MIMESIS

INTERNATIONAL

ANTHROPOLOGY

n. 3
 Albert Piette

SEPARATE HUMANS
Anthropology, Ontology, Existence
(translated by Matthew Cunningham)

MIMESIS
INTERNATIONAL
This book is published with the subsidy of the University of Paris West-Nanterre

© 2016 – Mimesis International

www.mimesisinternational.com
e-mail: info@mimesisinternational.com

Isbn: 9788869770395
Book series: Anthropology, n. 3

© MIM Edizioni Srl

P.I. C.F. 02419370305
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 9

Anthropology of humans 15
Who are these Homo sapiens? 15
Volume of being and ontology 20

Existence and relations 27

Critiques of relationism 28
Ethnography as methodological relationism 37
Separate individuals, singularity and continuity 38
Phenomenography 43

Anthropology and para-humans 51

Methodological theism and realist atheism 53
Status of para-humans 58
Anthropology and minimality 68

Para coats… 75

References 81

Index 85
 “Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to
puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I
occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.”
(Dostoevsky)

“In the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate
sense of detachment, of the need of solitude — a feeling
which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious,
yet without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual
understanding and sympathy with one’s fellow-creatures.”
(Einstein)

“So that becomes how it is. They try to reach each other
with words and gestures. They almost tear their arms out
of their sockets, because the reach of their gesticulations is
much too short. They never stop trying to throw syllables
at each other, but they are extraordinarily bad at this game:
they cannot catch. And so time passes, while they stoop
over and hunt around for the ball — just like in life.”
(Rilke)
 INTRODUCTION

I must confess: I do not believe in ethnographic narratives. And yet

the temptation to believe in them is strong. Because the very principle
of such descriptions is not to act “as if” — something that happens in
many sociological theories, the authors informing us that although a
human being is not solely theatrical, rational or strategic, we are go-
ing to proceed as if this were the case. On the contrary, ethnographic
descriptions give the impression that their reduction represents reality.1

“Should a traveller,” writes Hume, “returning from a far country, bring us

an account of men, wholly different from any we have ever acquainted; men,
who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who know no ple-
asure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately,
from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar, with the
same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and
dragons, miracles and prodigies”.2

Frankly, this is more or less the impression I get when reading eth-
nographic narratives. Human beings are not presented as they are in the
course of day-to-day life, as I would encounter them in the real world.
Yet ethnographers assert their competence to get their noses into
everything, plunge into indigenous life, stick to reality, describe the
flow of the real world. Often their basic agenda and that of their field-
works is to understand and depict the life of human beings by means
of observation methods, especially participant observation. By joining
the natives, by immersing themselves in their day-to-day life, by at-
tempting to capture their point of view, ethnographers aim to observe,
understand and describe. But there is this — always this:

1 I thank the University of Paris West and the Centre for Ethnology and
Comparative Sociology for their subsidy.
2 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), section 8, part 1, p. 61.
10 Separate Humans

“First of all, it has to be laid down that we have to study here stereot-
yped manners of thinking and feeling. As sociologists, we are not intere-
sted in what A or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidental course of
their own personal experiences — we are interested only in what they feel
and think qua members of a given community”.3

Can social anthropology exist without intensifying differences from

others? This results in significant losses: details of presence, details of
existence as continuity.
I can already hear social anthropologists raising the objection that their
work cannot be reduced to Malinowski’s model, and that they have long
been taking precise account of details of action and interaction. I whole-
heartedly agree, but it seems to me that my criticism, that of an incredulous
realist, is also applicable to the interactionist paradigm that has long been
practiced in sociology, and is occasionally discovered or rediscovered by
anthropologists who express it in various forms, particularly in pragmatic
anthropology. I must admit that I am worried by anthropologists’ discovery
of Goffman, who is being cited by them at last, but without circumvent-
ing the pitfalls of interactionism. After culture, community, identity and
structure, the reader encounters another lexical register that is increasingly
prevalent in social anthropology, one that was long confined to sociology:
situation, negotiation, attribution, identification, meaning. The “ordeal” no-
tion becomes the top analyser of social life, and the situations favoured for
observation are particularly marked by uncertainty. What always emerges
from this is a human being who is competent at examining the constraints
of a situation, and able to find justifications with a view to arriving at an
agreement or escalating a dispute. That is not how people are!

But what is anthropology? The history of the word “anthropology”

is complex. In scientific institutions, for over a century the word has
been inextricably linked to at least two qualifications: the social and
the cultural. Anthropology usually designates the exploration of cul-
tural diversity and social relations. This meaning appears through its
reconstructed history and the choice of one of its founding fathers,
Herodotus, who is known for his “inquiry”, a compilation of stories
based on his travels around Greece, Egypt and Asia Minor. Historians
of anthropology rarely omit to recall this portrait of Herodotus as an
ethnographer. Another genealogy of an anthropology without qualify-

3 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge,

1922), p. 23.
Introduction 11

ing adjectives can be possible. It is the study of individuals, not as

social and cultural entities (something that would be the equivalent of
a sociology or culturology), but as human beings, or more precisely as
they exist as humans. An anthropo-logy!
Alongside metaphysics — which, according to Aristotle, studies “being
qua being” — the various “departmental sciences” delimit “some section
of what is”,4 each of them focusing on specific characteristics: for exam-
ple, quantitative beings for mathematics, living beings for biology. Indeed,
Aristotle placed much emphasis on the classification of the sciences and
the attribution of an object of study to each discipline. Researchers in a
given discipline usually do not worry about knowing what their object
is, and do not think about the “section” in which they place themselves
and conduct their work, considering these things self-evident. This is easy
to understand when there is relative clarity about the discipline’s objects.
What about anthropology? Could not its object of study be human beings
as they exist? Anthropology would then answer, or at least try to answer,
the following question: why and how are humans what they are?
It is important to begin considering these matters, which seem all
the more relevant in view of the worrying “liquefaction” of human
beings that is taking place in anthropologies that are interested in so-
cieties and cultures — that is to say beings as social or cultural enti-
ties, not as humans. This is made trickier by the fact that sociological
disciplines share this characteristic, and especially by the fact that, as
Francis Wolff very clearly expressed it, the principle of “as” consti-
tutes not just a filter, but also a way of “saturating” the object, as if
human beings were solely sociocultural — as if they were totally so-
ciocultural.5 But when it comes to this dissolution of human beings in
anthropology, the worst has already come to pass when one reads, as
part of what seems to be a very contemporary orthodoxy, that the idea
of anthropos has no relevance,6 that the future of anthropology will
consist in dealing with what surrounds the human being,7 that a some-

4 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London:

Penguin Books, 2004), 1003 a.
5 Francis Wolff, Notre humanité. D’Aristote aux neurosciences (Paris: Fayard,
2010), pp. 85–86.
6 See Amiria Henare, Martin Hobraad and Sari Wastell, “Introduction:
Thinking Through Things”, in Thinking Through Things: Theorizing
Artefacts Ethnographically, (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 10.
7 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014 [2005]).
12 Separate Humans

times surprising equivalence between human and nonhuman entities is

made. Are human beings so disgusting that they are unwanted as radi-
cal themes of anthropology, the preference today being for objects and
the environment, the preference yesterday being for social relations?
Why should they have to cease existing to attract scientific interest?8 Is
there anything more amazing than human beings as they exist? Let us
bet that there is an alternative solution that avoids in anthropology this
“cessation” of existence, and does not treat this human as something
mysteriously elusive and out of reach.
This solution cannot be found in the study of the “total human be-
ing”, who would simultaneously possess various dimensions (psycho-
logical, linguistic, geographical, sociological). Neither can the solution
be found in the profile of the anthropologist mastering information and
skills from every discipline concerned. Moreover, as we have just seen,
anthropological science cannot be the study of social and cultural prac-
tices, particularly those different from our own. Not only would this
overlook human existence, but it would also blur the boundary with
sociology, and would raise questions about the idea of difference based
on geographical distance. Otherwise, why would botany not study
tropical cats, and zoology not study the trees in New Guinea? And
human beings are more than social and cultural, more than speaking,
living in a certain space, etc., according to the characteristics of one
discipline or another. In my view, it is important to stress the difference
between the human being and each “as”. It is indeed a “more”, added to
several “as”, that gives food for thought and makes it possible to define
a theme, even a discipline with a characterising object. We know that
a science is often made up of the leftovers of other sciences. Lamarck
was in a comparable position in relation to chemistry, physiology and
anatomy when he discovered that living beings are also alive. When he
invented the word “biology”, his intention was to invent a science that
studies living beings “as” they are alive.9
Then what are the unclaimed leftovers that could characterise an an-
thropology? What if it were precisely “existence as such”, the individual
as he exists, that is to say as he appears, as he is present and as he dis-
appears? The individual who continues, a reality that lives and is also
lived. Existence is by definition private and inseparable from oneself. It

8 Wolff, p. 85.
9 André Pichot, Histoire de la notion de vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), pp. 588–
89.
Introduction 13

is that of an empirical unit; it is itself the empirical unit. Among philoso-

phers, Levinas gave remarkable expression to this principle of separa-
tion (though he was not the only one): “We are surrounded by beings
and things with which we maintain relationships”. This is a principle in
which the social sciences are deeply anchored. Levinas continues: “All
these relationships are transitive: I touch an object, I see the other. But
I am not the other. I am all alone”.10 Thus each individual is riveted
and chained to himself, sensing that he is an existence, knowing it and
speaking about it, feeling that which causes his body to be his own body
and his thoughts to be his own thoughts. In this respect, I could refer to
Michel Henry for another way of conceiving of existence, without re-
ducing it to experiences “of something”. He reproached Husserl for plac-
ing too much emphasis on consciousness and intentionality, for seeking
essences, thus neglecting the singular individual:

“The more the positive sciences develop and boast of their epistemologi-
cal breaks, [...] the less man has any idea of what he is. This is because what
makes him a man — specifically, the fact of being a me — is precisely what
has become totally unintelligible to thinkers and scholars these days”.11

From this point of view, the sharing of existences becomes non-

sense, incompatible with the principle of existence because “one can
exchange everything between beings except existing”.12 Anthropology
as the science of human beings as they exist is therefore necessarily
anthropo-focused from the beginning to the end of the research pro-
cess. This presupposes:
- not circumventing this tangible, perceptible human being,
- going beyond the filtering of the various kinds of “as” traditionally
associated with every scientific discipline,
- not focusing only on those traits of an individual which are salient
in a given action he performs (since existing also means continuing),
- not practicing grouping according to shared traits (since each ex-
istence is unique) or in any case delaying the moment of comparison,
- not isolating the various actions, interactions or relations from hu-
mans.

10 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. by Richard A. Cohen

(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987[1979]), p. 42.
11 Michel Henry, I Am the Truth, trans. by Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002), p.134.
12 Levinas, p. 42.
14 Separate Humans

Anthropological science would be — before becoming compara-

tive — that of “volumes of being” which are taken separately, that of
empirical units which can be distinguished in a situation and continue
in other situations. Anthropology’s anthropologism presents the world
as made up of humans taken individually and interacting (through
actions, relations, connections), in various contexts (society, culture,
environment). But in that case, without being absent, the activities,
relations and connections, like societies, cultures and environments,
only appear secondary to the volumes of being that are in the process
of existing.
This book is a theoretical essay that continues Existence in the
details,13 by laying foundations on which to build an anthropology of
existence, an existential anthropology, which directly observes hu-
man units. In the first part, I will attempt to show that the evolutionary
specificity of humans constitutes an argument in favour of focusing on
individuals. The consciousness of existing in time and nuanced mo-
dalities of presence call for a detailed observation of humans. Towards
a critical perspective of what is called the “ontological turn”, anthro-
pology is presented as a realist ontology of human beings. The second
part is a critique of the abundant use of the notion of relations in social
anthropology. This critique is necessary because of the extent to which
the various theoretical and methodological uses of relations absorb and
lose existences and their details. The whole critique also invites for the
observation of individuals. In this context, instead of ethnography, I
prefer the notion of phenomenography, which designates the process
of observing separate individuals and following them through succes-
sions of moments and situations. Such an anthropology focuses on a
“being in time”. The third part concerns nonhumans, another major
theme of contemporary anthropology. I see a certain debasement of
the notion of existence and confirm a realist ontology, considering
what does and does not exist, from the examples of divinities, animals
and collective institutions. It is not a matter of being satisfied with an
analysis of ontologies or local metaphysics, but also showing what re-
ally is in a situation, and not just from the point of view of people and
their discourse. This analysis leads to a classification of beings and to
a consideration of the importance of minimality in human existence.

13 Albert Piette, Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential

Anthropology (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2015).
 ANTHROPOLOGY OF HUMANS

Who are these Homo sapiens?

I am making the assumption that an anthropological science not

only can but must exist, because of the very particularities of Homo sa-
piens in the history of life. What actually happened to Homo sapiens?
It seems to me that evolutionary data has an important role to play in
legitimating this science of separate individuals. From the hominis-
ing process, three developments stand out: not using something, being
conscious of existing in time and learning indifference.

Not using something

At Olduvai, there is evidence of the presence, two million years ago,

of various animal skeletons, which were accumulated and therefore trans-
ported and concentrated in different spots on the site. There were also
stone tools with their splinters, as well as traces of cuts on the bones.1 A
new ability was developing: the non-abandonment of tools after use and
the possibility of looking at them not in order to use them, but rather to not
use them. This led to the establishment of a lateral world made up of non-
salient objects, and the concurrent development of a subsidiary perception
consisting in viewing the objects as details, as unimportant things.
The great apes often eat immediately, with little food transportation,
whereas hominids transport bones to where tools are concentrated.2
Unlike the mere “hammers” used by chimpanzees that break nuts near
the tree, a variety of tools serving various functions were accumulated
in one place at Olduvai. Some that were not necessarily useful for the
immediate course of action are there, and others were never even used.

1 Richard Potts, Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai (New York: Aldine de

Gruyter, 1988).
2 See William McGrew, Chimpanzee Material Culture. Implications for
Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 115.
16 Separate Humans

But they are there. The accumulated nearby presence of tools that were
not directly useful marked the emergence and development of a kind of
perception with blinders that integrated leftovers in the form of details.
The reuse of tools has been observed among chimpanzees, but it is just
that: reuse, linked to the same function.3
The accumulation of various objects also generated the new need to
perceive and filter the abundance of potentially meaningful elements.
Now other elements external to the concerns of the situation gravitate
around the hominid: they are inconsequential, without relevant mean-
ing, requiring no response, having no immediate utility. These things
bring no information. They are there, falling under the ever-moving
eyes. They cushion. From the background an object emerges, before
moving out of the human’s view just as another object appears, and
then another one, without being directly looked at. The hominids have
only surreptitiously seen it, and they will no doubt see it again soon.
These objects were previously used for a certain gesture, a certain ac-
tivity. They see them for an instant, still there, even after the need for
them has passed. Perceiving an object as a detail means seeing how to
not use it — but still seeing or perceiving it, without anything more.
Thus hominids learned to incorporate useful, meaningful things into
a backdrop and occasionally transform them into meaningless lefto-
vers, perceptible as such, relegated to the status of a detail. This is a
matter of considering not the distractibility of animals in general (as
opposed to their powers of concentration), but rather the human man-
agement of distracting objects as details.

Being conscious of existing in time

Antonio Damasio explains that consciousness begins when the brain

develops the ability to tell a “story without words”.4 Maybe it was enough
to make a few random sounds to communicate, then notice that one’s in-
terlocutor has left, and then continue “speaking” to oneself, aloud and then
quietly.5 Language itself creates a screen between reality and human pres-
ences, and when it is inner, it also allows roaming thoughts out of step with
the present concerns of the interaction. They distract without necessarily

3 McGrew, p. 202.
4 Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1999), p.22.
5 Daniel C. Dennett, Explained Consciousness (New York: Back Bay Books, 1992).
Anthropology of humans 17

disrupting the minimum attention required, and correspond to the entrance

into the situation of external elements extracted from other situations, kept
in the margin. Through their mode of perception and the screen of lan-
guage, hominids, who find themselves in front of a multitude of objects
accumulated from situation to situation, confirm that it is possible to be
detached from the world of objects to the point that these do not interfere
with the situation and the unfolding of the interaction in progress — but
they are not too detached, so these things or other elements can emerge
occasionally and generate a cushioning effect of the concerns (sometimes
brutal) of a situation.
In these facts, do we not find the ingredients that make possible the
first forms of discovery of the world as the world, alien to oneself, sep-
arate from oneself, and also the forms of consciousness that each indi-
vidual exists in time and is capable of expressing his existence in various
ways, capable of feeling it and of knowing that it is oneself that performs
a given action and also that will die? Alain Prochiantz uses the expression
“extreme individuals” to single out “our ability to absorb what has been
learned, to retain it, and to do so throughout our existence”, as well as
our ability to name and be named: Homo sapiens push individuation to
the highest degree.6 Prochiantz places much emphasis on the extra 900
cubic centimetres characteristic of the sapiens brain compared with that
of chimpanzees, a difference that “affects the surface of the cortex, but
also all of the underlying nuclei that serve as relays, exits and entrances
for the vast majority of the neural pathways that bring information to the
cortex and transport cortical responses”. This generates individuals capa-
ble of self-differentiation, not only differentiated in themselves, but also
for themselves, in other words individuals capable of “an elaborate sense
of self — an identity and a person, you or me, no less — and places that
person at a point in individual historical time, richly aware of the lived past
and of the anticipated future”.7 Let us say that humans exist. They are in
the world of course, but also they are in time.

