ABSTRACT
Nowadays everyone is aware that a text, of whatever kind, may be read independently of its authors intentions. The author’s personality, the motives which shaped the work, the circumstances in which it was written, all these biographical traces count for very little in the way it will be received. Each reader will take it as they wish, reading and interpreting it according to their temperament, mood and prejudices. It is, therefore, after much hesitation that I have yielded to the editors’ requests to provide a written version of the oral paper I gave on my book Les lances du crépuscule (Descola 1994), which was then nearing completion. I finally took this decision, not out of authorial conceit, but from an obscure wish to justify to my peers the project of writing an anthropological book ‘for the general public’. The unease I felt about this undertaking in fact reveals a more general problem in the practice of anthropology: how can one explain anthropologists’ reluctance to reach an audience wider than just the specialists of the discipline, when their scientific approach is based on an experience in principle open to everyone, and when their works are for the most part written in ordinary language?
