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FIELD SIGHTS: THEORIZING THE CONTEMPORARY

The Politics of Ontology by Morten Axel Pedersen and Martin Holbraad

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 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.

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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.

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 Anthropology 41:481–94.

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.

Page 3 of 44

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

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

politics-of-ontology

The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Axel Pedersen and Martin Holbraad

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 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

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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 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 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

Page 5 of 44

reasonably decent person. Conversely, no amount of anthropological relativism and old-hand

professional skepticism can serve as an excuse for not 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 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

Page 6 of 44

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 political inasmuch 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 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.

Page 7 of 44

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.

Cite as: Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, Pedersen, Morten Axel and Holbraad, Martin. "The Politics of Ontology:

Anthropological Positions." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online,

January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions

Page 8 of 44

What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean by Eduardo Kohn

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 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

Page 9 of 44

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).

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 how this 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.

Cite as: Kohn, Eduardo. "What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean." Fieldsights - Theorizing the

Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/463-

what-an-ontological-anthropology-might-mean

Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance by Peter Skafish

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

Page 10 of 44

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 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.

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

Page 11 of 44

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 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.

Page 12 of 44

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.

Cite as: Skafish, Peter. "Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance." Fieldsights - Theorizing the

Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/464-

anthropological-metaphysics-philosophical-resistance

Geontologies of the Otherwise by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

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. 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

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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.

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.

Page 14 of 44

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

Cite as: Povinelli, Elizabeth A.. "Geontologies of the Otherwise." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary,

Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-

the-otherwise

Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact by Ghassan Hage

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 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,

Page 15 of 44

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 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.

Page 16 of 44

Cite as: Hage, Ghassan. "Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact." Fieldsights -

Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014,

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/473-critical-anthropology-as-a-permanent-state-of-first-contact

The Political Ontology of Doing Difference . . . and Sameness by Mario Blaser

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 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.

Page 17 of 44

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 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.

Cite as: Blaser, Mario. "The Political Ontology of Doing Difference . . . and Sameness." Fieldsights -

Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014,

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/474-the-political-ontology-of-doing-difference-and-sameness

Practical Ontologies by Casper Bruun Jensen

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

Page 18 of 44

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 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.

Page 19 of 44

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.

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.

Page 20 of 44

Cite as: Jensen, Casper Bruun. "Practical Ontologies." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural

Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/466-practical-ontologies

Equal Time for Entities by Michael W. Scott

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 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

Page 21 of 44

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 radical or 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 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.” In Deleuzian 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.

Cite as: Scott, Michael W.. "Equal Time for Entities." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural

Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/467-equal-time-for-entities

Page 22 of 44

Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison as Ontology by Helen Verran

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 in Science and an African Logic (2001). I

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

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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.

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.

Cite: Verran, Helen. "Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison as Ontology." Fieldsights - Theorizing the

Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/468-

anthropology-as-ontology-is-comparison-as-ontology

Onto-Methodology by Tony Crook

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.

Page 24 of 44

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 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:

Page 25 of 44

(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.

Cite as: Crook, Tony. "Onto-Methodology." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural

Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/475-onto-methodology

Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics of Materiality by Benjamin Alberti

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

Page 26 of 44

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 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.

Page 27 of 44

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 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 for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association

annual meeting, Chicago.

Lucas, Gavin. 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cite as: lberti, Benjamin. "Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics of Materiality." Fieldsights - Theorizing the

Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/476-

archaeology-risk-and-the-alter-politics-of-materiality

The Ontology of the Political Turn by Matei Candea

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

Page 28 of 44

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 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

Page 29 of 44

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 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).

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.

Page 30 of 44

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.

Cite as: Candea, Matei. "The Ontology of the Political Turn." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary,

Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/469-the-ontology-of-

the-political-turn

The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through

Ontological Openings by Marisol de la Cadena

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 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),

Page 31 of 44

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,

turning its 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 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.

Page 32 of 44

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. 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.

Cite as: de la Cadena, Marisol . "The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through

Ontological Openings." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January

13, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/471-the-politics-of-modern-politics-meets-ethnographies-of-

excess-through-ontological-openings

Other Words: Stories from the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and

Medicine by Annemarie Mol

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 rolling avant-garde

run. Ontology becomes a term by which to relate the beauties and pains of differing 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.

