What does it mean to live in the Anthropocene? How do we get there? And who will be? To think the Anthropocene takes putting into question our relationships to all things and beings, from nature to technology. It means to realign and readapt – to set humankind into new proportions. If ‘nature’ was the first colonized object of modern European thinking and conquering, then the concept of the Anthropocene may demand us to leave the humanistic scope of Western thought. But how do we do you proposal yourself into a new mindset?

Here is a series of talk given in the framework of On Becoming Earthlings, at the Musée de l’Homme (Paris).

A Political History of “Spaceship Earth”: from Cold War to Geoengineering by Sebastian Grevsmühl
In a dialogue with a former space engineer from the Ariane program, Sebastian Grevsmühl explains how, with the closure of the Earth through the explorations of the last unknown territories during the 19th and the early 20th century, the exploratory focus moved up towards the sky and space and, subsequently, back to the view of the Earth from up there. Obviously, technologies like photography, balloons, airplanes and rockets also played a crucial role in this evolution. With the space era in full bloom in the 1960s, the idea of the spaceship Earth – our home planet seen as a very large dome-shaped vessel within a controlled atmosphere – became a leading political metaphor, used in the many discourses and manipulated both by political establishments and counterculture. Today, as the international debates about climate change and the ways to confront it are in full swing, this kind of spaceship earthism is coming back. A concept that is not far from the geo-engineering dreams of taking over the atmosphere through technical means. But, as Sebastian Grevsmühl points out, programs like these, besides the doubtfulness of their possible success, carry one main problem: they try to remove political decision processes by leaving all to design and engineering.

Adaptation or Death: Resilience of the Prehistoric Hominids by Marie-Hélène Moncel
The situation for hominids, tells Marie-Hélène Moncel, improved drastically 400,000 years ago. Big predators disappeared, leaving humans with much less competition. And with the invention of controlled fire around that time, humans were able to survive in harsher and colder conditions. During the time of the hominids, weather changes have been taking place in cycles of 100,000 years. For some time now, Moncel switches to our present, we have luckily been living in a very moderated climate, so it was quite a shame that we took off so badly. What we were facing today, was the first climate change perceived by man. Previous ones were out of scale of human perception, this one happens in the scale of a life-time. Humankind today has a complete sense of adaptation: we can live anywhere now. That would be the hope for the current climate change, that we will adapt. We don’t have the choice anyhow.

Anthropocapitalocene – Colonial Politics of Our Times by François Vergès
According to Francoise Vergès, the positive thing about the concept and term anthropocene is that it turns attention to how nature is fabricated. But European environmental politics with its eurocentrism tended to actively forget the remote areas of the world which are and will be in fact much more affected by climate change and which by no coincidence happen to be the former colonies. Vergès therefore prefers to talk about the “anthropocapitalocene” instead. As she shows in her dialogue, all the moments in history when exploitation and subsequently transformation and pollution of the earth on a large scale began, were linked to the advent of capitalism and colonialism: intensification of the exploitation of natural resources and of human workforce, including slavery, increase of traffic and trade. The longue durée of the era we are living in today and that recently has been given the name anthropocene started then, in the 16th and 17th century, and the colonial divide through the societies of today manifests itself not only between the global north and south but everywhere, between those, few, privileged and those disprivileged and exploited by the current economical order.

Are we All Equal in the Ecological Crisis? Environmental Inequalities in France and Elsewhere by Razmiq Keucheyan
The unfair distribution of the benefits and the prices of industrialization is nothing new, in fact it started with its very beginning, when factories were erected in the vicinity of the cheap quarters of town (and the other way round), and many of the European cities kept this shape and socioeconomic structure until the late 20th century (when the effects of de-industrialization started to transform them again). But, as Razmiq Keucheyan explains, with climate change and the environmental politics and new technologies related to it, the old pattern is being repeated again. In dialogue with an urbanist whose research work focusses on socio-economic aspects of Brazilian cities, he discusses why and how the universalistic talk about climate change and the anthropocene tends to render invisible the differences and inequalities that are continued, brought forward or amplified by it. Class struggles, race struggles and gender struggles – or what Keucheyan proposes to call environmental inequalities and environmental racism – not only manifest themselves between the rich and the poor areas of the world, but within the cities of the rich, northern hemisphere.

