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The ontological turn broadly relates to a development in a number of philosophical and academic disciplines that led to an increased focus on being. The ontological turn in anthropology is not concerned with anthropological notions of culture, epistemology, nor world views.[1] Instead, the ontological turn generates interest in being in the world and accepts that different world views are not simply different representations of the same world. More specifically, the ontological turn refers to a change in theoretical orientation according to which difference are understood not in terms of a difference in world views, but a differences in worlds[1] and all of these worlds are of equal validity.

Definitions

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The term 'ontologia' itself first appeared in 1606 in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, a German philosopher.[2][3][4] Ontology can be broadly defined as the study of reality as constructed in both human and non-human worlds.[5] Conversely, ontology has also been understood as a process of "becoming".[6] Finally, ontology has also been defined as the set of historical circumstances through which individuals comprehend reality. However, this last definition in particular has garnered significant critics due to its similarity to definitions of culture.[7]

Philosophical influence

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The field of ontology corresponds to the philosophical study of being.[8] This focus on being, draws on Martin Heidegger's insights into the specific nature of what it means to "be" in the world. Heidegger's theorizing on the fundamental nature of being drew on ontological ideals that emerged from the traditions of the Platonic school.[9] In this view, the mind or the experience of being a human, does not refer to a singular entity.[citation needed] Instead, the mind refers to a collection of events, life events, or material objects an individual experiences. Thus, ontology relates the experience of being in the world. Further, interest in ontology is associated with a greater understanding of existence, reality, becoming, and how these concepts relate to broad categories of entities.[10]

Development

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Within the field of anthropology, ontological ideas first began emerging around the 1990s. However, the first influence of ontological understandings within anthropology emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.[11] Following these initial deliberations, the ontological turn took hold of British anthropology. From there, North American anthropologists began considering how ontology might be useful in ethnographic research. The application of ontological frameworks really gained popularity following 2010[citation needed] and were brought to national anthropological attention at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago,[12] where ontology became the focus of several sessions there.[13][5] After the conference one of the oldest and prominent[14] anthropology blog, Savage Minds, declared ontology to be "the next big thing"[15] in anthropological theory. This burgeoning interest in ontology spawned a number of articles that highlighted the usefulness of ontological premises in anthropological research.[16][17][18][19]

Ontology in anthropology

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The concept of ontology and what people mean by ontology is diverse; therefore, tracing the ontological turn in anthropology remains difficult. However, if ontology refers to the study of reality then ontological anthropology incorporates theoretical and methodological elements of anthropology to a study of being or existence.[20] Ethnographies are the most widely utilized method in anthropological research.[21] While, in a theoretical sense, anthropology has contributed greatly to the concept of culture. These two elements in anthropology have broadened philosophical notions of ontology so that ontological anthropology is not simply about the world; rather, it is about the experience of being a human in the world.[5] Moreover, ontological anthropology is explicitly concerned with how humans communicate and interact with a host of non-human actors.[22] For example, as a trained biologist turned anthropologist, Donna Haraway insists on including other beings, both human and non-human, in her accounts of living with pets.[23] Finally, ontological anthropology is not claiming that individuals or communities are living in distinct universes and by crossing into a different setting you are suddenly in a different reality.[1] Instead, ontological anthropologists are claiming that we "should allow difference or alterity to challenge our understanding of the very categories of nature and culture themselves".[24]

Turns in anthropology

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Anthropology as a field has experienced a number of turns in its history, including the linguistic turn, the reflexive turn, the temporal turn, the affective turn, the literary turn, and the post-human turn.[citation needed] The ontological turn presents differences in cultural phenomena not as different interpretations of a singular, natural world. Rather, the ontological turn in anthropology suggests that there are alternate realities and other ways of beings that exist in parallel with our own. The proponents of this movement claim that this way of framing cultural difference is the first attempt anthropologists have made in taking the beliefs of their interlocutors "seriously" or "literally".[25] Critics of the ontological turn argue that claims of different worlds tend towards essentialism.

