Thinking about forms of human - non-human cohabitation, co-evolution and co-construction

The relationship between animals, plants and humans has long been studied and analysed by anthropologists. This is borne out by the many monographs from the 19th and 20th centuries on pastoral, agricultural/horticultural or hunter-gatherer communities, whose social systems, ways of perceiving and thinking (totemism and animism) and modes of subsistence (domestication, hunting, gathering) closely entwine humans and non-humans.

More recently, a branch of anthropology—ethnoscience—emerged in France with the creation in 1963 of the Laboratoire d'ethnobotanique (which became the Laboratoire d'ethnobotanique et d'ethnozoologie in 1966) attached to the National Museum of Natural History. This branch has focused particularly on taxonomy and the impact of animal and plant behavior on the constitution of local knowledge. The leading figure in this branch of anthropology (but also of ethnolinguistics and the anthropology of technology), which Jacques Barrau called the disciplinary “wall-passer,” was André-Georges Haudricourt. In his memorial book (A.-G. Haudricourt and P. Dibie, Les pieds sur terre, 1987: 169), he writes: "If ethnozoology is to have any meaning, it must break away from the zootechnics from which it originated and take a genuine interest in the reciprocal relations between humans and animals. The question is: which of these two mammals has influenced the other?“ And further on: ”One question remains unanswered for me: what if it was other living beings that educated humans, if horses taught them to run, frogs to swim, and plants to be patient?"

His work, conducted mainly in the field in New Caledonia, advocates referring to the animals and plants that surround humans in order to translate the unique ways in which humans exist in the world. Still in Melanesia, other notable names worth mentioning include, but are not limited to: Jacques Barrau, Ralph Bulmer, Florence Brunois, Peter Dwyer and Monica Minnegal, Steven Feld and Roy Rappaport, who have studied naturalist knowledge and the interdependence between humans and non-humans in a forest (Papua New Guinea) or island (Oceania) environment.

This theme gained momentum with, in particular, Philippe Descola's anthropological work in the Amazon. In an interview conducted in 2016 at the Collège de France, he confided: "... anthropology was born out of a peculiarity reported by observers: in many parts of the world under colonial rule, people did not seem to make very clear distinctions between humans and animals, plants and spirits, or other forms of life presumed to be present in the environment. It can be said that anthropology was born out of the need to shed light on this mystery...“ (”Animals and History, Beyond Nature and Culture," Revue d'histoire du XIXe siècle 54, 2017). In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France for the creation of the Chair of Anthropology of Nature, he starts from the observation that “nature does not exist as a sphere of autonomous realities” (Anthropology of Nature, Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France, March 29, 2001), recalling that the formal distinction between nature and culture, far from being universal, is a late characteristic of Western thought. And that it is time for “anthropology to challenge this legacy by rethinking its field of activity and its tools so as to include in its object much more than anthropos, the whole community of beings linked to it and long relegated to a supporting role” (p. 7). Mirroring this understanding of humans as living beings in their environment, the question of the agency of the beings and things with which humans interact is also raised. It is thanks to this ontological shift, influenced by related paradigms developed mainly in the field of the sociology of science under the influence of Bruno Latour (“Comment redistribuer le grand partage ?” [How to redistribute the great divide?], Revue de synthèse, IIIe S, 110: 203-2, 1983), that the study of the relationships between humans and animals (and to a lesser extent plants) has seen a resurgence of interest over the past two decades, becoming a privileged field of experimentation for the erosion of the great divisions between the social and the biological, between humanity and animality.

Today, research on human-animal relationships seems to be influenced by three trends. 

• the first (following on from Descola's work) which invites us to consider animals (almost) as humans by virtue of their intrinsic qualities (individuality, subjectivity, affectivity, intentionality);
• The second encourages us to describe humans, animals, and things on the same level, without prejudging the nature of their specific cognitive or affective properties, advocating an “interactive ethno-ethology” and aiming to conduct " an ethnography of how individuals perceive and conceive, in the course of their interaction with them, the behavior of living beings and how they react to these behaviors“ (F. Brunois, ”Pour une approche interactive des savoirs locaux : l'ethno-ethologie," Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 120/121, 2005: 34);
• Finally, the third view considers animals as subjects that create relationships, with and from which we should think and develop our knowledge; each having the ability to influence the other and transform their ways of doing things (V. Despret, What would animals say if... we asked them the right questions? , 2012).

The aim here is to revive a certain Melanesian “tradition” inaugurated by Haudricourt while continuing the “symmetrical shift” of human-nonhuman relations through the prism of the particularities of Pacific societies, whose commonalities, beyond their diversity, lie in their connection to aquatic environments, particularly the sea, the synergies and exchanges they conceive and establish between terrestrial and marine environments, and the special relationship they maintain with certain transformative agents, primarily metamorphosis. The processes by which a human adopts the perspective of another and “becomes” that other are multimodal. They involve, for example, physical transformations (tattooing, scarification, dance), metabolic transformations (ingestion of blood, mucus), technical transformations (artifacts as substitutes and extensions of the body) and/or social transformations (exchange of names), and highlight the porosity of the boundaries between different categories of beings.