Autodomestication: Immaterial Labor of Household Pets by Krõõt Juurak
The dancer and performer Krõõt Juurak has been closely looking at cats and dogs for quite a long time. She considers the cat she had when she was little as one of her most influential teachers. She says that as a performer, she has felt closer to household pets like cats and dogs than to many people of other, different professions. Therefore, she proposes to classify living beings not in terms of species but in terms of fields of labour. Cats and dogs are constantly working to get some attention and to please the humans – they are engaged in different forms of immaterial labour, according to Juurak’s understanding, very comparable to her work as an artistic performer. In her latest, on-going project, she decided to turn things around and do performances for her “colleagues from another species”. In this intense dialogue she shows some material and talks about her experiences with pet performances, touching many aspects of human-pet-relations from a consequently de-human-centered point of view.

Biodiversity and Ethics: Global Issues through the Perspective of Insects by Philippe Grancolas
As science is not situated outside of society, the value of research is linked to a market. More precisely, discoveries that are easily understandable (i.e. tradable) will probably have a more positive effect on the career than those from very complicated or remote areas of research. If, for instance, one studies a bird or a mammal, one will have more success than if one studies insects. This is a result of our anthropocentric worldview. The insects, Philippe Grandcolas’ field of research, are commonly seen as strange, rarely as positive and sympathetic. The western view on living beings is anthropocentric, as he points out in his dialogue, putting man on top of the world in an ancient biblical way. But in reality there is not a more evolved species, all species are extremely adapted to their situation. Humans should not be put on top, nor should some species be put on a higher level than others, because this doesn’t give a view broad enough to understand all living beings, and avoids to give answers to some questions that are urgent. This, Grandcolas concludes, was not only a theoretical and ethical problem but also a practical one. Only if we knew well all living things, we will know more about mankind itself.

Bot or Not? by Marie Lechner
In his 1998 book “Bots – the origin of a new species” Andrew Leonard described bots – strings of code programmed to do certain tasks autonomously in a software environment – as the first “indigenous inhabitants” of cyberspace. With this, he was the first to turn attention to the new phenomenon, as Marie Lechner opens her dialogue, and to describe the internet as a new kind of ecosystem. Today, more than 50 percent of the content in the internet is produced by bots like Google translator or the Wikipedia search engine. They have become the shadow army of the internet, a new lifeform that evolves fastly and more and more independently in an only seemingly fully man-made (and -controlled) space. Lechner demonstrates by many examples ranging from dating sites to surveillance software how internet users permanently interact with bots and how they frequently face situations in which they’d have to ask themselves wether they are communicating with a machine or a human being.

From Compassion to Love, a Spiritual Path to Vegetarianism by Nadim Ghodbane
Sufism encourages compassion, love for the other and humbleness. Vegetarianism can be seen as an act of compassion towards the animals. How is it possible to change habits within a religious community, but also for the generations to come? Nadim Ghodbane, who has been an activist in several environment-political movements for a long time, decided to become a vegetarian also for ecological but mainly for personal spiritual reasons and his love for animals. He and his dialogue partner discuss in a very dense conversation the politics and economics of eating meat, anthropological and religious dimensions of vegetarianism and the perspectives of a sustainable re-invention and strengthening of the ecological movement through spirituality. A reform that would eventually lead to nothing less than a revolution of our life styles and consumer habits.

Having a Monkey on Your Back (Body, Race and Racialization) by Seloua Luste Boulbina
Going back to Voltaire and Rousseau Seloua Luste Boulbina questions the begin- nings and different mechanisms of racialization. In his “Essay on the customs and the spirit of nations”, written in 1756, Voltaire introduces “colour of skin” and “nature of hair” as parameters used to draw principal distinctions. In his “Confessions”, Rousseau internalizes the new paradigm of anatomy, referring to his work as an ana- tomy of his inner self. This double movement of defining bodily distinctions that are supposed to reveal categorical differences and of internalizing this new, “scientific” gaze on the body, has been active until today, as Boulbina illustrates by describing the widely spread practice among black women in Paris who neglect their natural hair by carrying wigs with straight hair. How can we escape a racialized view that has been established over the course of the last 250 years? (And that the vast majority of people in France are not even aware of, even less seeing as a current active problem, as Boulbina explains.) Drawing on the philosopher, author and revolutionary Frantz Fanon who didn’t write but dictated all his theoretical work, Boulbina envisions the possibility to counter the diktat of the gaze with the persuasiveness of the voice.

