Juliet J. Fall, University of Geneva
Choosing books of the decade is so exciting as to be totally paralyzing: fear of leaving out an unknown discovery, or a particularly friendly face, or appearing to simply pander to fashion. So instead of offering anything definite, I will simply write about two rather intriguing books that I liked and that continue to make me think, one of which bounces off the other.
Philippe Descola’s Par-delà nature et culture is an extraordinarily ambitious book, in the French universalizing tradition of putting forward grand theories. Uniquely, however, this is done with subtlety and gentle humour, stretching to a landscape of human and non-human beings that owes as much to Latourian thinking as to Structuralism. In a French context where one is often an “élève de…” far into one’s career, this distancing from the ghost of Lévy-Strauss is all the more remarkable. Descola (http://www.college-de-france.fr/site/philippe-descola/) was born in 1949, and is French anthropologist, now member of the prestigious Collège de France. He starts his tale of decentering Western knowledge and the modern binary of nature / culture with accounts of his fieldwork in South America, presenting his own intellectual coming-of-age and distancing from accepted truths. This is a very effective pedagogical mode of engagement, leading the reader towards what are delightfully iconoclastic ideas for the academic context he is working within. If critiques and rejections of binaries are old hat in postmodern Anglo social sciences, this is far less the case in French social sciences – and particularly in geography. (See for instance Michel Sivignon’s reaction http://www.cafe-geo.net/article.php3?id_article=811; and Emmanuel Lezy’s reported reaction http://www.cafe-geo.net/article.php3?id_article=808). Yet this is not just political ecology ten years too late: instead it is an original, thought-provoking toolbox.
This ambitious work rather grandly suggests classifying all human cultures into four categories: animist, naturalist, totemic and analogist. Emmanuel Lézy, a French geographer, in a published review of the book (Lézy & Chouquer 2006, page 9) suggested using these classifications literally to map out cultures, in a sort of rather scary Samuel Huntington-style portrait of civilisations, only to conclude that Descola was wrong because China and India didn’t fit neatly. This seems to be profoundly missing the point: these are not spatial categories, as Michel Serres shows beautifully in his book Ecrivains, savants et philosophes font le tour du monde that picks up these categories up and plays with them. Serres uses Descola’s toolbox strategically, and with happy malice, to displace usual categories and to narrate not human cultures, but a personalized history of science: “to create a complete picture of my life, our daily practices, our philosophies and our literatures” (1) (Serres 2009, page 41). Now that is French theoretical ambition in a nutshell! In this boundless and surprisingly-readable reorganisation, Aristotle finds himself next to Flaubert and Linné (as totemists), but also next to La Fontaine, Baden-Powell and teddy bears; Proust is with Galileo, Bergson, Plato and mathematics (as animists); Leibniz is the arch-analogist and so on – but not only, and rarely rigidly. Serres positions himself successively in each of these categories (totemist page 15; animist page 43; analogist page 72; naturalist page 114), showing what is gained, and what is lost, as one quite literally navigates between them.
This book is what he calls his third world tour, the last of three coming-of-age or initiation voyages designed to turn him into a sage, or helping him to become a real philosopher (“accéder à une sagesse renvoyée au loin”, page 5): an intensely personal book written at the end of a life in which biography is woven into argument. He delights in every inch and every minute of his travels, filling his narrative with his usual creative etymologies and word games. Like Descola for human cultures, Serres is intent on designing a coherent theoretical framework for the social sciences. He is particularly concerned about understanding how real innovation is rendered impossible through the very tools we use to explain it: “we remain blind to the question of emergence in the sciences, because a transhistoric and virtual process constantly stalks us. (…) Or, inversely, we decide not to decide; we decide not to sit in a tribunal. Critique ruins invention. Teachers and professors teach the tools of critique to young people, no doubt through powerlessness and inability to invent anything themselves, but also specially because they deeply dread the innovation that will put all order and form into crisis” (2) (Serres 2009, page 35). This reference to form reveals, he argues, the fundamentally totemistic and fetishistic basis of the sociologies of science – and specifically Anglo-Saxon analytical approaches – in which endless classifications are projected onto knowledge. And yet, of course, he delights in knowing that he is doing precisely that here:
“Considering concepts or theories in the same way that pensées sauvages examine quadrupeds or birds to distinguish and classify them with great finesse and unparalleled rigor, these authors simultaneously – and no doubt purposefully – classify themselves and get themselves noticed. Any newly distinct theory is like a beacon to the singular genius of its author. That the so-called most evolved humans behave and think like those thought of as archaic, o rapture! On the campus, I now see myself walking around like Tintin in an Arumbayas reserve; but isn’t Tintin always followed by Snowy, his very own totem?” (3) (Serres 2009, page 31).
