CM: still I am infinitely far from granting any symmetry between poor and rich, the victims and the profiteers of the capitalistic land grab! BL: But would you really disagree that it would be possible to detect a sort of inverse history at work here? At the beginning of Middle Ground, remember, we are in the 16th century, you see how weak are the envoys of the Kings of England and France, they have to parley their ways through nations that are still powerful (whenever English and French think they are strong enough so that they don’t need to negotiate, they are roundly defeated!). Two centuries later, there is no need to discuss at all: the Indians have been literally pushed aside. CM: So? BL: So what I am hinting at with this new version of symmetric anthropology is that, because of the ecological mutation, three centuries later, we are now bound to observe a reversal that I take to be exactly symmetrical to White’s narrative: the Old Empires so to speak, are so much weakened, so much taken aback, that they have to negotiate anew, and are looking everywhere for cues on how to cope! Those who were doing the colonization now exclaim: “Ah that’s what you meant by having your culture broken down” and those on the receiving end of the colonization sigh back: “Ah! may be, finally you will now understand”. CM: Bruno, Bruno nothing of what you say works here. Where have you seen a negotiation going on? What chance had, for instance, the Fuegans to negotiate? In 50 years they have been wiped out. All of them. To the last canoe. Who is sent as a diplomat? Guns, microbes, greed, an abominable landgrab. Diplomacy? This is a sickening idea really.

Introduction to the catalogue When you think about it, it’s clear that the moderns have inherited a tradition that started badly. What we used to celebrate at school as one of the greatest achievements of Western philosophy is the strange story of cavemen who are kicked out of their cave and end up blinded by the sun because they were stupidly instructed to look at it directly without anything to protect their eyes! What a great parable this is, one that portrays mortals blindly stumbling in the open air instead of staying prisoners in a dark cave below. We have to recognize that such an excursion out of the cave is not terribly good training for those who wish to be earthly-minded.

In the last few years, electronic media brought a revolution in the traceability of social phenomena. As particles in a bubble chamber, social trajectories leave digital trails that can be analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of collective life. To make sense of these traces a renewed collaboration between social and natural scientists is needed. In this paper, we claim that current research strategies based on micro-macro models are unfit to unfold the complexity of collective existence and that the priority should instead be the development of new formal tools to exploit the richness of digital data.

Carolina Marinda — Since, in your book on the modes of existence (AIME), you invented a character, an anthropologist carrying out, in a way, your research work for you, I hope you will agree to an interrogation by a genuine anthropologist who is having real trouble doing her own research according to your methodological principles! Bruno Latour — A refusal would be quite out of place. Especially as the project aims to do something that is as unusual in philosophy as it is in anthropology, to do successful collective research.