Abstract
This interview focuses on the proposal for an "anthropology of life" developed by Perig Pitrou. The conversation traces the origins of this framework to fieldwork with the Mixe of Mexico, where rituals involving the metaperson "He Who Makes Being Alive" revealed a crucial distinction between "the living" (living beings) and "life" (the causes that make them alive). This separation underpins a comparative model examining how societies socialize two fundamental dimensions: the power to generate life and the fragility of individual existences. Methodologically, the approach draws on the anthropology of techniques, employing the concept of "agentive configurations" to analyze how humans coordinate with non-human agents and material processes—what the researcher terms technique du vivant. This perspective explicitly contrasts with approaches like Tim Ingold's, emphasizing the heterogeneous composition of technical acts over morphogenetic continuity. The framework further seeks to bridge subfields often kept separate: the ethnology of non-Western societies, Science and Technology Studies, and the anthropology of biopolitics and ordinary life associated with Veena Das and Didier Fassin. By defining life as an "epistemic space" rather than a biological given, the project offers tools for interrogating contemporary technoscientific developments—from synthetic biology to the unforeseen "aftermaths" of biotechnology—while maintaining a universal comparative ambition rooted in ethnographic observation.
An interview with Perig Pitrou, CNRS, Collège de France, EHESS, by Tomás de Oliveria, Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri as part of the Transatlantic Forum.
Author's Department/Program
Anthropology
Document Type
Interview Transcript
Publication Date
3-18-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI link
https://doi.org/10.7936/7g1v-s504
Author ORCID
Perig Pitrou, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3609-012X
Tomas de Oliveira, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8561-7354
Maddalena Canna, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7506-5875
Recommended Citation
Pitrou, Perig; de Oliveira, Tomas; and Canna, Maddalena, "The Anthropology of Life: An Interview with Perig Pitrou" (2026). Transatlantic Forum. 1.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/7g1v-s504