the world and of yourselves—it would be so interesting to compare
your visions to the equally factitious ones of your neighbors.”^30 Know-
ing in advance what the entities to be taken into account are, or tak-
ing them into account without the claim to reality that resides in
them: each of these approaches commits an error—the first against
perplexity, the second against consultation—that we now know
how to ferret out. No, unquestionably, neither mononaturalism or
multiculturalism could raise the question of number in a useful way.^31
If anthropology stopped there, it would become truly barbarous. It has
to change roles by becomingexperimental.
As soon as we introduce the expression “multinaturalism,” we
oblige anthropology to complicate the modernist solution to the polit-
ical problem of composition of a common world. The word reminds
us that no collective can claim to assemble without giving itself the
complex means to verify, in relation to the humans and the non-
humans that it unifies, what they say about it after their own fashion.
To speak about unity, it is thus not enough to anticipate a place re-
served for all the excluded entities, no matter how comfortable that
place might be: that place has to be designed by the excluded entities
themselves, and according to their own categories, as I noted in the
chapter above.^32 Neither ecumenism nor catholicity nor social democ-
racy nor political economy norNaturpolitikcan define for the others
and in their place the position that is appropriate for them. Fortu-
nately, despite the fears of those who always want to bring us back to
the age of the Cave, multinaturalism consecrates not the victory of
multiculturalism but its defeat, for the latter served only as a counter-
part to mononaturalism. The absolute relativists, if such beings exist,
could not welcomealiensin a civil fashion, since they would react to
such novelties with a simple blasé shrug of the shoulders: nothing, in
their eyes, could make a difference any longer.
With political ecology, we truly enter another world, one that no
longer has nature and culture as ingredients, a world that can there-
fore neither simplify the question of the number of collectives any
longerby unifying it through naturenor complicate the questionbyac-
cepting an inevitable multiplicity of incommensurable cultures.We enter
a world composed of insistent realities, in which propositions* en-
dowed with habits no longer agree either to keep the institutions
charged with accepting them quiet, or to be accepted by becoming
EXPLORING COMMON WORLDS
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