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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 Rdje
2010; Pedersen 2011; Holbraad 2012; Ishii 2012; Candea and Alcayna-Stevens 2012; Blaser 2013;
Paleek 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 dofor our engagements and collaborations with the people with
whom we work, and for anthropologys role within the global intellectual and political landscape at
large?

To instigate the discussion, the sessions 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: 896912.

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: 54768.

Candea, Matei, and Lys Alcayna-Stevens. 2012. Internal Others: Ethnographies of Naturalism. Cambridge
Anthropology 30, no. 2: 3647.

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: 37188.

Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Kjetil Rdje, eds. 2009. Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology and
Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of This Century, no. 4.

Paleek, 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 41:48194.

Scott, Michael W. 2013. The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?). Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4: 85972.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2012. A Comment on the Ontological Turn in Japanese Anthropology. HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 4025.

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: 152200.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other
Truths. Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 12845.

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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 thatand here we also mean politically powerful. Still, as anthropologists we are attuned
to the powers of the weakto 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 bewhat
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 acta 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 worlds peoples, and its corollary, to wit, that the disciplines 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
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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 thoughtto 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 centuryAdorno, 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 (Krijer 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 Bryants 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 thinkinga phenomenology in Simon Critchleys (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 controlto place limits upon alterity
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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: 34456.

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: 30934.

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: 285308.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Holbraad, Martin. 2013. Revolucin o muerte: Self-Sacrifice and the Ontology of Cuban Revolution. Ethnos.

Holbraad, Martin. Forthcoming. Can the Thing Speak? Anthropology, Pragmatology, and the Conceptual
Affordances of Things. Under review for Current Anthropology.
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Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Planet M : The Intense Abstraction of Marilyn
Strathern. Anthropological Theory 9, no. 4: 37194.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Thinks. Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Krijer, 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: 5965.

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: 45357.

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.
Tipit: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 322.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Mtaphysiques 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: 473502. 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





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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 reasonit is part of
a critical ethical practice. But the kind of reality that anthropology has been so good at exploring
has been restricted to onethat 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 truthhow things are (characterized as bad); (2) anthropology as the critique
of all such possible essenceshow things should be (also bad, because it relies on an unexamined
ontologysocial construction); and (3) ontological anthropology as the exploration and potential
realization of other realshow things could be, otherwise (good).

Note that Ontology1 is a lot like Nature and Ontology2 a lot like Culture. Now, Ill 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 essentializelike 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 ethnographicor,
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 Castros (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 humansthe Altersabout it, because this only recolonizes our thinking by a human
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way of thinking. (Im 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 beingsanimals, ghosts, and spiritsof 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, Im 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 usmaking 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 Ontology1how things arebecause 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. Mtaphysiques 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 politicslets call it, remembering the Valeryian
sense of metaphysics as a fantastic form of thought emphasized by Viveiros de Castro, a
metaphysical politicsthat 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
metaphysicsbecause, yes, thats what it isof 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
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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 anthropologyone not necessarily reducible
or identical to the current of thought usually associated with the termis 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 Mtaphysiques 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 anthropologythe
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 Latours An Inquiry Into
the Modes of Existence is that it lays out a series of metaphysical proposalsabout
transcendence, beings, additions to their essences made to them by the various modes of
existence, and transformationwithout 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 Mtaphysiques Cannibales and the part of Viveiros de
Castros 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 philosophyby which I mean conceptual thinking, from whatever discipline,
capable of being transposed into other disciplinesfar more than any originating merely from re-
evaluations of the Occidental tradition. The best example of this in Viveiros de Castros 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 Manigliers, superior comparativism. This last point is evident in Descolas
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 Heideggers 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 philosophys 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 anthropologythus 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-existenceexistence
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 existenceto build is to build the building and its noise. To raise a glass is to
build into existence the possibility it will fallor floatwhen 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 externaltranscendent/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 existenceloosely speaking, Western understandings of
those entities that have these capacitiesinto a global arrangement. Ethics is the practice of effort
that opens the conditions and cares for the entities that are this divisions 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: 38597.

Habermas, Jrgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of
Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon.
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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 Castros 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
Uexklls 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 elses shoes, which emphasizes an
experiential imaginary. The tension between the two is stressed in Jose Ortega y Gassets
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 Gods 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 dabbaco), 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 natureas the fundamental realities on which everything standsare 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 STSs 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 others 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 peoples 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 Holbraads (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
Blasers (2009) and Marisol de la Cadenas (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 uss and thems 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: 1020.

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, 166202. 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: 33470.

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: 4753.

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 ontologicaland therefore politicalasymmetry 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 Indras 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
spacesthe holes in Indras netare 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 Wagners thought and the philosophy
of Deleuze. Indras net is Wagners 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 fractallet 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 fractalityas described by scientists and
mathematiciansand the familiar macrocosmmicrocosm 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
reinventingor lending support toclaims 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 Indras netas good to think if not to embrace as methodological
ontologywe must acknowledge its absolute ambiguity. It is a classic figureground 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 spacesthe holes in Indras netcan be seen as
positive, it is equally the case that the positive spacesthe ligaturescan be seen as negative, as
gaps between the gems, rather than links. Indras net can instantiate a thoroughly essentialist
ontologyone that posits autonomous multiplicities at every scale.

More importantly, intrinsic multiplicitywhether this means internal relations that are isomorphic
at every scale, or (what is more likely) internal relations that are contingent and unique to every
entityneed not preclude a priori autonomy. The insight that entities are composed of relations
does not necessitate the asymmetrical privileging of relations over entities. People canand,
indeed, some people dosee 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 Flix 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: 5965.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2010. Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance. In Deleuzian Intersections:
Science, Technology, Anthropology, edited by Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rdje, 21953. 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, 15973. 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
Castros (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 ontologiesincluding anthropologys, 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
ethnographers 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 Oonis 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.