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 is anaemia? The textbook says it is a

deviant bodily condition and that there are various methods for knowing it: listening to a patient’s

Page 33 of 44

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 approaching a 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 not that “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 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 calls normativity. 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.

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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.

Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™. 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.

Cite as: Mol, Annemarie. "Other Words: Stories from the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and

Medicine." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014,

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/472-other-words-stories-from-the-social-studies-of-science-technology-

and-medicine

“Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise: The View From Technology by Rafael Antunes Almeida and Debbora Battaglia

Recent thinking on the politics of ontology (Holbraad, et. al. 2013) invites commentary on the

ontological sensibility of what Povinelli calls “an anthropology of the otherwise” (Povinelli 2011). In

this paper, we are concerned to bring the domain of technology into the discussion,

foregrounding possible implications of its impact on the “new turn” in political world-making

discourse.

Page 35 of 44

Overall, a politics of ontology recognizes the multiplicity of modes of existence and concretely

enacted relations. This approach carries with it a commitment to a transfigurative ethnographic

practice and “experimenting with the conceptual affordances present in a given body of

materials.” In other words, the idea is to take native claims and experiment with them. The political

axis here is about enabling difference to flourish against the coercive powers of sameness. In the

authors’ words, “Domination is a matter of holding the capacity of difference under control”

(Holbraad, et. al. 2013).

So where do we look for models that can appreciate that dimension of the project amenable to

techniques of diplomacy—an artisanal zone of exchange that creates a value for non-stable

design visions (Corsín Jiménez 2013; During 2002; Escobar 2012)? Where do we look to re-imagine

mutual “apparatuses of welcoming” (Derrida 2002) that operate in conditions of technologically

asymmetrical power relations? Or else to re-imagine modalities of resistance: contaminants to

both beautiful and unbeautiful ontologies (cf. Jensen 2014; de la Cadena 2010)? Leenhardt’s (1979)

classic description of conceptual and material tools deployed by Kanak in their dealings with

colonizers exemplifies both. But things get further complicated when discussion turns to inter-

species, human–machine relations, and alien otherwises and lifeworlds as we don’t yet know them.

By this route, we are positioned to invoke the idea of the onto-dispositif. The concept allies with

Law and Evelyn’s (2013) notion of devices that create their own heterogeneous arrangements for

relating, with the difference that it is a sensibility-engendering rather than an analytic device.

Further, the onto-dispositif creates its own heterogeneous exchange protensions—prospecting for

its own possible worlds and opening to things like Mars rovers and growing bioart sculptures

alongside experiments on earthlings as understood by E.T./UFO believers (Antunes Almeida 2012;

Battaglia 2006; Lepselter 2005), or more prosaically, mining machinery and A.I. “robots” studying

our commercial preferences.

All these operations create space for intercession in recombinant worlding, whereby different

onto-dispositifs can have different ways of relating—and different onto-politics. The issue is not

other peoples’ anthropologies, but the possibilities for an anthropology of appreciating actions

like hacking as a mode of relating for humans or nonhumans alike. Jensen (2014) alerts us to

ethnography that “begins to look like small machines for intervening in this or that part of the

world.” But “small machines” exist that intervene without regard for subject–object distinctions

beyond their own interests: Google sampling “robots” only care about subjectivity in algorithmic

terms. Cross-species anthropology gets into the same subject–object issues differently: Should a

mammal who climbs a human to better scan a far horizon be conscripted into a project that turns

on the value of “affection” (Candea 2010)?

Not always, but in some cases, yes—as Sá (2013) describes for the intersubjective relations

between Muriquis and primatologists. Or has the ethnographer become primates’ “new

technologies”? Google or our E.T. experimenters are taking us as resources, as in nonextractive

ways mammals do (the meerkat in the image below), repurposing us to their goals—exposing our

hackability.

That sites and operations of dominance are invariably of human design is no longer a given. Our

appellations must be parsed more finely, our ears attuned to who or what is engendering value

Page 36 of 44

hierarchies, the sina qua non for any dominance to be understood as such—that is, as an

undervaluation of something else within its particular ontological sensibility, or beyond it.

