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The Politics of Ontology

by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen

PUBLISHED ON

January 13, 2014

CITE AS

Holbraad, Martin and Pedersen, Morten Axel. "The Politics of Ontology." Fieldsights - Theorizing the

Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/461-

the-politics-of-ontology

Much energy has been devoted over the last decade to the so-called ontological

turn in the social sciences, and in anthropology in particular. A number of

statements, critiques, and discussions of this position are now available (e.g.,

Viveiros de Castro 2002; Henare et al. 2007; Jensen and Rödje 2010; Pedersen

2011; Holbraad 2012; Ishii 2012; Candea and Alcayna-Stevens 2012; Blaser

2013; Paleček and Risjord 2013; Scott 2013), and its implications for

anthropological research are being concertedly explored and passionately

debated (e.g., Venkatesan et al. 2009; Alberti et al. 2011; Viveiros de Castro

2011; Laidlaw 2012; Ramos 2012; Pedersen 2012; Strathern 2012). The

following set of position papers represent contributions to a well-attended

roundtable discussion held at the 2013 annual meeting of the American

Anthropological in Chicago. The purpose of the roundtable was to explore the

theoretical positions and methodological projects pursued under the banner of

ontology, focusing particularly on the political implications of the “turn,”

including its potential pitfalls.

The participants were invited to address such questions as, Why have social

scientists turned to the concept of ontology in the ways that they have? Why is

the move as controversial as it is proving itself to be, at least among

anthropologists? What explicit and implicit political projects does the turn to

ontology (as well as various critiques of it) evince? Does the ontological turn

open up new forms of cultural critique and progressive politics, or does it

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represent a “closet-culturalist” and potentially dangerous rehearsal of past

essentialisms? What, in short, does the ethnographic commitment to ontology

“do”—for our engagements and collaborations with the people with whom we

work, and for anthropology’s role within the global intellectual and political

landscape at large?

To instigate the discussion, the session’s organizers, Martin Holbraad and

Morten Axel Pedersen, joined Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who also contributed

to organizing and chairing the session, to write a position paper addressing

these questions. The paper was distributed to the participants in advance (and

in hard copy to members of the audience on the day of the discussion) as a

concise and synthetic statement of the three authors’ position on the politics of

the ontological turn. Inevitably, as is the way of jointly authored papers (and

making full virtue of the necessary brevity of the genre), the position is “more

than one and less than many.” Remaining faithful to the spirit of a roundtable

discussion, the participants’ subsequent statements are reproduced here more

or less as they were presented in Chicago, with the addition of similarly brief

statements by Marisol de la Cadena, Matei Candea, and Annemarie Mol, who

were unable to participate. Some participants chose to respond directly to the

organizers’ position paper, while others refer to it only obliquely or not at all. In

what follows, the statements appear in the order in which they were presented

in Chicago, with the three further contributions added at the end, in

alphabetical order.

The table of contents for the statements appears below.

References

Alberti, Benjamin, Severin Fowles, Martin Holbraad, Yvonne Marshall, and

Christopher Witmore. 2011. “‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Anthropology,

and Ontological Difference.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 6: 896–912.

Blaser, Mario. 2013. “Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of

Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology.” Current

Anthropology 54, no. 5: 547–68.

Candea, Matei, and Lys Alcayna-Stevens. 2012. “Internal Others: Ethnographies of

Naturalism.” Cambridge Anthropology 30, no. 2: 36–47.

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Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 2007. Thinking Through Things:

Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban

Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ishii, Miho. 2012. “Acting with Things: Self-Poiesis, Actuality, and Contingency in the

Formation of Divine Worlds.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2:

371–88.

Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Kjetil Rödje, eds. 2009. Deleuzian Intersections in Science,

Technology and Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. “Ontologically Challenged.” Anthropology of This Century, no.

4.

Paleček, Martin, and Mark Risjord. 2013. “Relativism and the Ontological Turn within

Anthropology.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43(1): 3-23.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in

Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. “Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent

Reviews of the ‘Ontological Turn.’” Anthropology of This Century, no. 5.

Ramos, Alcida R. 2012. “The Politics of Perspectivism.” Annual Review of

Anthropology41:481–94.

Scott, Michael W. 2013. “The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?).” Journal

of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4: 859–72.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2012. “A Comment on ‘the Ontological Turn’ in Japanese

Anthropology.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 402–5.

Venkatesan, Soumhya, Michael Carrithers, Karen Sykes, Matei Candea, and Martin

Holbraad. 2010. “Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at

the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University

of Manchester.”Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2: 152–200.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs,

Paradoxes, and Other Truths.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 128–45.

Image credit: "Indra's Net," www.aethericnumerics.com/.

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Posts in This Series

The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions p. 5

by Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean p. 12

by Eduardo Kohn

Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance p. 15

by Peter Skafish

Geontologies of the Otherwise p. 19

by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact p. 22

by Ghassan Hage

The Political Ontology of Doing Difference . . . and Sameness p. 25

by Mario Blaser

Practical Ontologies p. 28

by Casper Bruun Jensen

Equal Time for Entities p. 32

by Michael W. Scott

Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison as Ontology p. 35

by Helen Verran

Onto-Methodology p. 38

by Tony Crook

Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics of Materiality p. 41

by Benjamin Alberti

The Ontology of the Political Turn p. 45

by Matei Candea

The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess

Through Ontological Openings p. 49

by Marisol de la Cadena

Other Words: Stories from the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine p. 53

by Annemarie Mol

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The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological

Positions

by Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen and Eduardo Viveiros de

Castro

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

At first blush, “ontology” and “politics” make strange bedfellows. Ontology

evokes essence, while politics, as modern, democratic, multiculturalist citizens

tend to understand it, is about debunking essences and affirming in their stead

the world-making capacities of human collectives. Yet this notion of a social

construction of reality itself instantiates a particular ontology, and a powerful

one at that—and here we also mean politically powerful. Still, as anthropologists

we are attuned to the “powers of the weak”—to the many complex connections,

some of them crucially negative, between power differences (politics) and the

powers of difference (ontology).

For purposes of discussion, then, we begin with a broad distinction between

three different manners in which ontology and politics are correlated in the

social sciences and cognate disciplines, each associated with particular

methodological prescriptions, analytical injunctions, and moral visions: (1) the

traditional philosophical concept of ontology, in which “politics” takes the

implicit form of an injunction to discover and disseminate a single absolute

truth about how things are; (2) the sociological critique of this and other

“essentialisms,” which, in skeptically debunking all ontological projects to reveal

their insidiously political nature, ends up affirming the critical politics of

debunking as its own version of how things should be; and (3) the

anthropological concept of ontology as the multiplicity of forms of existence

enacted in concrete practices, where politics becomes the non-skeptical

elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could be—what

Elizabeth Povinelli (2012b), as we understand her, calls “the otherwise.”

How might “the otherwise” be rendered manifest ethnographically? Here, we

need to remind ourselves that ethnographic descriptions, like all cultural

translations, necessarily involve an element of transformation or even

disfiguration. A given anthropological analysis, that is, amounts to a “controlled

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equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2004) that, far from transparently mapping

one discrete social order or cultural whole onto another, depends on more or

less deliberate and reflexive “productive misunderstandings” (Tsing 2005) to

perform its translations and comparisons, not just between different contexts,

realms, and scales, but also within them. This, if anything, is what distinguishes

the ontological turn from other methodological and theoretical orientations: not

the dubious assumption that it enables one to take people and things “more

seriously” than others are able or willing to,[1] but the ambition, and ideally the

ability, to pass through what we study, rather as when an artist elicits a new

form from the affordances her material allows her to set free, releasing shapes

and forces that offer access to what may be called the dark side of things.

Accordingly, while the ontological turn in anthropology has made the study of

ethnographic difference or “alterity” one of its trademarks, it is really less

interested in differences between things than within them: the politics of

ontology is the question of how persons and things could alter from themselves

(Holbraad and Pedersen 2009; Pedersen 2012b). Ontology, as far as

anthropology in our understanding is concerned, is the comparative,

ethnographically-grounded transcendental deduction of Being (the oxymoron is

deliberate) as that which differs from itself (ditto)—being-as-other as immanent

to being-as-such. The anthropology of ontology is anthropology as ontology; not

the comparison of ontologies, but comparison as ontology.

This, in our understanding, is what the ontological turn is all about: it is a

technology of description (Pedersen 2012a) designed in the optimist (non-

skeptical) hope of making the otherwise visible by experimenting with the

conceptual affordances (Holbraad, forthcoming) present in a given body of

ethnographic materials. We stress that such material can be drawn from

anywhere, anytime, and anyone; there is no limit to what practices, discourses,

and artifacts are amenable to ontological analysis. Indeed, articulating “what

could be” in this way implies a peculiarly non- or anti-normative stance, which

has profoundly political implications in several senses.

For a start, to subjunctively present alternatives to declarations about what “is”

or imperatives about what “should be” is itself a political act—a radical one, to

the degree that it breaks free of the glib relativism of merely reporting on

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alternative possibilities (“worldviews,” etc.), and proceeds boldly to lend the

“otherwise” full ontological weight so as to render it viable as a real alternative.

For example, the relativist reports that in such-and-such an ethnographic

context time is “cyclical,” with “the past ever returning to become the present.”

It is an evocative idea, to be sure. But strictly speaking, it makes no sense.

To be “past” is precisely not “to return to the present,” so a past that does so is

properly speaking not a past at all (in the same sense that a married bachelor is

not a bachelor). By contrast, like a kind of “relativist-turbo,” the ontologically-

inclined anthropologist takes this form of e(qui)vocation as a starting-point for

an ethnographically-controlled experiment with the concept of time itself,

reconceptualizing “past,” “present,” “being,” etc., in ways that make “cyclical

time” a real form of existence. In this subjunctive, “could be” experiment, the

emphasis is as much on “be” as on “could”: “Imagine a cyclical time!” marvels

the relativist; “Yes, and here is what it could be!” replies the ontological

anthropologist.

Furthermore, when such “ontographic” (Holbraad 2012) experimentations are

precipitated by ethnographic exposures to people whose own lives are, in one

way or other, pitted against the reigning hegemonic orders (state, empire, and

market, in their ever-volatile and violent comingling), then the politics of

ontology resonates at its core with the politics of the peoples who occasion it. In

such a case, the politics of ontologically-inclined anthropological analysis is not

merely logically contingent upon, but internally constituted by and morally

imbricated with, the political dynamics in which the people anthropologists

study are embroiled, including the political stances those people might

themselves take, not least on the question of what politics itself “could be.”

