This week, the radar follows three figures in anthropology working on different questions. Philippe Descola devotes the final paragraph of an essay on how different societies think about animals to artificial intelligence. Tim Ingold is due to present a proposal for a new humanism in Leuven on 4 November, of which we currently know only the abstract. And Anna Tsing and five colleagues propose to tell the history of property from the muddy shores of Southeast Asia. The three works do not engage with one another, and this radar does not bring them together under a shared position.
1. Descola and the final paragraph
On 31 October, Le Grand Continent published an essay by Philippe Descola with a question for a title: L’intelligence artificielle nous oblige-t-elle à repenser notre animalité ? (Does artificial intelligence compel us to rethink our animality?).
Descola begins with Cabeza de vaca, a 1984 photograph by Andres Serrano, and the animals painted by Rosa Bonheur to show how the modern gaze, which he calls naturalist, attributes a human-like interiority to animals because their bodies are of the same nature as ours. He contrasts this gaze with Amazonian animism, in which the interiority of plants, animals and spirits is expressed through speech and encountered in dreams, and in which the young of a hunted animal are adopted as orphans without anyone becoming their owner. He then turns to analogism, from the medieval Great Chain of Being to Montaigne, to conclude that there is no universal humanity and that each collective draws the boundary between humans and everything else in its own way.
Descola opens the final paragraph by warning that artificial intelligence ‘ne relève vraiment pas de mon domaine de compétences’ (really does not fall within his area of expertise). He sees it as an illustration of ‘naturalisme accompli, dans tous les sens du terme’ (naturalism brought to completion, in every sense of the phrase). For Descola, naturalism is the inverse of animism: only humans have interiority, yet everything that exists, humans included, is subject to the same natural laws. From the outset, this ontology has carried a contradiction between the moral and cognitive exceptionalism it grants humans and our condition as material beings. Descartes, he recalls, explained it through the existence of God, who had supposedly chosen to give humans a soul.
According to Descola, AI turns out to be, in a sense, ‘comme une vérification expérimentale du naturalisme’ (like an experimental verification of naturalism), insofar as what is distinctive about human consciousness and intellectual activity ‘peut désormais être imité par une machine’ (can now be imitated by a machine). From this he draws an explicit conclusion: ‘Il n’y a donc plus de singularité de l’humanité du point de vue moral et cognitif’ (there is therefore no longer any uniqueness to humanity from a moral and cognitive standpoint). He closes with a sentence that locates the exception elsewhere: ‘Notre exceptionnalité n’a de sens que parce que nous avons été capables de construire ces machines qui nous imitent’ (our exceptionality only has meaning because we have been able to build these machines that imitate us).
It is a brief conjecture, in a field the author himself says lies outside his expertise, at the end of a text devoted to something else.
Sources
2. Ingold and a humanism yet to be presented
On 4 November, from 17:00 to 19:00, Tim Ingold is due to deliver The Return to Nature and Culture at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy. It is the sixth lecture in the Phenomenology and Anthropology series, with Till Grohmann as discussant. This radar is being published before the lecture takes place. What follows is drawn from the abstract circulated by the institute; the lecture may develop, qualify or revise it.
Ingold proposes to reorient the concepts of nature, culture and the human towards a new humanism. He recalls that, for Enlightenment humanists, the essence of humanity lay in transcending a nature destined to be conquered, and he returns to older meanings. Nature, from the Latin nascere, denoted a power to bring forth new life; culture, from colere, referred to the human task of cultivating and tending that life so it could grow and flourish. From their conjunction he draws a sense of being human that predates the modern invention of humanity. He calls it humanifying: shaping one’s own existence and that of others ‘in the crucible of a common life’.
The abstract concludes that, through the gift of language, humans bear an exceptional responsibility that they can exercise only from within the world of life. This is why, he writes, the new humanism is ‘necessarily anthropocentric, in the strict sense of the term’. That final qualification matters: the anthropocentrism Ingold defends is bound up with responsibility and shared life, far removed from the Enlightenment idea of a humanity that dominates nature.
Read alongside Descola’s essay, the abstract makes it possible to distinguish two ways of thinking about human exceptionalism: a moral and cognitive one, which Descola argues machines have undermined, and one based on responsibility, which Ingold links to language. That comparison is ours. Ingold does not mention artificial intelligence in the abstract or respond to Descola.
Ingold’s recent schedule includes two other events. On 29 October, an online conversation was scheduled with Sha Xin Wei, philosopher, mathematician and engineer, and director of Synthesis at Arizona State University, on rhythm, gesture, digitality, music, mathematics, environmental relations and the use of tools. The event page does not link to a recording. On Thursday 5 November, at 18:15, he is due to present La línea, el nudo y el pliegue: reflexiones sobre el arte textil de Aurèlia Muñoz (The Line, the Knot and the Fold: Reflections on Aurèlia Muñoz’s Textile Art) at MACBA in Barcelona, as part of the international symposium Aurèlia Muñoz. Resonancia y confluencia. The museum describes Muñoz as an artist who anticipated contemporary sensibilities, from the ontological turn to ecofeminism and new forms of craft.
Sources
Synthesis, Rhythm and Gesture, 29 October 2026
MACBA, Aurèlia Muñoz. Resonancia y confluencia, 5–6 November 2026
3. Soft coasts and the history of property
On 21 October, Kirsten Keller, Megan Thomas and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing presented The Clam, the Mud, and the Girl: Soft Coasts and the Story of Property at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
They propose looking at Southeast Asia from its muddy shores and inland swamps. Before colonisation, these ‘soft coasts’ sustained a maritime world that connected diverse peoples through trade, kinship and loyalty. European ideas of property and governance drove the conversion of wetlands into dry land reclaimed from water, destroying those wetlands in a practice that continues in postcolonial forms. The team asks about the social and ecological effects of that transformation and chooses mud as the thread of its account. Mud conceals pirates, frustrates urban planners and becomes the raw material of private property. It also provides refuge for more-than-human lives and a means of telling stories of great ethnographic and historical depth.
This is a collective undertaking. Keller, Thomas and Tsing belong to a team that also includes Gillian Bogart, Joe Klein and Zahirah S. The group began working together in 2019 at the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast) and has co-authored a book. The talk was presented as a preview of that book; the event listing gives neither a publisher nor a publication date.
The talk description does not mention artificial intelligence. Its interest for this radar lies in extending one of the most productive strands of recent anthropology: the study of how regimes of property and governance transform landscapes and ways of life. It also does so through collective authorship, something rarely seen in radars centred on individual figures. We will follow up when the book has a publication date.
Sources
Also on the radar
In September, Éditions Wildproject published a paperback edition of Écrits politiques by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski, translated and with an afterword by Oiara Bonilla. According to the publisher, in this short book the authors ask, from Brazil, about the possible end of the capitalist world and about the forms of politics specific to Indigenous peoples, who resist capture by Progress and subordination to the nation-state.
We have found no verifiable new developments in recent weeks concerning Marisol de la Cadena, Veena Das, Arjun Appadurai or Sherry B. Ortner. Nor have we found any concerning Arturo Escobar, whom we covered on 28 and 29 October.
Sources
Context photograph: Don Hoi Lot, Thailand (2000). Ahoerstemeier; unmodified original. Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0.
