Area 4. Between the human and the non-human: critical recompositions

The work taking place under this theme is oriented by a twofold observation: first, the awareness of the upheaval or impoverishment of human ecologies known as the “Anthropocene” has been reflected in the humanities by the deployment of inquiries aimed at repopulating the social sciences with new entities (hitherto referred to by default as “non-human”), as well as by increased attention to the correlations and interdependencies between phenomena on a deeply variable scale. The second observation is the growing rise of a political sensibility that attempts to bring habitability back to the forefront and emphasizes its relational and material nature. Paradoxically, however, everything seems to be done to render these two aspects invisible: the materiality of our surroundings, infrastructures, environments, and processes of composition, but also ecological chains of interdependence and the diversity of modes of association and relationship.

Anthropology over the last thirty years has largely contributed to making use of this point of view to critique the project of the “moderns,” a project synonymous with the impoverishment or even purification of the composition of the world. The critique highlights the imposition of a division between the human and the non-human based in part on the attribution of anthropocentric capacities and relationships. The work in this area aims, on an empirical level, to continue the motion of the kind of inquiry that has already been initiated, while radically renewing it on a theoretical level. Three types of problems arise: How can we describe the composition of the things and environments of human beings? Up to which scales is it interesting for anthropology to situate itself? To what (im)perceptibles should we be sensitive?