The Fragile Aid of Comparative Anthropology
Political ecology has finally taken the drama out of the perennial con-
flict between nature and the social order. If the lesson political ecology
has to teach is not obvious, this is not, as its theoreticians still some-
times believe, because political ecology has invented exotic new forms
of fusion or harmony or love between man and nature, but because it
has definitively secularized the dual political question, the dual con-
flict of loyalty between the power of nature and the power of society.
We have no idea at all what things themselves would look like if they
had not always been engaged in the battle of naturalization. What
would the entities we have callednonhumans* look like if they were
not wearing the uniform of matters of fact marching in step in the
conquest of subjectivities? What would humans look like if they no
longer wore the uniform of partisans bravely resisting the tyranny of
objectivity? If we are going to attempt to redraw the new institutions
of democracy in the remainder of this work, from here on we need
to have access to the multiplicity of associations of humans and non-
humans that the collective is precisely charged withcollecting.In the
absence of conceptual institutions or forms of life that could serve as
alternatives to the modern Constitution, we run the risk of remaining
engaged in spite of ourselves in wars between realism and social con-
structivism that do not concern us in the least, forgetting in the pro-
cess the entire novelty of the political ecology that we were seeking to
deploy.
Fortunately, the anthropology of non-Western cultures is generous
enough to offer us an alternative. To understand this offer, alas, we
must detour by way of another seeming paradox and disappoint those
who imagine that other cultures will have a “richer” vision of nature
than our own Western version. It is impossible to blame those who
share such illusions. Countless words have been written ridiculing the
miserable whites who are guilty of wanting to master, mistreat, domi-
nate, possess, reject, violate, and rape nature. No book of theoretical
ecology fails to shame them by contrasting the wretched objectivity of
Westerners with the timeless wisdom of “savages,” who for their part
are said to “respect nature,” “live in harmony with her,” and plumb
her most intimate secrets, fusing their souls with those of things,
speaking with animals, marrying plants, engaging in discussions on an
POLITICS OF NATURE
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