Indeed, one of the most oft-quoted (and criticized) mottoes of the ontological

turn in anthropology is the notorious, “Anthropology is the science of the

ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples,” and its corollary, to wit,

that the discipline’s mission is to promote the “permanent decolonization of

thought” (Viveiros de Castro 2009; for an earlier version of the argument, see

Viveiros de Castro 2013 [2002]). In this connection, the first (unproductive)

misunderstanding that should be dispelled is the idea that this is equivalent to

fighting for indigenous peoples’ rights in the face of the world powers. One does

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not need much anthropology to join the struggle against the political

domination and economic exploitation of indigenous peoples across the world.

It should be enough to be a tolerably informed and reasonably decent person.

Conversely, no amount of anthropological relativism and old-hand professional

skepticism can serve as an excuse fornot joining that struggle.

Second, the idea of an ontological self-determination of peoples should not be

confused with supporting ethnic essentialization, Blut und

Boden primordialism, and other forms of sociocultural realism. It means giving

the ontological back to “the people,” not the people back to “the ontological.”

The politics of ontology as self-determination of the other is the ontology of

politics as decolonization of all thought in the face of other thought—to think of

thought itself as “always-already” in relation to the thought of others.

Third, the idea of the self-determination of the other means that a fundamental

principle of anthropologists’ epistemological ethics should be, always leave a

way out for the people you are describing. Do not explain too much, do not try

to actualize the possibilities immanent to others’ thought, but endeavor to

sustain them as possible indefinitely (this is what “permanent” means in the

phrase, “permanent decolonization of thought”), neither dismissing them as the

fantasies of others, nor by fantasizing that they may gain the same reality for

oneself. They will not. Not “as such,” at least; only as-other. The self-

determination of the other is the other-determination of the self.

This brings us to a final point regarding the political promise held by

ontologically-oriented approaches in anthropology and cognate disciplines;

namely, that this promise can be conceived, not just in relation to the degree to

which such approaches are in affinity with (or even actively promote) particular

political objectives, or with the abiding need for a critique of the state and the

turns of thought that underpin it, but also in relation to their capacity to enact a

form of politics that is entailed in their very operation. Conceived of in this

manner, the ontological turn is not so much a means to externally-defined

political ends, but a political end in its own right. Recapitulating, to some

extent, standing debates about the political efficacies of intellectual life (e.g. th,e

ambivalent stance of Marxist intelligentsias to Communist Parties’ calls to

political militancy in the 20th century—Adorno, Sartre, Magritte, etc.), the

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question is whether ontologically-oriented analyses render political the very

form of thinking that they involve, such that “being political” becomes an

immanent property of the mode of anthropological thought itself. If so, then the

politics of ontography resides not only in the ways in which it may help promote

certain futures, but also in the way that it “figurates” the future (Krøijer

forthcoming) in its very enactment.

The major premise of such an argument might border on a cogito-like

apodeicticity (sensu Husserl): to think is to differ. Here, a thought that makes

no difference to itself is not a thought: thoughts take the form of motions from

one “position” to another, so if no such movement takes place then no thought

has taken place either. Note that this is not an ontological credo (e.g., compare

with Levi Bryant’s recent [2011] “ontic principle,” which is pretty similar, but

cast in the philosophical key of metaphysical claim-making). Rather, it is offered

as a statement of the logical form of thinking—a phenomenology in Simon

Critchley’s (2012, 55) sense that is, moreover, apodeictic insofar as it

instantiates itself in its own utterance. The minor premise, then, would be the

(more moot) idea that to differ is itself a political act. This would require us to

accept that such non-controversially “political” notions as power, domination,

or authority are relative stances towards the possibility of difference and its

control. To put it very directly (crudely, to be sure), domination is a matter of

holding the capacity to differ under control—to place limits upon alterity and

therefore, ipso facto (viz., by internal implication from the to-think-is-to-differ

premise above) upon thought also.

If these two premises are accepted, then a certain kind of politics becomes

immanent to the ontological turn. For if it is correct to say that the ontological

turn “turns,” precisely, on transmuting ethnographic exposures recursively into

forms of conceptual creativity and experimentation, then ontologically-inflected

anthropology is abidingly oriented towards the production of difference, or

“alterity,” as such. Regardless (at this level of analysis) of the political goals to

which it may lend itself, anthropology is ontologically politicalinasmuch as its

operation presupposes, and is an attempt experimentally to “do,” difference as

such. This is an anthropology that is constitutively anti-authoritarian, making it

its business to generate alternative vantages from which established forms of

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thinking are put under relentless pressure by alterity itself, and perhaps

changed. One could even call this intellectual endeavor revolutionary, if by that

we mean a revolution that is “permanent” in the sense we proposed above: the

politics of indefinitely sustaining the possible, the “could be.”

Notes

[1] Although one could somewhat uncontroversially argue that to take other

ontologies seriously is precisely to draw the political implications of how things

could be for “us,” given how things are for those “others” who take these other

ontologies seriously as a matter of fact.

References

Alberti, Benjamin, and Yvonne Marshall. 2009. “Animating Archaeology: Local

Theories and Conceptually Open-Ended Methodologies.” Cambridge

Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3: 344–56.

Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities

Press.

Candea, Matei. “‘Our division of the universe’: Making a Space for the Non-Political in

the Anthropology of Politics.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 3: 309–34.

Critchley, Simon. 2012. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of

Resistance. London: Verso.

Crook, Tony. 2007. Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New

Guinea: Exchanging Skin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 2012. “Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political

Imaginary Today.” Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 3: 285–308.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban

Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Holbraad, Martin. 2013. “Revolución o muerte: Self-Sacrifice and the Ontology of

Cuban Revolution.” Ethnos.

Holbraad, Martin. Forthcoming. “Can the Thing Speak? Anthropology, Pragmatology,

and the Conceptual Affordances of Things.” Under review for Current

Anthropology.

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Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Planet M : The Intense

Abstraction of Marilyn Strathern.” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 4: 371–94.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Thinks. Toward an Anthropology Beyond the

Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krøijer, Stine. Forthcoming. Figurations of the Future: Forms and Temporality of Left

Radical Politics in Northern Europe. Oxford: Berghahn.

Mol, Annemarie. 2003. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012a. “Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent

Reviews of the ‘Ontological Turn.’” Anthropology of This Century, 5.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012b. “The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For

the Motion.” Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 59–65.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. A. 2012a. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and

Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. A. 2012b. “The Will to be Otherwise / The Effort of

Endurance.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3: 453–57.

Scott, Michael W. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a

Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham N.C.: Carolina

Academic Press.

Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press.

Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. “And.” Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of

Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of

Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 3–22.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Métaphysiques cannibales. Paris: Presses

Universitaires de France.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2013. “The Relative Native.” Translated by Julia Sauma

and Martin Holbraad. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3: 473–502.

First published in 2002.

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What an Ontological Anthropology Might

Mean

by Eduardo Kohn

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Ontological anthropology seeks to open us to other kinds of realities beyond us.

What are the stakes? Doing anthropology ontologically addresses this political

question by reconfiguring both what the ends of such a practice might be as well

as the means by which we could achieve them.

All good anthropology has always been ontological in that it opens us to other

kinds of realities. And it has also always been political. We undertake such an

exploration for a reason—it is part of a critical ethical practice. But the kind of

reality that anthropology has been so good at exploring has been restricted to

one—that which is socially constructed. This, of course, is a real real, and we can

tap its transformative potential. The problem is that it is a kind of reality that

can make us blind to other kinds of realities and it is a kind of reality that, on

this planet at least, is distinctively human. What is more, the political problems

we face today in the Anthropocene can no longer be understood only in human

terms. This ontological fact demands another kind of ethical practice.

These observations put me somewhat at odds with the three takes on ontology

laid out in the position paper by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro.

These are: (1) ontology as the search for essential truth—how things

are (characterized as bad); (2) anthropology as the critique of all such possible

essences—how things should be (also bad, because it relies on an unexamined

ontology—social construction); and (3) ontological anthropology as the

exploration and potential realization of other reals—how things could be,

otherwise(good).

Note that Ontology1 is a lot like Nature and Ontology2 a lot like Culture. Now,

I’ll be bad: What is the Ontology1 of Ontology2? What is the Nature of Culture?

I think we can and need to be quite formally precise about what this is: Culture

is that contingent system, wherever it is found (or wherever we project it), in

which relata are co-produced by virtue of their relationships to an emergent

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system of other such relata. But what is the Nature of Nature? This is much

more complicated. My concern is that when we discard this monolithic Nature,

we actually, in this rejection, stabilize it. Nature for me would include all sorts of

not-necessarily human dynamics and entities that are quite difficult to

essentialize—like the reality beyond humans of generals and constitutive

absences; the generative logics of form; nonhuman modes of thought, which

involve relational logics that do not work like culture or language; nonhuman

kinds of value, telos, and selves; souls, and even spirits. These can, if we let

them, emerge through ethnographic—or, following Holbraad et al.—

“ontographic” engagement. I would say that they are real (Ontology1) but this is

suggested to me by the ways their properties have come to work their ways

through me in ways that remake me.

I take Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2009) call for the “permanent

decolonization of thought” seriously, but what colonizes our thinking is

language, or more specifically a form of thinking that is (on this planet) specific

to humans. This is a mode of thinking that involves, technically speaking,

symbolic reference, which is what produces things like social construction as

well as the conceptual difficulty we have in relating to and harnessing what lies

beyond social construction.

The problem is that we cannot do this sort of decolonization by just thinking

about it, or thinking with other humans—the “Alters”—about it, because this

only recolonizes our thinking by a human way of thinking. (I’m not arguing for a

turn to phenomenology or panpsychism, but I do worry that we are thinking too

much from within human thought.)

Let me illustrate. My recent book (Kohn 2013) is an ethnographic/ontographic

exploration of how certain humans, the Amazonian Runa, relate to the beings—

animals, ghosts, and spirits—of a tropical forest. This book is called, How

Forests Think (Ontology1, perhaps), not How the Runa Think Forests

Think (Ontology2). In this book I am not just telling you how it is that forests

think (bad Ontology1). Rather, I’m attempting a kind engagement with Runa

thinking with thinking forests such that this sort of sylvan thinking (which is no

longer human, and therefore not just Runa or mine) can think itself through

us—making us over in ways that could make us otherwise (Ontology3).