Learning indifference

Religious statements are often contradictory statements (the rock is

a spirit, the dead person is alive) that give rise to a relation of credu-
lity: “What if it were true?”. And this, according to the theory I have

6 Alain Prochiantz, Qu’est-ce le vivant ? (Paris: Seuil, 2012), p. 148.

7 Damasio, p. 13.
18 Separate Humans

formulated,8 gradually led to a new state of mind: the cognitive loosen-

ing connected with the attitude of not pushing certainty to the limit, ac-
cepting uncertainty. In my view, this is the key moment in the process
of hominisation and human development as we know it, and it prob-
ably took place more recently than we think. Neanderthals might not
have had this sort of capacity for indifference. This ability to think oc-
casionally that something incredible is possible, even real, engenders
other abilities: to give assent to such assertions and to tolerate not fully
understanding that which is implied by their contents. Henceforth, hu-
mans get used to not thinking “too much”, to suspending their critical
faculties and therefore remaining in a kind of cognitive blur.
Arising as it did from an attitude of credulity towards religious
statements, the tolerance of cognitive blurring was able to extend
into other activities of everyday life. And this is crucial. In all situa-
tions, it confirms what I have called the minor mode. Human beings
accept the presence of external, contradictory beings and information
(which do not disturb the activity in progress) and the constant dis-
placement of concerns of meaning (without requiring a solution or an
agreement). This form of consciousness veils, stops one from look-
ing things in the face and attenuates the acuteness of presence. In my
view, it is not so much that which accompanies immediate perception
or the thoughtless performance of habitual actions, but rather the un-
deruse of the higher order of thinking associated with consciousness
of oneself and of the world. Human beings’ minimality became all
the more possible ten or fifteen millennia ago when the structure of
social life was increasingly being organised by material markers of
social roles, entailing their increased stability, and also by sedentary
life surrounded by fields and herds.
A specifically human form of being was therefore generated by the
suspension of the cognitive dissonance effect that religious statements
entail, human beings having perceived the comfort they offered. The
cognitive cost that was able to exist in the tension and hesitation with
which these statements were met was turned into a kind of psycho-
logical comfort after their contradictory effect had been placed in

8 Albert Piette, L’origine de la croyance (Paris: Berg International, 2012). See

Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of Mind (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996)
and also: Tom Wynn and Fred L. Coolidge, ‘The Expert Neanderthal Mind’,
Journal of Human Evolution, 46 (2004), 467–87. In L’origine de la croyance,
there are many bibliographical references, especially about comparisons
between Neanderthal and sapiens graves.
Anthropology of humans 19

parentheses — a comfort that could be beneficially reproduced under

various life circumstances. I am interested more in the corollaries of
the discovery of cognitive loosening, of “setting aside”, than in the
conditions underlying the transmission of a religion, which also pass-
es by means of strong manifestations of commitment. There came a
day when humans learned to accept unverifiable information. Rather
than interpreting this change in terms of tension and social relations,
l see it as the process of human beings learning non-verification, sus-
pension, delay, a form of cognitive loosening that would also make it
easier to accept what is imposed on them. Human beings are thus no
longer the same. We are in the hardly-begun age of that Homo.
In this interpretation, contrary to many narratives of origin, homi-
nisation is not the process of compensating for original “deficiencies”
on the model of the famous story told by Protagoras in a dialogue
of Plato, describing well-equipped, specialised animals and naked,
unprotected humans. On the contrary, the hominising transformation
was marked by a double “deficiency”. The first time, the hominids’
ability to not use something represented a divergence in contrast
with preoccupied chimpanzees, and the second time, the ability to
not think about something and be indifferent led to a divergence in
contrast with other hominids, particularly Neanderthals who, with-
out cognitive fluidity, were caught up in the thought, consciousness
and anxiety of their time. Furthermore, from an anthropological
perspective, three elements of the evolutionary process stand out:
the ability to create a distance, the importance of the “individual”,
and the passivity of human beings in action. Anthropological sci-
ence cannot ignore these three (even foundational) particularities of
Homo sapiens in the range of living beings. They each nuance and
complete three classic themes of the social sciences: the relations,
collectivity and actions that justified a diversion from the human
being himself, and his substitution with cultures and societies, ei-
ther through various kinds of relations and links (interactions, con-
nections, associations, etc.), or through activities or other events.
Did the social sciences get the wrong species? Because it seems to
me that the only way to get a close look at the singular individual,
his detachment and passivity is to watch, observe and analyse the
individual himself in the process of existing. This is what I have
designated by the term “existential anthropology”, which is not in
any sense a recasting of existential philosophy, but rather a focus on
the continuous existence of humans.
20 Separate Humans

Volume of being and ontology

The extremely high level of individuation in humans is a major an-

thropological fact (and has been, not just for a few recent decades, but
for tens of thousands of years of hominisation). Other living species
do not possess it to such a high degree, to the level that defines con-
sciousness of the self, of existing as singular. It would be oxymoronic
if anthropology as the science of human beings were to socioculturally
homogenise these units, since the characteristic feature of existence is
that it is implacably private and singular. Anthropology must therefore
be a de-linking and separation operation, an anthropo-analysis.
As reflected in philosophy’s classic debates, an anthropology that sets
out to be anthropo-focused cannot separate an action, connection or ex-
perience from the person who performs or experiences it. It is through
this lens that Aristotle’s lexicon is provocative towards mainstream con-
temporary discourse. One of Aristotle’s central concepts is that of “sub-
stance”. He tells us that substance characterises bodies.9 It is not a fixed,
unchanging entity. It cannot be dissociated from “the first matter underly-
ing anything which has its own source of motion and change”.10  With this
same word, Aristotle introduces a certain confusion by using it with dif-
ferent meanings. But let us consider this: substance characterises “simple
bodies”.11 In this expression, I find the notion of “volume of being”. The
volumes are the primary constituents of the world: Socrates, Plato, a dog,
etc. Like substances, they are the reference points to be seized, observed
and followed as separate from other substances and volumes. “Given that
there are some things that are separate and some that are not separate, it is
the latter that are substances”.12 We have a pinpointable substance with a
state of separateness. Like a biologist who uses a sophisticated microscope
to track a distinct molecule with fluorescent markers in order to observe its
fluctuations, the anthropologist could track and observe human volumes
that are also separate from him.
Aristotle explains that substances are such “because, far from their
being predicated of some subject, the other things are predicated of
them”.13 He asks:

9 Aristotle, 1028 b.
10 Aristotle, Physics, trans. by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 193 a.
11 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, 1017 b.
12 Aristotle, 1071 a.
13 Aristotle, 1017 b.
Anthropology of humans 21

“And so one might even raise the question whether the words ‘to walk’,
‘to be healthy’, ‘to sit’ imply that each of these things is existent, and simi-
larly in any other case of this sort; for none of them is either self-subsistent
or capable of being separated from substance, but rather, if anything, it is
that which walks or sits or is healthy that is an existent thing. Now these
are seen to be more real because there is something definite which un-
derlies them (i.e. the substance or individual), which is implied in such a
predicate; for we never use the word ‘good’ or ‘sitting’ without implying
this”.14

I cannot see the action of strolling or sitting without seeing the person
who performs these actions. It is this unit, this volume of being, identifi-
able at least in its material unity, that is the subject of anthropology.
Defining humans as relational beings seems to me to be a tautology,
something obvious: it is a feature of all living organisms, including a
germ cell that is not associated with a rigid genetic programme, and
also has links with its micro-environment. Does this mean we must,
like Jean-Jacques Kupiec, say that “the living organism comes into
being relative to what it is not”?15 In any case, we must not forget that
“we are, each of us, bodies, i.e., embodied; each is this one and not
that, each here and not there, each now and not then”.16 The principle
of anthropological science is this: there are individuals — those ones,
each one — which anyone can identify and designate as such. They
are the “human beings”, “separate humans”, found in all parts of the
world. Among others, each person is a unit, an identifiable corporeal
continuity. I will come back to this point.
It is difficult to distinguish a substratum from its attributes. Let us
stay with this volume of being, a concrete being with various charac-
teristics, its surface and everything it contains. I do not associate this
volume of being with that which exists by itself, with autonomy, nor
with a permanent substratum. But it seems to me that Lalande’s defini-
tion is not inadequate for the characterisation of a human volume of
being: “that which is modified by change while remaining the same”.17
Francisco Varela himself noted the following:

14 Aristotle, 1028 a.
15 Jean-Jacques Kupiec, The Origin of Individuals (London: World Scientific
Publishing, 2009), p. 209.
16 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality,
and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1979]), p. 369.
17 André Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2006 [1926]), p. 1048.
22 Separate Humans

“Unity (the fact of being distinguishable from one’s environment and

therefore from other unities) is the sole condition necessary for the exis-
tence of a studied field”, unity remains “a unity… independently of the
transformations it may undergo”.18

The volume of being enables one to draw attention to the fact that
properties and qualities — which play different roles in the formation
of the empirical unit — as well as accidents, arise, settle and change,
but they never completely change this unit. Varela also examines unity
with its internal transformations.19 In that case, it is indeed the coher-
ence of “unity” that is observed.

The reference to ontology comes up at this point. It has been very

much in demand in the social sciences in recent years. In the ontologi-
cal turn of social anthropology, I distinguish especially two approach-
es. First, an ontological configuration, sociohistorical or sociocultural,
can be recognised from the modes of attribution of qualities by humans
to other entities, and very often, these are nonhuman entities. The ob-
jective is to understand human modes of mental and/or material cat-
egorisation, and also the sociocultural organisation linked with these
modes of attribution.20 There is a second meaning, in which ontology is
associated with the study of a conceptual system, for example a scien-
tific discipline or a religious thinking. This orientation consists above
all in understanding the relations between the different entities in this
system.
In this ontological turn as it has mainly been theorised in social
anthropology, the most common themes are — of course in varying
proportions depending on the anthropologist —: cultural cosmolo-
gies, conceptual systems (particularly non-European ones), narratives
rather than situations, nonhuman beings rather than humans, the dif-
ferences of “worlds”, or relations between entities instead of the enti-
ties themselves. About the ontological turn, Palecek and Risjord wrote
the following: “An ontology, in the sense that these anthropological
theorists are using the word, is the product of such human–non-human

18 Francisco Varela, Principles of Biological Autonomy (New York: Elsevier,

1979), p. 61–62.
19 Varela, p.191.
20 Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. by Janet Lloyd (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Anthropology of humans 23

interactions”.21 Despite the possibilities offered by a more radical onto-

logical orientation, social anthropology seems to be preserving its pet
themes: differences in culture, language and relations.
So how does one get the ontological turn to turn more radically?
I will follow a third meaning: it will be a matter of considering what
really and concretely exists. There is indeed another strong orienta-
tion — absent in the ontological turn — of ontology as the radical sci-
ence of beings. It consists in thinking that an external reality exists (or
does not exist), with its characteristics, independent from conceptual
and perceptual schemes.22 These schemes can be those of the people
observed and of the anthropologists as well. This implies that people,
and anthropologists too, can make mistakes. Anthropology would thus
have to describe “the” reality, the only one that exists, searching for the
truth in what is happening. To say it briefly, what is present for people
does not necessarily exist in reality. As Maurizio Ferraris reminds us,
it is relevant to consider objectivity, reality or truth as useful notions.
They are not a sin!23
When ontology is considered as the study of what really exists (what
I consider to be the sole reality in a specific situation), I leave what
could be called an ethno-ontology (as we say ethnobotany or ethnome-
decine) for a study of the concrete reality: how are people and what is
really there in the situation? Ethno-ontology is transformed into a real-
ist ontology of beings. It is not the study of the beings in discourses, the
beings of the discourse, the beings for people, but the study of real be-
ings. Moreover, instead of radical differences between cultural worlds,
I prefer to emphasise individuals and situations, as well as the fluidity
and intermixing of these.
It thus results in a few theoretical or methodological principles —
different from the options of the ontological turn — according to what
could be called a methodological and also realist ontism:
1) Ontology thus suggests an ontography24 of beings in the complex-

21 Martin Palecek and Mark Risjord, ‘Relativism and the Ontological Turn
within Anthropology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 43, 1 (2013), 3–23
(p. 12).
22 See Maurizio Ferraris, Introduction to New Realism, trans. by Sarah De
Sanctis (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 39.
23 Ferraris, p. 14.
24 Martin Holbraad uses the notion of ontography in a different sense. See
Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban
Divination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), pp. 255–256.
24 Separate Humans

ity of their presence — beings in a situation — rather than focusing on

speech, narratives, and conceptual systems. In my view, then, ontology
indicates a theoretical and empirical orientation that consists in observ-
ing, describing and comparing beings, presences, individuals, and ex-
istences in and through their constantly changing, various and diverse
situations. Therefore, as I interpret it, ontology is not an anthropologi-
cal object, but an anthropological way of seeing things. It is therefore
opposed to the idea of emphasising cultural alterity and difference and
conceiving anthropology only as a science of others — of other ontolo-
gies and metaphysics.
2) Ontology therefore serves as a critical guarantee that keeps the focus
on singular beings and prevents their absorption into various constructed,
relational sociocultural groups. “At the present time”, according to Varzi,
“many philosophers believe it is possible to get rid of categories with the
help of a solid ontology of concrete individual entities”.25 This implies,
on the one hand, avoiding too quickly slipping present beings into these
groups (cultures or relations) that risk eclipsing them, and on the other
hand it means considering their existence, in any case questioning their
existence or their reality outside of the position of the researcher and also,
when studying nonhumans, outside of the conceptions of people.
3) Moreover, from this perspective, ontology cannot work primarily
and solely on the basis of human linguistic expressions. Particularly
when it is linked with analyses of mythological narratives, there is a
risk that language will be substituted for the world, that it will make
us forget that things are really happening, that people are really suffer-
ing, are really happy, are really having a certain thought at a particular
moment, in a situation. This realist option also applies to nonhuman
entities, and this implies not stopping at the attribution of properties,
but also describing the real properties of the entities in question. Such
would be the ontological requirement of anthropology.
Thus ontology is no longer a matter of local practices and of autoch-
thonous thoughts, but is rather a theoretical, epistemological, meth-
odological matter for anthropology: describing reality, questioning the
specificity of anthropological knowledge, practicing a method focused
on beings, on volumes of being. “Why are there beings at all instead
of nothing?”26 It is not up to anthropologists to answer this question. It

25 Achille C. Varzi, Ontologie (Paris: Ithaque, 2010 [2005]), p. 85.

26 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Gregory Fried
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000[1935]), p. 1.
Anthropology of humans 25

is more a matter of not forgetting it, keeping it in mind so that the an-
thropologist never ceases to be amazed that human beings are, and so
that he does not hold himself back from approaching them, as closely
as possible, not turning away from beings but learning to feel astonish-
ment before the raw fact of existing, and always improving observa-
tion.
I repeat: what should drive anthropologists is existence, the singu-
larity of each human existence. In this spirit, to art and philosophy, I
believe it is important to add anthropology, whose astonishment arises
not in the face of social and cultural diversities, but before existence
itself. If the enigma of existence is a prerequisite for the anthropo-
logical exercise, then anxiety—the anxiety with which this existence is
confronted—lies at the heart of anthropology. Astonishment and anxi-
ety meet. The anthropological act should begin by making all beings
alien, not through cultural distancing, but by taking a step back from
their presence. Science, description and concepts come just afterwards.
Beings, even those of the researcher, can quickly be “forgotten”. It is
therefore advisable to cultivate astonishment as much as possible and
as well as possible, to try and make it part of every day, even if this as-
tonishment concerns only one research subject. Thus science is a way
of existing, which allows itself to be permeated by the confrontation of
this questioning human, as he confronts his feeling of strangeness, con-
fronts the fact that he is, that other human beings also are. I am quite
aware that this proposition, not all that easy to realise, is tinged with a
certain optimism, but I want to see it as a goal to strive for and share
with students who are far from being led towards this perspective by
educational programmes in social anthropology and ethnology. Would
it therefore be necessary for them to be introduced to an initiation in
metaphysics, before (re)starting anthropology? I think so.
 EXISTENCE AND RELATION

Relations are given much importance in social anthropology, even more

than societies, cultures and actions. They cut across everything, and are less
polemical. “Society” and “culture” have always been considered primary
theoretical points of departure, and have at the same time been exposed
to more or less vigorous challenges and objections. When “society” and
“culture” are judged obsolete, “actions” and “individuals” are proposed,
but these are quick to draw criticism from their detractors. “Relations” are
the ideal compromise, the diplomatic word. They are between society, the
individual and the action. One may hesitate to say one has seen a society,
but we see relations all the time. Is there any research theme that does not
confront issues of relations: migration, religious cults, social hierarchies,
artistic creativity, animal breeding, health, etc.?1
Relations seem to be the inescapable element in anthropology’s
theoretical propositions both past and present. As Alfred Gell notes:

“Anthropological theories are distinctive in that they are typically about

social relationships. […]. The aim of anthropological theory is to make
sense of behavior in the context of social relations”.2

Marilyn Strathern suggests that we understand “persons as simul-

taneously containing the potential for relationships and always em-
bedded in a matrix of relations with others”.3 According to another
perspective, Lévi-Strauss explains that anthropology’s objective is to
consider social life as “a system of which all the aspects are organically

1 Some of the ideas of this chapter have been published in an article of

Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 104 (2015), 19–34.
2 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 11.
3 Marilyn Strathern, ‘The Concept of Society is Theoretically Obsolete. For
the Motion’, in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. by Tim Ingold (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 60–66.
28 Separate Humans

connected”.4 System, structure, relation, interaction, activity and even

person as we have just seen: these terms all speak of relations in their
own way. This theoretical context is very tenacious in anthropology.5
Is there not the risk of focusing observation more on relations, on the “be-
tween”, than on the relata, that is to say on individuals? They are of course
engaged in relations, but are they not more than their participation in rela-
tions, especially their current relations here and now? It seems to me that it
is necessary to subject these ways of conceiving relations to a critical evalu-
ation, in order to better describe the individuals engaged in these relations.

“The provocation,” Matei Candea writes, “comes in part from the fact
that anthropology’s commitment to relationality operates on at least three
different levels: ethnographically, relations are our subject matter; analyti-
cally, the making of connections is our method, and engagement has come
to be the ubiquitous key-word for thinking about anthropological ethics”.6

Let us attempt to trace a path through relationism’s various manifes-

tations.7 I will link authors to each of them, though other authors could
have been chosen. I think that the main modalities of thinking with
relations are represented here. Beginning as they do with relations, I
will be moving each time towards the individual.

