Traslation by Luigina D’Introno

Through the anthropological view of nature conservation, cultural anthropologist Andrea Staid explains the different terminologies of the anthropological world and how they have influenced and continue to influence the world. 

In The Living House and Being Nature, she shatters the Western man/nature dichotomy and its consequent objectification of the environment, by introducing an opposite view to the constantly mediatised one:you speak of chapterocene and occidontocene and not the anthropocene. 

We are used to think about the climate crisis and the current geological situation as the Anthropocene, where our consumption and lifestyles have destroyed the planet. Anthropos stands for pollution of all humans on the planet. Many native cultures point out to us that it is not the fault of all humans, but that it is the responsibility of a certain type of human. During the colonial era – and it has never ended – the West has endlessly taken advantage of nature in a material vision where mountains, seas and rivers are nothing more than storehouses of objects to be exploited. So the critique we are being made of is, rather than Anthropocene, Capitolocene as we could call it. It is a life view of capitalist production, hence of the planet exploitation as commodities from which to profit, and which has led to ecosystem destruction. More than in the Anthropocene, we are therefore in the Age of the Capitolocene, where this type of outlook on the world, this type of limitless economy of destruction, has led to the destruction of Gaia, of the planet.

How has your travel and research shaped you?

I mainly focused on Southeast Asia, on communities such as Dzao and Hmong, between Thailand and Vietnam, and on South America. I had the opportunity to meet the Quetchua and Haimarà world, of the Andes, between Peru and Bolivia. Then I did a little research in the Valle Sagrado in Cusco and stayed in Urubamba Kotowincho, in a self-built house of a Hober curandera. Last year I was with the Guaraní people in the north of Argentina, between Paraguay and Brazil. Now I am writing and taking stock of these ten years. There are many things that have marked me. The Andrea of ten years ago who left to do research no longer exists, there is now a construct of Andrea that is closely linked to the experiences he had with other cultures and other visions of the world. What struck me most is definitely the concept of nature and home by communities that have an animist cosmology. In the natural world, human beings are not separated from the entity of nature and home is not something owned where we go to lock ourselves away just to sleep, but is really the collective relationship that one has in the community. A not-only-community of humans that goes beyond the question of species: community with trees, with gardens, with game. The place where I felt most in cultural transit where I put myself in perspective was among the Dzao community in Vietnam. I was impressed by the very concept of life and death and there was a relationship with the power of dwelling and building that was different from what we are used to. It was outside my ethnographic research, but one thing that really shook me was, in South East Asia, discovering and entering the world of Jain and Buddhist spirituality. Seeing the practice of worship inside temples, both archaeological and contemporary, made me feel an extreme fascination, compared also to my relationship with the church and western worship. 

What do you think are the challenges we face today?

The challenge would be to change our habits and customs to stop the destruction of the ecosystem. We would have to live in a more elastic way and break the ethnocentric and anthropocentric vision that is increasingly leading us towards the end. Another major urgency is now to curb wars and end militarism by preventing the production of weapons. That would be the only solution to what is happening today in Palestine and Israel, Lebanon and Iran, Ukraine and Russia, Sudan and Myanmar. I believe the priority is to discuss a peace policy that must be built through the ability to negotiate. This tis closely linked to the issue of ecology mentioned earlier, because wars destroy not only human lives but also the life of the earth. It is a reality that we do not see and do not realise exists, just because we live in a world of privilege, but very often we are the cause of these conflicts.

Could we say that it is ethnocentrism that has triggered these emergencies? Can you explain what you mean?

Edward Tylor bases one-sided evolutionary anthropology on the issue of ethnocentrism, placing one’s own culture above others. Ethnocentrism in fact is the tendency of every culture to consider its own cultural models better and superior to those of others. So I study others by thinking of myself through my own filters, taking my own cultural values as the yardstick. Anthropology, from Franz Boas onwards, seeks to deny ethnocentrism and to found a critical view of this posture through cultural relativism, that scientific attitude that aims at knowledge and understanding, hence not moral justification, and that knows how to put other cultures into perspective. There are no superior or inferior cultures. Anthropology over time has understood that one cannot judge according to one’s own parameters. There are many different cultures in the world that develop internally in different ways. Simple or complex, this is an erroneous dichotomy. For a complete paradigm shift, however, one has to go back to the 1970s, when the first terms of post-colonial, de-colonial and interpretative anthropology began to appear. Certainly among the first we can mention the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Not forgetting the earlier work of Michael Leiris. Among the reflections he brought to ethnology was the question of the Western museum as something extremely political that constructed white supremacy. Ethnography was transformed by its discourse on the constant denial of colonial theft, the appropriation of works and the display of other cultures. Now the museum is no longer the only way to represent the history and vision of other cultures.

How to apply a decentralisation of the gaze?

We have to perceive our own point of view today as one among many others. That is, our cultural world is one of many possible worlds. The ability to put ourselves in perspective with the other means precisely decentralising our gaze, not thinking that all solutions and all the right things come from our cultural world, whether it is Western or not. The question is precisely the ability to relativise one’s positioning of the world. With all the flaws our contemporary world may have, however, it offers you the possibility to do this decentralisation more easily. 

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Andrea Staid is an Italian cultural anthropologist. He teaches Cultural and Visual Anthropology at Naba and at the Università statale di Genova. He has directed the ‘Biblioteca Antropologia’ series for Meltemi. Among his publications: Essere natura (UTET 2022), La casa vivente (ADD 2021), Disintegrati (Nottetempo 2020), Contro la gerarchia e il dominio (Meltemi 2018), Senza Confini (Milieu 2018), Abitare illegale (Milieu 2017), Le nostre braccia (Milieu 2011- 2015), Gli arditi del popolo (Milieu 2008-2015), I dannati della metropoli (Milieu 2014). He collaborates with several newspapers, including Il Tascabile and Left.