment. At the end of that study, I was forced to conclude that none of the descriptive categories I had brought in my ethnologist's tool kit had proved adequate for describing what my hosts were doing and saying. I had sought in vain among the Achuar something that resembled nature or culture, history or religion, ecological knowledge clearly distinguishable from practices of magic, or systems of resource exploitation governed by technical effectiveness alone. The very concept of society, that hypostasis with reference to which our so singular sciences identify themselves, was a quite poor descriptor of a gathering of humans, animals, plants, and spirits whose everyday interactions flouted the barrier between species and the differences in capabilities among beings. All the analytic levels I had been taught to distinguish were mingled here - economic activities were religious from beginning to end, political organization appeared only in rites and vendettas, and an evanescent ethnic identity depended essentially on the memory of conflicts - so much so that I had to imagine a mode of description that did justice and gave coherence to the ethnographic jumble without taking the usual paths.2

This first experiment, inductive and reflexive, gave rise to a second, more theoretical one that kept me occupied for a long time. The Achuar had made me aware that the intellectual tools of the social sciences called upon a quite particular type of cosmological and epistemological configuration that had grown out of Enlightenment philosophy - a universal nature of which each of the myriad cultures was its own limited version. This configuration corresponded hardly at all to what I had observed on the ground or to what other ethnographers had reported from other regions of the world, nor did it correspond to what historians have described for other periods of human history. So, I launched into a comparative study of the various ways of detecting and stabilizing the continuities and discontinuities between humans and nonhumans that had been attested by ethnographic and historical documents, with the goal of bringing to light what might be called forms of "worlding."

Taking the opposite tack from the classic idea in anthropology and in history, according to which there is only one world, a sort of self-sufficient totality awaiting representation from different vantage points, I thought it was more appropriate - and more respectful of those whose ways of acting and being I was struggling to describe - to consider the diversity of customs as a diversity of worlding processes.3 By this I mean the ways of actualizing the myriad qualities, phenomena, beings, and relations that can be objectivized by humans by means of the ontological filters they use to discriminate among everything their environment allows them to apprehend. Consequently, when the movement of worlding is initiated for a human, that is, at the moment of birth, it does not produce a "vision of the world," that is, one version among others of a transcendent reality to which only Science, or God, could have integral access; it produces a world in the proper sense of the word, a world saturated with meanings and swarming with multiple causalities, one that, around its edges, straddles other worlds of the same kind that have been actualized by other humans in analogous circumstances. And it is the relative coincidence of some of these worlds, the common reference points, and the shared experiences to which they attest, that give rise to what is ordinarily called a culture.

Taking up Marcel Mauss's idea that "humans identify themselves with things and identify things with themselves, while having at the same time a sense of the differences and the resemblances that they are establishing,"4 I have called these ontological filters that structure worlding "modes of identification." They can be seen as cognitive and sensory-motor schemas that are incorporated during socialization into a particular physical and social milieu; they function as framing arrangements for our practices, our intuitions, and our perceptions without mobilizing any propositional knowledge. In other words, it is this type of mechanism that allows us to recognize some things as meaningful and to ignore others, to link sequences of actions without having to think about them, to interpret events and utterances in a certain way, to channel our inferences about the properties of objects present in our environment. In short, these schemas encompass everything that goes without saying and everything that people say unthinkingly.

Still, despite the great diversity of qualities that can be detected in beings and things, or that can be inferred on the basis of indices offered by appearances and behaviors, one can plausibly think that the ways in which these qualities are organized are not very numerous. Our judgments of identity, that is, the recognition of similarities among objects or singular events, cannot depend on a series of analytic comparisons carried out one term at a time. For reasons of cognitive economy, they have to be able to be carried out rapidly and unconsciously by induction on the basis of shared schemas, arrangements that allow us to structure the qualities perceived and to organize behaviors. On the basis of a fairly simple thought experiment, I have thus hypothesized that there are no more than four modes of identification, that is, four ways of systematizing ontological inferences, each being based on the types of resemblance and difference that humans detect between themselves and nonhumans on a double plane, physical and moral. Relying in part on a conventional terminology, I have called these four contrasting ways of detecting continuities and discontinuities in the folds of the world animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism.5

Animism, which I had discovered in the course of my conversations with the Achuar, is the imputation to nonhumans of an interiority of the human type - the assumption that most beings have a "soul" - combined with the observation that every class of existents, every kind of thing, is supplied with a body of its own that gives it access to a particular world that it inhabits in its own way. The world of a butterfly is not the same as that of a catfish, which is not the same as that of a human, either, or of a palm tree, or of a blowgun, or of the race of spirits that protects monkeys, for each of these worlds is at once the condition for and the result of the actualization of singular physical functions that the other forms of existence do not possess. By shaking up my complacent certainties, by bringing me the revelation that other worlds could unfold on the margins of the one in which I had felt comfortable, animism triggered the study of which this book is one stage. By contrast, it was in the texts, in the great monographs about the Australian Aborigines from early in the last century, that I began to glimpse what totemism was, and with great astonishment. For, quite unlike ordinary intuition, totemic identification consists in basing the resemblance of humans, animals, and plants belonging to the same totemic class not on the similarity of their appearances but on the sharing of a set of physical and moral qualities that the totemic prototype - generally designated by an animal name - transmits generation after generation to the human and nonhuman individuals making up the group that bears its name. Thus, the human and nonhuman members of the eagle class do not resemble eagles and do not descend from them as from ancestors; rather, they share properties with eagles - speed, decisiveness, distance vision, combativeness, endurance - that are more manifest in eagles than in any other being, but whose effective source derives from one of the totemic beings that once gave the world order and meaning.

In the course of my readings, a third mode of identification had arisen from the fortuitous intersection between Chinese thought as seen by Marcel Granet, Renaissance thought as seen by Michel Foucault, and Aztec thought as seen by Alfredo López Austin. Despite the cultural abyss that seemed to separate these civilizations, all three were obsessed with analogy as a way of reducing the burgeoning of differences among the world's objects: their constitutive elements, the states, situations, and qualities that describe them, and the properties with which they are endowed when they are connected in broadened networks of correspondences.6 In "analogist" ontologies, everything is meaningful, everything refers to everything else: no singularity is left aside on the interpretive pathways that make it possible to graft a color onto a moral quality, a day of the year onto a constellation, or a mental state onto a social function. As for the last form of worlding, the one in which I was brought up, I have labeled it - not very imaginatively - as "naturalist."

A distinguishing feature of the naturalist form is that it reverses the animist formula. Its practitioners are of course unaware of this,...