Economic Development, Anthropomorphism, and the Principle of Reasonable Sufficiency

I will talk about my own work on Amazonian cosmopolitics. Bruno asked me to play t he contraria n in t his meeting. Not knowing exactly to whom or what I should play the contrarian, I decided that I will be the contrarian of all, the enemy of all. This all here will not be taken to mean you all, of course, but rather the all, le tout, the one. In other words, monotheism and its double faced creature: humanism and naturalism. I shall be speaking for pagans. In behalf rather than on behalf of pagans. I have no mandate from them, of course. But the nice thing about paganism or radical polytheism, understood in a certain sense, is that precisely you do not need to abide by any authority or scripture. The pagans I shall be speaking for do not have a scripture, they do not even have a script. They are illiterate. Their technological imagination and their theological imagination were applied to all the objects and all the aims. I will start, before getting into the present Indians, with two anecdotes concerning savages from the new world visiting the great cities of Europe. One dates from the sixteenth century and is to be found in Montaigne. The other dates from yesterday and concerns my visit to Venice

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