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In finding ways to allow thinking forests to think themselves through us, we

cannot just walk away from Ontology1—how things are—because Ontology2

(social construction) is not just a western ontology, but a human one. The point

is that we have to be able to say howthis is (Ontology1), so that in recognizing its

limits we might open ourselves to that which lies beyond it and us (toward

something much stranger than what we take monolithic Nature to be). Our

human way of being is permanently being opened to that which lies beyond it.

This is an ontological fact that, if recognized, can allow us to tap these other

kinds of reals in order to develop another kind of ethical practice in the

Anthropocene, one that could include, in some way or another, those many

other kinds of beings that lie beyond us and with whom we make our lives.

References

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the

Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Métaphysiques cannibales: Lignes d'anthropologie

post-structurale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

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Anthropological Metaphysics /

Philosophical Resistance

by Peter Skafish

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

One of the key political stakes of the ontological turn lies less in concrete, actual

politics than in a certain at once philosophical and anthropological politics—let’s

call it, remembering the Valeryian sense of metaphysics as a fantastic form of

thought emphasized by Viveiros de Castro, a metaphysical politics—that could

be said to involve what Derrida once called “philosophical resistance,” a

resistance through intellectual means to metaphysical structures themselves.

Such resistance today takes place along three fronts, against what can be

dubbed three different conceptualities: (1) the baseline anthropological

metaphysics of the anthropologists; (2) the metaphysics—because, yes, that’s

what it is—of modernity or the moderns (because, yes, the moderns exist and

can be identified); and (3), finally, although we have no time to discuss it, the

new metaphysics articulated by what are nonetheless some very old-school

metaphysicians, by which I mean the metaphysics of speculative realism and

allied currents in English and French philosophy. But this metaphysical politics

also has an active, constructive side whose import lies in its “superior

comparativism” and the transformations it can effect in the core of the

metaphysical bases of the human sciences. I will make this last point apropos

the work of Latour, Viveiros de Castro, and Descola, all of whom I take up here

both because we in fact have well-developed ontologies and metaphysics within

anthropology and to emphasize that discussion of these should be part of a

conversation like ours.

I say that we have to resist a certain baseline anthropological metaphysics

because one of the signal contributions of a certain ontological turn in

anthropology—one not necessarily reducible or identical to the current of

thought usually associated with the term—is that the old anthropological project

of a comparative and critical specification of the modern (and its various

cognates: liberalism, the natural sciences, technology, capitalism) can no longer,

following Viveiros de Castro's Métaphysiques Cannibales and the entire

16

philosophical side of the Latourian corpus culminating in An Inquiry Into

Modes of Existence, be segregated from the actual practice of metaphysics (an

approach for which “ontology” is not exactly be the right word). In other words,

like it or not, the anthropologists are becoming philosophers, and some of the

only ones worth listening to. But if the new concepts they are laying out are not

only to be understood but further deployed, very few people besides the

anthropologists are going to be able to do it, which requires dispensing once and

for all with the tacit metaphysics of anthropology, that poorly mixed, difficult-

to-swallow cocktail of the phenomenological Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,

Foucault, and a little Marx, according to which everything human is constituted,

in essence, from some mix of Zuhandenheit, lived experience,

perceptual/cognitive forms, historical conditions, and that favorite metaphysical

master concept of anthropology: practice. Unless that metaphysics is smoked

out and exposed for what it is, the new, explicitly metaphysical metaphysics of

anthropology—the other or alter-metaphysics of Viveiros de Castro and the

empirical metaphysics of Latour, both quite aware that they are indeed

metaphysics and of the distribution of the real they propose—will not be heard.

What exactly does the new, avowedly metaphysical metaphysics of the

anthropologists offer a philosophical politics? Three things, each of which is an

aspect of its active, constructive, transformative side. The binding, first of all, of

metaphysical ontology to a comparative, pluralist specification of the modern.

Among the many remarkable things about Latour’s An Inquiry Into the Modes

of Existence is that it lays out a series of metaphysical proposals—about

transcendence, beings, additions to their essences made to them by the various

modes of existence, and transformation—without necessarily universalizing

them, and instead subordinating them to a question about who and what the

moderns are. What this link between comparison and metaphysics does is

overcome the entire philosophical tendency to presume that ontology can be

undertaken without an account of how it relates to peoples and traditions of

thought external or marginal to modernity and it seeks instead to make ontology

a project of specifying the modern. Metaphysics instead becomes

“modernography,” and cannot be undertaken outside it.

17

As for the second political stake, the new anthropological metaphysics offers a

means, perhaps unprecedented in philosophy, toward the transformation of

modern, Western metaphysics, which is one of the most important points

of Métaphysiques Cannibales and the part of Viveiros de Castro’s thinking that

follows it. If philosophy has become particularly stale, if we suffer, as Catherine

Malabou has put it, from a certain kind of metaphysical exhaustion, this is

perhaps because (I offer it as a hypothesis) metaphysical thought can no longer

rely for its materials on the Western canon, whose conceptual resources have

become depleted. Even its margins are becoming too well tread to provide the

materials for philosophical invention. Understanding forms of life and thought

based on conceptual/cosmological coordinates radically different from those of

the moderns, as the Amazonian case shows, requires us to resituate and

conceive anew our fundamental categories and whatever basic form of thought

underlies them. What this means, concretely, is that (1) so-called “subjects,"

"histories," and "truths," for example, that are marginal to, or not of, the

modern West can be listened to and understood only if the concepts (i.e., of the

subject, of history, and of truth) used to interpret them are profoundly

transformed by the encounter. But something even more profound is also at

stake: (2) the resultant transformations will effectively sustain philosophy—by

which I mean conceptual thinking, from whatever discipline, capable of being

transposed into other disciplines—far more than any originating merely from

re-evaluations of the Occidental tradition. The best example of this in Viveiros

de Castro’s work lies, I would say, in his notions of virtual affinity and the

Amerindian “other-structure,” concepts with heavy consequences for the old

Deleuzian virtual/actual couple and the notion of consciousness associated with

them. While I can only gesture to this point, understanding Amazonian

cosmology turns the philosophies of difference on their head while

simultaneously continuing them.

The third political stake of this new metaphysics could be called its “externalist

pluralism,” or, to steal an idea of Patrice Maniglier’s, “superior comparativism.”

This last point is evident in Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, a statement

that some will find surprising, but I want to make clear (before it is inevitably

given a thin assessment in the post-theoretical United States) how far this book

goes in migrating metaphysics away from its home territories. Although Beyond

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Nature and Culture can be taken as offering merely an explanatory typology, it

takes very little imagination to also see it as the first “geography of being,” a

term I use to suggest that its quartet of ontologies is like a group of Heidegger’s

dispensations of being or Foucaultian epochs but with the very crucial

difference that modern metaphysics is not assumed to be primarily legible with

respect to the past of the West. By taking a step out of history and time and onto

a synchronic, geographical plane, Descola shows that modernity can be

rendered intelligible when its basic ontological arrangements are contrasted

with others external to it (not with, that is, arrangements supposedly internal to

its history and thus itself). He thereby provides an alternative to the approach of

a rather large group of post-Heideggerian thinkers, which includes Foucault and

Agamben, who presume that the character of now-global modern problematics

can be assessed through an account of an exclusively Western historicality. This

preference for lateral, geographical comparison opens, moreover, the possibility

of a truly planetary metaphysics, in a double sense: one that would see all

peoples as philosophy’s intercessors, and that would also take the planet as a

whole as a comparable unit, such that this world would be but one variant of

others and thus not limited to the political-economic-ecological-collectivist

possibilities imagined for it by the present neoliberal global order.

References

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of

the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. n.d. [2012]. “The Other Metaphysics, and The

Metaphysics of the Others.” Unpublished paper.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Forthcoming. Cannibal Metaphysics. Translated

by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Press.

19

Geontologies of the Otherwise

by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Words are dear here where we are charged with commenting on the potential of

the concept of ontology for contemporary anthropology—thus the condensed

and clipped nature of my writing. In what follows, I begin by stating some of my

major disagreements with the programmatic statement organizing our

discussion and then outline what I believe are the three nested conditions to any

productive conversation about an ontologically-informed anthropology of the

otherwise.

The Major Disagreements

First, I do not agree that ontology necessarily evokes essence. Numerous

philosophies would demonstrate otherwise. We need only say “Martin

Heidegger” to remember one major philosophical treatise that did not

(existence, remember, precedes essence). Second, I do not agree that the

opposite of ontological essence is multicultural social constructionism. One

would have to understand the complex thinking of Spinoza, Peirce, Deleuze, et

cetera, as “multiculturalism,” something that seems awkward to me. Finally,

engaging the literatures on ontology does not necessitate engaging in a

translation exercise. One could, for instance, be engaged in a transfiguration

exercise (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Povinelli 2011).

The Preconditions

First is a position on the sources of the otherwise. Before I can assess what an

ontology of the otherwise can do for anthropology, I need to know whether

“ontology” is situated in an immanent, transcendental, or trans-immanent

framework. Of course, significant philosophical debates rage within each of

these grossly-characterized positions about who is an example of which and

what will be meant by any of them. But some basic groundwork needs to be laid

so that we know whether we believe that we are dealing with essences or

existents, first and fundamentally. Thus, for the record, if ontology concerns me,

it concerns me as an arrangement of existents at/on/in the plane of existence.

We are, in other words, grappling with a meta-existence–existence dynamic.

20

Entities and their arrangements are immanent to the plane of existence. But the

plane of existence is also immanent in relation to itself and the entities it

produces. In other words, the plane of existence is not one plane of existence. It

is always more than one, even as it is becoming hegemonic or maintaining its

hegemony. Why? The plane of existence is the given order of existents-as-

arrangement. But every arrangement installs its own possible derangements

and rearrangements. The otherwise is these immanent derangements and

rearrangements. Michel Serres (1987) explored a compatible understanding of

how the otherwise is built into every arrangement of existence—to build is to

build the building and its noise. To raise a glass is to build into existence the

possibility it will fall—or float—when let go.

Second are the definitions of power, politics, and ethics that arise from this

approach to the ontology of the otherwise. If any arrangement of

existents/existence builds its own otherwise, then ontology presupposes a study

of power, politics, and ethics as analytically separate problematics. Power is

understood as that which enables arrangements to maintain their apparent

unity and reproduce this apparent unity over time, no matter that these

arrangements are continually creating their own otherwises. Politics is the

adventure of the otherwise as it becomes (or does not) a self-referential,

extended, and dominant entity-arrangement. This process can be summarized:

What is initially dispersed noise comes to enclose itself through self-reference

(and thus an initial this-that differentiation), creating its differential qualities

and skin, and, in the process, pulling in and altering that which surrounds it.