Our work, then, is to ask which devices and strategies are useful for crafting a diplomacy adequate

to engage “the powers that be.” Onto-dispositifs that can create an interest in slowing down

(Battaglia 2013), or in post-cyborgian “transaffection” (Haraway 2003), are cases in point for

worlding in a new key. And here is what such a diplomacy might sound like, courtesy of Stefan

Helmreich (see video below).

Reference List

Antunes Almeida, Rafael. 2012. “Do Conhecimento Tácito à Noção de Skill, ou Como Saber o Que é um

Disco Voador.” Paper Presented at IX Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Estudios Sociales de La Ciencia y de la

tecnología, México, Esocite.

Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 2006. E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Durham, N.C.: Duke University

Press.

Battaglia, Debbora. 2013. “Cosmic Exo-Surprise, or When the Sky is (Really) Falling, What’s the Media to

Do?” e-flux 46.

Candea, Matei. 2010. “I Fell in Love With Carlos the Meerkat: Engagement and Detachment in Human-

Animal Relations.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2: 241–58.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2013. “Introduction: The Prototype: More Than Many and Less Than One.” In

“Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science and Politics in Beta,” ed. Alberto Corsín Jiménez. Special issue, Journal of

Cultural Economy. Published electronically December 3.

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

Politics.” Cultural Anthropology, 25, no 2: 334–70.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Hospitality.” In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 358–420. New York:

Routledge.

During, Élie. 2002. “From Project to Prototype (Or How to Avoid Making a Work).” In Panorama 3: Living

Prototypes, 17–29. Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains.

Escobar, Arturo. 2012. “Notes on the Ontology of Design.” Paper presented at the Sawyer Seminar,

Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues about the Reconstitution of Worlds, organized by Marisol de La

Cadena and Mario Blaser, October 30. University of California, Davis.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness.

Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. “The Politics of Ontology:

Anthropological Positions.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Jensen, Casper Brunn. 2014. “Practical Ontologies.” Theorizing the contemporary, Cultural Anthropology

website, January 13.

Page 37 of 44

Law, John, and Evelyn Ruppert. 2013. “The Social Life of Methods: Devices.” Journal of Cultural Economy 6,

no. 3: 229–40.

Leenhardt, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Lepselter, Susan. 2005. “The Flight of the Ordinary: Narratives, Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American

Uncanny.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.

Pedersen, Axel Morten. 2012. “Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Reviews of the Ontological Turn.”

Anthropology of This Century, no. 5.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011.“Routes/Worlds.” e-flux, September 27.

Sá, Guilherme J. S. 2013. No Mesmo Galho: Antropologia de Coletivos Humanos e Animais. Rio de Janeiro: 7

Letras.

Cite as: Almeida, Rafael Antunes and Battaglia, Debbora. "“Otherwise Anthropology” Otherwise: The View

From Technology." Fieldsights - Commentary, Cultural Anthropology Online, February 24, 2014,

http://culanth.org/fieldsights/493-otherwise-anthropology-otherwise-the-view-from-technology

The Ontological Spin by David Bond and Lucas Bessire

The latest salvation of anthropology, we are told, lies in the so-called ontological turn. By all

accounts, it is a powerful vision (Sahlins 2013). The ontological turn is exciting in two ways: First, it

offers a way to synthesize and valorize the discipline’s fractured post-humanist avant-garde

(Descola 2013; Kohn 2013). Second, it shifts the progressive orientation in anthropology from the

critique of present problems to the building of better futures (Latour 2013; Holbraad, Pederson,

and Viveiros de Castro 2014; cf. White 2013). In both, the turn to ontology suggests that the work

of anthropology has really just begun.

At the risk of oversimplifying a diverse body of research, here we ask how the ontological turn

works as a problematic form of speculative futurism. While the symmetrical future it conjures up is

smart, the turbulent present it holds at bay is something we would still like to know more about.

