Towards an anthropology of in-betweenness: reflections on a new and urgent decentering of the human

Abstract

This article seeks to reflect on questions related to contemporary anthropology, or anthropology in contemporaneity, in order to resituate the object of the discipline (the human and its relations) in the face of the increasing ecological threats of the present and its future. Such problems indicate a new decentering of the human in relation to the cosmos, which implies going back to the question of who or what we describe in our ethnographies.? The challenge here is to face the inherently anthropocentric foundation of anthropology (as well as of the social sciences and the humanities) as a condition for engendering more realistic descriptions that can respond to this decentering, and that can open the way to approaches that allow us to recognize new political (or, rather, cosmopolitical) coalitions that highlight continuities between humans and their worlds, which a significant part of contemporary thought.