Food for Thought – Exercises in Decentring

Paul-Henri Moinet
A graduate of École Normale Supérieure, columnist for Le Nouvel Économiste, editorial director at Sinocle, an independent media outlet on China, Paul-Henri Moinet has also taught at Sciences Po Paris and held strategic planning leadership roles in major advertising agencies such as Publicis Groupe and Havas Media Group.
An idea, a book, a concept—a “matter for reflection” that we share with you to stimulate thinking, explore new subjects, and encourage seeing things from a fresh perspective.

Anthropologists have a great virtue: they study distant or indigenous peoples and the traditional societies of other worlds. By observing us from afar, they help us better understand ourselves—and perhaps even challenge our assumptions. By examining how humans organise the world—through language, beliefs, norms, production systems, and social interactions—they encourage us to decentre ourselves, helping us to put our own ways of structuring society into perspective.

But what can a European entrepreneur or French manager take from a study of the Baka of Congo, the Even of Siberia, the Cree of Canada, or the Achuar of the Amazon? Perhaps a picturesque escape from stress, but more importantly, a profound conceptual upheaval. Through them, one can better understand their ties to peers, employees, partners, and markets. Who around them seems familiar, foreign, hostile, or an adversary? What agreements should be made with the forces surrounding their project? Do they think in a dense or a sparse network?
Any society in constant interaction with a multitude of forces forms a dense network. As Claude Stépanoff, anthropologist at EHESS, demonstrates in his brilliant study Attachements: Enquête sur nos liens au-delà de l’humain, traditional societies operate in dense networks with social and ecological intelligence far exceeding our own. In such networks, humans interact reciprocally with all living things—plants, animals, trees, spirits, gods, ancestors, demons, and even the dead—each considered a force to engage with. This is a regime of generalised empathy, far broader than the vague sense of goodwill that leads one to sympathise with a colleague or neighbour. In dense-network societies, social relations extend beyond the human. Rather than being hierarchical, vertical, and asymmetrical, social interactions are horizontal, reciprocal, and reversible, encompassing the entirety of nature and the cosmos. When a Siberian hunter kills a bear, he apologises, dances, or sings for it—a ritual that also applies to trees or mushrooms harvested. Ignoring it risks the retaliation of animal or plant spirits, which may bring disease or famine.

Anthropologists call this ontological polyglossia, meaning all beings communicate with one another, regardless of differences in their mode of existence. Humans are indebted to everything around them—cosmic debtors, in a sense. In Oceania, Siberia, or the Amazon, one can observe women breastfeeding monkeys, bear cubs, fawns, or puppies. Compare this with ourselves: as predators with little consideration, we live in sparse networks, maintaining limited, utilitarian relations with a few species we exploit.
In France alone, 26 million pigs, 7 million sheep, 40 million rabbits, and 1 billion poultry are slaughtered annually. These figures are not meant to advocate veganism, but to illustrate the consequences of domestication. A society becomes modern when it exits the dense-network mode of life, reducing not only the number of living species in interaction but also instrumentalising the nature of these interactions. Modernity is the regime of poor, disenchanted otherness: all that was powerful in dense-network societies becomes mere object, reserve, or resource. Invisible realms—the powers of nature and the cosmos—give way to another invisible regime: that of law, institutions, corporations, the nation, and the state, as Stépanoff notes. Multiple attachments across all living scales are reduced to human-only relationships. Interactions with the invisible are channelled through temples and churches, tied to a minimal pantheon of one to three deities. Production relations become univocal; humans communicate only with their peers, in an increasingly codified language. The empathic, polyglot predator of traditional societies has become a monoglot producer, with greatly diminished ecological intelligence.

Anglo-Saxon anthropologists have coined the acronym WEIRD to describe our modern Western worldview: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic—Weird also meaning strange. What is stranger: that we, considering ourselves modern, view other cultures as strange and archaic, or that we no longer question our own strangeness? When observing the jaguar, let us, like the Achuar of the Amazon, think symmetrically about how the jaguar perceives us.

References
Claude Stépanoff, Attachements: Enquête sur nos liens au-delà de l’humain
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Nastassja Martin, East of Dreams: Even Responses to Systemic Crises
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Philippe Descola, The Shape of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration
Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy
Viveiros de Castro, The Jaguar’s Gaze
A summary note by Paul-Henri Moinet