Our skepticism derives from our respective fieldwork on the co-creation of indigenous alterity and

on how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized. In both of these sites, we have

documented dynamics that elude and unsettle the ontological script. Much, we would argue, is

missed. We are troubled at how ontological anthropology defers thorny questions of historical

specificity, the social afterlives of anthropological knowledge, and the kinds of difference that are

allowed to matter. We are also concerned by the ultimate habitability of the worlds it conjures. Or

consider nature and culture. In many places today, nature and culture matter not as the crumbling

bastions of a modern cosmology (e.g., Latour 2002; Blaser 2009) but as hardening matrices for

sorting out what forms of life must be defended from present contingencies and what must be set

adrift. That is, nature and culture matter not as flawed epistemologies but as dispersed political

technologies.

Page 38 of 44

Ontological anthropology is fundamentally a story about the Amazonian primitive. It rests on the

recent discovery of a non-modern “multinaturalist” ontology within indigenous myths (Viveiros de

Castro 1998). Yet, as Terry Turner (2009) shows, the figure of this “Amerindian cosmology” is

based on ethnographic misrepresentation. Kayapó myths, for instance, do not collapse

nature/culture divides. Rather, the “whole point” is to describe how animals and humans became

fully differentiated from one another, with one key twist: humanity is defined not as a collection of

traits but as the capacity to objectify the process of objectification itself. In such ways, the

attribution of this hyper-real cosmology paradoxically reifies the very terms of the nature/culture

binary it is invoked to disprove.

At the very least, this means that ontological anthropology cannot account for those actually

existing forms of indigenous worlding that mimetically engage modern binaries as meaningful

coordinates for self-fashioning (Taussig 1987; Abercrombie 1998). This is certainly true in the case

of recently-contacted Ayoreo-speaking peoples in the Gran Chaco. Ayoreo projects of becoming

are not a cosmology against the state, but a set of moral responses to the nonsensical contexts of

colonial violence, soul-collecting missionaries, radio sound, humanitarian NGOs, neoliberal

economic policies, and rampant ecological devastation (Bessire 2014). Only by erasing these

conditions could a “non-interiorizable” multinaturalist exteriority be identified. Doesn’t this suggest

that ontological anthropology is predicated on homogenizing and standardizing the very

multiplicity it claims to decolonize? What does it mean if ontological anthropology, in its

eagerness to avoid the overdetermined dualism of nature/culture, reifies the most modern binary

of all: the radical incommensurability of modern and non-modern worlds?

Charged with getting nature wrong, modernity is rejected out of hand in the ontological turn.

While the West mistook Nature for an underlying architecture, indigenous people have long

realized a more fundamental truth: the natural world is legion and lively. Yet this supposed

distinction between modernity (mononaturalism) and the rest (multinaturalism) seems strangely

illiterate of more nuanced accounts of the natural world within capitalist modernity (Williams 1980;

Mintz 1986; Mitchell 2002). Attributing the pacification of nature’s vitality to the modern episteme

neglects how colonial plantations, industrial farms and factories, national environmental policies,

biotechnology companies, and disaster response teams have attempted, in creative and coercive

ways, to manage the dispersed agencies of the natural world. The easy dismissal of modernity as

mononaturalism disregards the long list of ways that particular format never really mattered in the

more consequential makings of our present.

It is all the more ironic, then, that ontological anthropology uses climate change to spur a

conversion away from the epistemic cage of modernity. We would do well to remember that, in

the most concrete sense, modernity did not disrupt our planet’s climate, hydrocarbons did. Such

fixation on modernity misses the far more complicated and consequential materiality of fossil fuels

(Bond 2013). In the momentum they enable and in the toxicity they enact, hydrocarbons naturalize

differences in new ways. Such petro-effects amplify existing fault lines not only in industrial cities

but also in the premier fieldsites of ontological anthropology: the supposedly pristine hinterlands.

In the boreal forests of the northern Alberta or in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin or in the

snowy expanses of the arctic or in the dusty forests of the Gran Chaco, the many afterlives of

hydrocarbons are giving rise to contorted landscapes, cancerous bodies, and mutated ecologies.

Such problems form a “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that the spirited naturalism of ontological

anthropology cannot register let alone resist.

Page 39 of 44

These observations lead us to formulate the following three theses:

First, the ontological turn replaces an ethnography of the actual with a sociology of the possible.

Second, the ontological turn reifies the wreckage of various histories as the forms of the

philosophic present, insofar as it imagines colonial and ethnological legacies as the perfect kind of

village for forward thinking philosophy.