Critiques of relationism

Let us begin with interactionism, especially Goffman. The focus

would seem to be placed on the individual engaged in relations. Ac-
tions are the externalisation of relational abilities. For interactionism,
they are actions accomplished by an individual with a view of com-

4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. by Claire Jacobson and

Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963 [1958]), p. 365.
5 Soumhya Venkatesan, and others, ‘The Task of Anthropology is to Invent
Relations’, Critique of Anthropology, 32, 1 (2012), 43–86.
6 Matei Candea, ‘The End/s of Engagement: the Ethics and Analytics of
Detachment’, Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
6th December 2009 (http: // detachmentcollaboratory.org). There is also this
recent book about detachment and its various forms: Detachment: Essays on the
limits of the Relational Thinking, ed. by Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Catherine
Trundle and Thomas Yarrow (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
7 I use the word ‘relationism’ to designate all the thoughts and reflections,
which attribute a central or exclusive weight to relations, and which define
individuals only as relational entities.
Existence and relation 29

municating, informing, negotiating, interacting. From this perspective,

considering and examining actions as interactions implies noting the
signs that are relevant, those that other people consider meaningful and
acceptable enough to serve as a point of departure for their response.
Interactionists are interested in looks, gestures, postures and verbal
utterances only insofar as they are “external signs of orientation and
involvement”.8 Gestures and postures provide information about those
who execute them, particularly to the other people in the situation, ena-
bling them to evaluate the normality of these acts.
But then the danger of such analyses arises: it resides in the overly
strict focus on the concept of role, since even the role distance is also
interpreted as role, in a way that is a little too rigid. Furthermore—and
this is important—although roles and social positions are of course
the basis of relations or various actions, these do not imply the whole
presence of a given individual at moment t of his act. Richard Sennett
accurately points out that “in Goffman’s world, people behave but they
do not have experience”.9 With interactionism, we are faced with a
disciplinary habitus, which consists in watching, theorising and de-
scribing what is shared by actors and the relevance of the messages
exchanged in the interaction. Individuals are fit for consideration when
they express, when they communicate, when they identify, when they
perceive as X, and when they are perceived as Y. What interests inter-
actionism are gestures, words, attitudes, a point of view that is expect-
ed in the situation, as well as disruptions in a role and the subsequent
management of these. This type of discourse underpins a specific an-
thropology: a human being expressing, communicating, manipulating,
perceiving. Of course, anyone observing modes of human presence can
pinpoint a set of expressions, impressions and reciprocal perceptions.
But there are also other things, even in large quantities, that must qual-
ify a theory of interaction, particularly gestures, movements, thoughts
and states of mind that may be non-relevant to the situation but are not
incongruous, namely leftovers, which are not “expressive” and are not
seen as such. In fact, all interactionism in the broad sense absorbs the
presences of individuals into that which links them together, and also
into that which matters—and matters exclusively—in their relations
with objects, space or their environment.

8 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 1.

9 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972),
p. 36.
30 Separate Humans

Let us say these interactions are “exo-actions”. The prefix “exo” clearly
indicates that it is a matter of expressions that emerge from individuals,
and that these actions are forms of their presence. Exo-actions refer to ac-
tions of individuals, that is to say the units of relations. These exo-actions
are not independent of their carriers since it is they who perform them,
but their concrete performance is not absolutely determined by the char-
acteristics, roles or statuses of these people, and certainly not solely by the
elements which are relevant in the situation. Moreover, the exo-actions
that are expected in the course of an action are not performed without a
reserve of other possible actions that may or may not leave traces, some-
times minute, in a moment of presence. I have used the notion of the minor
mode to designate this presence of “other things”.10
Furthermore, the interactionist perspective indicates that individual X
is, on the one hand, changed by his perceptions and his own actions, which
target other individuals or entities in the situation, and by the actions, looks
and words of others and, on the other hand, he himself can, through his
own attitude, change the attitudes of others. Exo-actions can of course
change the individual entities, but very rarely in a total sense. Individuals
usually preserve a feeling of continuity and remain recognisable to others.
Many of these exo-actions — those of the individual engaged in them
or those of other people in a situation — are not entirely “essential” to
his existence. Certainly nothing would really have been the same if these
exo-actions had not been what they had been, but the differences between
before and after would vary widely. These actions never affect the whole
volume of being of the person executing them or the person at whom they
are directed. They only affect this or that stratum, with very diverse, some-
times very minor consequences. One might say that these exo-actions are
more or less implicatory, generating changes that have various impacts
— passing or lasting, sudden or gradual — on the continuity of the exist-
ence of the individuals concerned. Only through detailed observation of a
person can one grasp this movement of continuity and change.
Let us look now at the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, according to
whom elements considered independently of one another are unintel-
ligible:

“They [ancient philosophers] did notice that in a given language certain

sequences of sounds were associated with definite meanings, and they ear-

10 See Piette, Existence in the Details and Albert Piette, ‘Existence, Minimality
and Believing’, in What is Existential Anthropology? ed. by Michael Jackson
and Albert Piette (New York–London: Berghahn, 2015b).
Existence and relation 31

nestly aimed at discovering a reason for the linkage between those sounds
and that meaning. Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very
beginning by the fact that the same sounds were equally present in other
languages although the meaning they conveyed was entirely different. The
contradiction was surmounted only by the discovery that it is the combina-
tion of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the significant
data”.11

This is clearly the structuralist position placing interdependence, the

system and the structure at the center of its analysis. In the work of
Lévi-Strauss, relational terms can only be understood and described
through their interdependence with others within a whole. Empirically,
in structural anthropology, links, relations and interdependencies be-
come its objects of study.

“Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like pho-

nemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems.
‘Kinship systems’ like ‘phonemic systems’, are built by the mind on the
level of unconscious thought”.12

The signification operation therefore does not depend on a spe-

cial relationship between the sign and reality, but on a specific re-
lationship between signs. Having set aside subjectivities, the struc-
tural anthropologist seeks, despite everything, to isolate fundamental
distinctive elements and their combination modalities within this or
that system of activity. The signification potentiality that these details
possess, for example a sound in relation to another, the role and po-
sition of a father in relation to those of a son, I would place among
the internal, “endo-relational” stock of each unit in a system.13 This
designates the characteristic ability, the potential to have a meaning,
necessarily in relation to something else. Some of these logical and
significative principles can become decisive for a part of the indi-

11 Lévi-Strauss, p. 208.
12 Lévi-Strauss, p. 34.
13 The notions of endo-relations and exo-relations are used by L.R. Bryant (in
a sense that is slightly different from mine). See Levi R. Bryant, ‘The Ontic
Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology’, in The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne, ed. by Levi R. Bryant,
Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), pp. 261–
278. I should also point out that this opposition between endo-relations and
exo-actions does not encompass that commonly used in philosophy between
internal and external relations.
32 Separate Humans

vidual’s identity, such as being the father or son of…, as well as for
some of his actions.
Furthermore, the impact that the structural linguistics project had
on Lévi-Strauss is linked to its ambition to move away from the state
of conscious linguistic phonemes to discover their unconscious infra-
structure. In fact, where it is a matter of humans, or “human elements”,
Lévi-Strauss adds a structural unconscious, present in each of these,
which operates according to a set of logical rules governing exchanges
between individuals. This structural unconscious, the ultimate cogni-
tive ability, is in the mind and works according to a binary logic that
contrasts and combines the elements and their own characteristics. I
might say that they “relation”, that they unconsciously activate endo-
relational potentialities of meaning.
Ultimately what becomes central is indeed this structural uncon-
scious, that is to say an ordering, structuring mind that enables indi-
viduals to exchange, oppose, and create interdependencies. And every
human being possesses it. The terms, or individuals, are themselves
relational and are presented as such. While they are endowed with
this relational ability, they are conceived as being relative in differ-
ent systems, for example a kinship system. Relational ability lies at
the heart of the individual, whom it causes to act. But this structural
individual is a mutilated one. Because — as is a well-known feature of
Lévi-Strauss’ theories — it does not matter much that there is a “me”,
a “spoiled child” who feels, perceives, experiences the possession of
these endo-relations or even these cognitive operations. And my ques-
tion is: how does the individual do so, furtively, among many other
things, sometimes strongly, in the flow of everyday life? It is clear that
an individual who exists cannot only be described and understood on
the basis of some relative positions within systems.
Having social relations: in its everyday use, this expression means hav-
ing a stock, having social-relations capital. From a Bourdieusian perspec-
tive, it designates a given individual’s social experiences and relational
stock, accumulated in the course of his or her existence. It is endo-relations
of a different kind, in this case more social than cognitive. They corre-
spond to predispositions that make exo-actions possible in a situation, spe-
cifically a set of behaviours, attitudes, ways of thinking and judging. These
things are well-known in the social sciences. Behind every confrontation
between two human beings, there is a confrontation between “habitus”,
therefore between endo-relations. These endo-relations expressed in exo-
actions are themselves in a relationship of distinction with others. Accord-
Existence and relation 33

ing to the Bourdieusian point of view, each individual only exists rela-
tively. And this does not apply solely to human beings, but also to various
things in life that are only intelligible in their relations with one another, in
their relationship of difference.14
I believe it is essential to meticulously study the acquisition of, and
changes in, endo-relations over the course of days and situations. But in
this case, individuals once again become central, in place of the “between”
or “relative”. Each individual, I might add. Bernard Lahire focuses his
analysis on the singular individual, with a view to studying the individual
variations of social trajectories that are either activated or on standby de-
pending on the context, or on the situation and actions in progress.15 But
the methodological difficulty is not slight. Of course, it is sometimes easy
to draw a link between a gesture, words and an acquired social predisposi-
tion. Basically a causality link. This link between an act and this sort of
endo-relation activated in the context of a situation is often not obvious
to the carrier or the observer, but it exists. The fact that people (sharing
the same social class) react differently under identical circumstances does
not eliminate the possibility that their reactions are linked to their own
social capital since different endo-relations are progressively accumulated
through the life trajectory of each of them. But where is the limit beyond
which it is no longer possible or relevant to apply this interpretation to
gestural and verbal details? Can all gestures and all speech be inserted into
this scheme? I do not believe this is the case. It is enough to subject an
individual to detailed examination in a situation to find oneself marveling
at his movements, his thoughts, his mental associations, in order to under-
stand that the whole of his present volume of being cannot be reduced to a
sum of acquired social endo-relations.
Let us look at another relationist proposition. Today, Latour’s theo-
ries are certainly those that most reinforce the primacy of relations
and the suspension of the presence of individuals. Bruno Latour places
connecting and associating relations at the center of his analysis. The
Latourian entity is solely defined by its relations, its action of changing
an object or being reduced to the effects of the action. It seems to be
described as if it existed at every moment, fully activated in connec-
tion with other entities. And the least change in an object turns it in into

14 For example, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by

Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
15 Bernard Lahire, Dans les plis singuliers du social (Paris: La Découverte,
2013).
34 Separate Humans

a new actor. We are far from what was said above about exo-actions
and the subtlety of continuities in an existence. As a target and relay
of connections and trajectories, the Latourian individual appears with
few qualities except the relevant attention he directs to the network
in which he finds himself, to its modes of expression, to intersections
with other networks.
Latour’s views are radical in their relationist manifestation:

“But what about me, the ego? Am I not in the depth of my heart, in the
circumvolutions of my brain, in the inner sanctum of my soul, in the vivac-
ity of my spirit, an ‘individual’? Of course I am, but only as long as I have
been individualized, spiritualized, interiorized”.16

It is an astonishing structuralist formulation! But specifically: what

am I like when I am “individualized”, “internalized”, when I do things,
when I live, etc.? In An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Latour sticks
to this position, seeking:

“networks for the production of ‘interiority’ and ‘psyches’ endowed

with some materiality, traceability, solidity similar to those of the networks
for the production of ‘objectivities’”.17

And he continues:

“Instead of situating the origin of an action in a self that would then fo-
cus its attention on materials in order to carry out and master an operation of
manufacture in view of a goal thought out in advance, it is better to reverse the
viewpoint and bring to the surface the encounter with one of those beings that
teach you what you are when you are making it one of the future components
of subjects (having some competence, knowing how to go about it, possessing
a skill). Competence, here again, here as everywhere, follows performance
rather than preceding it. In place of Homo faber, we would do better to speak
of Homo fabricatus, daughters and sons of their products and their works”.18

This is indeed structuralist! Even if we seem to be in full “ontologi-

cal turn”, with beings and modes of existence, where are the empirical

16 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction of Actor–Network–

Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 212.
17 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: an Anthropology of the
Moderns, trans. by Catherine Porter (Harvard: Harvard University Press.
2013), p. 158.
18 Latour, p. 230.
Existence and relation 35

units? They do not exist! We do not see them situated and described.
They are solely treated as the effects of utterances and relations.
Latour’s readers circulate within a structuralist and relationist lexi-
con. It inclines more towards structuralism when the text favours the
passive voice and sets the individual aside, something that recalls the
“I am acted upon, I am thought” of Lévi-Strauss. Latour proposes to
track the creations of interiority, the “psychotropic beings” that change
beings, that produce subjectivities and skills, as we have just seen. In-
dividuals are secondary. The text inclines more towards relationism
when it emphasises “having things done”, focuses on the activity, the
“between”, translations, trajectories, transfers, attachments, networks.
What is important, according to Latour, is that which precedes and
that which follows.19 “Instead of striving to find the proportion of In-
dividual and of Society in each course of action, it is better to follow
the organising act that leaves these distorted, transitory figures behind
in its wake”.20 What could be more Latourian than this proposition:
“We shall simply say that Peter and Paul, along with their friends and
enemies, find themselves linked, attached, bound, interested”?21
It is quite different on the one hand to think, as I might do, that hu-
man beings have relational abilities and predispositions, that they are
independent of one another even if some of their roles are interdepend-
ent (husband, father, wife, son, etc.), that in a situation they give con-
crete expression to their relational predispositions and roles, that these
manifestations certainly shape them and contribute to their identity,
and also that the volumes of being in a situation are more or less than
the directly manifested relations; and on the other hand to think that
relations constitute entities, create and determine these, that they are
all interconnected and form society, as Latour says.
Let us sum up. The idea of relations led to at least three different direc-
tions: relations as interactions — this implying a focus on the interaction-
ally relevant, and concentration on the “between”; individuals as relations
(as relational or as constituted by relations, even as “relationed”), that is to
say without other properties; relative individuals in a system. There could,
however, be another, very different point of view, as I pointed out at dif-
ferent aspects in my critique: the singular individual as a volume of be-
ing, more than relative and more than a relation. Exo-actions are indeed

19 Latour, p. 285.
20 Latour, p. 402.
21 Latour, p. 428.
36 Separate Humans

acts, gestures and words that are completed, accomplished and spelt by
the individuals themselves. There is a risk that, by placing oneself in the
middle of situations, between the relata, one will overlook the entirety of
each person’s volume of being, and only focus on the dimensions that are
relevant to the interaction. Let us instead consider that there are individu-
als, and that they accomplish actions, which are multiple and changeable
— actions that are implicatory, more or less implicatory, sometimes non-
implicatory. There is also that reserve of being which can leave traces in
ways of being present, exo-actions that are not directly relevant to the situ-
ation in progress. So I do not accept the reduction of an individual’s pres-
ence to a “role”. Nor do I accept seeing a moment of presence only as a set
of exo-actions that are salient and relevant to the situation, or as the effect
of a “relationing” mind.
Getting close to the individual makes it possible to better observe not
only this volume of being engaged in relations and removed from them,
but also the always-variable modalities and intensities of engagement and
detachment in the action, as well as the exo-action in which he is engaged,
which can itself move towards another individual with varying intensity,
not to mention the manifestations of other things that may filter in. Getting
close also makes it possible to pinpoint the endo-relations that are layers,
traces and predispositions that have accumulated in a volume of being.
Being a father or husband: these are forms of endo-relations whose expres-
sion is sometimes visible and direct in a given situation, sometimes invis-
ible in another, though it might sometimes leave minor traces. Exo-actions
actualise endo-relations and melt into them. Are all of these exo-actions
an actualisation of incorporated and internalised endo-relations? No, as I
have just suggested. It is impossible — in any case, not easy — to measure
all of the endo-relations and to draw the links from actions, attitudes and
gestures to the stock of endo-relations. And beyond these links, I repeat,
there are leftovers with regard to social trajectories.
Moving beyond relationism first means opposing this excess of rela-
tionism, opposing relations as a research theme (examining roles, rela-
tionships, links) and opposing relations as a theoretical interpretation that
reduces individuals to trajectories, interdependencies, or salient elements
in situations. Next, it means examining the individual in the process of
existing, with all of his subtle differences and his continuities — before,
during and after the moment of interaction. From this point of view, ontol-
ogy takes on a meaning that is sometimes different from what is implied
by anthropology’s “ontological turn”. As we have seen, ontology is not
an anthropological object, but a method of anthropological observation.
Existence and relation 37

Ethnography as methodological relationism

There is a relation that I have not mentioned, the one that the re-
searcher, the ethnographer, develops with the people he observes in
the course of his fieldwork. In this case, the relation is central to the
method: ethnographic relations, fieldwork, encounters with people,
participation in their activities to the point of becoming one of them.
This sort of fieldwork sanctifies the researcher’s relationship with the
people he observes: the relational influences in his ethnographic posi-
tion, the importance of empathy or researcher sensitivity.
In fact, social anthropologists very often, and more and more ex-
plicitly, assert the importance of the “interactional” interplay in their
fieldwork, which is the very foundation of ethnography. They present
ethnography exclusively as a matter of relations, as a social encoun-
ter.22 From this perspective, the ethnographers do not look for an exte-
rior position: they immediately acquire a place in the indigenous social
sphere. It is directly on the basis of the researcher’s assignment to one
place or another that he identifies local classifications and the spacing
of positions and relations. He can accept, reject or change these defi-
nitions himself and attempt to get others to accept his own definition
of his role. The people develop their own idea of the researcher and
attribute to him a role which serves as the basis for their reactions.
He himself attributes meaning to the verbal and nonverbal actions of
others and discovers meaningful categories through a constant process
of redefinition. Instead of being a source of distortion to be eliminat-
ed, the researcher’s way of perceiving things is incorporated into his
fieldwork, and is an integral part of the relational interplay. That is
ethnography: interactionism in action, methodological relationism. The
opposite of this is, on the one hand, the setting aside of this methodologi-
cal interplay and, on the other hand, the independent reality of the object
of study, the human being, the individual, these constituting the objective
of anthropology.
As we have seen, the critique of relationism implies breaking away
from the ethnographic focus on relations and interactions as abstract
wholes constructed by the researcher, for example social relations, var-
ious exchanges, activities between individuals, etc. It also implies no
longer theoretically conceiving of the individual as a relational entity

22 For example: Norman K. Denzin, The Research Act (Englewood Cliffs:

Prentice Hall, 1970).
38 Separate Humans

engaged in one action or one activity. It is rather a matter of favouring

a conception of the individual in successive situations, as a singular
entity that is never reducible to any one of these situations. From a
methodological point of view, this implies bringing into question the
“myth” of participant observation and carrying out the required indi-
vidual intrusion. More than any other method, even though it asserts
the importance of getting close to the experience and aiming for ex-
haustiveness, ethnography deserves criticism. First of all, contrary to
its principles of proximity and exhaustiveness, it constitutes a process
of uncontrolled data loss, from the observation phase to the writing
phase, with its particularly regrettable selection from field notes. Next
it is always getting bogged down in relational problems between the
observer and the observed. With its principles of proximity and ex-
haustivity, ethnography could advantageously turn itself into direct,
filmed or photographed observation of existence in the strictest sense:
as the continual experience of moments and situations.
And what if the question were changed and became: what are hu-
man beings like when they are or are not engaged in relations, with a
given set of people and then with another? Anthropology would then
become the close observation of concrete existences and of the details
within them. It would keep hold of particular individuals and exist-
ences through every stage of research, from the note-taking stage to
the writing of the final text. Following and observing individuals in
details are of course very different from the life stories and biographies
methods. The anthropologist would then stay out of the individual’s
activities. But this of course does not prevent him from speaking and
asking questions to the observed individual.

