cause anthropology could grab hold of them by getting them to detach
themselves from a common background that had been unified in ad-
vance. There are thus two equally unstable solutions to this problem
of unity: mononaturalism and multiculturalism. Mononaturalism is
not at all self-evident; it is simply one of the possible solutions to an
aborted experiment in constructing a common world:onenature,a
multiplicityof cultures; unity in the hands of the exact sciences, multi-
plicity in the hands of the human sciences. Multiculturalism*, if it is
more than a bogeyman conjured up to frighten small children, offers
a different but equally premature solution to the exploration of the
common world: not only are cultures diverse, but all can make equal
claims to define reality in their own terms; they no longer stand out
against a background of unified nature; each is incommensurable with
the others; there is no longer any common world at all. On the one
hand, an invisible world, but one that is visible to the eyes of scientists
whose work remains hidden; on the other hand, a visible and percep-
tible world, but one that is inessential because it has been emptied of
its essences. On the one hand, a world without value, since it corre-
sponds to nothing experienced, but a world that alone is essential be-
cause it has to do with the real nature of phenomena; on the other
hand, a world of values, but a world which is also worthless because it
has access to no durable reality, even though it is the only world we ex-
perience subjectively. The solution of mononaturalism stabilizes na-
ture at the risk of emptying the notion of culture of all substance and
reducing it to mere representations; the solution of multiculturalism
stabilizes the notion of culture at the risk of endangering the univer-
sality of nature and reducing it to an illusion. And it is this cockeyed
arrangement that passes for good sense! To get the experimentation
with a common world (which has been prematurely shut down by
these two calamitous solutions) started up again, we shall have to
avoidboth the notion of culture and the notion of nature.This is what
makes political ecology’s use of the findings of anthropology so deli-
cate, and may explain why it has refrained up to now from using them
more fully.
A comparison will enable us to provide a better understanding of
the instability into which we must not be afraid to enter in order to re-
store full meaning to what could be called politicswithoutnature. Be-
fore feminism, the word “man” had the character of an unmarked cat-
POLITICS OF NATURE
48