The Determination of the Subject—in an Antillean Context—through the Appropriation of His Environment

Abstract

There are numerous reflections by different specialists that question the epistemological rupture historically established between nature and culture. In effect, this dualism which might determine two types of societies—traditional and modern—seems not at all to be founded with respect to a new paradigm that would define the relationship between man and nature. Is it a calling into question of the Cartesian, if not Judeo-Christian, foundation that positions the human at the summit of a nature that is subject to him? In other terms, does the anthropos no longer have this (Cartesian) obligation to become master and possessor of nature? Yet would this dialectic which is characteristic of Occidental civilisation be valid in other cultural areas? How then is one to apprehend the prism of the subject and the object? Or how might one do so in societies in which the we of society supplants the I of the individual? Our research aims to determine the subject outside of his social interactions, but to apprehend him in relation to his or her environment. In effect, through the appropriation of the latter: through the invention of the jardin créole ; through the domestication of the human as observer of nature; by making the latter an ally in resisting the conditions of existence—the animism of insulars—Afro-descendents have been able to domesticate an insular nature and thereby emerge as subjects and not as completely de-ontologised individuals.