Separate individuals, singularity and continuity

But what is an individual? There are individuals, in groups or alone,

that anyone could define and designate as such. They are empirical
units, “human beings” all over the world, whatever the cultural con-
ceptions of the individual and of the person. Note also that “subjec-
tification”, “individuation” or “individualisation” are associated with
too macrological analyses for my objective. Dissected, so to speak, an
individual certainly reveals cultural elements, social trajectories and
relational experiences. But his volume, as I have said, reveals other
elements. Every individual is different from the other individuals that
Existence and relation 39

sociologists designate as belonging to the same shared social group,

that ethnologists or social anthropologists attribute to the same shared
cultural group, that biologists classify as one species. This singularity
is not what is grouped and designated as shared, relevant and solic-
ited by members of the group, activity or interaction, nor is it what is
isolated at moment t in the individual’s life. Leftovers, I would say,
are important. Iris Murdoch’s question cannot but speak to me: “Why
should attention to detail, or belief in its inexhaustibility, necessarily
bring paralysis, rather than, say, inducing humility and being an ex-
pression of love?”23
An individual, who can be defined by a proper name and a demon-
strative reference (that person, this person) possesses his own singularity,
which is made up of permanent elements such as genes, relatively stable
elements like physiological characteristics, social inclinations or psycho-
logical tendencies that are gradually formed over years of life. But this sin-
gularity is also made up of circumstantial details, unimportant gestures or
words spoken here and now. A volume of being detected over the course of
a few moments is a complex presence of actions and feelings, of more or
less visible traces of trajectories, of various minor thoughts and gestures,
all mixed together, changing and qualifying each other.
It is important to indicate that, in this exercise of focusing on one
individual, it is not primarily the fear, happiness or attention of person
X that interests me, but rather X himself, as a fearful, happy or atten-
tive person, with his states of mind, mixing them together, qualifying
and mitigating them, and continuing towards other heres and nows.
As far as existence is concerned, it is not only actions or emotions that
are at play, but also ways of being present while performing or feeling
them, and of subsequently carrying on. Is not there indeed a difference
between existence and experience? The experience of refers to a mo-
ment, an activity, a relation to. It implies to look for relevant elements
of this experience of (sickness, power, music, etc.). Existence directs
the focus onto the existent being who lives this experience, and on his
entire volume of being. This point of view allows to observe that the
human being is more than just this experience at the moment he experi-
ences it, and goes on through other activities after this experience.
Each individual is a separated volume from any other volume. He is
thus a numerical unit, associated with an identifiable corporeal conti-

23 Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and

Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 88.
40 Separate Humans

nuity and a mental identity, which he is able to feel, also over time. If
he experiences joy, it is he who feels his joy, that specific joy. Someone
else could not feel it for him. A central element of this singularity is
death, which no one can “experience” for someone else. At most, one
can give support to someone else as he dies. We are each “numeri-
cally one” from birth to death. This is what Martha Nussbaum calls,
after Stanley Cavell, the principle of “separateness”.24 The pain felt
by a given individual reminds him that it is he who is suffering and
not someone else. Even in “symbiotic” relationships, the separation of
individuals is not overcome.
This is why I cannot associate human beings exclusively with rela-
tionality, since in my view, this is always integrated with, or covered by,
a form of solitude. What Donald Winnicott has written, from another per-
spective, on “the capacity to be alone”25 or “not communicating” seems
to me to be very true. It emphasises the young child’s ability to withdraw,
to be alone in the presence of his mother, and supports the idea of a
kind of solitude, “the permanent isolation of the individual”. “At the cen-
tre of each person is an incommunicado element”, he writes. And even
this: “Each individual is an isolate, permanently non-communicating”.26
Moreover, I have always thought that each person’s minor gestures,
without having anything to do with the concerns of the relation in pro-
gress, are the sometimes minute expression of this partial but permanent
“distance”, and more radically, of the separation between beings. Each
individual is, under various forms, in an imperfect presence. His rela-
tions are like a defeat every time, or in any case like a beginning, an em-
bryonic, incomplete link with others, whom he is necessarily separated
from and cannot completely reach. This is very important.

Now, let us clarify the idea of singularity. What are the modes of
change of a volume of being, of its main features and of its accidents?
How could one distinguish what is not modified from what has been?
Today’s dark hair will become white in fifty years and can be red in ten
minutes after a dye. The individual, kind at one time, can be mean a
few minutes later. He was a single person and now he has just become

24 Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Liberalism and the

Good, ed. by R. Bruce Douglas, Gerald M. Mara and Henry S. Richardson
(New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203–52 (p. 223).
25 Donald W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment (London: Karnac Books, 1984), p. 29.
26 Winnicott, p. 187.
Existence and relation 41

married. He changes his profession. But in any case, he stays rich or

poor, tall or small, clever or simple. He moves from one place to an-
other, but he remains this or that. These questions would be relevant to
an anthropology of singularities.
In fact, a unique volume of being arises from the meeting of a sperm and
an ovum. This meeting produces an egg, a new cell, one that is unique, at
least in terms of its genome. Having resulted from what may have started
as an embrace, it is immediately more than the sum of the two. In utero, it
develops and modifies itself from received genetic potential and according
to the diverse information this volume of being integrates from its immedi-
ate environment. Before dividing, there is first a single, unique cell, which
lives between twelve and twenty-four hours. This volume of being will
then develop physiologically, neurologically, cognitively, emotionally, so-
cially, culturally, from its first moments, and will thus continue its develop-
ment, or what we could call its existence, until it dies, integrating different
relations.27 Being unique, the substance preserves a certain psychological
and corporeal continuity that is not hindered by constant cellular (but not
only) variations. I should add that the overlap between moments and situ-
ations, the traces of one situation in another, the continuity of moods and
states of mind, and self-narration place the individual not only as a multi-
plicity of roles, “dividuals” or selves, but also, in every part of the world,
as a “coherent” continuity crossing these and filling them with conscious-
ness and cognitive abilities.
From this, several forms of singularity appear:
-- The singularity of separation. Originating in a single cell, it
consists of the existence of the numerical unit as separate from
others, as not being any of the others, as linked to the physical
fact of not being anything else. The language, continuity of ex-
istence and memory accentuate this separation, by enabling to
represent oneself as oneself and to feel like oneself.
-- The singularity of combinations. It is linked to the sum of social
trajectories, relations experienced in the course of existence.
The infinite combinations of these relations generate a virtually
zero probability of being reproduced.
-- The singularity of details. As we have seen in this chapter, de-
tails that cannot be reduced to social combinations emerge in

27 For another interpretation of embryological development, see Peter van

Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1990),
pp. 150–58.
42 Separate Humans

one situation and are repeated from time to time, several times.
They can then be recognised as characterising an individual.
-- The singularity of continuity. This constitutes a kind of core,
some parts of which are actualised in a situation, others remain-
ing on stand-by in the succession of moments. Parts of the core
go through the roles and “dividuals” fulfilled by the individual.
They also give each person a style of existence, from situation
to situation in different roles. This core forms in and through
relations, but also in and with the contingency of accidents.

In the social sciences, singularity and individual variations are given

consideration, but they are often viewed as the result of combinations of
social and cultural trajectories. I would say that even in biology, there
are properties that cannot be described solely by previous relations,28 but
rather correspond to fortuitous, unpredictable changes. In the perspec-
tive of anthropology, this interpretation, which does not reduce acts and
their detailed forms to a set of influences and connections, I would call
it “existantialist” (ideally with an “a” and not an “e”). However, what is
thus emphasised is not an “existantialism” of freedom, but the singular
existent in the details of his or her style of existing. Iris Murdoch said of
Sartre that he emphasised the study of particular cases, and more impor-
tantly that he presented them as syntheses or totalities, overlooking the
diversity of a life’s accidents and contingencies, describing a conscious-
ness that was too transparent, and too abstracted from individuals and the
imperfections of their relations.29

Each human volume is thus a particular volume, not another one. On

the strength of its ability to think and understand, it knows, feels that
it is itself that feels and acts, and that one day it will no longer exist
(ever). It is an “informed” volume, as Aristotle would say; it performs
a succession of mental, corporeal and linguistic acts with various links
of causality and continuity between them. This volume exhibits a style
of existing through its acts and modalities, some of which are the result

28 Philipe Huneman and Guillaume Lecointre, ‘L’individualité, entre logique

et historicité’, in Redéfinir l’individu à partir de sa trajectoire, ed. by
Barthélémy Durrive and Julie Henry, (Paris: Editions Matériologiques,
2015), pp. 281–98 (p. 295). This is in reference to the theories of Georges
Canguilhem, Knowledge of life, trans. by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela
Ginsburg, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).
29 Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Realist (London: Penguin Books, 1989).
Existence and relation 43

of combinations of trajectories and relations or connections, while oth-

ers are also deployed through details that cannot be reduced to these
relations. An individual is also characterised by the fact of being one-
self, with the impossibility of being someone else, being in someone
else’s place — that human over there is irreplaceable. On the basis of
this interpretation, I emphasise continuity and irreducibility, and I am
thus out of step with many empirically contestable interpretations that
emphasise discontinuity and relational dependence.

Phenomenography

I have often used the word “phenomenography” to designate this

observation of volumes. What is phenomenography? What is impli-
cated by this method? As I have explained, a relationist perspective
is one that considers that there are only relations, and that everything
is explained by relations. A relationist theory focuses on the “between
individuals”, and a relationist method places importance on relational
interplay for the production of knowledge. Phenomenography is there-
fore not relationist. It considers that there are only individuals in a
situation, who of course act and speak to other individuals. Of course,
these exo-actions must be described, even subtly in the complexity of
their heterogeneous simultaneity at moment t and on the basis of their
individual existence as it develops over time. With this objective, what
is important is not so much relational complicity and interactional in-
terplay, but rather the observation of the individual, one at a time.
What is this human being really like at moment t and afterwards?
This is the question of a phenomenography that aims for realism. It as-
serts the existence of a reality to describe, independent of the observer,
and does not emphasise a relationist method, as is the case with eth-
nography. I do not reject this totally, but I would only make it a point
of departure, an exploration of the context. Whereas during fieldworks,
the observation is often circumscribed to a space, event or specific ac-
tivity, phenomenographic attention30 orients the observer towards a dif-
ferent perspective: following an individual throughout his days — this

30 I prefer using the word “phenomenography” (and not “ethnography”)

to designate the observation of humans. I will keep “ontography” for the
observation of nonhumans, as we will see in the next chapter. See Piette,
Existence in the Details.
44 Separate Humans

can be one or a few days, even several weeks —, and preserving the
continuity of moments in the final text, as close as possible to field
notes. The methodology of following exists, and it is called “shadow-
ing”: “The researcher follows a person as his or her shadow, walking
in his or her footsteps over a relatively long period of time, throughout
his or her different activities, to collect detailed-grained data”.31 This
method is for instance widely practiced in organisational studies, as
indicated in the summary book by Barbara Czarniawska, a manage-
ment studies specialist.32 But the method is still very marginalised in
the social sciences, all the more if the shadowing takes place outside
of professional or public spaces, entering into individuals’ private, do-
mestic spheres. “Focusing on an existence” — I think it would be a
more relevant expression than “shadowing” — is of course possible
with a movie camera, even desirable.33 It is intrusive and uncomfort-
able to say the least, but anyone who practices it comes away rich in
discoveries and available data.
It seems to me that researchers do not give enough consideration to
the heuristic power of keeping notes or transcriptions of recorded video
in the text, both for obtaining accurate descriptions and for understand-
ing the act of existing. When the focus is placed on the individual (of
course in relations), on one individual at a time, the anthropologist will
observe: elements relevant in the relations, those directly visible, and
also those which are not relevant (these two sets are exo-actions), strata
that concern traces of past relations, such as social trajectories (endo-
relations), as well as strata that give a glimpse of relevant non-rela-
tional elements, leftovers and leftovers of leftovers. This observation
is based on the focusing on this same individual for varying periods of
time, identifying modalities, modulations, modalisations of intensities
of presence and absence. This focusing is an observation, one that I

31 Dominique Meunier and Consuelo Vasquez, ‘On Shadowing the Hybrid

Character of Actions: A Communicational Approach’, Communication
Methods and Measures, 2 (3) (2008), 167–92 (p. 168).
32 Barbara Czarniawska, Shadowing and Other Techniques for Doing fieldwork
in Modern Societies (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business Press, 2007).
33 I am thinking of the work of François Cooren and his team: for example
a video recording of a brief that a manager holds with his team before a
meeting (without the manager) and debriefing after the meeting (with the
manager), and the analysis of aspects of discourse as they travel through time
and space: see François Cooren, and others, ‘A Humanitarian organization in
Action: Organizational Discourse as an Immutable Mobile’, Discourse and
Communication, 1(2) (2007), 153–90.
Existence and relation 45

would say is external, and as accurate as possible. This has something

of the nature of realist ontism. The observation’s point of departure, the
“basic particular”, as Strawson would say, is a given individual present
in a situation, visible, tangible and observable.
In phenomenography, observation alone is not enough. Anthropol-
ogy of existence, or let us call it existential anthropology,34 also con-
ducts very introspective interviews, with the goal of finding out how
the individual was at a given moment, what his thoughts and emotions
were, with the aim of getting a close view of his feelings, which may
be more or less detached. There are various ways of completing this
information: particularly the use of diaries, which the researcher could
ask to be kept, or which might already exist in all of its possible forms,
and be made available to the anthropologist, who is then able to track
variations in states of mind. It is also possible for the humans to re-
cord themselves in various formats, if the observer has asked them to
do so. When people self-observe in this way, it is important that they
then immediately note their feelings and states of mind.35 Investigating
volumes of being is certainly not easy. It is also possible for a person
to specify — for example based on photographs or film images that
constitute an exceptional resource — what states of mind they were
in, according to the pace of the situation, according to their gestures,
words, and what direction they were looking in.
An artist or a teacher, a child or an old man, in Paris or in Tokyo:
what are they like, as they exist here, then there, when they are in a giv-
en situation, then in a different environment, when they are conscious
of, or relate to, this or that thing? Of course, the complicity generated
during introspective interviews is obviously a useful resource. But it
seems to me that these questions make it possible to go beyond a too
exclusively relational perspective focused on the being in the world, in
an environment, and conscious of. Let us say it again: what is each in-
dividual like in a situation with others, when he speaks or when some-
one speaks to him, when he shares or does not share, adjusts or does
not adjust, when he has expectations and obligations, when others have
expectations, their own expectations, various obligations that have an
effect on him? In short, what is each person like within and alongside
relations? Between presence and absence, activity and passivity?

