Gaïa and diplomacy as a cosmopolitical device. Interview with Bruno Latour

Abstract

The questions that give body to the interview were developed within the 'Nucleo NaturalezaCultura'. Our interests were linked to the discussion of the nature-culture pair, as it is currently being discussed in an anthropology interested in the so-called 'ontological turn'. In this context, Bruno Latour's work constitutes an indisputable turning point when considering the political, ecological and 'cosmopolitical' consequences of this 'turn'. Defender of a symmetrical anthropology, he has not only taken care of 're-assembling the social' through his notion of 'collectives', but he has managed to 'symmetrize' the anthropologies of the 'margins' (indigenous ethnology, among them) with that anthropology practiced in the centres, among the 'modern' ones. Thus, for example, while ethnologists were dedicated to investigate the distinction nature-culture in the Amazon as defined by indigenous cosmologies, he himself was dedicated to understanding how this binarism was manufactured in scientific laboratories, within our modern cosmology. In this interview, carried out in his Medialab de Sciences Po, in Paris, he covers part of his career and gives us some details of his project that allow us to continue reviving those current discussions that, faced with the 'ecological emergencies' embodied in Gaïa, place 'diplomacy' as a 'cosmopolitical' device.