Narrow turn towards ontology

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The works of French authors Philippe Descola[26][27] and Bruno Latour,[28] and Brazilian author Eduardo Viveiros de Castro[29] gravitated towards what has been termed "a narrow ontological turn".[5] This narrow ontological turn produced much concern and curiosity within North American anthropology.

Descola's beyond nature

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Philippe Descola in his work among the Amazonian Achuar suggested that the category of nature is not a human universal and therefore, should not be considered a line of anthropological inquiry.[26][30][31] The domain of "nature", Descola argues has emerged from modern, Western notions that intend to posit "nature" as ontologically real. Instead, Descola claims that "Other civilizations have devised different ways of detecting qualities among existents, resulting in other forms of organizing continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, of aggregating beings in collectives, of defining who or what is capable of agency and knowledge".[31] Meaning Descola treats animism not as some sort of mistaken belief, but as an extension of social relationality to nonhuman actors. In this sense, Descola utilizes ontology as an elementary analytical tool to explore how worlds are constructed in a manner that is distinct from the way anthropologists generally discuss worldviews. Descola proposes that anthropology can utilize ontological frameworks to best account for how worlds are composed.[31]

Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism

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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro utilizes a framework perspectivism in his synthesis of Amazonian ethnographic literature.[32] His discussion of Amazonian understandings takes into account how perspectives of human versus nonhuman are not inherently different. Viveiros de Castro's reflections on perspectivism lead him to conclude that we are dealing with a perspective that is fundamentally different from those which inform Western academic thought. Viveiros de Castro's approach inherently takes an ontological approach that "allows him to see more clearly the ways in which anthropology is founded on a nature/culture divide that posits nature as a sort of universal, unitary, and existent ground and culture as the infinitely variable form of representing nature."[5]

Latour's modes of existence

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Sociologist Bruno Latour argues that researchers should not sort entities into the "social" world and the "natural" world. Latour argues that instead of predetermining what things are deemed as part of society and what things are deemed as part of nature, social scientists should view these categories as complex negotiations between people and their world.[33] This resistance to the division between the social and natural is integral to ontological anthropology.

Political Ontology

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Political Ontology is specifically concerned with the process of how practices, entities (human and non-human), and concepts come into being or are enacted [34], and therefore how what is real is always in a process of contention[35]. Political Ontology is not concerned with presenting what is real as the more accurate understanding of what is there as a meta-ontological narrative. On the contrary, it is concerned with the possibilities of claiming what is there[34]. In this sense, political ontology is not concerned with what is the ultimate reality, instead is invested in making visible the multiplicity of ontologies or worlds[36]. It is important to clarify that political ontology is not concerned with independent realities, but it is interested in reality-making with the enacting of the worlds through practice[36][37][38].

Political Ontology recognizes that the division between Nature and Culture is constitutive of the modern ontology, but this ontology cannot be taken for granted as a universal division[39]. According to this, political ontology does not assume that there is a single world and that the multiplicity of differences are just cultural. On the contrary, political ontology takes those differences as different ways in which worlds are enacted. These differences between "what is real" are interrelated with the power dynamics that reproduce modern ontology as the dominant and Indigenous ontologies as cultural differences [39]. In this sense, political ontology is concerned with the negotiations and conflicts between worlds and how these worlds exist and interact with each other[39]. In other words, political ontology is concerned with the power dynamics that emerge from recognizing the notion of multiple ontologies[37][40][41].

Political Ontology offers a framework to understand the emergence of multiple ontologies through the concept of the pluriverse[34][37]. According to Blaser, the “pluriverse constituted by intra-acting worldings that share partial connections. Thus, while worldings are co-emergent, they do not share an overarching principle that would make their entanglement a universe. Rather their partial connections often constitute the sites in which it is possible to discern how what is brought into existence by certain worlding might interfere and conflict with what is brought into existence by another''[34]. The key proposition of the pluriverse is that there is not an overarching principle that makes the multiplicities of ontologies into one single universe.