Finally, the ontological turn formats life for new kinds of rule premised on a narrowing of

legitimate concern and a widening of acceptable disregard, wherein the alter-modern worlds

discovered by elite scholars provides redemptive inhabitation for the privileged few, while the

global masses confront increasingly sharp forms and active processes of inequality and

marginalization (Beck 1992; Harvey 2005; Appadurai 2006; Wacquant 2009; Stoler 2010; Agier

2011; Fassin 2012).

In conclusion, we argue that it is misleading to suggest anthropology must choose between the

oppressive dreariness of monolithic modernity or the fanciful elisions of the civilization to come.

Both options leave us flat-footed and ill-equipped to deal with the conditions of actuality in our

troubled present (Fischer 2013; Fortun 2013). Instead, we insist on a shared world of unevenly

distributed problems. This is a world of unstable and rotational temporalities, of semiotic and

material ruptures, of unruly things falling apart and being reassembled. It is a world composed of

potentialities but also contingencies, of becoming but also violence, wherein immanence is never

innocent of itself (Biehl 2005; Martin 2009). In this world, we ask how the wholesale retreat to the

ideal future may discard the most potent mode of anthropological critique; one resolutely in our

present but not necessarily confined to it.

[This is a distilled version of a longer critical essay.]

References

Abercrombie, Tom. 1998. Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean

People. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, N.C.: Duke

University Press.

Agier, Michel. 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government.

Cambridge: Polity.

Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage.

Bessire, Lucas. 2014. Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Biehl, João. 2005. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Blaser, Mario. 2009. “Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without Culture?” Cultural Studies 23, nos. 5–6:

873–96.

Bond, David. 2013. “Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment During the BP Oil Spill.”

Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 694–715.

Page 40 of 44

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. 2013. “Double-Click: the Fables and Language Games of Latour and Descola; Or, From

Humanity as Technological Detour to the Peopling of Technologies.” Paper presented at the American

Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

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Cite as: Bond, David and Bessire, Lucas. "The Ontological Spin." Fieldsights - Commentary, Cultural

Anthropology Online, February 28, 2014, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/494-the-ontological-spin

The Form of the Otherwise by Emily Yates-Doerr

A quiet question was raised at the end of the “The Politics of Ontology” roundtable about where

writing fit in the discussion. The absence of the topic was noticeable given that much thinking on

ontologies has grappled with how this shared practice of ours, the graphy of ethnos, transforms

realities. After the turn past representation, past translation, past alterity dependent on binary logic

and analysis that treats differences as equivalents; after we have shown ontology to be multiple,

there are still stories to be told. I wonder if others following the conversation as it has developed

share my concern that for all the productive turns (yours, theirs, the ones we take together), so

many of the stories we write are still used for waging wars.

I wanted to jump in, angrily, and ask of the recent discussion, What about our ancestors, the

feminists, barely acknowledged, who have been writing about this for decades? Javier Lezaun has

an excellent piece on Somatosphere in which he makes the case that the history of science and

technology studies can be read as a turn to ontologies—even if few have adopted the word. I

would add that many anthropologists have also grappled with the multiplicity of nature and the

failures of holism for quite some time. In this brilliant, difficult scholarship, ontologies are not a

recent discovery but a matter intensely reworked, with sundry conclusions, for decades. In contrast

to previous posts, my version of what we might call ontological anthropology does not

fundamentally pertain to the Amazonian primitive (see, in addition to Helen Verran, Annemarie

Mol, Elizabeth Povenelli, Marisol de la Cadena, and Matei Candea—who each have essays in “The

Politics of Ontology” series—Marilyn Strathern, Tom Abercrombie, Lys Alcayna-Stevens, Andrea

Ballestero, Filippo Bertoni, Tim Choy, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kim Fortun, Cori Hayden, Ann Kelly,

Marianne Lien, Emily Martin, Atsuro Morita, Michelle Murphy, Fred Myers, Natasha Myers, Stacy

Pigg, Rayna Rapp, Annelise Riles, Kim TallBear, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Anna Tsing, Charis

Thompson, Emilia Sanabria, Karen Skyes, Paige West, and many many more). This ontological

anthropology does not fundamentally pertain to any one region in the world out there. It does

not fundamentally pertain to a singular thing; as with the world, it is neither singular nor shared.

