Keynote address
Human natures
Dr. Philippe Descola, Collège de France, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale
What we are (as organisms, as humans, as parts of a collective, as gendered beings) depends upon intrinsic
qualities (physical and cognitive dispositions) as much as upon contrastive qualities, i.e. differentiating
features that we selectively detect or fail to detect among other human and non human components of the world.
Human nature is thus moderately plural and largely relational, in that it draws its specificities from its
capacity to respond to the affordances provided by our environment according to patterns that are not beyond the
reach of scientific inquiry. The lecture will explore some of the consequences of this situation, often
acknowledged but seldom confronted, for the practice and agenda of anthropology.
