author: Thibaut Sardier , - June 28, 2019 at 17:14
translation: Google Translate; doxa-louise
INTERVIEW
Dominique Guillo: "We were too convinced that culture is above all based on a shared identity"
How to reconnect man to his environment? For many, this implies abandoning notions of nature and culture, responsible for the "great chasm" between humans and the rest of the world. In his book, the sociologist proposes instead to focus in detail on our interactions with animals, without trying to know at all costs if this implies "social relations".
Nature - culture: that's the enemy! In the view of many anthropologists and specialists in environmental problems, we must abolish this "great chasm" separation between what is properly human and what is not. On the one hand, because it is the cause of much damage: it is by relying on this opposition, forged in modern times, that Westerners, seeing themselves as masters and possessors of nature, might well have undertaken its exploitation to excess. On the other hand, because humans will only be able to save themselves from an ecological and climatic crisis by becoming aware of the links which unite them to the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
But is it enough to break the opposition between two notions to start such a process of "re-connection" ? This is the question presented by sociologist Dominique Guillo, research director at the CNRS, professor at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco, in his essay Les Fondements Oubliés De La Culture (The Forgotten Foundations of Culture) (Seuil). He summons dogs, monkeys and dolphins to propose a new method: to analyze in detail the interactions between humans and animals without worrying in advance about what is natural or cultural. Rather than challenging the validity of these great notions that structure our thinking, it is better to be interested in how they interpenetrate, explains the researcher who hopes to reconcile natural and social sciences.
Why is this nature-culture separation problematic for you?
The question of the frontier between the two is a trap that makes it necessary to polarize the debates with, on the one hand, phenomena that would fall under natural laws and, on the other, exclusively cultural facts. However, we can imagine other types of relationships that allow for less of a grip by conceptual tensions. We must leave aside questions of a priori definition of "what is natural" and "what is cultural", to better see how the two elements are related to each other, how we can think as one knowledge that comes from the natural sciences and the disciplines that have traditionally been responsible for culture.Why did you focus on the relationship between humans and animals?
In specific ways, research in Ethology on animal cultures and societies, on the one hand, and social science on humans, on the other, have given us a lot of new knowledge. These two research fields should be linked. The idea is to think about the relationships between beings in a given ecological space, whether they are of the same species or not. If we consider the problem in this way, we can get rid of thorny questions that surround "proper to man" - questions that arise, for example, when we place humans on the side of culture and animals on the side of nature - because one is simply interested in specific concrete interactions between actors and what they produce. Through the study of interactions between beings as different as a dog and a human, taking animals into account also makes it possible to show that we have too often thought that social bonding and culture are based above all on a shared identity, including in the study of interactions between humans. Now, by affirming this, we neglect a fact: what produces social life is also the adjustment of differences, which can create relations as rich as simple identity alignment. The study of relationships with animals thus produces a magnifying effect which highlights the importance of the play of these differences in all social life
The contributions of this perspective appear in a situation as simple as a dog tapping on a bay window so that his master lets him enter the house.
While being very commonplace, this example gives to see some amazing things. We often make erroneous assumptions about dogs, inherited from a current of research called behaviorism: they are passive, learn things mechanically , by simple conditioning, they are incapable of developing new behaviors not shaped by human intention. The example of the dog who scratches with his little paw on the bay window waiting it opened shows that this vision is inaccurate since it is here the dog that starts the interaction coming to act on the glass while the human is busy at something else. Moreover, we can see that there can exist between these two beings communicative signals which are not intentionally taught to the dog by the human: here, the signal - scratching on the window - agreed on between the dog and the human without the latter having tried to teach it to him. Beyond this example, we also know that animals can learn from humans things they themselves could not accomplish, as seen with blood-seeking dogs [able to track wounded prey during hunting, note]. We are thus far from a binary stimulus-response model, and this forbids us putting the dog on the side of a nature reduced to inert things, and the human on the side of culture. It seems to me that we must avoid asking theoretically whether or not animal interactions are "true" social interactions before having studied them in practice, otherwise we risk an insidiously sorting out of things. that we seek to observe,
You insist on the importance of Darwinism to think about these issues. Why is that?
