A longitudinal review of the anthropological literature will show that usage of the concept of “ontology” has increased dramatically: Drawing on Google Scholar one can see that between 1960 and 1990 there were only eight articles published which had anthropology and ontology-related words in the title, while between 1990 and 2016 the number was approximately 90. And akin to the ontological maneuver of a reversal of perspectives, our impression is that these 90 merely comprise the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In other words, anthropology has literally become awash with debates invoking ontology in a myriad ways—and, crucially, in ways that are often mutually incompatible. Opening Google Scholar’s gates of knowledge—or, more correctly, the digital sediments of research texts—will therefore lead you to “ontology” being inferred in what may seem as sprawling and ultra-diverse anthropological discourses.
The notion of ontology is, of course, also integral to non-anthropological political analyses, such as in critical analyses of capitalism. For one, the French philosopher Alain Badiou refers to the “ontological virtue of capital” (quoted in Pignarre and Stengers 2011, xii) while, for instance, the anonymous politically radical group The Invisible Committee in a recent book describes the totalizing ontology of a capitalist world itself where (almost) all alterworlds or outsides have receded into or been co-opted by capitalism (The Invisible Committee 2015 [2014]). Such relatively recent turns of theory and methodologies—in anthropology and beyond—are informed by disparate analyses of scholars so differing in perspective as, for instance, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Philippe Descola, Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, Marisol de la Cadena, Bruce Kapferer, Isabelle Stengers, John Law and Michael W. Scott, to name a few. However, what is shared among all of these, we argue, is that they in profoundly varied and sometimes also conflicting ways develop forms of anthropology where, first, a notion of difference is accentuated and, second, where such difference is analytically explored and theoretically circumscribed (if not fully empirically represented) as somehow bounded, tangibly other or, also, as existing within entities.
However, beyond stating a sharp rise in the usage or invocation of the term and beyond recognizing the accentuation and tentative entification inherent to usage of “ontology” as difference, how is one, possibly, to define or assess the impact and direction of the so-called ontological turn—a term first coined by the anthropologists Henare et al. (2007, 7–10)? 1 When seeking to respond to such a question, one needs first to note that for anthropology the notion of “ontology” was, at least initially, seen to belong to the domain of particularly phenomenological, ritual or philosophical anthropological analyses. These analyses regularly drew on perspectives from philosophers like Alfred Schutz, Paul Ricoeur, Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl and generally deployed insights from the discipline of philosophy’s much-longer engagement with the term. However, from such a position of relative stability as to the meaning of the term “ontology”, the notion has now become disciplinarily dislodged and infuses a range of anthropological debates concerning, for instance, the nature of perspective, representation and truth, the intricacies of material and human agencies, and the emergence and possibility of alter-politics. How can we make anthropological sense of such diverse debates and fields—all of which are often defined as or ascribed to the so-called “ontological turn” (hereafter unbracketed)? In light of the fact that anthropologists arguably always have studied other people’s worlds, does the series of new engagements with “ontology” even qualify as “a turn”, in the sense of a reorientation or novel direction? Or may it, simply, be seen as a re-run, a return to and rehashing of previous positions in anthropology and related disciplines? And, more crucially, what is at stake in these debates in relation, particularly, to notions of alterity and difference—notions of anthropological pre-eminence habitually articulated analytically and conceptually as “culture”, “epistemology” and “cosmology”?
While such questions are engaged in various ways by all contributors to this book, this Introduction will elaborate on these issues through an examination of contributions to the ontological turn in terms of its promises, premises and politics. Specifically homing in on the posture and construction of alterity and difference in this regard, we seek also to elaborate briefly on the three strands of the ontological turn that we have identified as central and which organizes the book—vistas, materialities and politics—followed by a short discussion of the main critical contentions concerning the ontological turn, before providing a short overview of the book’s chapters.
