Naissance d'une théorie éthologique

by Vinciane Despret

A partir d'un exemple - celui des cratéropes, oiseaux qui vivent dans le désert du Néguev - l'auteur montre comment travaillent les éthologues, comment ils récoltent des faits et construisent des théories. Vinciane Despret livre ici une réflexion argumentée et non dénuée d'humour tant sur l'émergence et le devenir des théories éthologiques que sur notre rapport à l'animalité. L'éthologie qui consiste à étudier les animaux dans leur milieu naturel, est actuellement en plein essor et inspire d'autres domaines des sciences sociales, y compris la psychiatrie.

Paperback

Published January 1, 1996

About the author

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science, associate professor, at the University of Liège, Belgium.
First graduated in philosophy, she studied psychology and graduated in 1991. She is most known for having provided a reflexive account on ethologists, observing babblers in the Negev desert and the way they would interpret those birds' complex dance moves.
She is considered to be a foundational thinker in what has now become the field of animal studies. More generally, at the heart of her work lies the question of the relationship between observers and the observed during the conduct of scientific research.
Despret affiliates herself to such critical thinkers in philosophy and anthropology of science as Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour. She undertakes a critical understanding of how science is fabricated, following scientists doing fieldwork and the way they actively create links and specific relationships to their objects of study.

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow that was a journey.
I'm not sure how I ended up reading this -- I have a vague memory of hearing about this charming story of dancing birds and how they could change how we do science.
That story is definitely the seed of this book, but most of it is a very dense investigation of competing theories of ethology. It was a big mental stretch for me -- full disclosure: I had to Google the word "ethology." The writing style is wordy and syntactically a little off: perhaps Academic French does not translate easily. Nevertheless, I found it fascinating, if at times disturbing. The story of the maverick scientist who becomes part of his bird community is seductive, but the story is mired in gender relations and geopolitics in a way that undermines the optimism I originally felt.
Overall, from my completedly unqualified point of view, this is an extremely coherent and well argued piece of scholarship, with occasional flashes of beauty.

[Pavlogreen]

Opera prima de Vinciane Despret en la que ya se anuncia su profunda formación científica y filosófica y su pensamiento contracorriente que abre grietas en el sólido edificio de la biología convencional y sus modelos estereotipados para explicar la conducta de los seres vivos.

La danse du craterope ecaillé narra la experiencia casi etnográfica de la autora en el estado genocida y colonial de oriente próximo de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme y cómo allí confrontó la metodología cosificante de Oxford, que veía a los animales, en concreto a los tordalinos arábigos, pájaro que da título al libro, como autómatas programados, con el hacer científico flexible y generoso de Amotz Zahavi, que, al contrario, hacía de los tordalinos dueños de sus propias excentricidades.

Por el camino se cuelan reflexiones excelentes e imprescindibles para cualquier persona interesada en la filosofía de la biología. Gran libro.