1Published posthumously two years after the author's untimely death, this beautiful work bears witness to the intellectual eclecticism that characterizes the work of Patrick Pérez. It reveals his truly 'Americanist' ethnological mindset, an impressive erudition, and, as underlined by M. Albert-Llorca and G. Rozenberg in the preface, a mastery of the art of anthropology topically associated with the author's architectural eye. It constitutes a remarkable work at the crossroads of anthropology, architecture, history of art and the history of techniques.

2Beyond specialists in Americanist ethnology, it will be of interest to a wide academic audience (anthropologists, geographers, historians, archaeologists and architects) but also to various practitioners (especially landscape architects, curators, mediators of cultural heritage, defenders of Amerindian cultures).

3Starting from the “raison panaméricaine” (i.e. Pan-American Indian) postulated by Lévi-Strauss, P. Pérez navigates between his Pueblo fieldwork (among the Hopi of Arizona, where he conducted his doctoral research in the mid-1990s, a field that he had revisited several times) and his Mayan fieldwork among the Lacandon (or Hatx Winik) of southeastern Mexico. Throughout the chapters, he deploys all his qualities as an attentive observer and perceptive interpreter of Amerindian cultures to give us a properly anthropological analysis of their relationship to space (physical but also social). He does so through architecture and landscape.

4The main purpose of the book, by contributing "to enrich our knowledge of the space that humans build and think" (p. 17), is to develop an anthropology of the habitat or dwelling. Dwelling being apprehended as a total social fact, architecture gives here an opening onto the whole culture: its social organization, its political strategies, its economy, its vision of the cosmos, its aesthetics etc.

5For that, the author posits from the start three intuitions which will become the cardinal ideas of the book: 1. space is above all a bodily reality, 2. a pre-eminence of the cultural role of architecture (as operator of symbolic projections) over its functional dimension as human habitat and 3. the very long duration of the symbolic representations and the spatial practices, as revealed in particular by architecture which "is in itself a memory" (p. 21).

6One could be puzzled, in the texts gathered here, by the relative stretch of comparing the Hopi and the Lacandon. Indeed the "pan-American reason" may seem insufficient to establish a basis of comparison between these cultures which have evolved in environments that could not be more contrasted (the deserts of Arizona and the wet jungle of Chiapas), belonging to separate linguistic families and cultural traditions with very distinct trajectories (the Southwestern cultural complex and Mesoamerica respectively) and today absorbed into two nation-states inherited respectively from Anglo and Hispanic colonial traditions. But, however connected through a long American Indian agricultural tradition and overlapping European colonial domination and influences, this is not the essential argument of the comparison. It is precisely in such different contexts that it is relevant to compare the same object, in this case the relationship to space and topology.

7And from this point of view, while providing many arguments in favor of this pan-American reason, the reflections of P. Pérez suggest above all an overcoming (or an extension? ) of the notion of Mesoamerica: in his analyses of Hopi and Lacandon topologies, so many common symbolic logics are identified that the informed reader in Mesoamerican ethnology will readily concede that many traits conventionally reserved for the Mesoamerican area are shared by the cultures of the southwestern United States (which have, moreover, experienced many contacts with Mesoamerica, but also with South America, as recent progress in archaeological knowledge attests).

8Architecture and the relationship to space are not only the bridge between the materials studied throughout the chapters, but, as a discipline, architecture also establishes the intellectual mediation between archaeology, history and anthropology. The approach to the study of modes of "inhabiting the world" proposed by Pérez thus partly overlaps with the proposal for a transdisciplinary synthesis between the “four A’s” (Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture and Art) put forward by Tim Ingold (Lucas, Ingold & Harris, 2007). However, if Pérez sometimes mobilizes the Ingoldian phenomenology of dwelling, he rejects its dissociation between phenomenological experience and symbolic order - a salutary prevention in my opinion.

9The book implements this approach in the first three parts in the analysis of various ethnographic, historical, archaeological, and architectural materials concerning the Hopi and Hatx Winik, progressing from the general order of cosmologies (Part I), to the more specific questions of landscape construction and architecture as a mechanism of identity politics through history (Parts II and III, the chapters of which are based primarily on Hopi materials).

10The long-distance dialogue between Pueblos and Mayas in the chapters sometimes takes circuitous paths, such as the question of the status of Katsinam spirits among the Hopi or that of predation among the Lacandon. However, these examples allow Pérez to bring to light, through successive strokes, the theme of the relationship to space and a certain "Amerindian topology" (p. 94). They allow him to reveal important similarities, on the level of the spatial logics, between Pueblos and Mayas. It is notably the case of this notion of "bodily and topological inversion" that he advances in an analysis inspired by the levi-straussian proposal of a leitmotiv of reversal of space in the Amerindian mythologies, a continuity between inside and outside similar to that of Klein's bottle.