How Come the Vatican Calls the Earth “Our Sister”? by Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour and a member of the Canadian activist theatre group “Fight with a Stick” exchange views on our relationships with nature, Earth, indigenous people. Latour talks about his theatre piece on Gaia, and about a pre-enactment of the World Climate Conference COP 21 entitled “Make it work” he initiated at the théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers near Paris in the summer 2015. His Canadian conversation partner summarizes the works of his own theatre group on territorial politics, settler colonialism, the idea of nature and related topics. Reference point for all their reflections is Latour’s excitement about the fact that pope Francis in his encyclical on human-natu- re relations and environmental politics, “Laudate si”, referred to nature as “Our Sister”. A mother, Latour argues, you want to leave behind as soon as you are grown up, you want to emancipate from. On the other hand, siblings have a much more lasting relationship, mutual bonds that they carry all their lives. Regarding Earth as a sister makes the shift work in both directions (which is, as Latour points out, very typical of anthropocene thinking): humans anthropomorph “Sister Earth”, but the Earth also deanthropomorphs the humans and their understanding of themselves.

Indigenous People in the World and Their Right to Maintain Their Living Cultures by Irène Bellier
Historically, indigenous people around the globe were denied citizen rights. Instead, they were left out, put into territories, enslaved and killed. Today, with the environmental crisis and the crisis of the Northern, industrialized way of living, many doubtful and critical minds see them as the keepers of an ancient knowledge that must be preserved and rehatched as part of the cultural heritage of those nations and cultures that colonised them. How do indigenous populations themselves react to this situation, how do their representatives speak out and fight for them on an international level? Irène Bellier, who has been working as a researcher for multinational organisations and participated in multiple debates and negotiations on the rights of indigenous people for a long time (such as U.N. meetings), underlines their difference. The only thing they have in common with us is their modernity – and their capacity to live, act and decide differently. How will modern societies face these legacies and potentials, without confining them once more to museums or touristic sites?

Invasive or Companion Insect? About the Ladybird and the Notion of Invasive Migrants by Romain Nattier
Asiatic (or “chinese”) ladybugs – those with yellow dots instead of red ones – were brought into Europe in large quantities as a natural insecticide (they eat ten times as many lice as their European relatives). Because they are flourishing so well, they are now considered to be an “invasive” species by many who fear they might draw back the “native” Eropean ladybug species. But the total number of ladybugs Romain Nattier and his colleagues count as part of their research in the region of Ile de France doesn’t indicate such a drawback or decline of numbers. Taking his special research field of the european ladybug species as a focal point, Romain Nattier questions the use of categories of migration, homeland and territorialisms of all sorts in plant and animal populations. Instead of describing fluctuations like the one of the asiatic ladybug as anthropogenic species migration he would rather understand them as a “change of distribution pattern due to human activities.” And instead of as a problem of migration he proposes to understand those spacial movements as part of evolution.

K9: On Emotional Economy in the Parallel Evolution of Wolves, Humans and Dogs by Maja Smrekar
Wolves are investing there energy very economical, only hunting for the old, the weak and the ill. When humans started to domesticate them some 30.000 years ago, the new breed later called dog evolved from this coalition by becoming the ultimate wolves: not having to invest any energy anymore on hunting and food they could spare everything for the relationship with their new companion species, the humans. Maja Smrekar would have elaborated on this surprising proposition, hadn’t she encountered a person for this dialogue, another artist, who was interested in completely different things. So they talk instead about a film project in which a dog would be the central symbol and character, a police dog that died during the terrorist raid in St. Denis, the 6th species extinction, and the humans as an invasive species on the verge of extinction.

