Abstract
In recent anthropological debates, it is accepted—sometimes rather hastily—that ‘naturalism’ represents the prevalent ontology within Western modernity. The ethnography of the contemporary world does not necessarily require us to contest this statement in a fundamental way; but it does compel us to put into perspective the scope of such a claim. This is particularly true if we consider what is taking place in the domain of humanoid robotics and the way in which the actors in this field explicitly seek to challenge certain ontological presuppositions that supposedly characterise our era. After briefly introducing the stakes of such a debate, I will demonstrate why an unprecedented experiment with a humanoid robot in the collections at the Musée du Quai Branly offers the opportunity of an ethnographic study to reflect upon the role that ontological presuppositions play in the way in which the visitors comprehend the robot and, more broadly, their environment.
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- 1.
The humanoid robot in question (Berenson) is the result of a collaborative enterprise between Denis Vidal (IRD) and robotics engineers (Philippe Gaussier, Ali Karaouzene, Pierre Delarboulas) as part of a research project carried out in collaboration with the URMIS (Paris Diderot), the ETIS (Université de Cergy—Pontoise) and the research department at the Musée du Quai Branly. This research program is financed by the Labex Patrima. P. Debarloubas is also in reception of a CIFRE grant, in cooperation with the company Partnering Robotics. It is thanks to Anne-Christine Taylor and the mediation department at the Musée du Quai Branly that the robot could be presented in the Museum’s collections, as part of ‘digital week’ from the 14th to the 22nd April 2012.
- 2.
Perhaps the most sustained debates on this subject are those generated by the works of Edward Sapir and B. L. Whorf, which are supposed to embody—somewhat arbitrarily—a sort of paradigm of cultural relativism.
- 3.
It must obviously be noted that attributing, for example, a form of interiority to a machine is not the same as the much more speculative position of, when pushing materialism to its extreme, thinking that the machine might actually have one.
- 4.
It is, incidentally, this temporary incapacity to accurately grasp such a limit that has conversely provoked the hold historically exerted by certain well-known automatons (like Vaucanson’s chess player, for example).
- 5.
Here we are able to make use of the many hours of video that we collected. The interested reader can see a brief sample by watching the short film about it that we made with Geoffrey Becker: http://vimeo.com/47930510, the password is: berenson2012.
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Vidal, D., Gaussier, P. (2019). Visitor or Artefact! An Experiment with a Humanoid Robot at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. In: Laumond, JP., Danblon, E., Pieters, C. (eds) Wording Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 130. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17974-8_9
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