11It is indeed around the shared logic in their myths concerning a lower world (of fertility and the dead) closely linked to the theme of bodily inversion that the parallel between the Hopi and Lacandon is most convincing and stimulating. This correspondence between bodies and spaces is illustrated in particular by the case of these flayed deities, whose interior is turned inside out, just as the inframundum of the non-humans and the dead corresponds to a world turned inside out (more than upside down) with respect to that of the living. The corporal inversion reveals, in the interpretation that P. Pérez makes of it, a common conception of "a topological continuity between the face of the beings and their respective worlds" (ibid.), between the habitat and the appearance. This leads the author to position himself in alignment with Philippe Descola's model of ontologies regarding the identification between humans and non-humans. He thus proposes, in support to this ontological model, that in the sub-continent "the dualistic opposition between physicality and interiority makes sense for at least three cultures spread out over more than three thousand kilometers" (p. 95).

12From the point of view of these debates in the field of environmental anthropology, P. Pérez's approach is not to engage into the confrontation between great theoretical discourses, but rather to always advance the reflection by letting himself be guided by his field data. Even if it means not deciding between the theoretical approaches, or in any case not making his own point of view explicit, which is sometimes regrettable. The second part of the book on the question of landscape and the construction (through architecture) of a landscape-perspective on the environment, is quite revealing in this respect. The history of art and the author's point of view as an architect are mobilized in a very convincing way to show how the landscape of the Grand Canyon was literally constructed from these landscape devices that are the panoramic viewpoints and their architecture, particularly advanced in the case of the buildings constructed by Mary Coulter - which thus constituted the "parkitecture" of the beginning of the twentieth century, a true canon of national park architecture in the United States. In the demonstration made by the author, we understand that the symbolic form, in this case the aesthetic landscape-perspective on the environment, is the inspiration, the pre-existing template, which directs the implementation of this architecture in order to orient the (mainly visual) phenomenological experience of the environment towards this aesthetic landscape perspective. While demonstrating how the framing of the glance, by the corporal placement of the visitors (and the constraint imposed on their movements), from such tower, in front of such skylight framing such photo-shot, or in front of such mirror filtering the luminosity of such fraction of landscape, Pérez shows that there is no phenomenological experience independent of the symbolic representations of the environment. The latter are certainly produced and re-produced through the phenomenological experience in specific practices (of wandering, contemplation, delimitation of the ritual space, artialisation, etc). Yet, at the same time, phenomenological experience is conditioned beforehand by these symbolic representations. Thus indeed landscapes are "already known before being seen" (p. 142). In the stride, the author also delivers a meticulous demonstration of the existence of a "Hopi landscape" from an aesthetic point of view on the environment whose origin is independent of the landscape tradition of the Old World. To our knowledge, this is the only exhaustive demonstration of the existence of a landscape (in the strict sense of landscape aesthetics) in a Native American culture, apart from the many cases of colonization of the imaginary and the adoption of the post-conquest landscape perspective.

13The fourth part, whose title "the detours of the social" hardly announces the subject, seems less well articulated to the rest of the book. However, this does not diminish the value of the two chapters that appear in it: they focus on the processes of acculturation and cognitive processes, respectively among the Lacandon, notably concerning the temporality and historicity of the territory, and among the Hopi, around the oscillation between secrecy and disclosure, a dialectic that is inscribed throughout the ages in the architecture itself of these Pueblo villages.

14Filled with proposals and heuristic intuitions, the book, with its elegant writing, is enriched with a beautiful iconography (including sketches by the author), remarkable notes, often full of side observations and enlightening comments that sometimes advance new intuitions rich in potential. For example, this remark on the symbolic and practical role of Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks in the "making of American identity". This role is explained not only by their location on the great axes of migration to the West but also from the "railroad sociology" of their visitors at the end of the nineteenth century: often young newlywed couples making their "trip of a lifetime" to reach California instituting by their tourist stop these monuments of nature into the "cathedrals of the New World" (note 27 p. 127).

15In conclusion, it is no exaggeration to say that “Habiter le monde” (“Inhabiting the World”) does more than suggest the potential of an obra magna in the making. If the full development of this obra magna could not be achieved due to the early death of Patrick Pérez, the book is nonetheless a demonstration of the productive potential of the contribution of an anthropology of architecture to the field of environmental anthropology. It proposes the comparative study of the articulation between body and space as constitutive of a topology specific to each society. In this way, this collection of essays on the "anthropology of the habitat" suggests a topological anthropology that would constitute a whole new research program. We can only hope for the book to be translated sooner rather than later into English and Spanish.