Résumé
This critical analysis of narratives on protected areas stems from situations observed in my field surveys in North and South Vietnam since 2003, as well as from reviewing a wide range of literature. The essay highlights significant differences between local facts about the environment and the scholarly texts about them. When researchers/experts describe actions and discourses on nature outside the Western world, while retaining Western logic and ontology as their sole point of reference, the correspondence between their narratives and the realities of the others they are supposed to describe is often very poor. From an anthropological and epistemological perspective, the essay proposes some tools to describe the reality of others with greater accuracy, richness, and respect, drawing on the mesological approach: the study of the “milieux” in which humans evolve, as defined by the French geographer Augustin Berque. This mesological approach makes it possible to describe and understand the great diversity of ways of acting, speaking, and thinking about the world, and therefore about nature, while focusing on the role of the interpreter, which makes it possible to propose a science that is more respectful of non-scientific ways of thinking.