We Still Have Not Embraced Indigenous Worlds, or What Is The Endgame for the Ontological Turn?

Szlendak, Konrad

doi:0137-4079

Skip to main menu
Skip to search engine
Skip to content
Skip to footer

Download

Title: We Still Have Not Embraced Indigenous Worlds, or What Is The Endgame for the Ontological Turn?

Abstract:

This article examines some of the most important methodological and ethical challenges to be tackled by anthropologists advancing the ontological turn. I extricate such issues as causality, determinism, material relationality, Cartesian duality, Western modes of being, ethnocentric-ontological bias, the appropriation of indigenous ontologies and the decolonisation of indigenous thought. In the process, I explicitly connect with post-relational anthropology, actor network theory, thinking through things, cultural critique and controversy mapping. In conclusion, I propose a coherent set of methods with a strong potential to further improve ethnographic fieldwork, shed light on ongoing dilemmas and make the next step possible for OTTers (proponents of the ontological turn). Specifically, I point to performativity, active participation in creating “the common world” and connecting with indigenous scholars and thinkers (via ethical relationality), which encourages a way forward.

References:

Adorno, Theodor W. 2019. Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Aristotle. 1906. The Nicomachean Ethics, 10th edition, trans. by F. H. Peters. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
Aristotle. 1984. “Metaphysics”. In The Complete Work of Aristotle. Volume Two: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1552–1728. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barth, Fredrik. 1993. Balinese Worlds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique”. American Ethnologist 41 (3): 440–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12083.
Bessire, Lucas, and David Bond. 2015. “Ontology: A Difficult Keyword”. American Ethnologist (Virtual Issue). Ontology in American Ethnologist, 1980–2014. Accessed 21 July 2024. https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/15481425/ontology.
Blaser, Mario. 2016. “Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?”. Cultural Anthropology 31 (4): 545–570. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.05.
Blaser, Mario. 2024. For Emplacement. Political Ontology in Two Acts, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bohr, Niels. (1934) 1961. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bohr, Niels. 1958. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Bråten, Eldar. 2022. “The ‘onto-logics’ of perspectival multinaturalism: A realist critique”. Anthropological Theory 22 (2): 201–221. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634996211072.
Carrithers, Michael, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad, and Soumhya Venkatesan. 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 (2): 152–200. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308275X09364070.
Debord, Guy. (1967) 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis & London: The University of Minnesota Press.
Descola, Philippe. (2005) 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
de Ronde, Christian. 2013. “Causality and the Modeling of the Measurement Process in Quantum Theory”. Disputatio 9 (47): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0022.
Ermine, Willie, et al. 2004. The Ethics of Research Involving Indigenous Peoples. Report of the Indigenous Peoples’ Health Research Centre to the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics. University of Saskatchewan website. Accessed 13 July 2024. http://drc.usask.ca/projects/legal_aid/file/resource385-2c4c0417.pdf.
Evens, T.M.S. 2008. Anthropology as Ethics. Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice. Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books.
Fischer, Michael M.J. 2014. “The lightness of existence and the origami of ‘French’ Anthropology. Latour, Descola, Viveiros de Castro, Meillassoux, and their so-called ontological turn”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 331–355. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.018.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gödel, Kurt. 2003. Collected Works. Vol. IV. Correspondence A-G. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graeber, David. 2015. “Radical alterity is just another way of saying ‘reality’. A reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 1–41. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.003.
Graeber, David and Marshall Sahlins. 2017. On Kings. Chicago: HAU Books.
Hacker, P.M.S. 2015. “Some Remarks on Philosophy and on Wittgenstein’s Conception of Philosophy and its Misinterpretation”. Argumenta 1 (1): 43–58. https://doi.org/10.14275/2465-2334/20151.HAC.
Halbmayer, Ernst. 2012. “Debating animism, perspectivism and the construction of ontologies”. Indiana 29 (Dossier): 9–23. https://doi.org/10.18441/ind.v29i0.9-23.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1955. Culture and Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Harvey, Graham. 2017. “If Not all Stones Are Alive… :Radical Relationality in Animism Studies”. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 11 (4): 481–497. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.31066.
Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1986. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics. New Haven & London: Yale Nota Bene.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell. 2007. “Introduction. Thinking through things”. In Thinking Through Things. Theorising artefacts ethnographically, edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell, 1–31. London & New York: Routledge.
Heywood, Paolo. 2012. “Anthropology and What There Is. Reflections on ‘Ontology’”. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30 (1): 143–151. https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2012.300112.
Heywood, Paolo. 2020. “‘All The Difference in the World’: The Nature of Difference and Different Natures”. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (6): 565–585. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0048393120917947.
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2017. The Ontological Turn. An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1971. Studies on Child Language and Aphasia. Paris: Mouton.
Kelly, John D. 2014. “Introduction. The ontological turn in French philosophical anthropology”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 259–269. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.011.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement”. American Ethnologist 34 (1): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2015. “Anthropology of Ontologies”. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014127.
Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. (2010) 2013. The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press.