Many who are interested in the human-animal relationship start from very general questions before carrying out empirical analysis: what does social mean? What is the mind? How do various societies think about the nature-culture link? They thus implicitly make an sort in the empirical abundance of things that they might observe, because of these previously defined frameworks. Darwinism, as it is applied in this book, avoids this pitfall. I'm not talking about the way it was - badly - interpreted in the XIXth century: evolution understood as the unfolding of a hierarchical series of increasingly complex beings, from the simplest unicellular beings to the humans of the complex industrial societies, through primates, then so-called "primitive" societies. In fact, Darwinism today is generally conceived of as an ecology, that is, in principle, a study of the relationships and of the evolution of behavioral, physiological, and morphological traits that interact dynamically with each other. in a given space. If we slide humans into this epistemological space we give ourselves the means to see how they produce effects on animals, which in turn influence them.
Anthropologist Philippe Descola also criticizes this "great chasm" between nature and culture that for him is characteristic of modernity. What do you make of this approach?
This thesis is inaccurate historically. In the XIXth century, the social sciences conceive the world in terms of the long hierarchical chain of beings of which I spoke earlier - a chain considered entirely "natural". But this ethnocentric and racialist vision implies a continuity between animals and humans, the so-called "primitive" societies being an intermediary between great apes societies and industrial societies. Moreover, anthropologists, like Charles Létourneau, then willingly lend faculties like religion to primates. So there is no fundamental cleavage between nature and culture, between humans and animals, neither with Durkheim nor Comte: there is a regular hierarchical progression. In reality, the nature / culture opposition appears in anthropology later, in the middle of XXth century, precisely to criticize the "biologism" and "racialism" of these approaches of the XIXth. From there, we see the irony of the story: the "great opposition" between nature and culture in the social sciences is not an emanation of Western scientific ontology: on the contrary, it came as a rebuke to the pretensions of this scientism to talk about the human.
And beyond this matter of a"grand opposition"?
Imagine for a moment that I admit that this partition of nature and culture dominates the Western view of things and that we must free ourselves from it to think about relationships with non-humans. That might allow me to say that forests think, that jaguars nourish ideas of revenge, that scallops are represented by fishermen in assemblies ... Why not. But by saying that, I do not learn anything new about animals themselves: I am just allowing myself to describe them as I wish. And finally animals lose all depth, because nothing can tell me why most humans behave differently given, for example, dogs or oysters, since there are no more, objectively-speaking , traits specific to the dog or of the oyster. The process is a reduction to a simple change of language. Take of something everyday, a person who walks his dog. One can transpose the description to the passive voice, write that "the dog is being walked by his human", and take from this the argument that the dog is a "real actor". This procedure can be confusing or attention-grabbing for the reader, but it does not actually change much to the concept or things it can teach us.
These difficulties are already visible in the ways we approach domestication.
The usual approach oscillates between two hypotheses: is domestication made clear by the culture of the societies in which animals live? Or is it more of an agronomic aspect that needs to be considered? These two options make the human the crucial element, neglecting other visions such as that of Darwinism, which makes it possible to account for the beginnings of domestication without referring to human intention as an indispensable explanatory factor. Following researcher David Rindos, it can be hypothesized that the domestication of some fruit trees, for example, was the result of unintended mechanisms: consumers of fruit, including animals, might have tended to eat bigger fruit. We would thus have a dispersal of those seeds, increasing the chances of development of these plants, with hefty fruit when compared to others.
If there was a cleavage to be abandoned as much as nature-culture, it would be human-non-human ...
There are two. Human / nonhuman, first. Non-human, it's a big carry-all term that quickly shows its limits when considering the agency of a dog, a shark or a leopard. The other cleavage that must be erased is that which separates the life sciences from the social sciences, which forces one to choose a camp: either we are work from one or the other. Either we focus on the effect of the collective on individuals, or we place ourselves squarely on the side of genetics. In reality, genes do not decide our cultural practices, and conversely, there is no cultural practice that does not strictly involve genes, even if it is always very complex and refractory ways. The proof: we have never managed to make a monkey speak ...
Thibaut Sardier, interviewer
LES FONDEMENTS OUBLIÉS DE LA CULTURE by DOMINIQUE GUILLO Seuil, 360 pp., 23 €.
https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2019/06/28/dominique-guillo-on-a-trop-pense-que-la-culture-repose-avant-tout-sur-une-identite-partagee_1736838
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