Them and Us

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Them and Us

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Let us imagine an ethnologist who goes out to the tropics and takes along with her the Internal Great Divide. In her eyes, the people she studies continually confuse knowledge of the world - which the investigator, as a good scientistic Westerner, possesses as her birthright ­ and the requirements of social functioning. The tribe that greets her thus has only one vision of the world, only one representation of Nature. To go back to the expression Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim made famous, this tribe projects its own social categories on to Nature (Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1967; Haudricourt, 1962). When our ethnologist explains to her informers that they must be more careful to separate the world as it is from the social representation they provide for it, they are scandalized or nonplussed. The ethnologist sees in their rage and their misunderstanding the very proof of their premodern obsession. The dualism in which she lives - humans on one side, nonhumans on the other, signs over here, things over there - is intolerable to them. For social reasons, our ethnologist concludes, this culture requires a monist attitude. 'We traffic in ideas; [the savage mind] hoards them up' (Levi-Strauss, [1962] 1966, p. 267). But let us suppose now that our ethnologist returns to her homeland and tries to dissolve the Internal Great Divide. And let us suppose that through a series of happy accidents she sets out to analyze one tribe among others - for example, scientific researchers or engineers ( Knorr-Cetina, 1992). The situation turns out to be reversed, because now she applies the lessons of monism she thinks she has learned from her earlier experience. Her tribe of scientists claims that in the end they are completely separating their knowledge of the world from the necessities of politics and morality (Traweek, 1988). In the observer's eyes, however, this separation is never very visible, or is itself only the byproduct of a much more mixed activity, some tinkering in and out of the laboratory. Her informers claim that they have access to Nature, but the ethnographer sees perfectly well that they have access only to a vision, a representation of Nature that she herself cannot distinguish neatly from politics and social interests (Pickering, 1980). This tribe, like the earlier one, projects its own social categories on to Nature; what is new is that it pretends it has not done so. When the ethnologist explains to her informers that they cannot separate Nature from the social representation they have formed of it, they are scandalized or nonplussed. Our ethnologist sees in their rage and incomprehension the very proof of their modern obsession. The monism in which she now lives - humans are always mixed up with nonhumans - is intolerable to them. For social reasons, our ethnologist concludes, Western scientists require a dualist attitude

The goal of anthropology is not to scandalize twice over, or to provoke incomprehension twice in a row: the first time by exporting the Internal Great Divide and imposing dualism on cultures that reject it; the second time by canceling the External Great Divide and imposing monism on a culture, our own - that rejects it absolutely. Symmetrical anthropology must realize that the two Great Divides do not describe reality - our own as well as that of others - but define the particular way Westerners had of establishing their relations with others as long as they felt modern. 'We', however, do not distinguish between Nature and Society more than 'They' make them overlap. If we take into account the networks that we allow to proliferate beneath the official part of our Constitution they look a lot like the networks in which 'They' say they live. Premoderns are said never to distinguish between signs and things, but neither do 'We' (Figure 4.3.3 and the bottom of 4.3.1 look very much alike). If, through an acrobatic thought experiment, we could go further and ask 'Them' to try to map on to their own networks our strange obsession with dichotomies and to try to imagine, in their own terms, what it could mean to have a pure Nature and a pure Society they would draw, with extreme difficulty, a provisional map in which Nature and Society would barely escape from the networks (Figure 4.3.4). But what does this picture represent, this picture in which Nature and Culture appear to be redistributed among the networks and to escape from them only fuzzily as if in dotted lines? It is exactly our world as we now see it through nonmodern eyes! It is exactly the picture I have tried to offer from the beginning, in which the upper and lower halves of the Constitution gradually merge. Premoderns are like us. Once they are considered symmetrically, they might offer a better analysis of the Westerners than the modernist anthropology offered of the premoderns! Or, more exactly, we can now drop entirely the 'Us' and 'Them' dichotomy, and even the distinction between moderns and premoderns. We have both always built communities of natures and societies. There is only one, symmetrical, anthropology.

Designer

Latour, Bruno

Date

1993

Source

We Have Never Been Modern

Bibliographic Citation

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press. Figure 4.3. Page 102.

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