But it does engage with the question of how to disagree.

So instead of staying angry, I went to these ancestors, to their stories. Ursula Le Guin tells a

beautiful one of the seed container, and how, for all the tales of violence—kicking, bashing,

thrusting, killing, “blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents”—this container has been busy

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changing worlds. It is variously formed (bottles, baskets, woven nets, wombs, books, the list goes

on). The materials used must be attended to, since these influence what it can hold and the

possibilities, the worlds, it can bring about. This is not incidental to writing. She warns us that it is

difficult to write in a gripping way about seed containers. It is not impossible—she is clear on

this—but it might mean being slow with our stories, giving them room for people and objects

instead of battles and heroes.

Le Guin wrote this before the time of blogs, before the visible shares and likes of social media, but

I hear in her words a warning that telling gripping stories of seed containers might not be possible

in the length offered here: one-thousand words—a bit more if you push it—and then the short

attention span of the comment. So next to the question already asked about how to write

ontologies, I’ll add one more about reading: What happens when we spend our attention and our

anger among quick bloodshed and bold heroes? Much may be gained from this way of ordering

reality: from audience to passion. Anger can be a generative thing. (There is also no way to ask

this question without hypocrisy; yes, I have been reading and following this discussion). But I worry

that we miss out on the gripping but less obviously heroic stories—and the pasts and futures they

carry with them. This is a disciplinary question and an ontological question: what kind of otherwise

are we forming here?

Cite as: Yates-Doerr, Emily. "The Form of the Otherwise." Fieldsights - Commentary, Cultural Anthropology

Online, March 26, 2014, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/515-the-form-of-the-otherwise

Field of Difference: Limitations of the Political in Ontological Anthropology by Ender Ricart

Ontological anthropologists have moved beyond reflexive anthropology because they are fully

aware and intentionally involved in choosing which analytic they use and apply, which directly

related to and critically affects what they will be able to see and explore in the field. An analytic is

not unlike a visual illusion or ambiguous image: to borrow from Wittgenstein’s example, both a

duck and a rabbit can be seen, but always one or the other, never both at the same time. This is

not to say that the ontological anthropologist arbitrarily chooses which analytic to employ. There

is a dialogue, a mutual exchange, between the analyzer and the analyzed, which leads some

analytics to be more suited than others for particular situations. The ontological anthropologist

recognizes that, whichever analytical lens is assumed will, in turn, release certain kinds of shapes

and forces in our field of analysis (thinking along lines with Heidegger’s Gestell). This is why politics

and ontology should not be conflated into a politics of ontology, because the political is but one

ontology among many, and one ontological analytic that may be suited to some situations but

not others.

Like Kantian mental precepts, our ontology is the time-space orientation through which we

perceive the world. Thus, if we merge politics with the ontological analytic to form a politically

inclined ontologist, we deprive ontological anthropology of its full potential. We impose on

ontological anthropology a secondary ontology, the ontology of political analysis—its precepts,

questions, and understandings of how the world works and moves (for example, power moves

over a field of difference). Politics is as a matter of difference and control of difference (see

Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014). This understanding of “difference” and “control”

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is situated within a larger ontological understanding that there are already established “things” in

the world that can differ and be controlled. There are discrete things that come into relation with

one another, forming between them or across their borders an exchange or compromise of some

sort (see, for example, studies that revolve around the relationship between subject–government,

self–society, mind–body, nature–culture, analyzer–analyzed, and colonizer–colonized). The

worldview that political analysis assumes, then, is a give-and-take relation: power exchanges

between two or more defined spheres, communicated across various bridges of relations (the

body, technology, language, even Serres’s “noise”) that, however unfaithfully, transmit a force or a

message that either initiates change or elicits a response from the “other.”

Political analysis, and arguably even actor-network theory, engages in analysis at this level of

individuation—when differentiation has already firmly established discrete and distinct parts or

things with likewise discrete and distinct functions and relationships that exhibit a measurable level

of stability over time and space. It is at this level of differentiation that identifiable “things” can be

picked out and their relationship with other self-differentiating “things” can likewise be isolated

and studied. Thus, the focus of political analysis is on the relationship (network) between different

things (actors) and the forces of change that move across these bridges of relation.

