outside politics. If they do not form the lovely unities imposed on
them by exoticism, at least the other cultures are not blind in one eye.
As a discipline, anthropology has always hesitated on this point: it
has only quite recently succeeded in becoming indispensable to politi-
cal ecology^53 —this is one reason we cannot hold a grudge against com-
mon sense for having so badly resisted the exotic baubles that deep
ecology sought to foist off on it, on the pretext that barbarians respect
Mother Earth more than the civilized peoples do. From its earliest
contacts at the dawn of modern times, anthropology has understood
that something was amiss between what it called “the savages” and na-
ture, that there was in Westerners’ nature something that other peo-
ples found unassimilable. But it has taken a very long time—three cen-
turies, let us say—to understand that the natureofthe anthropologists
was too politicized for them to grasp the lesson of the “noble sav-
ages.”^54
Let us quickly go back over the path that made it possible to trans-
form this very particular politics of nature. The first reflex was to view
“primitives” as “children of nature,” something intermediate between
animals, humans, and Westerners. This move was not friendly toward
animals, savages, or Westerners, the latter never having lived “in” na-
ture in any form. The second, more agreeable stage entailed a judg-
ment that natives, while as different from nature as whites, neverthe-
less lived “in harmony” with nature, respecting and protecting it. This
hypothesis did not hold up under the scrutiny of ethnology, prehis-
tory, or ecology; these disciplines rapidly produced multiple examples
of pitiless destruction of ecosystems, massive disharmony, countless
instances of disequilibrium, even fierce hatred for the environment.
In fact, under the name of harmony, the anthropologists gradually
noticed that they should not look for particularly sympathetic rela-
tionships with nature, but for the presence of a categorization, a classi-
fication, an ordering of beings that did not seem to make any sharp
distinction between things and people. The difference no longer lay in
the savages’ not treating nature well, but rather in their not treating it
at all.
The third, more sophisticated stage thus involved viewing natives
(rebaptized non-Western peoples in the meantime) as having formed
complex cultures whose categories established correspondencesbe-
tween the order of nature and the social order. Among these peoples,
POLITICS OF NATURE
44