The analytic study of power and politics asks why, given that the otherwise is

everywhere, some existents-existences stay in place? Ethics is a practice of effort

oriented to the formation of new existents and new planes of existence. This

ethics does not have an external—transcendent/transcendental point of view

to/about any given plane of existence. It cannot, given that an immanent

ontology does not allow for adjudication external to the plane of existence. How

and why, therefore, the ethical subject puts effort here or there, on this or that,

now or then, must be understood outside the comfort of normative

adjudication. Even the Habermasian notion of a regulatory ideal (Habermas

1984) is merely a practice of ethics raised to the level of a politics of existence.

21

Third, we must double back onto ontological from the perspective of the entities

it builds into dominant fields of knowledge production (ontic

possibilities, savoir), including anthropology. These entities, I would suggest,

are built on a foundational division within ontology as savoir. Since its

inauguration as a field of philosophical reflection, ontology has been defined

through the problems of being and nonbeing, finitude and infinitude, the zero

and the (multiple) one, most of which create and presuppose a specific kind of

entity-state, namely life. In the natural, social, and philosophical sciences, “life”

acts as a foundational division between entities that have the capacity to be

born, grow, reproduce, and die and those that do not: biology and geology,

biochemistry and geochemistry, life and nonlife. Ontology is, thus, strictly

speaking a “biontology.” Its power is its ability to transform a regional plane of

existence—loosely speaking, Western understandings of those entities that have

these capacities—into a global arrangement. Ethics is the practice of effort that

opens the conditions and cares for the entities that are this division’s otherwise.

And politics is, first, the struggle to demonstrate that this is simply one

arrangement of many possible arrangements between biontology and

geontology; and, second, the struggle to foster and extend the many names of

the otherwise to this ontological division (climate change, anthropocene,

Indigenous cosmologies, animism, vitalism, geontology) such that they are

given life.

References

Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. 2003. “Technologies of

Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition.” Public

Culture 15, no. 3: 385–97.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1:

Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas

McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. “Routes/Worlds.” e-flux, no. 27.

Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

22

Critical Anthropology as a Permanent

State of First Contact

by Ghassan Hage

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

There is enough of the Marxist that remains in me to make me unable to think

of politics without thinking about capitalism. So I want to use this intervention

to reflect on the relation between the so-called “ontological turn” and

capitalism.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s reflections on the way Amazonian perspectivism

(multi-naturalism) differs from the dominant Western perspectivism (multi-

epistemological perspectivism, mono-naturalism) spurred me to think about the

history of the western notion of perspective. Going back to the rise of

perspective painting in renaissance Italy with Alberti and Bernuschelli, and

looking at the circulation of notions of perspective from this

architectural/artistic/religious milieu and into philosophy and the social

sciences, one finds diverging conceptions of perspective that continue to mark

the present-day debates associated with the ontological turn:

* Mono-perspectivism and multi-perspectivism: many histories of perspective

in art show how renaissance paintings’ mono-perspectival gaze was not the only

form that perspectivism takes. The latter rose at the expense of a pre-existing

multi-perspectivism that continued to exist as a minor form that took an

artistically radical shape with the emergence of cubism.

* Ontological and epistemological perspectivism: there has been an ongoing

tension between a conception of perspective as a “subjective take” on a reality

that is presumed to be always already "there," and an ontological perspectivism,

which highlights the view that reality is the very relation to/perspective on

otherwise undifferentiated surroundings. While in everyday life epistemological

perspectivism has been dominant, in philosophy a long tradition has espoused

various forms of ontological perspectivism. Key figures in this tradition run

23

from Leibniz and Spinoza, to von Uexküll’s influence on the phenomenological

tradition, to Whitehead and Deleuze.

* Visual perspectivism and experiential perspectivism: this denotes the

difference in the popular imagination between perspective as a “point of view”

or as a “way of seeing,” which highlights a visual imaginary, and perspective as

“walking in someone else’s shoes,” which emphasizes an experiential imaginary.

The tension between the two is stressed in Jose Ortega y Gasset’s argument that

“while it is impossible to see an orange fully and simultaneously from all sides, it

is not impossible to touch it or hold it three-dimensionally” (Elkins 1994, 339).

It can be argued that visual perspectivism is more aligned with epistemological

perspectivism, while experiential perspectivism, denoting perspective as a mode

of being enmeshed and existing in the world, has more affinity with ontological

perspectivism. If that is the case, one has to ask if anthropology, particularly

when it is phenomenologically-oriented, has not always favored, at least

implicitly, an ontological conception of culture.

* Finally, one has to point to an interesting, though minor, debate that emerged

out of the well-known renaissance belief that optics, seen as the condition of

possibility and the raw material with which perspective painting was executed,

was one of the ultimate manifestations of God’s creation on earth. The

interesting divergence here is that while some saw perspective, in its relation to

optics, as a way of capturing “the perfection” of God, others saw perspective as a

mode of touching “the mystery” of God.

It is here, in the context of these debates and divergences, that one has to

remember that the dominance of mono-naturalism and epistemological

perspectivism was part of the dominance of the monotheistic, democratic,

scientific and mercantilist assemblage that defined the rise of merchant

capitalism. This assemblage brought together the intimately connected beliefs in

monotheism and the one-ness of nature with the rising mercantilist desire of a

unified mode of measurement of value and “reality” which was also at the core

of the mono-naturalism of perspective painting. The “abacus schools” (scuola

d’abbaco), or schools of “commercial arithmetic,” which emerged in Florence

shaped the mono-naturalist habitus of both merchants and artists. This mono-

naturalism was complemented with a multi-epistemological perspectivism in

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politics (democracy as the co-existence of many “points of view”). All this, in a

sense, defined the essence of democratic capitalist politics: talk and have as

many “points of view” as you like, as long as capitalism and nature—as the

fundamental realities on which everything stands—are left one and

unchallenged.

In light of the above, it is clear that the multi-naturalism and the ontological

perspectivism that mark the ontological turn stand in opposition to the long

tradition of mono-naturalism and epistemological perspectivism on which

capitalism has rested. There is a clear radical political potential in an

anthropology that is always in pursuit of ontological multiplicity and the

highlighting of existing dominated and overshadowed modes of existence. But it

would be a mistake to see in the highlighting of such minor realities an

intrinsically anti-capitalist act. Minor realities offer new spaces of possibility

but, nonetheless, such realities are merely arenas of political struggle rather

than counter-hegemonic modes of existence in themselves.

Likewise, one cannot forget that today, because of the threat of global warming,

capitalism is decoupling itself from scientific mono-naturalism, and as such

even multiple ontologies can end up being harnessed in the service of

capitalism. But multi-naturalist anthropology is not only defined by ontological

multiplicity. It has also situated itself in the tradition of the renaissance

perspectivists we have noted earlier, who in opposition to those who saw in

perspective a capturing of the perfection of God, saw themselves as always

aiming to be in touch with the mystery of God. It is particularly here that the

ontological turn is at its most radical, reinvigorating a long tradition of an

anthropology defined by a continual encounter with radical alterity:

anthropology as a permanent state of first contact.

References

Elkins, James. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University

Press.

25

The Political Ontology of Doing

Difference . . . and Sameness

by Mario Blaser

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

In this intervention I would like to contrast different ways in which some

versions of science and technology studies (STS) and some versions of

anthropology have explored ontological politics. Conversations like the one

staged in this panel, composed to some extent by representatives of both, have

been going on for sometime now so it is a bit unfair to make a strict distinction

of “camps.” However, for the purpose of this discussion let me play with what I

perceive as different initial emphases: on the one hand, the emphasis of STS on

enactment; on the other hand, the emphasis of anthropology on alterity. The

STS’s emphasis on enactments has rendered for us, ontological multiplicity; a

call to dwell on becomings rather than being; and a form of politics that is

fundamentally concerned with how realities are shaped into a given form or

another. The anthropological emphasis on alterity, in turn, has given us

multiple ontologies (that is, ethnographic descriptions of the many-fold shapes

of the otherwise); an injunction not to explain too much or try to actualize the

possibilities immanent to other’s thought but rather to sustain them as

possibilities; and, as a corollary, a politics that initially hinges upon the hope of

making the otherwise visible so that it becomes viable as a real alternative.

What happens if we cross-check these emphases? From the perspective of an

emphasis on alterity, STS-inflected notions of ontological multiplicity and

becomings (expressed in terms of emergences, fluidity, material-semiotic

assemblages and so on) seem to leave no way out for the people described: those

are not necessarily the terms with which they would describe themselves!

Conversely, from the perspective of an emphasis on enactments the

anthropological penchant for foregrounding difference seems to put the cart in

front of the horse: difference comes before an account of how it gets enacted.

In the position paper shared by the organizers I notice an attempt to bring

closer these emphases. The authors do pay attention to enactment, but in a

recursive fashion and to make the point of why ontologically-oriented

26

anthropological analyses are intrinsically political: basically because they

“figurate” the future through their very enactment, they “do” difference as such.

This figuration of a future abundant in difference is presented to us as a “good”:

this is the political value of doing ontologically-inflected anthropology.

If I am correct in reading the position paper as advocating a certain good, then

in spite of the authors argument to the contrary, ontologically-oriented analyses

do not offer an alternative to imperatives about what it should be, they are one

such imperative. And I am informed here by intellectual traditions often

labeled Indigenous, which, in translation of course, will alert us that once you

have associated ontology with enactment, it follows that any kind of analysis or

account carries in its belly a certain imperative about what it should be. Hence,

whether you do difference or sameness, and in more or less explicit ways, you

are already enacting a certain imperative.

Now, if we accept that all kinds of accounts are equivalent as enactments we

come right back to the fundamental political question of STS inspired analyses:

what kinds of worlds are being done through particular accounts and how do we

sort out the good from the bad. As you may have noticed, if we accept that all

accounts are enactments we also end up in a position that is problematic for the

ontologically-inclined anthropologist: in making accounts equivalent as

enactments, we are doing sameness and leaving no way out for our

interlocutors, partners and circumstantial political foes who would not describe

their accounts as enactments. Here is where the injunctions not to describe too

much or actualize other possibilities try to make their mark... But then, how do

we provide an account that makes a case for the “good” being offered by

ontologically-informed anthropology?