34 Piette, Existence in the Details.

35 Noelie Rodriguez and Alan Ryave, Systematic Self-Observation (London:
Sage Publications, 2002).
46 Separate Humans

Other complementary methodologies will be increasingly used:

various sensors and detectors, embedded cameras. In any case, it is
not so much the relationship established with the individual that is
important, but rather the results supplied by this equipment. In the
film, what is important to me is not so much the relationship be-
tween the cameraman and the person, but rather the document that
makes it possible to watch and to listen again. This is not to say
that there is no need for relational preliminaries prior to filming and
photographing, but the knowledge sought does not concern the rela-
tionship built between the filmer and the filmed individual. And as
I have said, when the perspective is relationist, it is not unusual for
the ethnographic content, with or without any film intermediation, to
consist of an account of relations between the ethnographer and the
people, saying nothing about the attitudes, words and gestures of this
observed people. Refining the observation experiment would require
the anthropologist not only to watch the individual over a longer pe-
riod of time, observing his continuous presence in the interlinking of
situations, and to question him of course, but also — and this is very
important — to keep all of his notes without selecting and filtering
some of them. Being faithful both to real time and to field notes ena-
bles the researcher to examine other elements, peripherals, leftovers,
to give them a central theoretical place, and to rediscover the pres-
ence of human beings in the process of performing actions, or what I
would call existing.
What, therefore, is phenomenography? An initial task could consist
in an exploration of all that can happen in a situation or context, while
also conducting a polyfocal observation that establishes a hierarchy
between the concerns of meaning. After, the real observation work be-
gins, with a focus on separated human beings, their actions, gestures
and states of mind from situation to situation. As I have already said,
this observation takes care not to immediately eliminate secondary, pe-
ripheral or irrelevant elements. By the same token, it endeavours to
identify as many details as possible in human presences, particularly
the presence of an element and of its opposite. Depending on the an-
thropologist’s objectives, the observation may combine the continuity
of existence and modes of presence with a detailed focus on particular
moments, in order to understand the continuity of situations. The goal
is to achieve a balance between closer or more distant perspectives,
in order to write a description of the existent, not just of one activity,
situation or event. The final text offers a referential presentation that
Existence and relation 47

incorporates indications of presences, through images or transcriptions

of conversations.
None of this goes without saying. In ethnography, the rejection
of the realist position prevails, as well as an emphasis on acquiring
knowledge through the researcher’s relationship with the people be-
ing studied. As we know, it is often a question of participation, shar-
ing and relations, and this rules out all knowledge independent of the
researcher, his presence and the place he occupies. Furthermore, this
phenomenographic position, which detects details in a human pres-
ence, obviously places a great deal of emphasis on the absence or the
passivity in the presence and not only on the action.36 This clashes
with the politically engaged habitus of many social science research-
ers. This anthropology ultimately seeks “universals” even though the
social sciences attempt to explain diversities and transformations. Fi-
nally, the “micro” is taken into consideration in the social sciences,
but it does not include individual singularity, even less the details of
thought and the inner self. This is immediately denied in the name of
access problems, or dismissed as a psychologising excess, or because
the objective is incompatible with the custom of flexible and partici-
pant methodologies.
With this focus on unique existences, looms an existential anthro-
pology that can serve as a bridge between the descriptions of psy-
chologists and sociologists, between literature and cognitive science.
Anthropology would then be an observation of individuals, and a
comparison between them, with transmittable methods, from the ob-
servation stage to the writing stage. And what if this were anthropolo-
gy: an “anthropography” of individuals, to be compared according to
various sociocultural characteristics, and of course also according to
diverse conceptions of what constitutes a person in different parts of
the world, but also according to psychological, generational or other
characteristics. In my view, the method would have to play down the
role of relational interplay in the data collection process, in favour of
observations that are detailed, filmed, recorded on webcam, taking
advantage of the latest advances in computer video technology, or
even with the naked eye, focused on singular existences and not iso-
lated activities. Anthropology would then be primarily the direct ob-
servation of individuals. Beforehand, at the initial stage, ethnography
would sometimes constitute, as I have said, a first exploration, and

36 Piette, ‘Existence, Minimality and Believing’.

48 Separate Humans

afterwards, in order to confirm information, laboratory experiments

could become important resources.
My ideal would be this: leave it up to the social sciences (sociol-
ogy and social anthropology, fundamentally quite similar) the study
of social and cultural phenomena, and grant existential anthropology
the specificity of being the empirical and theoretical science of human
beings, separated individuals, their living, existent, present singulari-
ties with all their particularities, which are of course also social and
cultural, but not only. In order to be general, this anthropology would
compare individuals with one another, with other existing entities,
themselves also present in the diverse scenes of life, as well as with
other species that exist or once existed.
What if by avoiding relationism we were able to get beyond the
dichotomy between individuals and relations, and to describe individu-
als as well as possible, engaged in relations, according to varying re-
lational modes and degrees, either activated or in the background, and
to describe them as they are or are not, feel or do not feel, related! Let
us summarise the four principal characteristics of phenomenography:
- the principle of separation. This consists in focusing on individual
existences, one at a time, without highlighting shared social or cultural
traits identically detected in sets (social classes, cultural groups, etc.). This
principle is directly linked to the very nature of existence, which is singular
and not sharable. It contrasts with the traditional subject of the social sci-
ences and ethnography: relations, links and connections. The separation
also concerns the distance between the observer’s presence and the person
observed, with the aim of understanding not the relationship between the
observer and the observed, but rather the existence of the observed.
- the principle of exhaustiveness. This indicates the action of ex-
hausting (in Latin, exhaustio designates the action of exhausting). It
should be interpreted as a goal, an ambition that is not translated by the
action of emptying after having mined everything, but rather through
the difficult action of always remembering that after an initial sort-
ing process there are leftovers which are important to find, and also
remembering that new things can be added to these. The attempt of
exhaustiveness in anthropology is inseparable with the idea that every
description is a “failure”.
- the principle of reality. This is attained when the final description
says how a given individual is at one moment or another, in different
situations. It is thus important to write minute descriptions of attitudes,
gestures and states of mind. And this cannot be dissociated from the
Existence and relation 49

mitigated dimension of all of the human modes of presence, uniting

activity and passivity, action and rest, the major mode and the minor
mode.
- the principle of continuity. This concerns continuous presence —
uninterrupted, I must stress — of an individual in time, in the suc-
cession of moments and situations. This principle can be applied with
the naked eye or with video, over a short or long period of time — a
few hours, a day, a week — and can also be practiced several times at
regular intervals. Even if this principle of continuity complicates the
exhaustiveness task, it does not suspend it, and implies the need for a
certain creativity for placing the obtained data in a written form.
 ANTHROPOLOGY AND PARA-HUMANS

In a situation, individuals sense, perceive or infra-perceive non-

human entities. The anthropologist thus observes an individual in a
situation who perceives a group, a divinity, an animal. The observer
describes the forms of presence of the individual and of these non-
humans (or what could be called para-humans) “alongside” him, as
companions of humans, which have their own forms of presence since
they are seen or perceived.1 Thus in addition to following a human
being in his day-to-day continuity, this perspective consists in observ-
ing para-humans—those which are perceived and designated by the
human in question—in order to observe them in their presence through
moments and the succession of situations. How should a nonhuman
be observed? Either it is physically present (maybe it is alive as in the
case of animals, but not necessarily, as in the case of the dead), or it
is a “presence” whose effect goes beyond a raw material, noticeable
mainly because at a given moment it imposes a certain salience that
causes someone to perform an action. Thus another entity is found by
the observer when he sees a human being in the process of addressing
himself to a divinity for example, or treating a group or social sign as
present here and now, or even performing an action in relation to a spe-
cific object, for example a red traffic light. Once a statement or gesture
of the human being has indicated the presence of a local para-human, it
can be a matter of “approaching” it, following it if possible, something
that might involve abandoning the original situation, to detect various
forms of presence, even when it is doing nothing and is not making
anybody do anything.
Alongside each human being, nonhumans — whether large, tall,
short, living, non-living, real or virtual — constitute presences that
are amazing, insofar as their way of coming and going, being present

1 In Ancient Greek, ‘para’ means ‘next to’.

52 Separate Humans

and absent is characteristic. Throughout the situations he crosses in the

course of his days, any human will meet and then leave para-humans,
which themselves either continue or do not continue after this moment
of co-presence, at the same location or elsewhere.
One remark should be made at this point. My thought represents an
anthropo-logical perspective, and as we have seen, I consider human
beings to be the primary “object” of anthropological science. They are
in a world with other humans, surrounded by things they have built. All
around them, there is hardly any reality that is not the result of the work
of human beings. This goes for computers, sofas, money, passports,
divinities, universities and states. It is the humans’ world, with its dif-
ferent entities. As an anthropologist, I can describe humans as well
as these entities that surround them. But these appear with different
realities within the human world. Therefore, I believe it is important to
find criteria to distinguish and compare these “anthropological” enti-
ties. I am doing this from a perspective based on two types of real-
ism: the realism of the researcher who observes the observed human as
something different and independent of him, as a reality that does not
depend on the subject of knowledge,2 and the realism of the entities
surrounding the human; it is their reality that is considered, independ-
ent of the humans in question.
It seems to me that the methodological principle which consists in
giving a certain weight to the local ontology of the situation, and de-
scribing entities according to this ontology, needs to be completed with
a consideration of what really “is” in this situation. Para-humans are
not humans. This does not mean they are not present. Some entities
exist, others do not exist, some are present, others are not. And this is
the case regardless of local ontologies and indigenous categories. It is
important for the anthropologist to fully describe what exists, what is
present, as realistically as possible.
In social science analyses, it is possible to make just about anything
exist: gods, collective entities, etc. In this case, human beings would
only be an existent among many others. In contrast, what follows is an
attempt at a classification of para-humans. What does not exist? What
is independent of humans, and would continue to exist without them?
Armchairs, no doubt. But not money and divinities. Banknotes would
remain but would they be understood? Statues would remain, but not
gods. However, the statues would lose their meaning. Let us say that an

2 Ferraris, Introduction to New Realism.

Anthropology and para-humans 53

armchair is a material volume. It is more than a linguistic convention,

not a mere piece of fiction like Tintin. It is different from a divinity to
which humans attribute a referent and an almost concrete existence,
and to which they speak.
There is a first possible criterion: having a material volume, a spati-
otemporal volume that is unique (distinguishable) and endowed with a
certain independence relative to other entities in a situation. This leads
back to Aristotle’s substance, as a separate material body, evoked in the
first pages of this book. On this point, one cannot equate, on the one
hand, a thought dependent on the person who generates it, a divinity
that consists in its forms of presentification, and on the other hand a
human individual, an animal or an object.3

Methodological theism and realist atheism

I shall distinguish two (chronological) steps in my work: the first

one is associated to what I have called methodological theism4 and the
second one, more recent, consists in a realist atheism. In particular, the
last one is necessary in order to attempt reaching the ontological ambi-
tion, as I have defined it. My fieldwork in French parishes and later a
theoretical thinking about the origin of believing were important steps
for constructing my point of view about ontology.
In what consists methodological theism? A situation is a scene,
which happens in a specific space, at a specific time. A dominical mass
in a French village is a situation. In such a worship scene, there are of
course human beings and objects: they are individual, concrete, palpa-
ble; these are visible entities. But the analysis is not limited to objects
that are directly perceived and perceptible by the anthropologist. It also
includes the analysis of divinities. If not, in our case, we would not
understand anything to the situation and to what people are doing. It is
necessary to rigorously observe the situation, and in this one, the im-
pact of the divinity and its modes of presence. The comparative obser-
vation of different dominical cults makes it possible to deduce — from
what is going on, what is visible —, a few of the divinity’s presence
modalities, somehow as if I deduced what an interlocutor (which I do

3 Some of the ideas of this chapter have been published in an article of Tsantsa,
20 (2015), 34–44.
4 Albert Piette, La religion de près (Paris: Metailié, 1999).
54 Separate Humans

not hear) would say to the phone to a friend which I hear answering
him.
Pushing methodological theism to the limit implies — so far as pos-
sible — going beyond human modes of expression in order to focus on
describing the god with different ontographic characteristics. This is of
course easier with a living being, like an animal, than with an invisible
entity. Even if in the case of divinities, it is difficult not to work with
the language of human beings about them, if one sticks too exclusively
to analysing linguistic forms, one risks missing an important element
of the situation: the god’s modes of presence and action. At this stage,
it is a matter of admitting that in a situation there are entities that are
visible while others are invisible, and therefore finding, for each type,
appropriate methods for pinpointing, observing and describing them.
There is here a difficult compromise to handle because the observation
of divinities (as invisible entities) is of course dependent on human ac-
tions and behaviours.
In what follows, I summarise a collection of ontographic descrip-
tions of dominical masses, which the reader can find in more details
in La religion de près.5 What is then observed about the divinity? It
is the divinity which causes these people to come together —people
would not come if the divinity was not there somehow —, and implies
specific attitudes during the ceremony. In such celebrations, Catholics
treat God’s presence as a dimension framing the situation, placing cer-
tain constraints on the exchanges that take place, or implying refer-
ence points that determine humans’ coordination. It is therefore up to
individuals to either feel that they are under God’s ascendency or keep
a certain distance, or to relate to it, through the attention the believer
invests in the details of the exchanges. From this deductive ontogra-
phy, I observe that God is one of those entities that can be present

5 At that moment I was explicitly indicating the work of Bruno Latour, On

the Modern Cult of Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010
[1996]). What seemed rare in the nineties (when I made this fieldwork) has
become nearly a new habit in anthropology, since the theory of Bruno Latour
has known more and more success. See Jon Bialecki, ‘Does God Exist in
Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back
and Bruno Latour’, Anthropology of Consciousness, 25 (1) (2014), 32–52;
Matthew Day, ‘Constructing Religion without The Social: Durkheim, Latour,
and Extended Cognition’, Zygon. Journal of Religion and Science, 44 (3)
(2009), 719–37; Martha L. Finch, Dissenting Bodies. Corporealites in Early
New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Tania M.
Luhrmann, When God Talks Back (New York: Alfred A. Knopk, 2012).
Anthropology and para-humans 55

in an inconspicuous way, without constantly being addressed directly.

Because it is also within lexical and gestural details that God comes,
circulates, claims extra attention and becomes newly engaged in the
situation. When it seems to have left, it is not a permanent departure.
It withdraws as quickly as it arrived, returning to oblivion for a few
moments before re-emerging, perhaps more distinctly. Liturgical se-
quences also make it apparent that God is circulating, with different
appearances and faces. Its mode of presence is particularly ambiguous
and fluid. From the beginning of these masses, its presence is wished
for, and then this wish is repeated, particularly in Eucharistic prayer
(“May God be with you”). But at the same time God is already there,
not only scattered through the church itself, but also stabilised in vari-
ous objects placed on and beside the altar. It is even materialised in the
hosts, and there is also the possibility that it could speak through the
reading of the gospels. And at the same time, it is repeatedly said that
its coming is expected, all of this in a short sequence, during which it
assumes various forms: that of Christ or the Spirit. Furthermore, pa-
rishioners appeal to the divine entity by means of various utterances:
chants, prayers or other formulations, which either address it directly
or evoke it without any direct exchange, or which may imitate Jesus’
words (and gestures), for example at the last supper with his disciples.
In these words we also hear praise of the qualities and actions of God
and Christ, presented either as a powerful and creative Father, or as a
benevolent and merciful love. After a series of requests for the benefit
of the church, for people in general or for people in particular, thanks
are expressed. As these appeals for actions are being addressed to God,
I can deduce that these actions are being performed. In any case, that
is what the development of the scene invites us to think, according to
the principle of methodological theism. Thus in this liturgy, God sum-
mons the parishioners, forgives them, delivers them from “evil”, sanc-
tifies them, blesses them, turns offerings into the body and blood of
Christ, unites those assembled, helps the dead share in his “light” and
helps the living to hope for another, “eternal” life. Sometimes God also
makes parishioners shed tears, inspires them to sing with more feeling,
to find an inner happiness, a feeling of hope, and even encourages them
to briefly see their divinity in front of them.
Emotion is not the most important thing. It is not even necessary,
and if it arises, it is only isolated and not widespread. Beyond a few
powerful moments experienced only by a few people, the divinity’s
presence — if one really thinks about it — is never very demanding.
56 Separate Humans

The descriptions show a divinity which seems to advance and then to

withdraw immediately after. Thus God constitutes a completely particu-
lar presence, to the point that the concepts of interactionism do not ap-
ply. For example, is the divinity a “non-person” to use Goffman’s term,6
like a taxi driver or a maid who is treated as if he or she were not there,
sometimes to the point of being subject to a lack of consideration? But in
the worship situation, for the sake of its coherence, the divinity is present
and individuals behave as if it were there and as if it were not there, but
without any lack of respect and without people strategically showing
that they are ignoring it. Is the God a “ratified hearer” 7 who hears, par-
ticipates and can be spoken to? Does it hear? In any case, to requests ut-
tered by humans it seems to respond with action. But it does not respond
every time. Does it participate? No doubt it does, since it is said to be
present, though it does not always participate actively and directly. Does
one speak to God? Yes, but without expecting direct responses, as one
does when speaking to a human. The co-presence of human beings and
gods is ultimately very amazing, quite asymmetrical in any case.
Should we stop the analysis at this reading of methodological the-
ism? I think on the contrary that the ontological aim should be pursued,
as I have already mentioned in this book. It implies leaving the sole
coherence of the situation for the people and describing the concrete
reality of what is happening.
There are certainly other ways to pursue the analysis. It would of
course be possible to continue describing and specifying the divin-
ity’s modes of action and presence. I could also take a serious look at
worship objects and the terms that designate them, allowing myself
to be guided by the things and their meanings. It would be possible
to interpret this type of situation as that of a “world” in which wine is
blood, bread is the body, as Martin Holbraad8 does when he draws an
equivalence between powder and power in Cuban divinatory cosmol-
ogy. But on this point, I prefer Evan Killick’s comments on certain
interpretations of the ontological turn, specifically on Holbraad’s anal-
ysis, an analysis of conceptual systems without people, which omits in-
teractions and modes of believing, and triggers an over-intellectualised
over-interpretation of what is going on:

6 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:

Anchor, 1959), pp. 151–53.
7 Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1981), p. 132.
8 Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion.
Anthropology and para-humans 57

“Holbraad’s methodology and writing can be more broadly accused of both

essentializing and exoticizing Ifá ontology. In the first place by distilling one
particular aspect of it, making the search for and understanding of its point
of ultimate alterity so precious that nothing else matters. In the second place
by reifying and fixing this understanding in place as if it is stable and shared
uniformly. And finally by emphasizing the radical alterity of the concept, such
that it can only apparently be understood by others through the creation of new
and newly-shared concepts”.9

Holbraad’s analysis risks missing what’s happening: this is the risk

of over-interpretation, one that those participating in worship do not
run through their own attitudes and their often critical views; a risk of
reinforcing cultural differences through this idea of multiple ontolo-
gies, generating new forms of exoticisation; also the risk of missing
or obliterating the day-to-day complexity of reality for the sake of set-
creating abstractions, thus suspending essential ontological questions.

Today, several years after my fieldwork in Catholic parishes and

given such conclusions of the ontological turn, it seems to me that the
ontography of God would not be complete without considering another
question: are the descriptions I offered of the situation true?

“You are ontologically serious”, wrote John Heil, “if you are guided by the
thought that the ontological implications of a philosophical claim [I would
add: a fortiori ethnographic descriptions] are paramount. The attitude most
naturally expresses itself in an allegiance to a truth-maker principle: when an
assertion about the world is true, something about the world makes it true”.10

Thus the requirements of ontology enable the anthropologist to step out-

side of the worship situation. From this ontological perspective, the anthro-
pologist can assume that the divinity’s presence is not the effect of any being
existing in another world, “a spiritual world”, as say the believers. Readers
might see this as an overly radical assertion; they can interpret it simply as
an assumption that would apply to all supernatural entities.11 Let us clarify
that realist atheism does not replace but completes methodological theism.

