{"id":3303,"date":"2024-11-05T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-05T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grantalexander.com\/en\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2025-09-05T13:31:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T11:31:16","slug":"food-for-thought-exercises-in-decentring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grantalexander.com\/en\/our-news\/food-for-thought-exercises-in-decentring\/","title":{"rendered":"Food for Thought – Exercises in Decentring"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


Paul-Henri Moinet<\/em>
A graduate of \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure, columnist for Le Nouvel \u00c9conomiste<\/em>, 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\u2014a \u201cmatter for reflection\u201d 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\u2014and perhaps even challenge our assumptions. By examining how humans organise the world\u2014through language, beliefs, norms, production systems, and social interactions\u2014they encourage us to decentre<\/strong> ourselves, helping us to put our own ways of structuring society into perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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<\/strong>. As Claude St\u00e9panoff, anthropologist at EHESS, demonstrates in his brilliant study Attachements: Enqu\u00eate sur nos liens au-del\u00e0 de l\u2019humain<\/em>, 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\u2014plants, animals, trees, spirits, gods, ancestors, demons, and even the dead\u2014each considered a force to engage with. This is a regime of generalised empathy<\/strong>, 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Anthropologists call this ontological polyglossia<\/strong>, meaning all beings communicate with one another, regardless of differences in their mode of existence. Humans are indebted to everything around them\u2014cosmic 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<\/strong>, 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<\/strong>: all that was powerful in dense-network societies becomes mere object, reserve, or resource. Invisible realms\u2014the powers of nature and the cosmos\u2014give way to another invisible regime: that of law, institutions, corporations, the nation, and the state, as St\u00e9panoff 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Anglo-Saxon anthropologists have coined the acronym WEIRD<\/strong> to describe our modern Western worldview: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic\u2014Weird<\/strong> 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<\/strong>
Claude St\u00e9panoff, Attachements: Enqu\u00eate sur nos liens au-del\u00e0 de l\u2019humain<\/em>
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em>
Nastassja Martin, East of Dreams: Even Responses to Systemic Crises<\/em>
Donna Haraway, When Species Meet<\/em>
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed<\/em>
Philippe Descola, The Shape of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration<\/em>
Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy<\/em>
Viveiros de Castro, The Jaguar\u2019s Gaze<\/em>
A summary note by Paul-Henri Moinet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul-Henri MoinetA graduate of \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure, columnist for Le Nouvel \u00c9conomiste, 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\u2014a \u201cmatter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2887,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"activity":[7],"topical-themes":[],"news-type":[40],"class_list":["post-3303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFood for Thought - Exercises in Decentring - Grant Alexander<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.grantalexander.com\/en\/our-news\/food-for-thought-exercises-in-decentring\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Food for Thought - 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