It seems to me that the circularity of the problem has to do with an impossible

demand: that ontologically-informed anthropology should enact an account

devoid of any imperative of what it should be. It seems to me that, no matter

how much we may try to elude it, the implicit imperatives that come along with

our accounts unavoidably interrupt, redirect, clash and otherwise intermingle

with other accounts and their imperatives. Anthropology is ontologically

political inasmuch as its operation presupposes this many-fold consequential

intermingling. Then, in my view, the challenge lies not so much in devising ways

27

to indefinitely sustain the possible but contributing to actualize some

possibilities and not others. One of these possibilities (but not the only one)

might precisely be a “worlding” (so to speak) where the possible is indefinitely

sustained.

Contributing to actualize some possibilities and not others entails refusing a

wholesale embrace of either difference or sameness. Granted, in a context where

doing sameness is the dominant modality, doing difference largely becomes an

imperative. However I cannot shed from my mind what an Yshiro teacher and

mentor once told me: not all stories (or accounts) are to be told or enacted just

anywhere; every situation requires its own story. Telling just any story without

attending to what the situation requires is sheer recklessness. Thus, figuring out

where, when and how to do difference and sameness as the circumstances

require is to me the key challenge of doing political ontology.

28

Practical Ontologies

by Casper Bruun Jensen

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

This panel urges consideration of what an ethnographic commitment to

ontology does, and specifically of the politics of ontology. This seems an

important question at a time when the notion appears with increasing frequency

in anthropological discussions. To be in a position to address that question,

however, first requires some disentanglement as regards the notion itself. Such

disentanglement could no doubt be the topic of book-length treatises, but I will

limit myself to observing that a preoccupation with ontology has emerged more

or less simultaneously within science and technology studies (STS) and

anthropology. In the former, ontology has been discussed at least since the mid-

1990s in the works of Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, Andrew Pickering, and

Helen Verran, whereas in the latter, key inspirations include Marilyn Strathern,

Roy Wagner, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. I do not think the more or less

simultaneous emergence of ontology in these fields is fortuitous, since the

figures mentioned share certain genealogies and they are affiliated in various

complex ways. I also do not think the views of ontology propagated within each

are antithetical or incommensurable; indeed I think they can be mutually

enriching. However, they are different and those differences are important to

bear in mind in order to consider the implications of an ontological politics.

To draw the most schematic contrast possible, consider the following two

claims: Viveiros de Castro (2011, 34) says that anthropological explanation must

take place at the level of the “(cultural) structures of ontological

presupposition.” Andrew Pickering argues that the very nature of the world is

subject to transformation due to ongoing interactions between multiple human

and nonhuman agents. What we need is an ontological theory of the visible,

dealing with this “dance of agency” (Pickering 1995).

It appears to me these views pull in different directions in terms of ontological

politics. If Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad, etc., in spite of their protestations and

clarifications, are repeatedly accused of culturalizing ontology and essentialising

people, it is probably due to the focus on cultural structures of ontological

29

presuppositions. In contrast, ontology in STS generally leads to an interest in

elucidating ways in which new forms of subjects and objects are formed in

assemblages, which certainly include people’s “thoughts” but no less the

technologies and other materials with which they continuously engage (Jensen

2010; Jensen and Winthereik 2013). Rather than essentialising, such studies are

often seen as dangerously relativistic, since culture is here hardly held stable at

all and ontology is basically never spoken about in the singular. It is always an

issue of ontologies, even within what appears to be limited settings.

Where does that leave us, politically speaking? Since the conveners have

encouraged us to speak directly, let me offer a direct view. It seems to me that in

some of its anthropological guises, like Martin Holbraad’s (2012) work, we find

very interesting ontological experiments, but basically nothing resembling a

politics. Viveiros de Castro (2011) is quite different, in that he is explicit about

his aim to decolonize Indian thought. Other recent anthropological

explorations, like Mario Blaser’s (2009) and Marisol de la Cadena’s (2010) also

use ontological argumentation to support particular forms of politics, namely

those of specific indigenous people. But from which pre-ontological domain

comes the necessity or inclination to support just those people and agendas?

After all, we might say, states, colonizers, and mining companies also have

ontologies. We just tend not to like them. We might therefore say that in these

cases the politics (as contrasted with the choices of ethnographic description) is

not ontological, it is a more or less regular politics extended to operate also on

the terrain of nonhuman beings.

If, on the other hand, ontologies are manifest in transformations at the level of

the visible, so that one can always witness ontological contests or

choreographies (Cussins 1998) ethnographically, what then? In that case, rather

than using ontology as a leverage point for doing politics on behalf of a group of

people, ontological politics is evinced descriptively and conceptually as new

sociomaterial constellations that may include forms of science, governance,

livelihoods, myths, infrastructures, and so on. Such constellations, we might

say, are literal construction sites for divergent, practical ontologies. They have

effects that go considerably beyond culturally structured presuppositions. This

is already an important reason to give attention to them.

30

In terms of the anthropological politics of studying ontology, we might say that

studying forms of world-making in situations where many people, projects, and

technologies clash, tends to make obvious that Westerners and moderns

themselves are very different, both from what they think they are (modern and

rational, for example) and what anthropologists tend to claim they are

(reductive and dualist, for example). Ontologies thus multiply the us’s and

them’s of which the world is composed and render all of them more exotic,

simultaneously.

Finally, note the recursive implication of this view of ontology for anthropology

as discipline or project. If ontology is evinced in front of our noses in the shape

of all kinds of world-making projects, then anthropological practice can itself be

conceived as an ontological form. The kinds of topics we like to talk about as

epistemological thus collapse into ontology, and fieldwork, writing, and

argumentation begins to look like small machines for intervening in this or that

part of the world, for performing the world in this or that marginally different or

novel way (Jensen 2012). In that sense, we are invariably part of ontological

politics, but not of any politics given by the ontologies of those we study or work

with. Viewed thus, ontological politics relieves from anthropology the burden

and, as Deleuze might say, shame of speaking for others. But it creates new

obligations in terms of articulating the ways in which anthropologists feel

qualified to speak and their reasons for speaking as they do.

References

Blaser, Mario. 2009. “The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a

Sustainable Hunting Program.” American Anthropologist 111, no. 1: 10–

20.

Cussins, Charis. 1998. “Ontological Choreography: Agency for Women Patients

in an Infertility Clinic.” In Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices,

Techniques, and Bodies, edited by Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol, 166–

202. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes:

Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no.

4: 334–70.

31

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of

Human Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2010. Ontologies for Developing Things: Making Health

Care Futures Through Technology. Rotterdam: Sense.

Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2012. “Motion: The Task of Anthropology is to Invent

Relations.”Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 47–53.

Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Brit Ross Winthereik. 2013. Monitoring Movements

in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and

Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The

Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th Century Brazil. Chicago:

Prickly Paradigm Press.

32

Equal Time for Entities

by Michael W. Scott

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The turn to ontology has established at least one indispensable insight: it has

called attention to the fact that entities are intra-relational as well as inter-

relational. It has compelled us to recognize that entities are intrinsically

multiple, or self-differing. Without retreating from this insight, my contribution

to this discussion will be to question whether intrinsic multiplicity necessarily

implies an ontological—and therefore political—asymmetry between relations

and entities. It has become axiomatic in some quarters that relations are

logically prior to and encompass entities (e.g., Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros

de Castro 2013; Pedersen 2012; Viveiros de Castro 2010). The fact that entities

comprise relations has been taken to mean that there can be no simultaneously

autonomous things. Intrinsic multiplicity is presumed to constitute an invisible

extensive pre-connectivity. But this asymmetry, I want to suggest, is not only

unwarranted; it may also be politically undesirable.

To illustrate my point, I ask you to picture the image of Indra’s net, as developed

in Chinese Buddhism. As many of you will know, Roy Wagner (2001) has

invoked this image as an aid to conceptualizing what he calls the “holographic

worldview.” Wagner tells us that the negative spaces—the holes in Indra’s net—

are not really empty at all, but are “gems that reflect one another so perfectly

‘that they do not know whether they are one or many’” (2001, 13, quotation

unattributed).

Wagner (2001, 13) suggests that this image instantiates what he calls “the

absolute identity of part and whole.” His use of this image looks, in other words,

like an example of what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2010) describes as a virtual

connection between Wagner’s thought and the philosophy of Deleuze. Indra’s

net is Wagner’s way of expressing what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 23) call

“the magic formula”: “PLURALISM = MONISM.” In both cases, the ontology

indexed is one of infinite invariant fractality, what Wagner (1991, 163, 166)

elsewhere describes as the “whole cloth of universal congruence” or “integral

33

relationship” replicated across all scales. Everything contains everything else, at

least in potentia.

Now, in my view, there are many potential problems with this holographic

ontology, at least as methodological presupposition. For one thing, there is, at

present, no evidence that the universe is comprehensively fractal—let alone

fractal to the degree of invariant self-similarity across all scales. I am concerned

that we have simply been wonderstruck by the apparent congruence between a

few aesthetically powerful examples of invariant fractality—as described by

scientists and mathematicians—and the familiar macrocosm–microcosm

correlations found in many ancient, indigenous, and alter-modern cosmologies.

But the main point I want to make is this: if, like many of the ancient,

indigenous, and alter-modern cosmologies we study, we posit an asymmetry

between an all-pervasive relational background (whatever we call it) and

entities, conceptualized as figures emerging from it, we risk reinventing—or

lending support to—claims that some entities are either closer to, or somehow

have greater access to their inner capacities for infinite becoming than others.

Accordingly, if we return to the image of Indra’s net—as good to think if not to

embrace as methodological ontology—we must acknowledge its absolute

ambiguity. It is a classic figure–ground composition, but one that must be

read alternately as either a radicalor a partial duality (con. Viveiros de Castro

2010). It cannot be both at once only; a both/and formulation alone gives

permanent ontological ascendancy to the “whole cloth” of relations over entities.

Wagner says that the gems do not know whether they are one or many. But it is

equally the case, I suggest, that they do not know whether they are entities or

relations. They do not know whether they are autonomous terms with their own

core intra-relational essences, or nothing but nexuses in an infinite web. After

all, if the negative spaces—the holes in Indra’s net—can be seen as positive, it is

equally the case that the positive spaces—the ligatures—can be seen as negative,

as gaps between the gems, rather than links. Indra’s net can instantiate a

thoroughly essentialist ontology—one that posits autonomous multiplicities at

every scale.