9 Evan Killick, ‘Whose Truth is it Anyway?’, Anthropology of this Century,

2014, Issue 9 (2014) (online).
10 John Heil, From an Ontological Point of view (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), pp. VII–VIII.
11 In L’origine de la croyance, I present a genealogical analysis of the ability
to invent contradictory statements, to accept not verifying them and thus to
believe in them (Piette 2013). See also Piette (2015b).
58 Separate Humans

Either God is real, and the ontographic description above tells us

a few things about an invisible entity of this kind; or the anthropolo-
gist ponders the question (this would be the great merit of ontological
reflection) and thinks that if he possessed a complete film of the his-
tory of humanity and religion, he would find situated moments when
each divinity, supernatural spirit, ancestor, etc., was “linguistically”
invented. From now on, this is my position, which moves from a meth-
odological theism towards a realist atheism. In anthropology, and es-
pecially in the ontological turn, it is curiously uncommon to declare
that a supernatural spirit, divinity or ghost is non-existent, and that the
attribution of their existence is due to a lack of historical knowledge,
to a thinking error, that of believing the divinity existed in this spiritual
world before being created and built, or to a perceptual error, that of
believing the supernatural entity exists because it is perceived and felt.
According to my perspective, in a situation, divinities do not exist;
they are only made up of effects of presence, what I would call “auras”
insofar as this immaterial effect arises as an extra relative to the con-
crete elements (persons, objects) which are in the scene.
I think it is a great merit of the ontological reflection not to consider
the reality of the situation in the point of view of people, and to avoid
the risk of going too far in protecting the local or native discourse,
whatever they may be. This shift from methodological theism to realist
atheism is important and useful to define different status of the other
nonhumans in anthropology: animals and collective entities, for exam-
ple. It will be the first benefit of a critical ontology.

Status of para-humans

What about animals?

Today, they have become a great challenge in human sciences, with

different modes of approaches. A realist ontology has a clear position
on the status of “animals”. They cannot be mere objects of represen-
tation, nor objects of humans’ activities, actions, gestures or words.
Something I learned from a previous research on dogs was of course
the necessity—not yet fully entrenched—of not treating them as a
metaphor, a sign, only considered in order to understand symbolic sys-
tems, social systems, cultural configurations, etc. I add: it seems to
me that introducing dogs or any other animal into the human sciences
Anthropology and para-humans 59

does not solely consist in conceiving hybrid societies, analysing hu-

man forms of categorisation, observing attachment relationships and
watching human beings attribute some sort of agency to their animal.
It is the animal (as well as the human of course) that must be observed:
when it is with humans, when it interacts with them, but also when it
does not.
But even when one thinks one has got rid of discourse and repre-
sentations, one sometimes still gets bogged down in them. I agree with
what Philippe Descola writes in How Forests Think12 about the gap
between what the author promises and what he delivers: not entities of
the real world but entities of discourse. We know nothing about

“how nonhuman life forms actually deal with iconic and indexical
signs. Meanwhile, we have to rely on what the anthropologist says the
Runa say about nonhuman semiosis that, after all, is barely one step re-
moved from what Eduardo Kohn criticizes in the anthropological accounts
of the relationships between humans and nonhumans”.13

It is therefore not solely a matter of trying to understand what proper-

ties humans attribute to animals in this or that situation, but rather look-
ing also at them, whether they are for example totemised, naturalised,
animised or analogised. What are they like in their different configura-
tions, from situation to situation, according to properties and labels at-
tributed to them, and what are the human forms of more or less literal,
more or less metaphorical adherence to these categorisations? And also,
what are they like in various situations, the majority of which do not
activate Descola’s schemes?
This dog and that dog have their own way of perceiving, paying at-
tention, acting and reacting, being with humans, being without humans.
And as for this human and that human: what are the particularities of
their being in the world? Are they very different from those of dogs? Un-
doubtedly. What would we learn, for example, from comparing Japanese
poodles with French, Bolivian and Russian poodles, or comparing poor
bulldogs with rich ones, or urban with rural bulldogs? What similarities
and differences would emerge? And what are the differences and points
in common between all of these dogs observed here and there, and be-
tween all of these humans observed here and there? And what are the

12 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think. Toward an Anthropology beyond the

Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
13 Philippe Descola, ‘All too Human (Still)’, Hau, 4, 2 (2014), 267–73 (p. 272).
60 Separate Humans

differences between dogs’ differences and points in common, and those

of humans? Animals have much to teach us about human beings, as long
as they, too, are observed and not immediately imprisoned by overly
rigid observation protocols.
A detailed description, an ontography, of what a dog does, feels and per-
ceives cannot be clarified by the notions of interaction, signs, networks,
communication, coordination, roles or meaning. Animals should destabi-
lise the observer, and the observer should learn to be destabilised so that
he is not tempted to deploy conceptual baggage learned in sociology or an-
thropology, for example. Dare I say that the reason why animals are worth
considering and observing, and are amazing, is that they are asymmetrical
in their relationship with human beings—a relationship full of uncertainties
and disparities? How, in fact, is a dog in the world? Being in the world, in
a given situation, how is the dog? I would place much more emphasis on
the “is” than on the “in the world”. Can we not feel amazed by the fact that
this particular dog is here, that it is there, as we watch it, watch it being
more or less than an interactant, always continuing into new moments and
situations, with or without these humans? And according to these moments,
we discover that the animal is more interactionist than cognitivist, or more
cognitivist than interactionist, that it justifies now one of these categories
now the other, but we also discover that there are a lot of leftovers in its
way of being present, and that these are important for comparative analyses
between dogs, cats and humans.
The question of animals in anthropology involves a concept that is
hard to circumvent (as we have seen before): relations. Because in order
to succeed at this observation of human beings and dogs, there should
be no hesitation about the meticulous focus to be directed as precisely as
possible at both, zooming in not only on the inner life of both, but also on
their volumes taken separately. What are these beings like? How do they
subsist, not only within but also beyond and in addition to their immedi-
ate relations with human beings? Are relations not merely one way of
being present, one that does not fill the whole presence at moment t, and
even less in subsequent moments? Are not some approaches taken too
unilaterally from a relationist perspective, to the point that they absorb
the components of the relation, flattening them and causing us to forget
the entities’ particularities?
A recent interview-based study, in which many choices would have been
possible, is very symptomatic of this relationist choice.14 In it one reads:

14 Anita Maurst, Dona Davis and Sarah Cowles, ‘Co-being and Intra-action
Anthropology and para-humans 61

“Companion species are becoming together, and riders, as partners to

the horse and vice versa, are relational categories arising from engage-
ments in a range of intra-acting practices that form both riders and their
horses”15; “intercorporeal moments of mutuality or co-being between spe-
cies, moments where two bodies become in sync with each other”16; “a
kind of engagement between two agentive individuals” ; “horse and hu-
man meet as subjects, even as self-aware partners”17; “a genuine natural-
cultural exchange”18; “a co-creation of new beings, new articulations of
being human as well as horse”.19

Here we find a mixture of Deleuze, Haraway, relationism, and a lot

of romanticism. But it is not reality.
It is important also to get close to the dog’s “point of view”, to try and
get to know it, and not merely study the intentions its master attributes
to it, of course. Not just the dog’s point of view when it is with humans,
but also when it carries out its being separate from them or with other
dogs. The methodological equitability that Marion Vicart speaks of is
not without analogy to what is called “multispecies ethnography”20 on
condition — and this is far from being guaranteed — that this is not
established only on the basis of the narratives and representations of
humans, that it focuses on the human and the animal when they are
not together, compares their differences together and separately, and
examines the effects induced by the meeting between the two partners,
as well as the continuities of both, over the short and long term.
Describing and comparing what is it like to be a … therefore im-
plies looking at a unique being, understanding the position from
which it perceives, understanding what it perceives, and imagining
its motivations, if it has any. An animal is much more than a being
that does things and gets things done in a network. It is important to
consider that, regardless of whether or not it is associated with at-
tributions of intentions, it constitutes a real, living being with forms
of perception and attention, and various postures to be observed in a

in Horse–Human Relationships: a Multi-species Ethnography of Be(com)

ing Human and Be(com)ing Horse’, Social Anthropology, 21, 3 (2013), pp.
322–35.
15 Maurst, and others, p. 323.
16 Maurst, and others, p. 324.
17 Maurst, and others, p. 324.
18 Maurst, and others, p. 333.
19 Maurst, and others, p. 334.
20 See a special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology (‘Multispecies
Ethnography’, 25, 4 (2010)).
62 Separate Humans

situation. These are real forms of being, and properties that are im-
portant to search for.

“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine
this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources
are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining addi-
tions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually sub-
tracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtrac-
tions, and modifications”.21

I would rather be more optimistic. Epistemological prudence and

deontological considerations stand in the way of the discovery of new
things. Subtle observations informed also by the cognitive sciences,
conducted over varied but continuous timespans, are important re-
sources for finding out what it is like to be a dog.
The question that arises more than ever, in the context of research on
humans and animals, is that of anthropology’s link to other disciplines
such as ethology. There is a choice: either one describes the animal and
then it is important not to be satisfied solely with philosophical notions
of “point of view” or of “subjectivity”, and one needs the expertise of
ethology,22 cognitive ethology and animal psychology. Or one does not
describe it and one considers it as an object of interactions and repre-
sentations. Under the realistic option that I am asserting here, it is im-
portant to describe the animal, including when it is not in the presence
of human beings, when it is not acting alongside them.23
Ethology — let us say all forms of zoology — is therefore informa-
tive and formative; it supplies an object and, above all, furnishes essential
information about this object, which is not to be called into question. But
ethology is also often incomplete and distortive, because on the one hand
it says little or nothing about humans as animals’ partners (which is un-
derstandable), and on the other hand, owing to its paradigmatic choices, it
often says little about ways of being in the world. This ambition implies
considering the singularity of each animal in its continuous way of being
in the world, through the flow of situations, and not necessarily focusing
on a specific activity, skill, cognitive performance, or on a type of relations

21 Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to Be a Bat?’, The Philosophical Review,

LXXXIII, October (1974), 435–50 (p. 439).
22 Dominique Guillo, ‘Quelle place faut-il faire aux animaux en sciences
sociales ?’, Revue française de sociologie, 56/1 (2015), 135–63.
23 This is typical of Marion Vicart’s work on dogs: Des chiens auprès des
hommes. Quand l’anthropologue observe aussi l’animal (Paris: Pétra, 2014).
Anthropology and para-humans 63

that these animals may establish among themselves. It implies keeping this
sort of focus on the animal, compared to humans, in a situation, with the
possibility of drawing general conclusions. Anthropologists could there-
fore ask ethology for information, but they should take a critical view of its
observation apparatus, which does not necessarily meet the needs of their
detailist aim, with an eye to understanding and comparing the continuity
of beings.
Thus what should interest the anthropologist is not so much the hu-
man in relation to this or that nonhuman, as if both of them only existed
in relations (an interpretation that overlooks both the human and the
nonhuman), but rather the comparative characteristics of humans and
various nonhumans, particularly other living beings, within relations
and outside of relations. From this perspective, the human being is not
only the “yardstick”, but also reappears at the centre of, or above, the
scale of living things. Does this anthropocentrism not correspond to an
obvious empirical fact that would be observed by any extra-terrestrial
creature diagnosing what is happening on Earth? This only reinforces
the urgent need for an empirical anthropology that explores the human
way of existing.
Concerning anthropologists’ current intense interest in nonhumans,
my critique therefore targets 1) the strictly relationist interpretation
(centred on the “between”) of the relations of humans and nonhumans,
2) the risk of establishing equivalence between them, 3) the lack of
studies comparing and contrasting the forms of presence of humans
and nonhumans (particularly living beings) — an essential point for
an anthropology in the strict sense — in order to better understand hu-
mans. Either too much or too little is done with nonhumans: too much
through this establishment of equivalence, too little because there is
not enough varied empirical data to make the comparison.
This focus on animals — complementary to the focus on humans
— would only be used in anthropology to compare beings and better
understand the specificity of humans. Buffon himself said that without
animals, humans would be even more incomprehensible. When prehis-
torian François Bordes was asked what prehistory was for, he gave the
following answer in the preface of a book: “Like all scientific research,
to differentiate humans from animals”.24 A lot of concrete observa-

24 François Bordes, Leçons sur le Paléolithique (tome 1), Notions de géologie

quaternaire (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984). Thanks to Jacques Pélegrin for
providing me with this reference.
64 Separate Humans

tions in the field still need to be made to highlight these differences.

From this perspective, I believe it makes good empirical sense not to
consider humans, grasshoppers, poppies, bacteria and sheets of paper
equally existent. They are of course all “volumes”. It would be possible
to consider as existents all the volumes, or only living beings. But I
prefer to be even more restrictive, add a second criterion and make the
distinction between existents on the one hand (only humans), and other
living beings (animals, plants or other living entities) and also objects
on the other hand. While today many analyses stress continuities rather
than differences between humans and other animals25, I will use the
category “exist” for humans alone, because of the major specific char-
acteristics that my analysis of Homo sapiens pointed out. Not only
are they material realities capable of sensing themselves and knowing
themselves (with different levels of consciousness) in the movement
and continuity of time and life. And they are also able to attribute what
they believe to be existences to unsubstantial realities, to realities that
are not volumes, to fictions, with various degrees of adherence and dis-
tance. This decision not to classify nonhuman animals among existents
may appear surprising. It seems to me that this is one of the conditions
to limit the wasteful use of the notion of existence. In the phenomeno-
graphic perspective supported here, I think that there are not enough
comparative observations between for instance nonhuman primates
(but not only) and humans, regarding the details of gestures, activities,
modes of presence and continuity between situations.

Collective entities

Humans are surrounded by animals, but also collective entities, like

for example institutions. When political authorities sign a document
giving birth to a state, they agree on its name and on what it will at least
initially imply: particular actions by the representatives of this state,
the choice of flag and of a building for the head of state, etc..26 The
linguistic birth of a divinity or state will generate shared conventions,
a set of mediations and representations that either foster belief in the
divinity’s presence modalities and existence in another world, or make

25 A rare exception is Etienne Bimbenet, L’animal que je ne suis plus (Paris:

Gallimard, 2011).
26 François Cooren, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, incarnation, and
ventriloquism (Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010).
Anthropology and para-humans 65

people think there is a state that regulates social life, a state which
they very rarely ponder.27 From this birth and according to these rules
and conventions, various human actions and forms of engagement will
ceaselessly continue, following one another over time, taking on a cer-
tain weight, greater than in a local bridge club that occasions a few
friendships. But the state does not exist; it is only a linguistic conven-
tion28 with its implications, which are signs of this non-existent state.
On this level, there is no reason to differentiate the analysis applying to
divinities from that concerning a state. In a description, it would there-
fore be imprecise to say that the state protects citizens, that it is getting
weaker, stronger or imposing sanctions. And this is what is fascinat-
ing, almost incredible: many human actions are effects of these inex-
istences, are even generated by them. To say or to hint that everything
or almost everything exists, it is to miss this copresence of the human
existent with non-existents. I will come back to this point.
There are other collective entities which enable to distinguish other
status and modes of presence. Let us examine another one, the “social”.
By this I mean that which is linked to each person’s social trajectories,
accumulated and expressed through ways of talking, walking, eating,
appreciating beauty, etc., as is well known through Bourdieu’s concept
of habitus. When a teacher is teaching, especially when a student asks a
question (though not every time), it is possible for him to perceive some-
thing of a difference, not one of roles, but one of so-called social standing,
background, culture, etc. This micro-scene has just revealed the “social”
being (that linked to the social trajectory). It is a reality borne by every
individual. It will be all the more present when there is a perception, a
perceived difference, and also if it is felt and experienced at a given mo-
ment by its bearer. After it explicitly comes out through difference, it will
self-indeterminate, with its “large” reservoir of potentialities, fading into
an implicit, unfelt presence. In other situations, it can also be explicitly
asserted, not just perceived. The “social” — this is not the human being
himself, but that stratum which accompanies him — can be recognised by
marks of habitus, of sociocultural background: postures, gestures, words,
tones, etc. Specifically, it is what the individual received during five, ten,
fifteen years from his place in a family, and what he lives with in the course

27 On differences in the construction of these entities, see Laurence Kaufmann,

‘ Les voies de la déférence’, Langage et société, 117 (2006), 89–116.
28 On the debate between social science philosophers, particularly surrounding
Searle’s work, see Laurence Kaufmann, ‘Faire collectif: de la constitution à
la maintenance’, Raisons pratiques, 20 (2010), 240–82.
66 Separate Humans

of the situations of his existence, not without at least partial changes occur-
ring in the expression of his “social”. Attenuated and cushioned of course,
the “social” is as if integrated into the personality, appended to his pres-
ence like a shadow. Omnipresent but never fully expressed (leftovers are
potentialised), it lets itself be perceived in a situation mainly by contrast
with other “socials”, and all the more if social marks gather. Omnipres-
ent, the same “social”, particularly a given dimension, a given aspect of
it, is not active or visible with the same intensity at every moment for its
bearer, and especially not for other humans, who at certain times perceive
different social marks in various ways, and at other times do not perceive
them even though they are there. The “social”: a reality that is actual and
potential, extensible and accumulable, implicit and differential. How does
it let itself be perceived, clarified or stigmatised in a situation? By its hu-
man bearer? By other humans? How does it create effects? In short, how is
the “social” present in a situation, over the course of moments? It is worth
noting that amid the movement of situations and the quickness of percep-
tions, it sometimes gets quite “softened” and set aside.
But above all, in the reasoning developed here, the link between
someone’s way of eating and the “social” is not the same as that be-
tween a flag and a state. In the situation, the “social” is present, and
such a way of eating or speaking is a concrete index of it, just as smoke
is an index in relation to fire according to Pierce’s terminology.29 There
are the direct presence of the way of eating — it is firstly and directly
perceived — and the indirect presence of the “social” that this attitude
indicates.