Keeping One’s Distance to Understand and Respect Their Privacy – Field Research with Chimpanzees by Sabrina Krief
Since the late 1990s, Sabrina Krief has spent roughly six months every year living with ape communities, mostly chimpanzees. Part of her research focuses on selfmedication and the use of medical plants among chimpanzees, the other on changes in their behaviour due to anthropogenic influences. Many of the problems the apes as well as the humans living near apes are facing have to do with the fact that they can be dangerous to one another, especially in terms of diseases that can spread between the species. Therefore, the research into the plants and food the chimpanzees use for selfmedication could become extremely valuable for humans too. For now, the commonly shared realization is that humans and apes should keep a respectful distance from each other. Therefore, today, her work as a researcher mainly consists in observing the relationships between the animals rather than building relationships with them. As a primatologist, she has started to practice and adapt ethnographical methods. And one of the lessons chimpanzees as social beings can teach us, she says, is tolerance.

Lessons From a Marine Flatworm by Xavier Bailly
The little worm Bailly studies has the capability of photosymbiosis, which derives from the fact that the worm – like corals – lives in symbiosis with an algae. The worm has 40,000 to 50,000 (unicellar) microalgae located under its skin. The algae use photosynthesis and thus nurture the worm. So we have to do with a worm that can live of photosynthesis, domesticate algae and collaborate with it. The worm is also capable of regenerating its brain tissue and to regain its usual functions. Where does the animal get the information from how to do this? This information could of course, as Bailly underlines, help to cure degenerative illnesses: tumors and aging diseases. The Symsagittifera roscoffensis, the mighty flatworm in question, also helps to understand biology and ecology (the photosymbiosis in particular) of coral reefs. The coral reefs that have lost their algae lose their color, and die. The equilibrium of algae and the coral reefs is heavily endangered and has in many cases already been made impossible by the acidification of the sea. Bailly is convinced that people should learn at a very young age how special and vulnerable this photosymbiosis is. It could make them respect the marvels of nature and understand biology.

Lessons in Adaptation – On the Twisted History of Romani People in Europe by Marcel Courthiade
Records from the 13th century show that when the romani people first arrived in European countries, they were generally very well received. Because of the horses and the dogs they brought with them, and because of the clothes they wore, they were often seen as nobles. In a conversation with a collaborator of the Musée de l’Homme who is preparing an exhibition on the history of racist prejudices, Marcel Courthiade relates the European history of the Rromani people from its very beginning, detailing when, where and why discrimination and the stereotypes of the nomadic gypsies appeared. Contrary to the history of the Jewish people, there was no clear religious argument: Rromani people displayed a remarkably high capacity to adapt to very different cultural and religious surroundings, as Courthiade shows: they celebrated religious festivities and rituals with Christians, Jews, and Muslims without distinction. But that didn’t prevent them from being labelled until today as the people that are different and unable to adapt.

Mutual Benefits between Organisms: the Ecology of Symbioses by Marc-André Selosse
Selosse works on mycoses: the way mushrooms and trees collaborate. One takes nutrition from the soil and the other gives back sugar. In biology we now understand, Selosse tells in his dialogue, that organisms, of which we used to think that they were existing on their own, are in fact collaborating with microorganisms on an existential level: they are feeding by them and fighting illnesses with them. We can’t properly observe an organism anymore without also focussing on its bacteria. In general, organisms don’t exist autonomously, it is only our (limited) perception that produces this image. Climate change, Selosse continues, messes up the interspecies collaborations. If only one of the organisms has to change its behavior, the collaboration can no longer hold. Both have to adapt, so the chances of survival diminish. Therefore biodiversity is something that lies mainly in the interest of humans. Earth will flourish anyway, as it has proven in previous mass extinctions. What we should keep in mind, Selosse concludes, is that there is no natural equilibrium, no stable condition. In ecology, it’s a mess, it’s a constant struggle.

Myths of Migration. A Demographer’s View on Discourses of Climate Change by Hervé Le Bras
The history of migration is ongoing and perpetually renewing, whereas certain stories about migration and how it impacts society stay the same. In general, every new generation of migrants is confronted with the prejudgements that were produced on and by the migrants who came before them, as Hervé Le Bras points out. Therefore, a social scientist working on migration, that’s what Le Bras underlines and puts in the main focus of his dialogue, always has to deal with both the actual numbers and the myths of migration. For example, though taking refugees obviously seems to be the big problem of today, in France the vast majority of migration, about 80 %, has been and still is produced by regroupment of family members. And this new group of citizens does not mainly consist, as prejudice would further like to have it, of the new migrant’s often uneducated women and children from remote areas, but is in the vast majority the result of mixed marriages between french and non-french people who couple on the basis of shared interests, education, cultural backgrounds, etc.