More importantly, intrinsic multiplicity—whether this means internal relations

that are isomorphic at every scale, or (what is more likely) internal relations that

34

are contingent and unique to every entity—need not preclude a

priori autonomy. The insight that entities are composed of relations does not

necessitate the asymmetrical privileging of relations over entities. People can—

and, indeed, some people do—see the gems first as independent complexities in

need of swerve, in need of external connections to start up a cosmos. At the very

least, then, such a privileging of intrinsically multiple yet always already

autonomous entities needs to be sustained indefinitely as a possibility, both in

anthropological theory and in ethnographic contexts.

References

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Position paper

for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual

meeting, Chicago.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. “The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations:

For the Motion.” Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 59–65.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2010. “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance.”

InDeleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, edited by

Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rödje, 219–53. Oxford: Berghahn.

Wagner, Roy. 1991. “The Fractal Person.” In Big Men and Great Men:

Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and

Marilyn Strathern, 159–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagner, Roy. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview

in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of

Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

35

Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison

as Ontology

by Helen Verran

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

A claim that emerges about at about the halfway mark of Holbraad, Pedersen,

and Viveiros de Castro’s (2013) paper provides my beginning:

“The anthropology of ontology is anthropology as ontology; not the

comparison of ontologies, but comparison as ontology.”

I complement the claim that “anthropology as ontology . . . is comparison as

ontology” by insisting that the entities we deal with in doing anthropology are

themselves comparisons. The exemplar I have in mind here is numbers, like

those multiple numbers I met in Nigerian classrooms. Numbers are formalized

comparisons, solidified clots of relations; all the more solid for being

formalisms. As things, numbers are familiar comparison participants in many

collectives

My claim, that the entities we deal with and through in anthropology are

comparisons, can lead us to recognize ontic tensions, which might become an

ontological politics. However, that passage from recognizing entities as

comparisons participant in ontic tensions, to recognizing the possibility of

ontological politics, differs from the insight that anthropology as ontology is

comparison as ontology. The latter acknowledgement amounts to recognizing

that anthropology is a political ontology, one of several acting in any collective

in which ethnography is pursued. It is within the force fields of those political

ontologies—including anthropology’s, that the ontic tensions of a collective

might (or might not) emerge as ontological politics.

That emergence of an ontological politics in a collective in which an

ethnographer is participant can be felt as a disconcertment. I see this experience

as a form of epistemic disconcertment, when negotiations around what is known

and how it is known become evident as fluid. I felt this in Nigerian classrooms

as I describe in my beginning stories inScience and an African Logic (2001). I

met new numbers, brought to life by teachers who we might think of as ontic

36

innovators. The new numbers that these teachers brought to life were

participants in those classrooms, along with the “official number” of the primary

school curriculum. Classroom routines were designed to ensure the dominance

of that number but it did not stop Yoruba number entering the classroom. Many

of the children dealt with and through Yoruba number in their out-of-school

lives as young market vendors, and it still had influence, and the capacity to

interrupt the smooth workings of the Western number of modern

administration.

In the re-performance of those classrooms in the writing of an ontologically-

focused ethnography as an analytic text, yet another number came to life as

participant comparison. This number was, like many of those the teachers

brought to life in their experimenting, both and neither the number of the

official primary school curriculum and Yoruba market number. But the

ethnographer’s number differed from those of the experimenting teachers in

having its metaphysical commitment made explicit. That making explicit, albeit

in re-performance, is an expression of a political ontology. While perhaps a

benign political ontology, which by making its metaphysical commitments

explicit announces itself as proceeding in good faith, it is nevertheless a political

ontology, one that takes its place in the tense political landscapes of those

classrooms. It abuts and abrades the political ontology of the numbers

promoted by the modernizing school curriculum, and the resisting and

sometimes subverting political ontology that is forged and sanctioned in the

Ooni’s palace at the center of town, and a perhaps inchoate political ontology

enacted by the teachers who must manage their large classes of restless children

with few resources.

Recognizing contesting political ontologies, including that which enters with

ethnography, makes clear that what was happening with numbers there in those

Nigerian classrooms. I experienced disconcertment as immanent ontic tensions

clotted in becoming as an ontological politics within the force fields of mutually

interrupting political ontologies. And that tension zone is, it seems to me,

exactly where an ontologically-sensitive ethnography is located and where it

should stay in its re-performance as analytic text.

37

Staying in that place of tension where ontic tensions clot (or not) as ontological

politics within the force fields of political ontologies, the ethnographer has a

chance of discriminating divergences and convergences: generative, or

exploitative, or unfruitful doings of difference. So here we find the possibility of

judgment, of critique. Meta-critique was rightly written out of ethnography, but

ethnography located in that imagined zone of ontological tension can and

should engage a form of infra-critique, gesturing at possible generative tensions,

while explicitly refusing others.

References

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Position paper

for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual

meeting, Chicago.

Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

38

Onto-Methodology

by Tony Crook

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Because we can only know in relation to something else, this discussion of the

Politics of Ontology gets to the heart of the anthropological project. Ontology

provides a relational view of method. Every ethnographic description is equally

a description of the anthropology producing it.

Anthropology's engagements with the political have been turned inside out over

recent years. Any distinction or definition between textual representation and

political representation has been collapsed. Speaking about can now be heard

as speaking for. As much as what an ethnographic text or description might say,

even the act of ethnographic description itself can make a political statement.

But this roundtable is important for it provides an opportunity to separate out

again these twinned politics of representation. And it also provides a space

therefore, in which to leave aside the question of whether a discussion of

anthropological method should be political or non-political.

My book, Exchanging Skin (2007), derives from research in Bolivip village in

Papua New Guinea. The book takes up the Min Problem—a long-standing

analytical impasse—and argues that the problem all along was one of

Anthropology's own making. Intriguingly, the very peoples and places that,

through Fredrik Barth's work on the Baktaman, came to stand for and exemplify

secrecy and knowledge, have provided the discipline with one of its most

critically demanding tests. Although analyses based on Euro-American

conceptualizations of secrecy and knowledge were produced, they did not stack

up with the ethnography in Bolivip.

In Bolivip, “knowledge” implicates people in a double life by affording and

bringing together divergent gendered perspectives: not so much revealing to a

viewer their position in the composition of a field of knowledge, as newly

revealing the composition of the knower and the subtleties of their personal

capacities and relational supports. This is not so much being in the world (a

figuring out of positions) as world in the being (a figuring of internal capacities).

Revelations have the dual life effect of revealing that there is always more to

39

things than one knows—and so it creates a relation that carefully positions a

person in those new possibilities.

Knowledge practices in Bolivip employ the imagery of relative positions on a

tree: the muddled confusion of junior cultists is likened to the multiplicity of

branches and leaves, whilst very senior cultists display their solidifying grasp of

things in the way that the ever-branching stories of juniors seem always to come

down to the same thing. There is a double-ontology in Bolivip: for juniors in the

crown, words from seniors at the base appear to branch into multiple

possibilities.

Clearly, ontology is no one thing. As we've already heard, “ontology” can serve to

describe an all-encompassing world view, and to describe an all-encompassing

anthropological method. That “ontology” foregrounds and highlights this

isomorphism between ethnographic object and anthropological method is its

most important virtue.

Of course, anthropologists are adept at discerning the wider cultural histories

and metaphysical concerns at work in world views, and thus it is possible to

discern contemporary Euro-American conceptual collapses of nature and

culture such that things seem to have “micro-ontologies” (so every thing has a

world, and a worldview, of its own), and to discern emergent Christian and

process theologies which refashion the position and the mathematics of the

Godhead (so that God and his believers are part of, and can pass through, each

other).

Ontology provides a relational view of method, and reminds us that a critical

test for ethnographic knowledge-practices is the faithfulness with which they

acknowledge that they are both enabled and constrained by the knowledge

practices of our ethnographic subjects. For too long, the pretense of

scrupulously separating data from theory had anthropology barking up the

wrong tree, and afforded a privileged analytical position as if narrating from

outside the ethnographic relation. I take it that looking for theory in the same

place we look for data provides a crucial disciplinary and decolonizing turn.

Every ethnographic description is equally a description of the anthropology

producing it, then. Ontology is useful because it foregrounds our part in the

relational and conceptual scheme, and reminds us of three important lessons:

40

(1) Roy Wagner's (1981) enduring insight about our invention of culture—that is,

the efficacy and contingency of using our concepts (such as “culture” or

“ontology”) to apprehend, apportion to and describe the concerns of our

ethnographic subjects.

(2) Marilyn Strathern's (2011, 92) insights into exchanges between knowledge

practices—that is, “to be perspectivalist acts out Euro-American pluralism,

ontologically grounded in one world and many viewpoints; perspectivism

implies an ontology of many worlds and one capacity to take a viewpoint.”

(3) As I understand Viveiros de Castro's (2004, 3) “comparison between

anthropologies,” it is neither multiple natures nor singular cultures that require

analysis, but a description of the metaphysics, potentials and affordances that

find manifestation and expression in different forms.

Any methodological insistence on these three lessons carries political force for

the reproduction and transformation of the disciple. It may even save us from

being dazzled and taken in by the effects of our own creativity, and allow the

creativity of ethnographic subjects to further expand our understandings of

being human.

References

Crook, Tony. 2007. Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua

New Guinea: Exchanging Skin. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford

University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2011. “Binary License.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 87–

103.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method

of Controlled Equivocation.” Tipití: Journal of the Society for the

Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 3–22.

Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press. Originally published in 1975.

41

Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics

of Materiality

by Benjamin Alberti

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Here are some things familiar to many archaeologists: thermoluminescence;

electron spin resonance; X-ray fluorescence; scanning electron microscopy;

inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry; neutron activation analysis; as

well as shovels, barrows, dirt, line levels, and pencils. Some archaeologists are

angry that they have not been included more in debates on the ontological turn.

What could be more real, more ontologically weighty than the things

archaeologists study and how they study them? This is not to imply that

archaeology is all science and method. Though the big issue in archaeology is

often seen to be, precisely, methodological: how to get through things to past

human lives? We have an apparently endless sea of possible “other worlds,” but

they are sand-bagged by the problem of confirmation. We can only conjure up

such lives and worlds from their physical traces, translating differences in

materials through practice.

In this statement I make two interventions. The first takes the form of a

question: What is the status of materials in our ontological accounts? I’m going

to wag my finger a little and claim materials back from their status as “merely

prosaic” in the current debate. They are where alterity lies. Second, I argue that

to get political enough, to get worlds otherwise out of archaeology, requires risk.

