DISSOLVING NATURE IN CULTURE

Abstract

Biological attention to evolution and animal life has primarily emphasized a filiative approach that, although important, overlooks crucial dimensions highlighted by an ecological approach to animal human societies. Increased attention to singular animals and critical scrutiny of the operating definitions of society and culture indicates that vast dimensions of this area have been overlooked and remain to be studied. It is particularly important to pursue the aspects of signification, meaning, individuation, and subjectivity. Attention to animal human societies, or to animal cultures that develop in the heart of human cultures, shows that humans and animals often form extimate relations based on particular aspects of animal subjectivity. With certain species we share a dense form of intertwining built on natural, cultural, and biographical histories. Beyond that, an argument on biosemiotic grounds maintains that culture is intrinsic to the living.

Keywords:

• ecological approach
• singular animal
• reciprocal familiarity
• extimate relations

Notes

Translated from the “Postface” to Dominique Lestel, Les Origines animales de la culture (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). © Editions Flammarion, Paris, 2001 and 2003.

1 Vinciane Despret and Isabelle Stengers know how much this postface owes to them.

2 But things progress. See the article by Boesch and Tomasello on the archeology of stone tools used by chimpanzees in Taï, Côte d'Ivoire.

3 We should specify that there are some polytechnicians who have become researchers in psychology or cognitive sciences, and that they are all excellent … 

4 We have shown that animals such as rehabilitated orangutans must really be cognitively educated to be able to survive in the forest before being released there and that an important part of the difficulties encountered were cognitive (Grundmann and Lestel; Grundmann et al.). For her doctoral thesis at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Emmanuelle Grundmann spent a number of months in the forest of Meratus (East Kalimantan) observing the learning of rehabilitated orangutans.

5 As for French intellectual elites, one sole example will suffice to show the disaster of the current situation regarding these questions: not long ago, “nature” was one of the themes of the program for the agrégation in philosophy – a prestigious competitive examination for French apprentice intellectuals. Having had the occasion to thumb through some of the anthologies of fundamental texts and study guides offered to the candidates, I was surprised to see that Darwinism (which is, however, the great scientific and intellectual revolution of the West concerning nature) was purely and simply ignored! But the student could no doubt find consolation for this “oversight” in reading that which Heidegger said about the animal.

6 I invent (almost) nothing: some years ago, ecological and vegetarian activists said they were ready to defend biotechnologies uniquely in the case where we could genetically modify foxes to make them into vegetarians (qtd in Despret).