Kroeber, Alfred L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture. A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge, MA: The Museum.
Laidlaw, James, and Paolo Heywood. 2013. “One More Turn and You’re There”. Anthropology of this Century website, Issue 7. Accessed 06 July 2024. http://aotcpress.com/articles/turn/
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. “The Recall of Modernity: Anthropological Approaches”. Cultural Studies Review 13 (1): 11–30. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v13i1.2151
Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier. 2012. “The whole is always smaller than its parts’ – a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads’”. The British Journal of Sociology 63 (4): 590–615. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2012.01428.x.
Law, John. 1994. Organizing Modernity. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell. Law, John. 2008. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics”. In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner, 141–158. Oxford: Blackwell.
Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 1995. “Notes on Materiality and Sociality”. The Sociological Review 43: 274–294. https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-954X.1995.tb00604.x.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1987. Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. One Dimensional Man. London: Sphere Books.
Means, Russell. 1995. Where White Men Fear to Tread. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Morin, Edgar. 1992. Method. Towards a Study of Humankind. Vol. 1. The Nature of Nature. New York, San Francisco & Bern: Peter Lang.
Morrison, Kenneth M. (2013) 2014. “Animism and a proposal for post-Cartesian anthropology”. In The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, edited by Graham Harvey, 38–52. London & New York: Routledge.
Normand, Vincent. 2016. “Ideas of Savage Reason: Glass Bead in Conversation with Martin Holbraad and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro”. Glass Bead. Site 0. The Game of Ends and Means website. Accessed 6 July 2024. https://www.glass-bead.org/article/ideas-of-savage-reason-glass-bead-in-conversationwith-martin-holbraad-and-eduardo-viveiros-de-castro/?lang=enview.
Peltier, Leonard. 1999. Prison writings: my life is my sun dance. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Petz, Dénes. 2001. “Entropy, von Neumann and the von Neumann entropy”. In John von Neumann and the Foundations of Quantum Physics, edited by edited by M. Rédei and M. Stöltzner, 83–96. Dordrecht: Springer.
Pickering, Andrew. 2017. “The Ontological Turn. Taking Different Worlds Seriously”. Social Analysis 61 (2): 134–150. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2017.610209.
Rimbaud, Arthur. 2005. Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Rivera Andía, Juan Javier, ed. 2018. Non-Humans in Amerindian South America: Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. “Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (3): 399–421. https://doi.org/10.2307/2661275.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2004. Apologies to Thucydides. Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 2008. The Western Illusion of Human Nature: With Reflections on the Long History of Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy in the West, and Comparative Notes on Other Conceptions of the Human Condition. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Salmond, Amiria J. M. 2013. “Transforming translations (part I). The owner of these bones”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (3): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.002.
Salmond, Amiria J. M. 2014. “Transforming translations (part 2). Addressing ontological alterity”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 155–187. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.006.
Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. (1991) 2005. Partial Connections, Updated Edition. New York & Oxford: AltaMira Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. (1997) 2013. “Environments within. An ethnographic commentary on scale”. In Learning to see in Melanesia. Four lectures given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, 1993–2008. HAU Masterclass Series, Vol. 2, 207–239. Hau Books. Accessed 06 July 2024. https://haubooks.org/learning-to-see-in-melanesia/.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance & Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: The Athlone Press.
TallBear, Kim. 2014. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry”. Journal of Research Practice 10 (2): 1–8.
Tarski, Alfred. 1944. “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (3): 341–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/2102968.
Todd, Zoe. (2014) 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism”. Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124.
Vaneigem, Raoul. (1967) 2012. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Oakland: PM Press. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963662509102694.
Venturini, Tommaso. 2010. “Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory”. Public Understanding of Science 19 (3): 258–273. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625091026.
Venturini, Tommaso. 2012. “Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods”. Public Understanding of Science 21 (7): 796–812. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963662510387558.
Venturini, Tommaso, and Daniele Guido. 2012. “Once Upon a Text: an ANT Tale in Text Analysis”. Sociologica 3: 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.2383/72700.
Venturini, Tommaso, Nicolas Baya Laffite, Jean-Philippe Cointet, I. Gray, Vinciane Zabban, and K. D. Pryck. 2014. “Three Maps and Three Misunderstandings: A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy”. Big Data & Society 1 (2): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2053951714543804.
Venturini, Tommaso, Liliana Bounegru, Mathieu Jacomy, and Jonathan Gray. 2017. “How to Tell Stories with Networks. Exploring the Narrative Affordances of Graphs with the Iliad”. In Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data, edited by Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es, 155–169. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism”. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157.
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 (1): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.70845/2572-3626.1010.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics. For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. The Relative Native. Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: HAU Books.
Wagner, Roy. 1986. Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1978. Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.
Wilson, Robert A., and Neco Lucia C. 2023. “Ethnobiology, the Ontological Turn, and Human Sociality”. Journal of Ethnobiology 43 (3): 198–207. https://doi.org/10.1177/0278077123119478.