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A researcher at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), I trained in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

I reflect on the responsibilities of social anthropology in a post-colonial world. I study the transformation of contemporary societies by zoonoses (diseases transmissible across borders between species).

I work with museums to display the effects of microbes on human organisms.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl published works on German and French philosophers (particularly Auguste Comte) and on “primitive mentality.” He occupied an intermediate position between Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, between the analysis of collective representations and the synthesis of perceptions of living beings, through his concept of participation. This concept captures a mode of causality that introduces the supernatural into nature at the occasion of ordinary accidents. I have showed that this concept addressed the problems posed by preparing for unpredictible events after the Dreyfus Affair in France.

Philippe Descola has renewed Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of the relationship between humans and non-humans by drawing on the works of Bruno Latour on the politics of nature and Luc Boltanski on the justification of social conduct. He has relied on the reflection of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to demonstrate that Amazonian ontologies radically overturn the principles of European ontologies. His fourfold division of ontologies—animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism—provides a framework for understanding the conflicts and the alliances that arise from the global ecological crisis.

As the former director of the research department at the Musée du Quai Branly between 2014 and 2018, I learned to work with curators and artists to bring public issues to a wider audience than just the readership of my publications. While modern anthropology has always been accessible to the public, microbiology offers new opportunities to present images of the relationships between humans, other animal species, plant species, and the diversity of the microbial world. These relationships between living beings must be displayed because they are subject to transformations that affect them and sometimes make them ill. Working with museums allows us to consider ways to remediate these diseases.

Since the 1970s, diseases transmitted by other animal species have wreaked havoc on the human population: Ebola and HIV/AIDS, which originated in non-human primates; mad cow disease; avian and swine flu; bat coronaviruses (SARS and COVID-19)… I work with biologists who monitor mutations in these viruses to prevent them from causing pandemics. I hypothesize that they adopt the perspective of animals to understand how these viruses enter human ecosystems. From this, I draw theoretical implications for rethinking biopolitics in the Anthropocene and building new forms of justice for healthier habitats.

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Paul Rabinow introduced into American cultural anthropology Michel Foucault’s work on the genealogy of social norms and the emergence of biopolitics. He then applied this method to the new forms of biotechnologies that appeared in California in the 1980s and spread to the rest of the world through various political mechanisms. In the 2000s, he examined the norms of biosecurity governing the dissemination of biotechnologies, particularly the injunction to prepare for future disasters.