A peculiar timidity, however, takes hold of anthropology when the moment comes to extend this methodological skepticism to our own cosmology, either because it is thought implicitly that it is shared by all and that humans everywhere can distinguish between a matter of nature and a matter of society, or because it is believed that the dissociation between these two orders of phenomena is a scientific tool as transhistorical as the periodic table of the elements. But this is wrong on both counts: only in the last third of the nineteenth century did the dualism of nature and culture take shape in Europe as an epistemological device allowing a simultaneous discrimination between distinct orders of phenomena and distinct means of knowing about them. Admittedly, the idea of nature took its first faltering steps in ancient Greece and formed the pivot around which the scientific revolution unfolded during the seventeenth century. This revolution legitimized the idea of a mechanical nature, where the behavior of each element can be accounted for by laws within a totality understood as the sum of the parts and interactions of these elements. But opposite this nature, at once an autonomous ontological32 domain, a field of inquiry and of scientific experimentation, an object inviting practical exploitation and amelioration, there was not yet a collective counterpart. For singular communities, differentiated by customs, language, and relations-what we now term "cultures" -to emerge as scientific objects susceptible of being opposed to the field of natural regularities, it was necessary to wait until the end of the nineteenth century and the intense debates that, particularly in Germany with philosophers like Heinrich Rickert, lead to the distinction between the methods and objects of the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture. There is therefore nothing universal about this contrast. Nor is there either anything properly demonstrable about it. Distinguishing among the objects of the world those that are a matter of human intentionality and those that stem from the universal laws of matter and of life is an ontological operation, a hypothesis and a choice with regard to the relations that beings maintain with one another as a result of the qualities which are ascribed to them. Neither physics, nor chemistry, nor biology can provide proof of this, and it is furthermore extremely rare that the practitioner of these sciences, in their everyday use, actually refer to the abstraction that is nature as their domain of investigation. (I explore these issues in Chapter 3 of my book, Beyond Nature and Culture.)
Anthropology, no doubt because it is in great part the daughter of philosophy, has thus been averse to questioning the universality of the Modern cosmology. It is true that it has not gone so far as to claim that all cosmologies are similar to ours-this would not be very plausible. Simply, we see others, the non-moderns, through the distorting lens that structures our own cosmology, and thus as so many singular expressions of culture in contrast with a unique and universal nature. In other words, we do not envision non-Western civior even pre-modern Western ones, as complete systems of conceptualization of the world alternative to our own, but as more or less exotic ways of accounting for the state of a world that our own system of conceptualization has established (this idea brilliantly developed by Roy Wagner in The Invention of Culture). Making modern dualism the template for all the states of the world has thus lead anthropology to a particular form of academic eurocentrism, which consists in believing not that the realities that humans objectivize are everywhere identical, but that our own manner of objectivizing is universally shared.

(Philippe Descola "The Ecology of Others")