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Abstract :
[en] The history of primatology (Haraway, 1989) as well as the anthropology of nature (Descola) and animals (Ingold) shows that human beings have varied a lot in their appreciation of animals and primates and that they vary according to their cultural system or “ontologies”. But today the cultural systems are no more considered as fixed systems of values or opposition as in the structuralism times. In a more interactionist view, cultural systems are acted through interactions. Some anthropologists have thus argued that the animals themselves, because of their specific behaviour and the way they interact with human beings, influence the local cultural systems (Reed) and knowledge (Brunois). We can go one step further in the interactionist perspective and consider that in the process of human-animal communication, the signification of behaviours emerge from the actual course of the interaction (Quéré). Consequently, what people know about the animals should be considered in the light of the interactional context from which the knowledge is gained.
This theoretical framework is interesting because it allows for comparisons between local and scientific knowledge, given that both are accountable to a particular interactional context, which can be ethnographically described.
I will briefly present this theoretical framework and then I’ll use my own data to compare two very different interactional “regimes”: a scientific and a passionate one, both belonging to occidental culture.
References :
Brunois, Forence, 2005. Pour une approche interactive des savoirs locaux: l’ethno-éthologie, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 120-121, pp. 31-40
Descola, Philippe & Palsson, Gisli, 1999. Nature and Society, Anthropological perpectives. London & New York, Routledge.
Haraway, Donna J. 1989. Primate Visions. Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York : Routledge.
Ingold, Tim, 1994. What is an animal? London & New York, Routledge.
Ingold, Tim, 1996. Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment, in Roy Ellen and Kiyoshi Fukui (eds.), Redefining Nature : Ecology, Culture and Domestication, Oxford, Berg, pp. 117-154.
Quéré, Louis, 1991. D’un modèle épistémologique de la communication à un modèle praxéologique. Réseaux, 9, 46, 69-90
Reed, Edward S., 1994. The affordances of the animate environment: social science from the ecological point of view. In Ingold, 1994, 110-126