The power dynamic that political ontology makes visible is the way in which modern and non-modern worldings are enacted and interact with each other. It is relevant to distinguish how modern ontology constantly recognizes differences as cultural variations of the same world suppressing the possibility of the enactment of other worlds [36] [40]. The understanding of difference as culture privilege the understanding of a one-world reality that is “not clouded by culture (with lowercase c), and this access is premised precisely on recognizing the ontological difference between what is Culture and what is nature: a distinction that other cultures do not have”[34]. In this sense cultural differences as multiculturalism function as a way to ensure that the performance of other worlds does not contest the modern one-world ontology[42][39].

“The importance that protecting the unity of reality “out there” has for the modern ontology becomes evident if one considers that the consequence of accepting the existence of multiple ontologies or worlds would be the end of the “Internal Great Divide” between culture and nature and therefore of the fundamental characteristic that differentiates (and supposedly makes superior) the moderns in relation to the “others”[39]

The power move of political ontology is to take seriously the differences as ways of enacting the world and to show the limits that modern ontology has to grasp with other worlds [36][43]. Political ontology aims to recuperate radical difference as a way to escape the all-encompassing modernity[34]. Radical difference is a relational condition that emerges from the enactment of equivocal worlds[35] that is to say that non-modern enactments exceed modern categories of understanding[39]. This does not mean that the process of enacting worlds implies coherence and purity, to enact a world implies the connections to other worlds but these connections do not revoke the radical differences.

Political Ontology shows how reality is enacted as equivocal or as a “communicative disjuncture that takes place, not between those who share a common world but rather those whose worlds or ontologies are different”[39]. This communicative disjuncture usually occurs when an ontology or world is presupposed as universal. Because then the differences between “what is there” are based on knowledge or culture and not based on different enactments of worlds. These misunderstandings between modern and non-modern ontologies show how what is constructed as a fact within a worlding is an entanglement of the performativity of objectivity and subjectivity as well as of morality and politics[40].

One of the critics of political ontology is that the enactment of worldings seems to be invariable. The notion of non-modern ontologies as static reinstates the Eurocentric tendency to define non-modern as an image of the modern. Therefore, the changes can only come from the outside of the non-modern that is to say from the modern world[40]. There is also another assumption that is relevant to unstate that is based on the notion that non-modern is better in terms of societies that are egalitarian or non-hierarchical. This is another assumption that reinstates non-moderns as the past of modern societies[39]. In this sense, it is important to think about the enactment of worldings as Blaser quotes from a teacher and mentor Yshiro:

“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 and 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”[42].