Groups are another example. When I teach a group of master’s stu-

dents, it seems that the group is a kind of schema or mental script (pre-
sent in each of the participants, in the students and myself) that is dif-
ferent for each of us, no doubt complementary, stemming from earlier
experiences. And this script takes concrete form somewhat automati-
cally, as a result of different actions. This group of students, which I
perceive and speak to, becomes a concrete presence for myself and also
for the students. A virtually present script, an implicit concretisation
and a perceptible reference point are the ontographic characteristics of
the group—a particular, concrete, temporal and intermittent being. As
moments pass, the group quickly becomes decomposable, soon breaks

29 Charles S. Peirce, Signs, in Peirce on Signs, ed. by James Hoopes (Chapel

Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 239–240.
Anthropology and para-humans 67

up, sometimes never to be reassembled. Of course each moment, each

meeting also involves various effects over the short and long term:
echoes, reverberations, traces, thoughts. A group is also dependent on
its constituent humans. There can be no group without its members. A
group is an index of them. Where the “social” is concerned, it is the
ways of speaking, walking, eating which are its indices. The “social” is
an indirect, situated presence. Groups constitute a direct, situated pres-
ence which is an index of humans, just as a smile would have this kind
of presence, would be an index of a person.
Even if each of these examples has its specificities, they enable us
to distinguish another category of forms of presence: situated pres-
ences. They are different from effects of presence. Situated presences
are directly salient and pinpointable. In this category, I would place
sums of existents, for example that group which can be pinpointed
by the teacher when he speaks to his students, a relation, as well as
properties or components of existents: their “social”, a smile, emotion
or utterance. This could also be the case for other more virtual and ab-
stract presences such as rules and reasons for acting. A person is able
to designate them as such in the situation, and they are not represented
by other things, as are the gods and states mentioned above.

In the perspective of realist ontology, this analysis enables to avoid

an exaggerated extension of the notion of existence and existent in the
social sciences. Thus, among what I would call “beings” (or in a more
neutral way, “entities”), there would be:
- the “concrete particulars” (or the “substances”, the “individuals”),
that is to say: humans, animals, plants, objects or any other separate,
tangible, perceptible element in human environments. As we have seen
it before, in this category, I make a distinction between the existents
(only human beings), the living beings (animals and plants) and the
objects which are neither existing nor living.
- the effects of the presence of entities (like divinities or states) that
are intangible, imperceptible, non-existent, and are only in the form of
representations (they are not indices) resulting from social and histori-
cal constructs or mediations. By definition, these effects are dependent,
I would say: exclusively relational. “Effect” can be considered in two
senses, as a consequence and continuation of these mediations, but also
as a particular phenomenon generating this impression of presence. Ef-
fects of presence can be the effects of something that can be an error of
perception (for instance, a religious belief). They can also result from
68 Separate Humans

shared conventions that are accepted as such (as in the case of the state)
and, like gods, need representatives in order for an “effect of presence”
to be in a situation.
- situated presences that do not represent other things. This would
include direct or indirect presences. Groups, smiles or thoughts are
direct presences, more or less visible, but difficult to touch. They can
sometimes be concrete like a smile but not a thought. As for the “so-
cial”, I repeat, its presence is situated and indirect: it is not an index in
itself, because it is this or that expression that is an index of this “so-
cial”. None of them are visibly separate and they are dependent upon
the people in the group, upon the individual who smiles, who thinks
and who bears his “social”.

I have just distinguished different entities. Of course, this work still

needs to be carried on. It seems to me that the anthropological gain in
truth is twofold when one claims that the divinity or the state does not
exist. This brings into play first the truth on the ontological reality of the
situation, with a reflection about the differences between para-humans,
but also a more precise characterisation of human beings. Most of the
analyses lose both. What about the human modes of presence? It will
be the second benefit. Let us come back to the divinity and believers.

Anthropology and minimality

I think realist ontology invites to be more astonished to how humans

are when they are with entities, which do not exist. Let us review the
descriptions of the liturgy, going from a methodological theism to a
realist ontology of the present entities:

0. People attribute to God the ability to forgive.

1. God forgives people.

Without being completely false, description 0 seems to me to be

very far from the reality of what happens in the worship scene. De-
scription 1, which I formulated in La religion de près, is certainly an
ontography in the situation, linked with a pragmatic or interactionist
interpretation. This consists in taking utterances and attitudes like:
“God, forgive me”, and the subsequent “Thank you for your forgive-
ness”, and concluding from these that the divinity is a forgiving being,
among other characteristics. But the transformation of methodological
Anthropology and para-humans 69

theism into a realist atheism opens the door to another interpretation,

which allows to insist on the special, nearly fantastic, co-presence of
the human being and the divinity:

2. There is no forgiving God.

3. An effect of presence does not hear a request for forgiveness and
forgive.
4. People can feel “comforted, consoled and serene” during the ritual.
5. People believe that God forgives them, but how are people when they
are believing?
6. God, who is inexistent, forgives.

Indeed, descriptions 2 to 6, which seem more realist than description

1 and especially than description 0, enable the reintroduction of mental
states and the act of believing (point 5 with its interrogation), while
keeping the divinity, that is to say its modes of presence (point 6). In
the analysis of realist atheism, humans are not presented as attributors
and constructors of existences. They are attributors of false existences,
and are above all co-present with these, forgetting that others “invent-
ed” these existences and thinking that the existences existed before
this “invention”. The mystery of this co-presence is intensifying! We
are obliged to interrogate ourselves on the modes of presence of these
humans: who are these people to “believe” in these invented divinities
and that they believe existed previously? This is different from the case
of bacteria, which scholars discovered and which did indeed previ-
ously exist for a long time. According to the atheist (or one might say
naturalistic or historical) hypothesis, divinity is an invention and not a
discovery, one that has been attributed an existence prior to its inven-
tion. Indeed, the explicit hypothesis of the inexistent divinity makes
the situation more amazing. It raises two possibilities: either human
beings are “ontological idiots”,30 incapable of noticing that they forgot
the divinity has been invented;31 or human beings hesitate, with a cer-
tain awareness of their uncertainty. This is what is called believing. It
is worth noting that the act of believing — here presented as a mental
state — is a theme that is little investigated within the “ontological

30 Laurence Kaufmann, A la croisée des esprits: esquisse d’une ontologie d’un

fait social: l’opinion publique. (Lille: ANRT, 2001).
31 On this point see Rane Willerslev, ‘Taking Animim Seriously, but Perhaps not
too Seriously?’, Religion and Society , 4 (2013), 41–57, debating Viveiros de
Castro’s position.
70 Separate Humans

turn”.32 It is as if diminishing the ontological weight of the divinity

forces to precise the humans’ modes of presence. It is my point of view.
And it is in this sense that individual variations are very important
and the detailed observation of singular individuals necessary, as I
have suggested at the beginning of the book. Humans hesitate, as a
phenomenographic observation can attest. This is what one can no-
tice when observing closely the believers: believing “but no more than
that” in the divinity’s existence; believing anyway; knowing, but still
believing; not believing truly, believing now but doubting a bit later,
forgetting having believed, etc. Variations in belief intensity, like men-
tal states, are numerous.33 These seem to me to be central when faced
with the risk of an almost literalist analysis, that is focused on the con-
ceptual systems of indigenous metaphysics, and that circumvents the
complexity of human presences.34 It is then vital to re-specify the mo-
dalities of individual presence, engagement and disengagement. This
shifts the focus of observation directly onto presence modalities and
mental states, and makes it possible to move away from the interac-
tionally relevant, to observe the ambiguous and ambivalent presence
of persons, to identify the human ability to circulate from one situ-
ation to another, without going all the way in their engagement and
their distance, or even in their critical attitude towards the divinity. The
researcher is thus in front of a vast field of “not really”, which charac-
terises the believer’s behaviour and the minor mode.
People believe that God forgives without really believing it and
God, who is inexistent, forgives: this type of description is not really
interactionist or pragmatic. The methodological and theoretical diffi-
culty consists in not forgetting the other element of human presence or
divine presence, whatever it is: present and absent, absent and present.
This co-presence therefore involves some vagueness, with elements
that are negative, or at least restrictive. Thus the encounter between the

32 Holbraad (2012) rejects the notion of belief in his analysis of divination in

Cuba. Palecek et Rijsord place much emphasis on the anti-representationalist
aspect of the ontological turn: “The ontological turn is thus a turn away
from the idea that human difference can be captured by differences in
representational states”: Martin Palecek and Mark Risjord, ‘Relativism
and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology’, Philosophy of the Social
Sciences, 43 (1) (2013), 3–23 (p. 4).
33 See Piette, ‘Existence, Minimality, and Believing’.
34 See also the critique by Paolo Heywood, ‘Anthropology and What There Is:
Reflections on “Ontology”’, Cambridge Anthropology, 30 (1) (2012), 143–51.
Anthropology and para-humans 71

human being and the divinity implies an impossible choice between

two alternatives, the choice of one not destroying the possibility of
the other. It is a paradoxical co-presence that almost necessarily gives
rise to a set of hesitations in the relationship between human beings
and gods, very incomplete and unachieved relationships. Because how
can one not react with a certain indifference — what could be called a
minor mode and a diffuse reflexivity — in an interaction that is as un-
certain as that which presents a divine being simultaneously asserting
its presence and absence?
Indeed this type of interpretation helps stress the distance and mod-
ulation of the human presence, something that is necessary to avoid
over-interpreting what is happening. Various forms of laterality can be
observed or confirmed in the cults: evasive eyes, isolated distractions,
wandering thoughts, anticipating moments to come, remembering mo-
ments past. There is a sense of negative reserve, as some believers
report it indeed. This “not really” is found not only in the engagement
of belief that is always in the process of modalising, hesitating, lapsing
into “detachment” if it goes too far in its credulity, but also, in the re-
engagement of belief if it goes too far in its indifference and criticism.
With distance and flexible modes of engagement, this kind of presence
enables human beings to participate in various activities, sometimes
simultaneously, in any case in a fluid succession.
I have often used the word “co-presence” in my analysis. Why fa-
vour this notion over that of interaction, which is more thoroughly
anchored and developed in the social sciences? First, according to a
paradigm developed by the Chicago School, the notion of interaction
encourages a focus on interactional elements insofar as they are mean-
ingful and relevant in verbal and non-verbal expression, and insofar as
they thus constitute the foundation of the necessary mutual acceptance.
We have seen it in the previous chapter. Interactionism is interested
much more in shared and exchanged signs than in the present beings.
This theory describes an individual face-to-face with others, actively
mobilising mental and gestural resources to maintain order in the inter-
action, applying the principles of strategy and rationality — in short,
the principles of the “ceremonial labor”35 that constitutes the agree-
ment and the interactional order. Thus co-presence, by orienting the
focus towards present entities instead of links and relations (regard-
less of whether these contribute to the interaction’s central exchange),

35 Goffman, Interaction Ritual, p. 85.

72 Separate Humans

makes it possible to examine the singularity of each person’s presence

rather than solely concentrating on the interactionally relevant dimen-
sion. As we have seen, at every moment in a situation, the volume of
being is much more important than its interactional modality of being.
It therefore reveals activity and passivity, engagement or disengage-
ment, presence or detachment. It does not only imply a minimality
of presence and perception, that of the individual, but it also enables
something “beyond” the presence of the other being, that object which
becomes a trace of the divinity. This is the dual ability of human be-
ings to not think but at the same time inject something more, an extra.
Theologians might say that it is in the availability of presence that the
extra meaning appears. Distance enables — goes hand-in-hand with
— the object’s extra, unlike obsessive thinking, which limits, fixes and
has no leftover.
The continuity of present entities is also particularly important for
understanding this co-presence. There are two continuities. The first is
that of the divinity, which is linked to the Church’s history and which
is already there, prepared by the priest and parishioners (who do not
reinvent or reconstruct the divinity every time, but render it present).
Second, there is the individual’s continuity, which is itself at least two-
fold. On the one hand it is associated with a longstanding knowledge of
the catechism, the individual having been more or less socialised in the
beliefs of Catholicism; on the other hand it is associated with the con-
tinuity and fluidity of the moments: from his work to the church, and
after to his family reunion and to a jog. This continuity generates some
passivity, which is necessary in this co-presence of human beings and
gods. The passivity implies all the more tenacity insofar as it allows
itself to be penetrated by the various forms of laterality mentioned
above. Such a co-presence also requires a certain suspension of the
ability to wonder about the divinity’s origins. This form of distance is
no doubt necessary so that the beneficial effect of serenity is possible.
Let us also take the example of a red light, always-already there
before any driver arrives. The red light is not itself a collective entity.
It is nothing but a sign serving as a reminder of the traffic laws and
representing the police, let us say the State. It is worth noting that the
social sciences prefer to focus on drivers who pass through the light
when it is amber and especially when it is red. But when it is red and
the driver stops, this is done with an attitude of letting go, suspending
sight, will and consciousness, and also adopting an economy of per-
ception (did he even perceive the red?). Before leaving home, did he
Anthropology and para-humans 73

say that he would be stopping at the red light, that he was going out in
order to stop at the red light? Not likely! The red light and the driver
constitute a co-presence: that of a metal post that supports alternating
lights and that of the driver himself, but above all it is also a co-pres-
ence of two continuities, that of the sign-post which has been there a
long time, serviced by various employees from the police station, city
planning office or Ministry of the Interior, and the continuity of the hu-
man being. This human continuity has at least two components, as in
the case of the worshipper. On the one hand it is linked to longstanding
knowledge, habit, and socialisation that has made the driver capable of
recognising this element of the traffic laws, of subconsciously know-
ing its implications; on the other hand it is linked to the succession of
moments and actions he performs, usually without any explicit will or
intention.
We understand better the modes of perception of the non-existent
beings and hence their modes of presence. In that case, repose is not
the leftover. On the contrary, it is will, consciousness, reflection, justi-
fication and strategy that are in excess, as a leftover. They only become
central when a problem, an “ordeal” arises. One might say that the red
light usually does not attract focused attention. It is there, always there,
without soliciting the consciousness, which is in fact slightly blurred
by other things that have nothing to do with it. It is only sometimes
that it injects a constraint, that of stopping when one is in a hurry, or
disturbs the objective of driving quickly for various reasons.
According to Jean-Luc Marion’s analysis,36 the smooth operation
of this co-presence implies setting three things aside: the self that is
always ready to be activated, always able to think, to will, to madly ac-
celerate the car, etc.; the origins of this light, which can be traced back
to legislators and a set of civil servants and labourers from different
administrative departments; and that metal post, as a raw object. It is as
if the light could not be seen by the ordinary driver. Looking, staring,
obsessing: this is resisting the flow of moments. And when staring or
obsession exist particularly in a state of constraint and suffering, they
become fluid more or less quickly in the continuity of moments, to
different degrees of course. Usually the other entities are not so much
objects of thoughts and consciousness, but are rather there as a back-
ground. The individual finds himself beside them in an immediate co-

36 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1998]).
74 Separate Humans

presence. Sometimes of course he can also perceive and feel more or

less marked, diffuse or direct differences of presence and a more or less
strong weight of the collective entities that surround him.
In a situation there are humans, each with his minimal presence,
which passes, does not seek more, does not freeze (this is crucial), and
then there are objects linked to an additional presence, that of a divine
or collective entities. This is a double leftover: it is the fact of playing
the game without thinking about it, and at the same time attributing an
extra to objects. Minimality makes it possible to all the more easily
impart something extra to the reality of the object, to attribute a surplus
of presence to it, from which the human derives additional repose. This
minimalising stratum of human presence facilitates co-presence with
beings that are absent, or are in any case invisible, whose form of be-
ing is not primarily interactional and communicational. Co-presence
combines the absence–presence of the human being and the presence–
absence of other beings.
 PARA COATS…

What is this individual X, of the sapiens species? A detailed focus

on humans, on their modes of presence and absence, draws attention
to this human way of existing in the minor mode, in the presence–
absence. Because what does a human being do when he is with oth-
ers? Ultimately, not much: he is there doing what is necessary, without
much mental or physical effort, out of habit, with parsimonious per-
ception (that of the habits of everyday life), varying according to the
situation of course. Most human actions develop like this in a situation,
without requiring more from the people who are there: only the mini-
mal integration behaviour, I would say. These are expected behaviours
that often reflect not so much their ongoing performance but rather an
earlier intention or decision to perform them. At the same time, this
intention or decision is self-evident, reflecting other prior situations.
Very visible externally, the stratum of minimal integration behaviour
often intrudes little upon the immediate presence experienced by the
person. These minimal behaviours can of course correspond to social
challenges, but are executed all the more easily insofar as they are
also partially routines, with known rules or co-present objects and re-
source–persons.
To the shared minimum is added — in the individual’s volume of
being and presence — a variable set of leftovers. These are additional
to the shared, social minimum and are also realised in a minimal way,
since they do not jeopardise the main stakes of the situation. Let us
think of the worshipper and the situation described in the previous
chapter: there are gestures peripheral to the expected action, thoughts
heterogeneous to it, the absence of an inner state, the occasional feel-
ing that an experience is unfulfilling, or even an impression of con-
straint, or a brief critical doubt about what is happening. The expected
behaviours can be (though they are not always) less present in inner ex-
periences than remainders, some of which are strongly self-perceived
and felt in the course of the action, though not enough to jeopardise the
76 Separate Humans

successful development of the situation. Thus, the integration behav-

iour is minimal, but the remainder is minimal as well, because it cannot
go too far without risking altering the situation, through an excess of
lethargic indifference or an excess of critical doubt.
There is still another minimum: the presence, alongside human pres-
ence, of practically inexhaustible, always revivifying supports. They
consist of reference points, signs and rules. They are individuals or
objects, spatiotemporal indicators in a situation’s foreground or back-
ground. Among these supports, some of them represent a divinity or an
institution — also minimally there — in various forms, including as a
backdrop. By following this reasoning, ontology, when it designates a
local system of thought, is only a support, a flexible presence, some-
times active for just a few minutes in a day, often in the background or
even absent.
Humans modalise their presence by constantly injecting nuances
and increasing the fluidity of their shifts between modes and situations.
They keep moving, surrounded by more or less diffuse, more or less
structuring para-human presences whose absence will be impossible to
imagine as long as human beings exist — human beings who delegate,
who forget they have delegated, who always repose upon certain nearly
invisible supports, even though they are simultaneously capable of oc-
casionally busying themselves over matters relating to other supports
that are just as invisible or diffuse. By living with gods, institutions and
rules, human beings create new supports for themselves, new aids to
repose, further increasing the possibility of living in the minor mode.
That is a form of distance, of permanent no-relation: humans are
separate, we have said it before! This dimension is particularly clear
with para-humans which are a good laboratory to understand humans.
In fact, as if we had here a strong sign of human specificity, human
beings inject this modal characteristic into their close day-to-day com-
panions, enabling themselves to relax all the more when in their pres-
ence. Human beings make the non-existent exist, personifying animals
and humanising machines, each time opening the possibility of endow-
ing them with a “soft ontology” and gaining for themselves a relaxed
presence in their company. Humans are minimal beings, so specifically
minimal that they imbue the very being of their day-to-day compan-
ions with their own minimality — companions such as dogs, in which
Marion Vicart demonstrated expressions of the minor mode, through
the imitation of humans and/or the tranquilisation of their lives in the
company of humans. The ontologisation of human beings’ nonhuman
Para coats… 77

