“An Anthropology of Life” by Perig Pitrou

The next session of the “Governance of Transitions” seminar organized by the Key Initiative on Public Policies of Transition ( KIPPT) at I-Site in Montpellier, featuring Perig Pitrou, anthropologist and research director at the CNRS, the Maison Française in Oxford, and the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, PSL University.

Overview

How can we coexist with living organisms in increasingly degraded ecological environments? How can we create living conditions that reduce inequalities among human lives and promote a better quality of life? How can we use biotechnology responsibly? How can we reconcile the diverse ways in which human societies relate to the world, while taking into account their attachments to various living environments?

These four closely related questions revolve around a central question for our time: How should we live on planet Earth? At the intersection of the natural and the social, these issues are not limited to fields such as ecology and biology. They lie at the heart of scholarship in a rapidly evolving field: the anthropology of life.

By presenting the main conclusions of the book *What Humans Do with Life*, this presentation will offer a conceptual map of the research informing thinking in this field. The second part will offer an anthropological interpretation of James Cameron’s *Avatar* saga, showing how these films address issues similar to those studied by anthropologists.