We archaeologists can be very defensive about our things. In fact, one could

argue that a new essentialism has emerged—a return to things as things—as a

symptom of exhaustion in the face of the search for meaning. The claim is that

there is something about a thing that is beyond signification, that cannot be

captured or explained away. And it is the job of the archaeologist to care for our

things, to ensure them their dignity (Olsen et al. 2012). We might, on this basis,

rephrase Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “archaeology,” we might say “is the

science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s things.” This sounds

faintly insulting, but bears thinking about. As I read the position statement of

this panel by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (2013), the question

42

that came to me repeatedly was: What about the alterity lodged in materials, in

their indeterminacy? Materials are treated in the statement as prosaic ground

rather than excess. I would ask Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro why

they think materials afford anything at all.

This is the central question for an ontologically oriented archaeology and its

politics. How do things afford? Archaeologists are guilty of constantly passing

through the material traces on their way to past peoples but rarely actually

access the “dark side” of ontological alternatives. Instead, we find what we’re

looking for—abstractions, social structures, past ontologies-as-cultures—

because the ontological operation in the formation of the materials and how and

what they afford is rarely questioned. My suggestion is that we can only “elicit

new forms” from affordances of materials and forces if we refuse a common-

sense understanding of them as somehow primitive. The politics of things

before they emerge as such is what archaeologists ought to contend with.

Alterity is prior to properties.

It is becoming increasingly widely recognized that archaeology is onto-formative

in its very practice. We don’t uncover pasts but assemble them in the present

(Fowler 2013). The gap between past worlds and material traces is only

apparent. We now have rich and detailed descriptions of archaeological

practice—seeing and doing—as ontological in nature. The technologies of

descriptions are recognized to include multiple non-human agencies,

apparatuses, things. But because we are “wonder-struck,” as Scott describes it,

by that realization we can overlook alterity. What about the difference that a

focus on ontology should make? This is a question of politics and risk. Elizabeth

Grosz (2005, 129) has written that “politics, as much as life itself, is that which

‘gives being to what did not exist.’” I don’t think archaeology can participate in a

critical political ontology while we operate at the scale of the meta-theoretical—

the search for a corrective to our faulty metaphysics—which makes it difficult to

admit to the necessary contingency of theoretical foundations. We have a new

constituency of things to care for; but it is hard to leave a door ajar for alterity to

enter.

Sandy Budden and Jo Sofaer (2009) have argued that when potters made pots

at the Bronze Age Tell of Százhalombatta in Hungary they risked their social

43

identities, as each performance of potting was judged by an audience of the

potter’s community. If we include the material within the social, if what one is

working on—clay, materials—is seen as identical in kind to oneself, then far

more is at risk. Such is the case, I have argued, with body-pots from northwest

Argentina (Alberti 2014). A successful performance there involves both

producing an efficacious transformative act (of the material) and convincing a

far broader audience (of beings) of its success. The risk you run is ontological.

Archaeological practice as ontological ought to be the same. It should throw the

archaeologist and her materials into a state of vulnerability and risk. I think it

no accident that those archaeologists willing to risk in this way have learned the

lessons of contingent foundations from feminist, queer and Indigenous practice.

Extracting worlds otherwise in archaeology involves admitting doubt and

difference into our very specific examination of materials, including how they

afford. With further apologies to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, could we

characterize this effort, then, as “the permanent decolonization of matter”? Or,

could we argue, even, for an alter-politics of the (pre)particulate?

References

Alberti, Benjamin. 2014. “Designing Body–Pots in the Formative La Candelaria

Culture, Northwest Argentina.” In Making and Growing: Anthropological

Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim

Ingold. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Budden, Sandy, and Joanna Sofaer. 2009. “Non-Discursive Knowledge and the

Construction of Identity: Potters, Potting and Performance at the Bronze

Age Tell of Százhalombatta, Hungary.” Cambridge Archaeological

Journal 19, no. 2: 203–20.

Fowler, Chris. 2013. The Emergent Past: A Relational Realist Archaeology of

Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Position paper

44

for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual

meeting, Chicago.

Lucas, Gavin. 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

45

The Ontology of the Political Turn

by Matei Candea

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The position piece by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (2013) offers

an engaging account of how politics and the ontological turn might fit together.

The Deleuzian (or indeed Tardean) sounding thought that the ontological turn is

an immanent politics of permanent differentiation appeals. It certainly captures

much of what I for one have found attractive about this emerging bundle of

arguments, while eschewing much of what is potentially problematic, such as

the notion—clearly rejected here—of ontologies tied to named groups of people,

and hence of a new identity politics by ontological means. Similarly, the focus

on permanent theoretical revolution wards off—in principle at least—the

greatest danger which awaits any theoretical movement entering its second

generation, by which I mean the moment when, as is currently beginning to

happen, anthropologists are going to the field with a sense of “the ontological

turn” as a particular theoretical option. The danger this poses is the classic one

of replicating results rather than methodological commitments—crudely put,

the danger of going out to the field bent on “discovering” that whoever one

happens to be studying actually lives in a world in which there is no single

nature, and happens to have a striking penchant for elements of a relational,

non-dualist, immanent material vitalism. The ontological turn, defined as a

commitment to an immanent politics of permanent conceptual differencing,

couldn’t possibly stand for that type of prejudged rediscovery of the same and

that is all to the good.

However, I will argue that the acid test of the resolution of the permanent

conceptual revolutionary comes when she encounters the term “politics”—an

immovable object if ever there was one. Indeed, put “the ontological turn” and

“politics” side by side and you will soon find that the terms do not stay put for

long. Very quickly, the latter—“politics”—seems to want to pop up to a

superordinate level, and we are drawn to talking and thinking about the politics

of the ontological turn: what political project is implied by, or explicitly pursued

by anthropologists who deploy “ontology” as a designator? The potential

answers to this question are multiple, as the position piece makes clear, but its

46

form is broadly stable. In other words, “politics” seems necessarily to be the

bigger thing in terms of which the ontological “turn” can (and should) ultimately

be called to account. Tellingly, for instance, when the position piece speaks of

three different ways in which politics and ontology are correlated, it is in fact

describing the politics of three ontological positions (broadly speaking a realist,

a deconstructivist, and a performative one).

But what if the scale were reversed? What if instead of asking about the politics

of the ontological turn, the ontological turn were the superordinate entity and

the political just one of the particular topics falling under its call for permanent

revolution? The position piece makes some moves in this direction when it

speaks, for instance, of the limitations of one (modern, multicultural, etc.) kind

of politics. Here the ontological anthropologist might be able to show, by

drawing (through engaged mutual misunderstandings) on the politics of the

other, that an other politics is possible. But in that move, politics has again

taken the upper hand and become the common denominator that sutures

ontological difference. For how does the ontological anthropologist know an

“other” politics when she sees it? Presumably, it would have to look like

something other than what we currently know as (modern, multicultural, etc.)

politics—although in another sense, it would have to look enough like politics in

the widest definition given here (“power differences”). The ontological

anthropologist would then presumably have to say that this, too, is politics,

albeit not “our” version of it. And this, in turn, replicates and extends the classic

move of political anthropology from the 1970s onwards, of showing the political

to operate in seemingly un-political places (cf. Candea 2011b).

That is why, from the perspective of permanent conceptual revolution, the

political is the one ingredient that is hard to keep in the mix: it keeps floating up

to the top, as it were. In another sense too: any argument about the political

calls up a question about the politics of that argument. Thus politics still trumps

ontology, and method, every time. The position piece deftly seeks to square that

circle by rendering as political the ontological turn’s own methodological

commitment to the constant production of difference. This is an elegant twist,

and one that has a venerable line of predecessors from Foucault onwards, but it

does seem that once again, the political ends up on top. Indeed, when we take

47

the very fact of differing as political, we really have reached the horizon towards

which political anthropology has been tending, in which everything (and

therefore, in another sense, nothing) is political. And in that move, we are also

getting further from the commitment to generating alternatives to established

ways of thinking. After all, political anti-authoritarianism—the end-point of the

piece—is itself a fairly well-established way of thinking, amongst Euro-American

anthropologists at least. Adherents of the ontological turn have been repeatedly

asked a conventional question (“What are your politics?”) and this ultimately

requires a relatively conventional answer.

In many respects, the primacy of the political, its ability to return us back to

fairly grounded, conventional problems, is to be welcomed. Amongst other

things, it forces the would-be permanent revolutionary to ask a question that

has not yet, I think, been conclusively addressed in the ontological turn, namely

that of interlocution: whom, precisely, is one “taking seriously,”[1] and what

might a disagreement or response from them look like?

That being said, consider how different the conversation would sound if, for

instance, one asked instead about the religion rather than the politics of the

ontological turn (cf. Scott 2013)—that conversation might shake things up

rather more and bring its own problems. But it would certainly provide a

purview from which the political could emerge as just one topic among others.

Perhaps we do sometimes need to suspend (however briefly) the question of the

politics of ontological difference to genuinely bring into view the question of the

ontological difference of politics. By this I mean both the possibility of an

“other” politics and the possibility of there being things other than politics. To

ask about this is to ask, in other words, how “other” the otherwise can be.

Notes

[1] I would maintain, pace the position piece’s move away from the term, that

the normative injunction to take seriously the worlds of “others,” and thereby to

distort “our own,” remains a fairly apt description of the immanent politics of

the ontological turn. It is particularly apposite precisely because of the

fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the notion of “taking seriously” (cf.

Viveiros de Castro 2011; Candea 2011a).

48

References

Candea, Matei. 2011a. “Endo/Exo.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 146–50.

Candea, Matei. 2011b. “‘Our division of the universe’: A Space for the Non-

Political in the Anthropology of Politics.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 3:

309–34.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Position paper

for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual

meeting, Chicago.

Scott, Michael W. 2013. “The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious

Science?).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4: 859–

72.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies,

Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 128–

45.

49

The Politics of Modern Politics Meets

Ethnographies of Excess Through

Ontological Openings

by Marisol de la Cadena

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

I want to engage the position paper by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de

Castro (2013) by bringing to the fore an ethnographic moment that proposed

itself as obliging analysis at the crossroads of ontology and modern politics. But

first a comment on the opening line of the position paper: the bed-fellowship

between ontology and modern politics is that of a pair of complementary

opposites. Politics engages change, which its ontological makeup limits. To be

smoothly efficient, they require a third partner: history, explaining it all—

change and limit—and making it “as it should be,” rational and future-oriented.