New Mexico 1945, Trinity and White Sands Missile Range: “Red” Science, MacCarthyism, and the Birth of the Military-Industrial Complex by Ewen Chardronnet
During his research on the early years of the U.S. space program, namely the jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California, founded in 1943, Ewen Chardronnet met with the son of Frank Malina, the first director of this laboratory, who used to be the member of a communist student group, together with Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of Robbert Oppenheimer. In 1944 these scientist, mostly communists and socialists, executed the first atomic bomb tests. In October 1945 Malina and his team launched “White Corporal”, the first missile to reach space. Leftist scientists have designed the atomic bomb to counter fascism, and later refused to have it trigger a cold war. In may 1945, they elaborated with Wernher von Braun and some 100 other German engineers that were brought in after the war, on an updated version of the V2-rocket. Malina soon refused to work together with them and went to UNESCO in France. After the first Russian atomic bomb and the seizing of power by Mao in China, the red scientists from Pasadena were chased by FBI and Maccarthyism.

Obtaining the Big through the Very Small. The Operators at CERN between Particles and Cosmos by Sophie Houdart
The CERN Large Hadron Collider has been created to understand how matter initially agglomerated, in order to learn more about the origin of life. Common discourse on the Hadron Collider draws a straight line between the very small (the particles) and the very big (the macrocosms), pretending that the passage from the infra/invisible to the macrocosm is very easily crossed. What can be seen on a daily basis at CERN is however completely absent from the general discourse. Sophie Houdart, in her anthropological research, tries to understand the CERN collider as a whole, in order to find things that are necessary but obfuscated in the chain from the very small to the very big. What are the technical skills of the technical workers who know the ma- chine? To operate the machine correctly, the terrain must be taken into account. Both wild boars and people above ground have an impact on the workings of the machine. The collider is so big, that its very size influences the measurements. It being the most monitored terrain in Europe, the CERN has detected impacts from the Fukushima disaster. The place becomes a sentinel for effects of human activity outside the centre.

On the Edge: Resilience, Tipping Points and Unexpected Responses of Ecosystems by Sonia Kéfi
An ecosystem is a community of species living in a homogenous climate. In recent years, there have been two major tolls on ecosystems: the global temperature and the growing pressure of human population. Sonia Kéfi researches how these changes impact ecosystems to predict what the ecosystems will look like in 30 to 40 years. She predicts how the ecosystems will respond and evaluates how much stress they can handle before reaching a tipping point. To give an example of a changing ecosystem, she describes the desertification in Spain: with too many kettle feeding of too little vegetation, there is rapidly less biodiversity. Only saline resistant species survive, but animals do not eat them. Even since the cattle was forbidden in the 1970s, the vegetation has not regenerated, because an ecosystem that has been affected by overgrazing can’t easily go back to its original shape. This ecosystem has flipped: a catastrophic transformation has happened. Much like a canoe: a big push can be without consequence, but a little touch can knock it over. And once it is upside down, it is quite hard to turn it over again.But there is also good news: life forms are much more resilient than one would expect. New species can evolve. A new ecosystem can also be perfectly stable; it is just not suited to the life it once sustained.

Pastoralism and Predators in the 21st Century by Nora Kravis 
Nora Kravis’ farm is the first livestock enterprise in Europe that was certified as a predator-friendly business, meaning that it uses non-lethal means of controlling the presence of predators – guard dogs and electric fences. When she first settled in Tuscany and started keeping goats more than 30 years ago, farm life was a pastoral idyll, she tells us – with no reason to fear any threats from nature. And the people were glad that someone new was taking care of the deserted rural territories. About 10 years ago, things changed, when the dramatically growing number of wolves in the area (from one or two in the 1970s to 300 today) started to attack, while the new guidelines of environmental politics forbade to hunt them. In the first attack on one of her herds, she lost over 30 goats in one night. As a reaction, she decided to start working with a traditional breed of shepherd’s dogs. That was a success: for over four years, she hasn’t had an attack. Her “wolfologist”, a wolf expert she works with, says that she has developed a relationship with the neighbouring wolf pack, a sort of non-aggression agreement. But working with and feeding the dogs costs a lot of money and time, two things that most livestock farmers are not willing or able to spend.

