L’écume des mondes
This article discusses the phenomenological issues, both epistemic and methodological, raised by scientific research when engaging with living organisms. 150 years after the publication of AR Wallace’s Malay Archipelago (1855), from which I problematize a certain relationship to animals, I offer a series of etho-ethnological material based on fieldwork conducted in Borneo, among a peculiar scientific community striving to modelize the adaptive logics of exotic animal species experiencing deep ecological changes (mostly due to deforestation and loss of natural habitat). In updating the concept of Umwelt, I argue that the multiplicity of perceptive worlds involved in any ethological investigation forces us to reconsider the simple taxonomic affiliation of living organisms for the benefit of some other interactional (produced, productive) registers of shared life. I thus suggest shifting the focus of ethnography from the detailed depiction of interactions between (pre)constituted entities – humans/animals – to that of the processes of their (humanimal) co-constitution through shared interactions (which confers to any relationality an ontological status). In doing so, I underpin the importance of the informational and communicational processes that immanently give form to life and life to forms. Thus I am not wondering what could be a phenomenology of animals nor what would be an animal phenomenology, but rather what sharing a phenomenologisable reality actually produces in terms of differential relations (including epistemic ones) between living organisms.