companions therefore proceeds by means of a minorisation of their

forms of presence, which succeeds for each of them to different de-
grees. When it comes to a divinity, institution, code or the “social”,
the ontologisation process involves a form of fluidity and a forgetting
of their presence, with a constantly varying degree of recollection.
This ability of human beings to minorise the presence of para-humans
seems to me to be just as important as the ability to attribute to them
intentions or an “agency”. These para-humans reveal indeed one of the
important specificities of human beings. Hence a consistent character-
istic of para-humans (institutions, gods, the social, groups, etc.) is their
restrictive, negative mode, I daresay, their minor mode. Their potential
pressure (obligations, constraints) — obviously it is sometimes real
— is thus counterbalanced by different restrictive modes of existence.
The omnipresent god is also invisible, often muted, and is subject to
doubts about its existence. Political institutions like the state are very
structuring but are virtual too. Groups, which are also structuring, are
intermittent and polymorphous. The social is above all potential and
often implicit. Domestic animals, sometimes very present, are also of-
ten contingent, passive and neutral entities in a situation. Do humans
have such a strong understanding of their anthropological specificity
— the minor mode — in the world of the living beings that they are
thus able to externalise and amplify it in para-humans and in ways of
being co-present with them?
What, then, is the basis of the communal life of human beings, of
their existence with non-existents? In each situation, co-presence is
built around three essential elements:
– the minimality of the human being who, in the situation, deploys
most of his necessary skills and abilities more or less automatically,
setting aside questions about the origins of everyone and everything,
whether human or para-human;
– the continuity of the beings present, that of humans who have their
reasons for being there, from a variable number of past situations, and
that of para-humans, particularly salient objects in the scene in ques-
tion, which are themselves present after a long continuity;
– the virtuality of a set of para-human entities that are there without
really being there, such as collective entities or gods.
Continuity, minimality, virtuality: could these be key elements that
make it unnecessary to resort to other explicatory principles of social
life? I would add that this realist ontist perspective has nothing to do with
methodological whole-ism, nor with various forms of interactionism and
78 Separate Humans

connectionism that continue to present society not as a whole, but as pro-

cesses, connections and networks, which are nevertheless almost similar
to wholes. A mine of new observations is opening for anthropologists. It
is not one of realist ontology’s most insignificant merits that it stresses
this part of human presence, which necessarily provides a perspective
that is different from that which is usually implied by the “ontological
turn” and social anthropology in general.

Why an anthropology of human existences? Between the cognitivist

explanation and the constructivist point of view, anthropocentric anthro-
pology — which I call existential anthropology — has a role to play. It
focuses on the existence of existents, whereas much research focuses
on existents without their existence, their concrete life, or on modes of
existence without concrete existents. In this aim of describing human
singularities, I cannot restrict myself to individuals as results of neuronal
and physiological operations, effecting a reduction analogous to that of
the divinity. Because this is anthropology, and human beings with their
singularities remain the theme of reference. By making comparisons
with other beings and between humans, the objective is to consider the
singularity of human beings and also of each human being, as they cross
situations and moments. This perspective tends towards an ontology of
individuals, taken separately, in order to avoid the danger that relata,
that is to say beings and especially human beings, will be suspended in
favour of interactions, connections or relations.
I agree with Ralph Emerson when he writes that “the soul is not twin-
born but the only begotten”1, “our relations to each other are oblique
and casual” and that “the dearest events are summerain, and we the Para
coats that shed every drop”.2 Humans are indeed separate individuals
who try to meet one another: they are only beginnings of relations. To
“the optimistic constructivism of sociology”3 and of social anthropolo-
gy, existential anthropology opposes a pessimist realism. Different from
those of the social sciences, the axioms of the anthropological science
become clearer. For the social sciences, the social or the society exist, ex-
terior and interior to human individuals, and social facts have a meaning
to decipher. For the anthropological science, only human beings exist,

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, First and Second Series (Boston/New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1883), p. 79.
2 Emerson, p. 53.
3 Levinas, p. 59.
Para coats… 79

separate from one another; their main features are to know that they exist
in time, to be in a relational incompletion inherent to their separateness,
and to deploy a typical capacity of indifference or minimality.
 REFERENCES

Aristotle, The Metaphysics (London: Penguin Books, 2004).

Aristotle, Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Bialecki, Jon, ‘Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya
Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour’, Anthropology of
Consciousness, 25 (1) (2014), 32–52.
Bimbenet, Etienne, L’animal que je ne suis plus (Paris: Gallimard, 2011).
Bordes, François, Leçons sur le Paléolithique (tome 1), Notions de géologie
quaternaire (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1984).
Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977 [1972]).
Bryant, Levi R., ‘The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object–Oriented Ontology’,
in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. by
Bryant, Levi R., Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press,
2011), pp. 261–78.
Candea, Matei, ‘The End/s of Engagement: the Ethics and Analytics
of Detachment’, Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, 6th December 2009 (http: // detachmentcollaboratory.org).
Candea, Matei, and others, ed., Detachment: Essays on the Limits of the
Relational Thinking (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).
Canguilhem, Georges, Knowledge of life (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2009 [1965]).
Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and
Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1979]).
Cooren, François, Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation, and
Ventriloquism (Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010).
Cooren, François, and others, ‘A Humanitarian Organization in Action:
Organizational Discourse as an Immutable Mobile’, Discourse and
Communication 1(2) (2007), 153–90.
Czarniawska, Barbara, Shadowing and Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork
in Modern Societies (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business Press, 2007).
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1999).
Day, Matthew, ‘Constructing Religion without the Social: Durkheim, Latour,
and Extended Cognition’, Zygon. Journal of Religion and Science, 44 (3)
(2009), 719–37.
Dennett, Daniel C., Explained Consciousness (New York: Back Bay, 1992
82 Separate Humans

[1991]).
Denzin, Norman K., The Research Act (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1970).
Descola, Philippe, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013 [2005]).
Descola, Philippe, ‘All too Human (Still)’, Hau, 4, 2 (2014), 267–73.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, First and Second Series (Boston/New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1883).
Ferraris, Maurizio, Introduction to New Realism (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2014 [2012]).
Finch, Martha L., Dissenting Bodies. Corporealites in Early New England
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988).
Goffman, Erving, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior
(Chicago: Aldine Pub, 1967).
Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:
Anchor, 1959).
Goffman, Erving, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1981).
Guillo, Dominique, ‘Quelle place faut-il faire aux animaux en sciences
sociales ?’, Revue française de sociologie, 56/1 (2015), 135–63.
Heil, John, From an Ontological Point of view (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003).
Henare, Amiria, Martin Hobraad and Sari Wastell , ‘Introduction: Thinking
through Things’, in Thinking through Things: Theorizing Artefacts
Ethnographically (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Henry, Michel, I Am the Truth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002
[1996]).
Heywood, Paolo, ‘Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on
“Ontology”’, Cambridge Anthropology, 30 (1) (2012), 143–51.
Holbraad, Martin, Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban
Divination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Hume, David, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008 [1739]).
Huneman, Philippe and Guillaume Lecointre, ‘L’individualité, entre logique
et historicité’, in Redéfinir l’individu à partir de sa trajectoire, ed. by
Barthlémy Durrive and Julie Henry, (Paris: Editions Matériologiques,
2015).
Kaufmann, Laurence, A la croisée des esprits: esquisse d’une ontologie d’un
fait social: l’opinion publique (Lille: ANRT, 2001).
Kaufmann, Laurence, ‘Les voies de la déférence’, Langage et société, 117
(2006), 89–116.
Kaufmann, Laurence, ‘Faire collectif: de la constitution à la maintenance’,
Raisons pratiques, 20 (2010), 240–282.
Killick, Evan, ‘Whose Thruth is it anyway?’, Anthropology of this Century, 9
References 83

(2014) (online).
Kohn Eduardo, How Forests Think. Toward an Anthropology beyond the
Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
Kupiec, Jean-Jacques, The Origin of Individuals (London: World Scientific
Publishing, 2009).
Lahire, Bernard, Dans les plis singuliers du social (Paris: La Découverte,
2013).
Lalande, André, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1926).
Latour, Bruno, On the Modern Cult of Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010 [1996]).
Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction of Actor–Network–
Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Latour, Bruno, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: an Anthropology of the
Moderns. (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013 [2012]).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963
[1958]).
Levinas, Emmanuel, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1987 [1979].
Luhrmann, Tania M., When God Talks Back (New York: Alfred A. Knopk,
2012).
McGrew, William, Chimpanzee Material Culture. Implications for Human
Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge,
1922).
Marion, Jean-Luc, Being Given. Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1998]).
Maurst, Anita, Dona Davis and Sarah Cowles, ‘Co-being and Intra-action in
Horse–Human Relationships: a Multi-species Ethnography of Be(com)ing
Human and Be(com)ing Horse’, Social Anthropology, 21, 3 (2013), 322–35.
Meunier, Dominique and Consuelo Vasquez, ‘On Shadowing the Hybrid
Character of Actions: A Communicational Approach’, Communication
Methods and Measures, 2 (3) (2008), 167–92.
Mithen, Steven, The Prehistory of Mind (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996).
Murdoch, Iris, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and
Literature (London: Penguin Books, 1997).
Murdoch, Iris, Sartre: Romantic Realist (London: Penguin Books, 1989).
Nussbaum, Martha. C., ‘Aristotelian Social Democracy’, in Liberalism and the
Good, ed. by Douglas, Bruce R., Gerald M. Mara and Henry S. Richardson
(New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 203–252.
Palecek, Martin and Mark Risjord, ‘Relativism and the Ontological Turn
within Anthropology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 43, 1 (2013),
3–23.
Pierce, Charles S., ‘Signs’, in Peirce on Signs, ed. by Hoopes, James (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 239–40.
Piette, Albert, La religion de près. L’activité religieuse en train de se faire
84 Separate Humans

(Paris: Métailié, 1999).

Piette, Albert, L’origine de la croyance (Paris: Berg International, 2013).
Piette, Albert, Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential
Anthropology (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015a).
Piette, Albert ‘Existence, Minimality and Believing’, in What is Existential
Anthropology?, ed. by Jackson, Michael and Albert Piette, (New York–
London: Berghahn, 2015b).
Potts, Richard, Early Hominid Activities at Olduvai (New York: Aldine de
Gruyter, 1988).
Prochiantz, Alain, Qu’est-ce le vivant ? (Paris: Seuil, 2012).
Rodriguez, Noelie and Alan Ryave, Systematic Self-Observation (London:
Sage Publications, 2002).
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
Strathern, Marilyn, ‘The Concept of Society is Theoretically Obsolete. For
the Motion’, in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. by Ingold, Tim (London:
Routledge, 1996), pp. 60–66.
van Inwagen, Peter, Material Beings (Ithaca/London: Cornell University
Press, 1990).
Varela, Francisco, Principles of Biological Autonomy (New York: Elsevier,
1979).
Varzi, Achille C., Ontologie (Paris: Ithaque, 2010 [2005]).
Venkatesan, Soumhya, and others, ‘The Task of anthropology is to invent
relations’, Critique of Anthropology, 32, 1 (2012), 43–86.
Vicart Marion, Des chiens auprès des hommes. Quand l’anthropologue
observe aussi l’animal (Paris: Pétra, 2014).
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, Cannibal Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Univocal
Publishing, 2009).
Willerslev Rane, ‘Taking Animim Seriously, but Perhaps not too Seriously?’,
Religion and Society, 4 (2013), 41–57.
Winnicott, Donald W., The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating
Environment (London: Karnac Books, 1984).
Wolff, Francis, Notre humanité. D’Aristote aux neurosciences (Paris: Fayard,
2010).
Wynn, Tom, and Fred L. Coolidge, ‘The Expert Neanderthal Mind’, Journal
of Human Evolution, 46, (2004), 467–87.
 INDEX1
Animals 14, 16, 19, 51, 58-64
Aristotle 11, 20, 21, 42, 53, 81
Atheism (or theism) 53-58
Believing 53, 56, 58, 69, 70
Bialecki, Jon 54, 81
Bimbenet, Etienne 64, 81
Bordes, François 63, 81
Bourdieu, Pierre 32, 33, 65, 81
Bryant, Levi R. 31, 81
Candea, Matei 28, 81
Canguilhem, Georges 42, 81
Cavell, Stanley 21, 40, 81
Collective entities 52, 58, 64, 65, 74,
77
Coolidge, Fred L. 18, 84
Continuity 10, 21, 30, 38, 41, 42, 43,
44, 46, 49, 51, 63, 64, 72, 73, 77
Cook, Joanna 28
Cooren, François 44, 64, 81
Cowles, Sarah 60, 83
Czarniawska, Barbara 44, 81
Damasio, Antonio R. 16, 17, 81.
Davis, Dona 60, 83
1
The words ‘action’, ‘anthropology’, ‘ethnography’, ‘existence’, ‘humans’,
‘individuals’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’, which are almost in each page, are not in
the index.
Day, Matthew 54, 81
Dennett, Daniel C. 16, 82
Denzin, Norman K. 37, 82
Descola, Philippe 11, 22, 59, 82
Detachment 7, 19, 28, 36, 71, 72, 81
Details 10, 14, 15, 16, 30, 31, 33, 38,
39, 41, 12, 43, 45, 46, 47, 54, 55,
64, 84
Dividuals 41, 42
Divinities (or gods) 14, 52, 53, 54,
56, 58, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 76,
77, 83
Durrive, Barthélémy 42, 82
Emerson, Ralph W. 78, 82
Exo-action 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 43,
44
Ferraris, Maurizio 23, 52, 82
Finch, Martha L. 54, 82
Gell, Alfred 27, 82
Goffman, Erving 10, 28, 29; 56, 71,
82
Guillo, Dominique 62, 82
Harman, Graham 31, 81
Heil, John 57, 82
86 Separate Humans

Henare, Amiria 11, 82 Ontography 23, 43, 54, 57, 60, 68

Henry, Julie 42, 82 Ontology 14, 20, 22, 23, 24, 31, 36,
Henry, Michel 13, 82 52, 53, 57, 58, 67, 68, 70, 76,
78, 81, 82
Heywood, Paolo 70, 85
Paleck, Martin 22, 23, 83
Holbraad, Martin 23, 56, 57, 70, 82
Para-humans 51, 52, 57, 58, 68, 69,
Homo sapiens 15, 17, 19, 64
76, 77
Hume, David 9, 82
Pelegrin, Jacques 63
Huneman, Philippe 42, 82
Peirce, Charles S. 66, 84
Husserl Edmund 3, 86
Phenomenography 14, 43, 45, 46,
Interaction 10, 13, 16, 17, 19, 23, 48
28, 30, 35, 36, 37, 39, 43, 56,
Piette, Albert 14, 18, 30, 43, 45, 47,
60, 62, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78
53, 57, 70, 84
Kaufmann, Laurence 65, 69, 82, 83
Potts, Richard 15, 84
Killick, Evan 56, 57, 83
Prochiantz, Alain 17, 84
Kohn, Eduardo 59, 83
Risjord, Mark 22, 23, 70, 83
Kupiec, Jean-Jacques 31, 83
Rodriguez, Noelie 45, 84
Lahire, Bernard 33, 83
Ryave, Alan 45, 84
Lalande, André 21, 83
Sennett, Richard 29, 84
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de 12
Singularity 25, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42,
Latour, Bruno 33, 34, 35, 54, 81, 83 47, 62, 72, 78
Lecointre, Guillaume 42, 82 Snricek, Nick 31, 81
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 27, 28, 30, Strathern, Marilyn 27, 84
31, 32, 35, 83
Strawson, Peter F. 45
Levinas, Emmanuel 13, 78, 83
Substance 20, 21, 41, 53, 67
Luhrmann, Tania L. 54, 81, 83
Trundle, Catherine 28
McGrew, William 15, 16, 83
van Inwagen, Peter 41, 84
Malinowski, Bronislaw 10, 81
Varela, Francisco 21, 22, 84
Marion, Jean-Luc 73, 83
Varzi, Achille C. 24, 84
Maurst, Anita 60, 61, 83
Vasquez, Consuelo 44, 83
Methodology 14, 44, 57, 83
Venkatesan, Soumhya 28, 84
Meunier, Dominique 44, 83
Vicart, Marion 61, 62, 76, 84
Minor mode (or minimality) 14,
Virtuality 77
18, 30, 47, 49, 68, 70-79
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 69, 84
Mithen, Steven 18, 83
Volume of being 14, 20, 21, 22, 24,
Murdoch, Iris 39, 42, 83
33-45, 53, 60, 64, 72, 75.
Nussbaum, Martha 40, 83
Index 87

Wastell, Sari 11, 82 Wolff, Francis 11, 12, 84

Willerslev, Rane 31, 84 Wynn, Tom 18, 84
Winnicott, Donald W. 40, 84 Yarrow, Thomas 28
 MIMESIS GROUP
www.mimesis-group.com

MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL
www.mimesisinternational.com
info@mimesisinternational.com

MIMESIS EDIZIONI
www.mimesisedizioni.it
mimesis@mimesisedizioni.it

ÉDITIONS MIMÉSIS
www.editionsmimesis.fr
info@editionsmimesis.fr

MIMESIS COMMUNICATION
www.mim-c.net

MIMESIS EU
www.mim-eu.com
Printed by Booksfactory – Szczecin (Poland) in May 2016