Pastoralism and Transhumance: Keeping the Age-Old Legacy of Shepherding Alive by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro
How to regenerate the pastoralist culture that is losing ground so quickly? This problem is of a European scale. In 2012, Verlet-Bottéro as the secretary of the European Network of Pastoralist organizations organised an assembly of shepherds at the Documenta in Kassel. The goal of the assembly was to show that sustaining pastoralism has a cultural dimension. It is not just of economic importance, it is also an ancestral culture that forged Europe. The shepherds, Verlet-Bottéro explains in his dialogure, were the artists that for 10.000 years have sculpted the landscapes of Europe. Today, pastoralism is heavily threatened by the agro-industry, by landrights, by mining and by accumulation of bureaucratic norms. To give an example, electronic chipsare now, by European law, mandatory to trace the kettle. But since a shepherd knows every single one of his or her animals, this is just an unnecessary measure representing enormous costs. Verlet-Bottéro sees the shepherds as one of the last autochthonous people in Europe. To save this tradition, his current effort is to group and amplify their political demands by a united European network of pastoralist organizations.

Silaup Uqquusivallianinga – the Right to Coldness! Inuit Confronted with Global Warming by Sylvie Teveny
With the permanent ice floes vanishing on the north and south pole, currently up to 50 % since 1979, global warming is further speeding up because the ice is not reflecting the sunlight anymore (instead, its warmth is absorbed by land and water). The CO2 gasses on their part accelerate this system and make it a vicious circle.As the Inuit live by the North Pole, Sylvie Teveny tells us, they bear indeed much more of the impacts of climate change than most other peoples. Still being huntergatherers, they are faced with the consequences of the diminishment of the seasonal ice floes. It makes the sea more violent. It also often makes it impossible for them to travel from one village to another or to hunt. And the diminishing of snow also makes it hard to hunt trails, to travel and to build igloos. This know-how is thus getting lost. Their third problem is the infrastructure that collapses, now that the permafrost is becoming less consistent. Teveny predicts that the Inuit nevertheless won’t migrate, but rather adapt to this hardened situation. According to her, they see themselves as trailblazers, already facing the difficulties that await all of us.

The Anthropocene: Danger of a Temporal Confusion by Patrick de Wever
The confusion that worries Patrick De Wever is not about temporality but about mixing time scales: The cyclical time of the geological development, in which a million years is just a short period of time, and the linear time of human progress that led to the ecological reality now referred to as the ‘anthropocene’, in which a hundred or two hundred years is considered a ‘long durée’ (compared to the piling up of events which is how historical time tends to function) are incommensurably different. In arguing thus, the geologist doesn’t deny the global impact of human activities or the urgency of today’s environmental crisis. But he is worried that the confusion in time scales might lead to wrong conclusions and overestimation of the potentials of human activity.

The Capital Market is Part of the Problem but also Part of the Solution by Pierre Ducret
Pierre Ducret, a former member of the directorial board of Caisse des Dépôts, turned his professional focus on the economy of environmental protection a couple of years ago and became director of CDC Climat Recherche, a think tank for climate friendly economics and financing (recently renamed into: I4CE – Institute for Climate Economics). As an advocate of environmental protection and a banker, he is convinced that the only way to really change things is to bring together majorities of people and vast amounts of money. Economy is an evolutionary system as is nature, and we need to move the mainstream in order to bring it into a new course. But how do you manage to shift capital investments? How do you convince people to make the choice to in- vest in green technologies and the future of the planet? He explains that from a finance-capitalistic point of view, the current situation is characterized by three major risks: the risks of climate change, the risks of transitioning into a climate friendly economy, and the risk for the whole idea of a regulation of climate to turn into a fable… But this is actually good news, as Ducret declares: finance loves and runs on risk.

The Catastrophe and the Catastrophic – A Critique of Apocalyptic Reason by Yoann Moreau
Global warming has already started to produce an “epileptic nature”, as Yoann Moreau calls it, a climate producing unpredictable but certain catastrophic events on a higher frequency than in former times. How do we cope with this situation? In Moreau’s understanding, climate change and cultural change are inseparably linked. But the way cultures deal with catastrophes differs significantly: For example, in western understanding, humans make history and therefore tend to interpret catastrophes as tragic interruptions of (their) history. Whereas in an animistic world view, desastrous natural events are understood as being part of the same large force that animates and moves everything. Instead, loosing connection to this animistic force would be considered to be a real catastrophe. According to Moreau, there is a large potential of understanding and change in catastrophes. By touching fields from philosophy to anthropology to science fiction literature he shows and reflects on different modes to think and perceive of them.