Knowing the World: What and How
On one level, one may argue that the ontological turn goes for the proverbial disciplinary throat through attacking the stuff anthropological theory is made of, namely the inseparable questions of “What can I know about the world?” and “How can I know the world?” Framed this way, it thereby melds methodological anthropological procedures with theoretical and analytical implications. One position sometimes expounded here is to take informants’ world—in its ontological sense—seriously in their own right, for instance, through deploying indigenous conceptualizations in order to obviate ethnocentric impositions. Such an ambition is, for instance, clearly stated in the introduction of Thinking Through Things, where Henare et al. (2007, 16) advocate for a “methodology that allows for concept production that makes worlds”. They further hold that a methodological move to “make worlds” (in the plural) is made feasible by abolishing the distinction between concepts and things. A similar deep-seated auto-critique of anthropological concept-making and unease with the nature of representation informs also anthropologist Martin Holbraad’s Truth in Motion (2012), which as a methodological and theoretical experiment seeks to re-center anthropological concept creation through engaging and re-deploying recursively informants’ perceptions and methods of truth-making practices (see also Bråten, chapter 12). A comparable sense of a “world-making” disciplinary engagement—but one informed by the world—is found in the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist of science Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (2013 [2012]). Latour’s project here, it appears, is to open up the world through eradicating it of subject–object distinctions and nature–culture divisions seen to hamper our appreciation of the interconnected character of the planet or Gaia, as he terms it—only infrequently (e.g., Latour 2015) acknowledging his debt to James Lovelock (2000 [1979]). Latour argues that we need analytically “to try to benefit from the plurality of the ontologies that we have just released from the crushing division between Object and Subject” (Latour 2013 [2012], 182).
Several aspects of importance to anthropological practice are revealed by these three snippets and by way of opening up the questions of the “what” and “how” of anthropology. We will mention only a few more here.
For one, the ontological turn directs itself against the persistent root assumption in sciences of the unity of nature, and the common distinction between nature and culture, for example, which is approached as the problematic outcome of a Western dualist ontology which, in turn, is also inherent to capitalism (see, e.g., Tsing 2015). Generally, it is held that dualist assumptions have come to underlie much of how the West pursues scientific reasoning and research through, for instance, the division between the natural and the social. In this sense radicalizing anthropology’s long-standing critique of a Cartesian dualism (see, e.g., Strathern 1980) as well as exercising a variety of the discipline’s much-lauded project of so-called cultural critique (see, e.g., Marcus and Fischer 1986), many approaches within the ontological turn aims to end this dichotomy’s hold on anthropological thought.
Second, it is also an approach where a rethinking of the discipline’s methodological approach and apparatus is particularly significant. Put differently, it challenges the general anthropological pattern of reasoning concerning the relationship between data and analysis by reversing the sequence, arguing that ethnography should transform the concepts used (Laidlaw and Heywood 2013). 2 And because any anthropological undertaking, theoretical as well as methodological, necessarily is comparative, the starting point for exploring and later analytically defining significant and localizable patterns, structures, values, processes and practices will, by default, relate to some notion of alterity and difference (Detienne 2008 [2000]; Gingrich and Fox 2002; Kapferer 2012 [1988]). Unsurprisingly, alterity and difference are precisely domains that concern much anthropology associated with the ontological turn, as we shall discuss.
Third, what is at stake in the debate on the ontological turn is also a concern with the discipline’s relation to both the domain of the political per se, as well to the spectrum of possible analyses of how politics may be constituted, enacted and analyzed. For some, as anthropologist Ghassan Hage, the future of a critical anthropology is therefore one that has the potential to ultimately encourage as well as generate different forms of politics. Such potential for a different politics to emerge from anthropology’s radical orientation relies, in his view, precisely on a recognition of ontologically differentiated alterity and possibility (Hage 2012, 2015). Working on often Latin American material, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2014) provides a similar intervention into the debate. In her interpretation of what an ontologically informed anthropology means lies the possibility to unfold the situated conditions of politics in order, ultimately, to unsettle modern politics’ hegemony (Cadena 2014). The potential of ontological difference to shape novel forms of politics, expounded by Cadena and Hage, has also made an impact beyond anthropology. For instance, as famed radical political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negro write commenting on the direction and potential of Amazonianist and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “Our aim here—and Viveiros de Castro’s too—is not to advocate an unmodern Amerindian ontology but rather to use that perspective to critique modern epistemology and push it toward an altermodern rationality” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 124).
Thus, the ontological turn can be viewed as a response to, and an extension of, long-standing debates about the necessary diversification of anthropology—also at the global scale and including emerging positions of postcolonial anthropology external to age-worn traditions of thought in Euro-American academia (see, e.g., Devisch and Nyamnjoh 2011; Mignolo 2011; Santos and Meneses 2010). Rather than a ...