Cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Spencer Trask Fund.

Words such as “nature” or “culture’” do not denote a universal reality that would manifest itself under the same guise to everybody, but rather particular ways of carving ontological domains in the texture of things that the Moderns have devised in the course of the past four centuries. Other civilizations have adopted different ways of ascribing qualities to beings in the world, resulting in forms of continuity and discontinuity between humans and non-humans that, as they differ widely from our own cosmological standards, have long puzzled anthropologists who tried to describe them according to the Western cleavage between nature and society. It is time that we treat the modern ontological grid (physical universality versus moral singularity) as but one among several other combinations that have been employed to describe the structures of the world. Although they are grounded in common cognitive processes, these combinations generate quite distinct principles of aggregation of humans and non-humans into collectives, which our culture-specific concept of “society” can hardly account for. The challenge is to explain this diversity while reformulating our tools of explanation in a way that eschews Eurocentric concepts and frameworks of analysis.