Everything now thus depends on the way we are going to character-
ize this work of collection. One of two things must be true: either the
work has already been carried out, or else it remains to be done. All
(political) epistemology and theNaturpolitikthat follows affirm that,
under the auspices of nature, this work has been, for the most part,
completed;political ecology affirms, according to us, that the work
is just beginning.To participate in the development of political insti-
tutions adapted to the exploration of the common world and the
“same earth,” anthropology must becomeexperimental.What politi-
cal choice does it actually face? Must it always retain multiculturalism
against a background of unified nature that serves as its involuntary
philosophy?
Since the seventeenth century, it has been common to distinguish
between what things are in themselves independently of our knowl-
edge of them, independently of the way they are experienced by a con-
sciousness, and what are calledsecondary qualities. When we speak of
atoms, particles, photons, or genes, we are designating primary quali-
ties. When we speak of colors, odors, or lights, we are designating sec-
ondary qualities. Nothing is more innocuous than this distinction, at
first glance. Yet we need only modify it very slightly to bring fully to
light the political arrangement that it surreptitiously authorizes. The
primary qualities in fact make up thecommon world that we all share.
“We are all,” we like to say, “equally made up of genes and neurons,
proteins and hormones, in a universe of atoms, void, and energy.” On
the other hand, the secondary qualities divide us, because they refer to
the specifics of our psyche, our languages, our cultures, or our para-
digms. As a result, if we define politics, as I have done, not as the con-
quest of power inside the Cave alone, but as the progressive composi-
tion of a common world to share, we notice that the division between
primary and secondary qualities has already donethe bulk of the politi-
cal work.When we enter a universe whose furnishings have been al-
ready defined, we know from the outset what we all have in common,
what keeps us together. There remains what divides us, the secondary
qualities, but this is not an essential division, because their inaccessi-
ble essences are located elsewhere, in the form of primary qualities
that are, moreover, invisible.^56
Now we can see that if the anthropology of earlier times paid so
much attention to the multiplicity of cultures, it is because it took uni-
versal nature as a given. If it could collect so many diversities, it is be-
WHY POLITICAL ECOLOGY HAS TO LET GO OF NATURE
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