In spite of anthropological and biocultural accounts showing that human collectives co-evolve with nonhumans and that they jointly create specific milieux over time, the idea that societies, as if fallen from the sky, adapt to an already constituted environment is one of the basic tenets of modern times. This is not surprising if one accepts that modernity amounts to the affirmation that there exists a neat separation between nature and society. However, the new climatic regime into which we have entered forces us to reconsider this state of affairs in paradoxical ways that will be explored in the lecture.
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Philippe DESCOLA is emeritus professor at the Collège de France, Paris. He initially specialized in the ethnology of Amazonia, focusing on the relations of native societies with nonhumans. Besides his field research with the Achuar of Ecuador, he has published extensively on the comparative approach of the relations between humans and non-humans. Among his books in English are In the Society of Nature (1994), The Spears of Twilight (1996), Beyond Nature and Culture (2013), The Ecology of others (2013). He is a foreign member of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village Life Today (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member of the Research Group on Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of modernity.