These images of parallel worlds and worldviews, of the impossibility of being simultaneously in an animist, naturalist, analogist or totemic world – yet remaining able to travel between them – works well to disrupt linear narratives of progress and difference. In reading this, I constantly had in mind the long-standing debates within geography on the circulation of knowledge, on peripheries and hegemonies of knowledge. I find Serres’ iconoclastic approach productive specifically in drawing our attention to the multiple spaces, both physical and metaphorical, that we refer to when we think about these productions. Because when we think within particular paradigms “we do not only travel from lexicon to lexicon, but between tribes of traditions without translations” (4) (Serres 2009, page 117). On different islands of uncertain nature, we start to understand how simply assuming that knowledge should be ‘hybridised’ through encounter is problematic. This is not just a call for unalienable differences in standpoints, nor for quasi-geographical determinism and calls for spatially-determined difference. On the contrary, because Serres writes himself, and some others, successively into all of Descola’s categories, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not one more Grand Récit that surveys human knowledge, whatever Serres might choose to label it. Instead, it is a spatially complex, creatively relational way of looking at links and echoes, at difference and similarity, ahistoric but not acritical, finding links and neighbours in the most unlikely places. I thought it was a wonderful book, and it helped me to think.
References
Descola P, 2005 Par-delà nature et culture (Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, Paris: Gallimard) (Translated by Janet Lloyd as Beyond Nature and Culture, it will apparently be published in 2013 by University of Chicago Press)
Lézy E et Chouquer G, 2006, “Autour du livre de Philippe Descola”, Etudes rurales 178 229-252
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-etudes-rurales-2006-2-page-229.htm.
Serres M, 2009 Ecrivains, savants et philosophes font le tour du monde (Le Pommier, Paris)
Further reflections on Michel Serres will appear in: Fall, J.J. 2013. Writing (somewhere). In: Roger Lee, Anssi Paasi, Sarah Radcliffe. SAGE Handbook of Human Geography – Practising Human Geographies.
Notes
(1) Own translation from: « pour faire tableau complet, ma propre vie, nos usages familiers, nos philosophies et nos littératures ». All translations in the notes are my own.
(2) Own translation from: “nous restons aveugles à la question de l’émergence dans les sciences, parce qu’un procès transhistorique et virtuel ne cesse de rôder autour de nous. (…) Or, inversement, l’on trouve de ne pas trancher ; de ne pas siéger en quelque tribunal. La critique ruine l’invention. Les maîtres et les professeurs enseignent la critique aux jeunes gens, sans doute par impuissance d’inventer eux-mêmes, mais surtout parce qu’il craignent de façon panique l’invention qui met en crise tout ordre et tout format”.
(3) Own translation from : “Traitant concepts ou théories comme les pensées sauvages font des quadrupèdes et oiseaux, ils les distinguent et les classent avec une merveilleuse finesse, une rigueur sans pareille, et, en même temps – et sans doute dans ce but -, se classent eux-mêmes et se font remarquer. Toute théorie nouvellement distincte annonce au loin le génie différencié de son auteur. Que les plus évolués, dit-on, d’entre les humains agissent et pensent comme ceux que l’on croit archaïques, ô délices ! Sur le campus, je me vois passer désormais comme Tintin dans une réserve pour Arumbayas ; mais Tintin lui-même ne traîne-t-il pas derrière lui Milou, son totem?”
(4) “nous ne voyageons plus seulement de lexique en lexique, mais parmi des tribus de tradition sans traduction”.