Reception

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Haidy Geismar, one of the critics of ontological anthropology, has claimed that in presenting others not as having different cultures, but in having different worlds, is just a novel form of essentialism.[44][45] Further, many critics of ontological anthropology have demonstrated that this framework does not take difference as seriously as it claims to. Specifically, Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish have brought attention to the fact that many ontological anthropologists have drawn similar conclusions to anthropologists not using ontological frameworks, while also utilizing much of the same theoretical bases in their arguments.[46][1][47] However, the ontologists have responded that many of these critiques are merely attempts to reproduce the status quo.[48] In response to turn towards ontology a Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory's debate was held on 9 February 2008 in Manchester, on the motion 'Ontology is just another word for culture'.[49] Speaking for the motion were Michael Carrithers (Durham) and Matei Candea (Cambridge), and against Karen Sykes (Manchester) and Martin Holbraad (University College London). The final vote - 19 in favour, 39 against and six abstentions - reflected a general consensus that between culture and ontology, ontology might have something to contribute.[49] Marshall Sahlins in the forward to Beyond Nature and Culture, echos this consensus in his claim that ontology "offers a radical change in the current anthropological trajectory—a paradigm shift if you will—that would overcome the present analytic disarray by what amounts to a planetary table of the ontological elements and the compounds they produce".[27] Sahlins celebrates how anthropology, through this ontological focus, will return to its true focus - the state of being other.[50]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d Heywood, Paolo (1 January 2012). "Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on 'Ontology'". The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. 30 (1). University of Cambridge. doi:10.3167/ca.2012.300112. ISSN 0305-7674.
  2. ^ Ogdoas Scholastica English translation by Sara L. Uckelman of Chapter 8.
  3. ^ Jacob Lorhard’s Ontology: a 17th Century Hypertext on the Reality and Temporality of the World of Intelligibles Peter Øhrstrøm.
  4. ^ The Development of Ontology from Suarez to Kant
  5. ^ a b c d e Kohn, Eduardo (21 October 2015). "Anthropology of Ontologies". Annual Review of Anthropology. 44 (1): 311–327. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127. ISSN 0084-6570.
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  32. ^ Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998). "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 4 (3): 469–488. doi:10.2307/3034157. JSTOR 3034157.
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  35. ^ a b Cadena, Marisol de la (2015). Earth beings : ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham. ISBN 978-0-8223-5944-9. OCLC 898161720.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  36. ^ a b c d Blaser, Mario (2014). "Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages". Cultural Geographies. 21 (1): 49–58. ISSN 1474-4740.
  37. ^ a b c The anthropology of sustainability : beyond development and progress. Marc Brightman, Jerome Lewis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2017. ISBN 978-1-137-56636-2. OCLC 1000142894.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  38. ^ Bonifacio, Valentina (2013). "Meeting the Generals: A Political Ontology Analysis of the Paraguayan Maskoy Struggle for Land". Anthropologica. 55 (2): 385–397. ISSN 0003-5459.
  39. ^ a b c d e f g h Blaser, Mario (2009-09-01). "Political Ontology". Cultural Studies. 23 (5–6): 873–896. doi:10.1080/09502380903208023. ISSN 0950-2386.
  40. ^ a b c d Blaser, Mario (2009-03). "The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program". American Anthropologist. 111 (1): 10–20. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01073.x. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  41. ^ Espinosa Arango, Mónica L (2021-12). "Missing the political: A southern critique of political ontology". Anthropological Theory. 21 (4): 411–436. doi:10.1177/1463499620974797. ISSN 1463-4996. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  42. ^ a b Blaser, Mario. "The Political Ontology of Doing Difference... and Sameness". Society for Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved 2022-04-17.
  43. ^ Todd, Zoe (2016-03). "An Indigenous Feminist's Take On The Ontological Turn: 'Ontology' Is Just Another Word For Colonialism: An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn". Journal of Historical Sociology. 29 (1): 4–22. doi:10.1111/johs.12124. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  44. ^ Geismar, Haidy (7 July 2009). "On Multiple Ontologies and the Temporality of Things". Material World. Retrieved 17 April 2019.
  45. ^ "Turn, Turn, Turn". Public Books. 20 June 2017. Retrieved 1 April 2019.
  46. ^ Charbonnier, Pierre; Salmon, Gildas; Skafish, Peter (2017). Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology. London. ISBN 9781783488575. OCLC 929123082.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  47. ^ Abramson, Allen; Holbraad, Martin. Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds. Manchester. ISBN 9781847799098. OCLC 953456922.
  48. ^ Pedersen, Morten Axel (2012). Common Nonsense: A review of certain recent reviews of the 'ontological turn'. OCLC 842767912.
  49. ^ a b Rollason, William (June 2008). "Ontology – just another word for culture?". Anthropology Today. 24 (3): 28–31. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2008.00593.x. ISSN 0268-540X.
  50. ^ Bessire, Lucas; Bond, David (August 2014). "Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique". American Ethnologist. 41 (3): 440–456. doi:10.1111/amet.12083.
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