The Contingency of Cheese – Goat Milk, Metabolic Processes and Matter in Flux by Jennifer Teets
As part of a research project on the sociopolitical consequences of cyclone Xinthia that hit Europe on February 26th 2010, curator Jennifer Teets spent the summer of 2014 working with a flock of 300 goats in the coastal region of the Vendée, which had been severely struck by the storm. All the goats were suffering from a disease inflicted by psychosomatic repercussions of the storm. In fact, the incident the animals were mainly traumatized by, it turns out, was not the experience of the storm itself, but the fleet of helicopters that circled the area for hours right after the storm to save flooded people and to help start the cleaning-up operations. One of the question that still remains open until today is whether the disease influences the quality of the goat’s milk and subsequently the cheese that is derived from it and if so, how? Reconstructing this complex network of human-machine-animal-germ-natural disaster, Teets asks questions like: What is protection? What is risk in such an environment? What is the “pharmakon” within the goat’s bodies and their cheese? What is the infection, what is the remedy, what is the poison?

The Dead Reach Fulfillment by Forcing those who Remain to Take Care of those who Follows by Vinciane Despret
We are linked to the defunct by a regime of obligations and codes. We respect them. Probably because those who treat well the defunct have asked themselves: what will await me? But there is more to it than only treating well the corpse. Despret found a great inventiveness in the way we engage with the dead. An incredible talent and humor comes about in homage ceremonies, people can suddenly write much better than normally. As a link to shrinking and expanding the human, we are shrunken facing our dead – it shows that we are not all that modern after all – and it also expands us because it shows us how sensible we are to ‘our invisibles’. The dead have a life. They are beings who can’t speak for themselves and need to be represented. But people in the 21st century have a talent to speak both for and to invisible beings. A quite subversive practice, as Despret points out.

The Great Listening: an Ecstatic Exercise for Sensualizing the Consciousness-Organs by Ashkan Sepahvand
As a reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, a little more than one week before the Blackmarket at Musée de l’Homme took place, Ashkan Sepahvand wrote a long poem, a kind of invocation, inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to read out out loud with his dialogue partners. In traditional Tibetan Buddhism, he tells us, when someone passes away, it is a cause for celebration as the soul of the deceased now has the opportunity to pass through the intermediate stages and if it passes all the challenges, it may be reborn in a better life, or even ideally, transcend reality altogether and reach enlightenment. Ashkan Sepahvands’ interest especially lies in the concrete dimensions of this spiritual practice. Can we free ourselves through intention? Is the world simply what we make it in our imagination? To become human, it may be necessary to guide the dead towards a better living – not a Paradise elsewhere, but a world here and now. Not a dialogue but a shared reading, this intense session explores how our thoughts may be sensitized to accomplish the common task of world-making by seeing, listening, and speaking.

Transhumanism & the Anthropocene: Is it Acceptable that the Dam Determines the Fate of the River? by Catitu Tayassu
The living space for the humans was created by a catastrophe of oxygen that produced the ozone layer. Now we are in the paradoxical situation of a catastrophe of humans that threatens to destroy the ozone layer, our very livelihood. Catitu meditates on the stories and theories of the Anthropocene from the perspective of a shaman and a trained anthropologist and delivers a lot of mindtwisting insides both from the western world where she has been living and working a long time and the ancestral world of her origin in the amazonian jungle. Why is the anthropocene and for whom? Who is inside and who is outside? Under which conditions is there even an inside and an outside? Is it possible to merge old, indigenous wisdom and western world view in thinking the anthropocene?