I refer to already relatively stable and well-established collectives of discrete and distinct parts that

have resolved conflict to a level of functional coherence as a “field of difference.” It might

additionally be considered an established ontology, an established ordering of things. Political

analysis is suited to the study of already established fields of difference, where identifiable parts

have established a relatively stable and sustained series of relationships of exchange. However,

when a field of difference is just starting to take form, that is, when its parts are not yet discrete

“things” in and of themselves, when it has not yet concretized into a unified meta-stable whole,

political analysis may not be the best ontology to apply because it may reify certain parts and

relations that are not yet isolatable.

Ontogenesis (see Simondon 1980, 1992; Mackenzie 2002; Combes 2012; Lamarre 2012; and Ricart

2013), however, is another possible analytic. It focuses closely on the processes involved in the

becoming of a new and emerging field of difference, that is, the process of differentiation of its

parts. If a field of difference is an individuated and concretized ontology—a worldview and

understanding of how the world works, its parts, their functions, and the ordering of things—then

ontogenesis as an analytic focuses on the structuring of new pathways of action and affect, and

the differentiation of a field’s parts. An inchoate field of difference is recognizable by a high

degree of background commonality rather than a high degree of relations between differentiated

parts. This common background can also be thought of as the “field of sameness.” In an emerging

field, a background of sameness is readily observable and intact because the parts have not yet

specialized or differentiated to create a field of difference. The field of difference, which has

hitherto formed the cornerstone of much critical social scientific research, namely the political, can

only exist because there is a simultaneous field of sameness that forms the background on which

parts can differentiate and continue to presence themselves as distinct from an “other.” This

theorization returns to the primacy of the universal discussed by Hegel, together with Heidegger’s

presencing. It follows that in order for there to be differentiation, perception, thesis and antithesis,

there must be a simultaneity of space and time that sustains and supports the presencing of

difference. The field of sameness never fully disappears but tends to recede into the background,

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becoming less and less observable as its different parts come to attention, developing distinct and

discrete functions and identities.

To conclude, politics should not be conflated with ontology to form the “politics of ontology”

because politics and political analysis are ontologies. They have distinct origins, with distinct

understandings of how the world works, and distinct orderings of things. Ontological

anthropology can exercise political analysis and attend to politics when suitable: but it behooves

us as ontological anthropologist to recognize that in choosing a political lens, it biases our field of

observation and analytical trajectory, limiting it to sets of terms and problematics laid out by the

ontology of the analytic being employed. As a member of what Matei Candea terms the “second

generation” of ontological anthropologists, I am in search of an ontology that allows me to study

the emergence of a new field of difference where the parts are not fully distinguished or

disentangled from the field of sameness. Because of this, a politically inclined ontological analysis

would not be suitable, but analytics like ontogenesis might be. With ontological anthropology, we

are now aware of our ability to choose and create ontological lens of analysis suitable for our field.

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Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2014. “The Politics of Ontology:

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Lamarre, Thomas. 2012. “Afterword. Humans and Machines.” In Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the

Transindividual, 79–108. Translated by Thomas Lamarre. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Mackenzie, Adrian. 2002. Transduction: Bodies and Machines at Speed. New York: Continuum.

Ricart, Ender. 2013. “From Being to Ontogenetic Becoming: Commentary on Analytics of the Aging Body.”

Special issue, “The Body,” Anthropology and Aging Quarterly 34, no. 3: 52–60.

Simondon, Gilbert. 1980 (1958). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects: Part 1. Translated by Ninian

Mellamphy. Ontario: University of Ontario.

Simondon, Gilbert.1992 (1964). “The Genesis of the Individual.” Zone 6: Incorporations, edited by Jonathon

Crary and Sanford Kwinter, 297–317. Translated by Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone

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Cite as: Ricart, Ender. "Field of Difference: Limitations of the Political in Ontological Anthropology."

Fieldsights - Commentary, Cultural Anthropology Online, April 22, 2014,

http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/524-field-of-difference-limitations-of-the-political-in-ontological-

anthropology