This, which also explains away the politics of modern politics, can be opened to

critical view by what I (therefore) prefer to imagine as “ontological opening”

rather than “turn.”

Now to the ethnographic moment, briefly, because I have already narrated it

elsewhere (de la Cadena 2010.) The setting was Cuzco (Peru), the year 2006, a

time when neoliberal principles and the demand for minerals in certain parts of

the world exacerbated the translation of nature into resources. The event was

that of a mountain (perhaps replete of gold) that was also an earth-being (or an

earth-being, also a mountain) participating in a political contest where one

reality was more powerful than the other. The human participants in the conflict

were environmentalists, Quechua indigenous-mestizos, and engineers working

for a mining corporation. An alliance between the first two defeated the golden

aspirations of the corporate engineers. The mountain won, the mining company

lost: but to earn this victory, the earth-being was made invisible, its political

presence recalled by the alliance that also defended it.

In addition to political ecology and political economy, the above contest also

transpired in the field of political ontology in two intertwined senses of the

concept: (1) as the field where practices-entities-concepts co-constitute each

50

other, make each other be; (2) as the enactment, within this field, of modern

politics itself, obliging what is and what is not its matter. Yet, ontology was a

subdued partner in the arena of contention: that the mountain was also an

earth-being was an issue made irrelevant as the question unfolded politically.

Modern politics swallowed it, while saving the mountain from being swallowed

by the mining corporation. An ontological opening of modern politics can reveal

the inevitability of this “alliance” as resulting from the specificity of modern

politics.

Modern politics has a politics that is ontologically specific: what/who it includes

or excludes—who can/cannot parley—results from what modern politics

allegedly unquestionably is (and that, by becoming visible in events like the

above, also becomes subject to interrogation). Modern politics is premised on

representation (ideological, scientific, economic, cultural, and perhaps moral),

hence it requires reality out there, usually as facts that can then become

concerns. This is a requirement of modern politics, a condition of what it is, and

how it makes the world one. And while culture can propose matters of concern,

those proposals are not about facts and are therefore weaker as matters of

concern when in tension with those presented by nature. Modern politics

(liberalism and socialism) sustains nature and its facts through confrontations

like the above that include the translation of the earth-being (exceeding nature

and culture) into belief and hence not a political actor/concern—or a weak one.

That in this process the ontological make up of politics—or the politics of

politics—occupies a blind spot guarantees its hegemony. Opening that precise

spot offers the possibility of eventalizing (cf. Foucault) modern politics,

turningits own politics inside out to reveal how its seams, composed of both

situated conditions and universal requirements, enable its uniform imposition,

rather than its inevitable implementation. In this process, the hegemony of

modern politics may be productively disconcerted—to use Helen Verran’s

phrase (2013)—as it is exposed to what it cannot deal with, to what may

constitute its excess.

An ontologically-inflected ethnography may open partial connections with

“excess” if performed at “the limit,” which I conceptualize with R. Guha (2002,

7) as “the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first

51

thing inside which everything is to be found.” A caveat: this nothing is in

relation to what sees itself as everything and thus exceeds it—it is something.

The limit is ontological; establishing it, a political-epistemic practice; beyond it

is excess, a real that is “nothing,” or not-a-thing accessible through culture or

knowledge of nature (as usual). At the limit, ways have to be invented, creating

ontological openings, ethnographic sites to conceptualize otherwise, in partial

connection with difference, which located at this complex site emerges as

radical difference, “Western” or “not.” This may be what the position paper calls

“difference within,” and which I phrase as the project to “de-otherize”

difference, for “other” is how difference emerges and is made understandable

within (or before) the limit, and hence within the same, even if a cosmopolitan

(and tolerant) same, capable of relating from/at home with “the other.”

Invented at the limit, conceived with a deliberately localized and ephemeral

toolkit, a difficult partial connection between “everything” and “nothing,”

conceptualizing radical difference-within politics (for example) is immanent to

ethnographic moments like the above, which travel with difficulty and are

hardly cosmopolitan. Instead, they offer the opportunity for cosmopolitical

concepts that, rather than tolerance, can provoke an irritatingly localized

capacity to provincialize nature and culture, and thus put them into political

symmetry with what is neither (culture or nature.) Thus, ethnographically

inquiring both within the cosmos and the political as usual, cosmopolitical

concepts may propose a radically different (because immanent) notion and

practice of politics capable of offering to that which “politics as usual” has

evicted from its field, the possibility to engage in relationships of symmetric

alliance or symmetric adversarialism and, as important, to emerge as non-

political or excessive to politics as well.

References

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Conceptual Reflections

Beyond 'Politics.'” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2: 334–70.

Guha, Ranajit. 2002. History at the Limits of World History. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

2013. “The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions.” Position paper

52

for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual

meeting, Chicago.

Verran, Helen. 2013. “Engagements between Disparate Knowledge Traditions:

Toward Doing Difference Generatively and in Good Faith.” In Contested

Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, edited by

Lesley Green. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

53

Other Words: Stories from the Social

Studies of Science, Technology, and

Medicine

by Annemarie Mol

This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The term ontology is sexy. These days, in parts of anthropology, it seems able to

promise the possibility of escape, of running ahead, of allowing academic work

to take a rollingavant-garde run. Ontology becomes a term by which to relate

the beauties and pains ofdiffering to that other magic word, politics. By all

means, if it inspires you, run with it. But allow me to tell you some stories.

Story Number One

For a long time, while anthropologists went out (from Cambridge or Rio de

Janeiro) into the rest of the world to study “other cultures,” Nature stayed

behind in the laboratory (in San Diego, Geneva, London) where it was studied

by natural scientists. However, at the very moment that anthropologists who

had gone “elsewhere” were finding that the Others did not necessarily have

“cultures” (or “natures”), natural science laboratories got invaded by their own

brand of ethnographers. And by the time we learned that some Others live

with/in many natures rather than the singular Nature of the natural sciences,

the lab-ethnographers emerged from the lab to say that what went on there had

little to do with finding facts about Nature after all. Instead, it was about such

specificities as purifying ferric chloride, measuring blood levels of thyrotrophin-

releasing hormone, or hunting quarks. Hence, a variety of great divides

(between scientists and primitives; the West and the Rest; culture and nature;

facts and fiction) got more or less simultaneously messed with in various ways.

The overall picture of how ethnographic studies of Others and ethnographic

studies of laboratories relate was never quite drawn. Their various plots do not

fit within a single scheme. There is no overall.

54

Story Number Two

After the lab studies had opened up facts, the clinic, too, looked different. Not

that clinics were into fact-finding: their aim was to improve the health of

patients, but this includes knowledge practices of varied kinds. I have done

hospital fieldwork in the Netherlands since 1979. Here is an example of what

came out of this work in the 1990s. What isanaemia? The textbook says it is a

deviant bodily condition and that there are various methods for knowing it:

listening to a patient’s complaints; observing her body; and measuring the levels

of hemoglobin in her blood. All these methods approach anaemia in their own

way. But do they? My fieldwork suggested otherwise. Rather than approachinga

single object in different ways, each of these methods enacts an object of its

own. In daily clinical practice, a patient’s complaints, the color of her eyelids,

and her hemoglobin level are all real enough, but they do not neatly map onto

each other. The different methods, rather than allowing for different

perspectives on a single (forever elusive) object, follow from, and feed into,

different (more or less painful) events. Other hospital ethnographers found

similar things. We mobilized the term ontology to bring out what was going on

here. In nineteenth-century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a

powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is. For reality, in

the singular. But if each method enacts its own reality, it becomes possible to

put realities, and indeed ontologies, in the plural. It was a delightful, frightful

provocation.

What did it provoke? Putting ontologies in the plural is not relativism. The point

is notthat “it all depends from which side you look at it.” Instead, there is no

longer a singular “it” to look at from different sides. And while putting

ontologies in the plural indicates that reality is more than one, it may still

be less than many. For while the theoretical term, ontologies, is put in the

plural, the medical term, anaemia, is still singular. Our fieldwork showed that in

medical practices a lot of work is done to coordinate between versions of reality.

The politics, here, is not one of otherness. In a first instance, it is about fights;

not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics

of what). However, in a second instance, versions of reality that clash at one

55

point turn out to be interdependent a little further along. Ontologies are not

exclusive. They allow for interferences, partial connections. Sharing practices.

Story Number Three

Time goes on. In the twenty-first century, it appears (in my corner of academia)

that there are many theoretical things that the term ontology cannot do. As

originally this term got coined to designate what is, it was carefully emptied of

what Western philosophy callsnormativity. This means that the value of “what

is” does not form part of its essences, but relates to them as a secondary quality,

an afterthought. And the ideals that take distance from “what is,” the

counterfactuals suggesting “what could be,” do not form a part of ontologies at

all. Thus, while ontology—put in the plural ontologies—helps to shake up mono-

realist singularities, it is ill-suited for talking about many other things. Such as

the ways in which goods and bads are performed in practices, in conjunction

with pleasures, pains, ecstasies, fears, ideals, dreams, passions. Or the various

shapes that processes may take: causal chains; back-and-forth conversations;

tinkering and caring; and so on. And what about theorizing how fingers taste

when allowed to; what drugs afford to bodies and bodies do with drugs; migrant

ambitions and guarded borders in the Mediterranean; garment factories on fire

in Bangladesh; or soy for Dutch pigs being grown in the Amazon? To name just

a few examples. In some cases, it might be wiser (more enlightening, more

generative, more generous, and yes, even more provocative) to play with other

words.

Implicit References

Cussins, Charis. 1996. “Ontological Choreography: Agency through

Objectification in Infertility Clinics.” Social Studies of Science 26, no. 3:

575–610.

Despret, Vinciane. 2004. “The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-

genesis.” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3: 111–34.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature. London: Free Association Books.

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Haraway, Donna.

1997.Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoM

ouse™. London: Routledge.

Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2012. “Anthropology as a Following Science: Humanity

and Sociality in Continuous Variation.” NatureCulture 1, no. 1: 1–24.

Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the

Constructionist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon

Press.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social

Construction of Scientific Facts. New York: Sage.

Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mol, Annemarie. 1998. “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions.”

In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John

Hassard. London: Blackwell.

Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient

Choice. London: Routledge.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. “No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case.” In Nature,

Culture and Gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern,

174–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, Md.: Rowman &

Littlefield.

Viveiros de Castro, Edwardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity

and Divinity in an Amazon society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.