What is about the Antropocene Anyway? Implications and Potentials of a Hybrid Concept by Catherine Larrère
The anthropocene is generally defined as the era where the impact of human activities has become as strong as a geological force. Nature, in contrast, was classically understood as the territory and the sum of forces that have been existing before and independently of human activities and which are the opposite or the counterpart of culture. Now, the universality of the anthropocene claim leads to the assumption that this opposition between nature and culture can’t be upheld anymore, because there was no spot left on earth that was not directly or indirectly affected by the aftermath of human activities. But if “nature” doesn’t exist anymore, whom are we going to protect? And what sense does it make in the first place to mix up the long time frames of nature and earth and the short time frames of human history? Catherine Larrère takes up questions like these when discussing contradictions, findings and potentials in the discourses of the anthropocene.

What is the Place of Man in the Biosphere? by Paul Watson
For millions of years, the oceans have taken care of themselves, following the basic laws of ecology. The biological system starts with the plankton, and then goes all the way up to the whales. Many whale species and varieties of fish feed on the plankton. The whales, in return, take care of the plankton by providing nitrogen. Since 1950, there has been a 50 % decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton, which produces over 50% of the world’s oxygen. Until today, humans have killed 90 % of the whales, and 90% of the rest of the fish. If we don’t shut down all industrialized fishing operations for the next 40, 50 years, tells Paul Watson, very soon, there won’t be any fishing anymore. Obviously, no decision makers, neither from the industry nor from the governments, have been really interested in acknowledging this urgent state of affairs and taking the necessary measures. To move in this direction, Watson argues, we would need a revolution. Nevertheless, he sees no reason to be depressed, nor pessimistic. First, revolutions were never made by majorities. It only takes a critical revolutionary mass of 7 %, and everyday we are getting closer to that figure. Second, says the old activist with a sense of laconic awareness, life will go on, with or without us.

Where did we Hide our Nature? by Annamaria Lammel
Lammel works pro bono for the IPCC (known as the GIEC in France) to write rap- ports on climate change that serve as a base for decision making. As an eco-psychologist and anthropologist she researches how people position themselves towards nature. She is convinced that, as long as people don’t feel part of nature, they won’t accept and adapt to climate change. And if one (animal, human or plant) can’t adapt to the climate changes, the impact will be terrible. Western society is thus very vulnerable. Lammel is coaching people who want to act pro-environment, but can’t make it. Their cognitive bias, she explains, was the same as of someone who is smoking: even if you tell that person that smoking is lethal, it will not change its behavior. We always find a story to deceive ourself. When we buy that polluting car we say: ‘‘yes but anyway, I can’t change the climate alone.’’ Hope, according to Lammel, lies in the fact that people imitate one another. Just as we copy people and dress all quite alike, we should imitate behavior that is conscious of the urgency of climate change.

Why do we Teach Science in Schools by Guillaume Lecointre
For some time, Guillaume Lecointre explains in his dialogue, biological systematics have organized the diversity of living forms in terms of common features, complying to a logic of sharing. In science, one does not isolate a group through the capacities it lacks, that would be absurd. Culturally however, we think in terms of exclusion and differences. Lecointre is convinced, that if we took seriously the scientific method also in our view on culture and society, we no longer could ignore the social groups we exclude from the vision of a euro-centred world. Science, he explains, was reasonable, not as a discipline with a political goal but by nature. This reason unintentionally became compatible with the republican project of the political scientist Condorcet in the XVIIIth century, who wanted reason to be the pillar of citizenship. If we teach the children to see each other in terms of what they share, and not in terms of what makes them different, we teach them citizenship – living together. This is compassion: seeing in the other what you yourself could have. Teaching science to young pupils, Lecointre concludes, builds a school of democracy, it can forge citizenship by reason.

Your Garden is My Soil by Ingrid Paola Amaro
Ingrid Amaro is a gardener at the Laboratoire d’Aubervilliers, in an area mostly inhabited by migrant families in the North of Paris. Two analogies lead her work as a gardener: The first being that there are two different types of migrants, people and plants. We treat them in the same way: they are taken out if they are not marketable and they grow everywhere. The same jargon is applied. Some plants can travel, some seeds are forbidden to take on a flight. Secondly, she compares her interventions as a gardener to the invisible hand of capitalism: she makes the whimsical decisions. This is how the garden reflects society. In respect to the Anthropocene discourse and the question of the relation between humans and nature, she expresses her conviction that a change of attitude is necessary: respecting nature not protecting it. Because what we do and do not protect is completely arbitrary. Man should be standing on the same level as nature, connected to the earth.