Poetry and 'Ecoanthropology'. Reseach Seminar with Philippe Beck

Inspired by an article published in December 2019 relating how polar bears were dangerously approaching the village of Ryrkaïpii, on the edge of the Arctic banks of the Choucotka River at the north-eastern tip of Russia, the one hundred poems that form Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) invite readers to follow both non-human and human animals in their various crossings. Joseph Kabris, a key character in the ethnographers' libraries, is one of the figures to which the poems keep returning. His full-body tattoos not only testify to his encounter with the societies of the Pacific Ocean after his shipwreck in 1795, but it also opens up the possibility of new texts and writings, and to the amplification of poetry's own gestures and formal developments.
An examination of the relationship between poetry and modern anthropology suggests that poetry is not simply an object, or a possible object, of cultural anthropology but that it is perhaps its inner object insofar as poetry is at work in the didactics of anthropology. One might even say that poetry has taken the place of anthropology, while anthropology has had to clarify its relationship with poetry. This reassessment of the relationship between poetry and anthropology is all the more necessary since ‘[t]he modern paradox is a need for “ecological connection”‘. In a context in which we have been increasingly separated from Nature', the destruction of that from which we have been cut off, paradoxically, affects us more than ever. If poetry appears inseparable from ecology, the ‘ecological connection' we can hope to create is not a kind of ‘imitative harmony', but requires the ‘necessary re-inscription of “natural elements” in the modalities of form itself.' (Documentaires, Le Bruit du temps, forthcoming in 2024). This is what Ryrkaïpii exemplifies.
Philippe Beck is a poet and a writer. His poetry and poetics explore the frontiers of literature and other fields of enquiry: history, philosophy, anthropology, musicology, the visual and sculptural arts…, etc. The last doctoral student of Jacques Derrida (under the supervision of whom he wrote a thesis on ‘History and Imagination'), he teaches philosophy at the University of Nantes.