What an amazing gift! Sure it might be poisonous. But how silly it would be not to try to peek through the wrapping to take a glimpse of what is in store. Consider the situation: here is a battered scholarly discipline, always uncertain of its scientific status, constantly plagued by successive and violent “turns” (the “ontological turn” being only the more recent), a field which always finds itself dragged into the middle of harsh political conflicts, a discipline that runs the constant risk of being absorbed by neighboring specialties and voted out of existence by deans and administrators impatient of its methods and ideologies, a discipline that accepts being crushed under the weight of all the violence and domination suffered by the many populations it has decided to champion—a lost cause among all the lost causes; okay, you see the picture, and it is to this same discipline, which a few years ago, an amazing present was offered: pushed from behind by the vast extent of ecological mutations and dragged ahead by philosophers, historians, artists and activists, a sizeable group of natural scientists are describing the quandary of our time in terms that exactly match the standards, vices and virtues of that very discipline. Yes, what a gift! It is really embarrassing, especially if it is not deserved!

When I meet a geologist, a geographer, a geochemist, or some expert in geopolitics, after a few minutes of conversation about what sort of topic they research, I conclude: “Then, why don’t you say that you are, in fact” (and here I adapt my sentence to each specialty) “a Gaialogist, a Gaiagrapher, a Gaiachemist, or someone deeply involved in Gaiapolitics”. And then I observe with some amusement how they react to this falsely innocent change in the prefix. After all, geo- and Gaia share exactly the same etymology, both come from the same entity Gè, actually a chtonic divinity much older than Olympian gods and goddesses, the primitive power who is sometimes addressed with the very apt epithet of Thousand Folds. The reactions of the scientists thus addressed are hugely entertaining: they position themselves, according to my admittedly small sample, along a gradient that goes from utter incomprehension (“what did you say?”), then to indignation (“Me? A Gaia something, no way, absolutely not”) to surprise (“after all, why not? Yes, in a certain sense, if you say so”) to complete approval, as if this was somewhat obvious and no longer in need of being stressed that they work on Gaia (“yes of course, I have devoted my whole professional life to it, why do you ask?”)

I will take capitalism to mean not a thing in the world, but a certain way of being affected when trying to think through this strange mixture of miseries and luxuries we encounter when trying to come to terms with the dizzying interplays of “goods” and “bads”. Capitalism is a concept that has been invented to help absorb this odd mixture of enthusiasm for the cornucopia of riches that has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty and the indignation, rage and fury in response to the miseries visited on billions of other people. Especially troubling to me is the feeling of helplessness that is associated with any discussion of economics and that I have so much trouble reconciling with what I consider science’s and politics' main effects, these being the opening of new possibilities and the provision of margins to manoeuvre.

If it is notably difficult to do the anthropology of those who invented the anthropology of ''others'', it is in part because they have managed to avoid doing their own. This most primitive and most aboriginal lack of reflexivity makes any sort of self-examination a skewed enterprise. This is why it is fairly useless to try to distinguish philosophy from anthropology when one wishes to find one's way through such an entangled jungle. You need anthropology - associated whenever possible with its set of ethnographic methods – to overturn philosophy’s claims that it has already reached universality; and you need philosophy – with its own set of interpretative skills – to make sure that anthropology’s claims to scientific status are not a form of provisional and provincial metaphysics. Each discipline spurs the other to restart its inquiries into the collectives that are constantly enmeshed by conquest, commerce or war.