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My book, Exchanging Skin (2007), derives from research in Bolivip village in Papua New Guinea.
The book takes up the Min Problema long-standing analytical impasseand 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
knowsand 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 culturethat 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 practicesthat 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: 87103.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation.
Tipit: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 322.

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
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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? Im 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 emergeda return to things as thingsas 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 worlds 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 were looking forabstractions, 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 dont 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 practiceseeing and doingas 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 dont think archaeology can participate in
a critical political ontology while we operate at the scale of the meta-theoreticalthe search for a
corrective to our faulty metaphysicswhich 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 Szzhalombatta in Hungary they risked their social identities, as each performance of
potting was judged by an audience of the potters community. If we include the material within
the social, if what one is working onclay, materialsis 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 BodyPots 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 Szzhalombatta, Hungary. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 19, no. 2: 20320.

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 notionclearly rejected hereof 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 offin principle at leastthe 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 commitmentscrudely 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, couldnt 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 politicsan 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 latterpoliticsseems 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.) politicsalthough 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 turns 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-authoritarianismthe end-point of the pieceis 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 pieces 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: 14650.

Candea, Matei. 2011b. Our division of the universe: A Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of
Politics. Current Anthropology 52, no. 3: 30934.

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: 85972.

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: 12845.

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 allchange and limitand
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 excludeswho
can/cannot parleyresults 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/concernor a weak one. That in this process the ontological make
up of politicsor the politics of politicsoccupies 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
disconcertedto use Helen Verrans 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 itit 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: 33470.

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 patients
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 patients 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
ontologyput in the plural ontologieshelps 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: 575610.

Page 34 of 44

Despret, Vinciane. 2004. The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society 10, nos.
23: 11134.

Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association
Books.

Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManMeets_OncoMouse. London:
Routledge.

Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2012. Anthropology as a Following Science: Humanity and Sociality in Continuous
Variation. NatureCulture 1, no. 1: 124.

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, 17422. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.

Viveiros de Castro, Edwardo. 1992. From the Enemys 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 diplomacyan artisanal zone of exchange that creates a value for non-stable
design visions (Corsn Jimnez 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)? Leenhardts (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, humanmachine relations, and alien otherwises and lifeworlds as we dont yet know them.

By this route, we are positioned to invoke the idea of the onto-dispositif. The concept allies with
Law and Evelyns (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 protensionsprospecting 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 relatingand 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 subjectobject distinctions
beyond their own interests: Google sampling robots only care about subjectivity in algorithmic
terms. Cross-species anthropology gets into the same subjectobject 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, yesas S (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 goalsexposing 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 suchthat 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 Tcito Noo de Skill, ou Como Saber o Que um
Disco Voador. Paper Presented at IX Jornadas Latinoamericanas de Estudios Sociales de La Ciencia y de la
tecnologa, Mxico, 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, Whats 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: 24158.

Corsn Jimnez, Alberto. 2013. Introduction: The Prototype: More Than Many and Less Than One. In
Prototyping Cultures: Art, Science and Politics in Beta, ed. Alberto Corsn Jimnez. 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: 33470.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Hospitality. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, 358420. New York:
Routledge.

During, lie. 2002. From Project to Prototype (Or How to Avoid Making a Work). In Panorama 3: Living
Prototypes, 1729. 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: 22940.

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.

S, 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 disciplines 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. Kayap 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. Doesnt 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 natures 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 planets 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
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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
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Biehl, Joo. 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. 56:
87396.

Bond, David. 2013. Governing Disaster: The Political Life of the Environment During the BP Oil Spill.
Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 694715.
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.

Fortun, Kim. 2013. From Latour to Late Industrialism. Paper presented at the American Anthropological
Association annual meeting, Chicago, November 22.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.2014. The Politics of Ontology:
Anthropological Positions, Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2002. War of the Worlds: What About Peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, translated by
Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Martin, Emily. 2009. Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton, N.J.:
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Mintz, Sidney. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin.

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Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. Foreword to Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, xixiv. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago:
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Turner, Terence. 2009. The Crisis of Late Structuralism, Perspectivism and Animism: Rethinking Culture,
Nature, Spirit and Bodiliness. Tipit 7, no 1: 342.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998. Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivalism. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3: 46988.
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Wacquant, Loc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.

White, Hylton. 2013. Materiality, Form, and Context: Marx contra Latour, Victorian Studies 55, no. 4: 667
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Williams, Raymond. 1980. "Ideas of Nature." In Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays, 6785. London:
Verso.

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 ontologieseven 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 Candeawho each have essays in The
Politics of Ontology seriesMarilyn 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 violencekicking, bashing,
thrusting, killing, blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrentsthis 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 impossibleshe is clear on
thisbut 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 wordsa bit more if you push itand then the short
attention span of the comment. So next to the question already asked about how to write
ontologies, Ill 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 storiesand 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 Wittgensteins 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 Heideggers 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 analysisits 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
Page 43 of 44

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 subjectgovernment,
selfsociety, mindbody, natureculture, analyzeranalyzed, and colonizercolonized). 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 Serress 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
individuationwhen 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 ontologya worldview and
understanding of how the world works, its parts, their functions, and the ordering of thingsthen
ontogenesis as an analytic focuses on the structuring of new pathways of action and affect, and
the differentiation of a fields 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 Heideggers
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.

References

Combes, Muriel. 2012. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas
Lamarre. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2014. The Politics of Ontology:
Anthropological Positions. Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, January 13.

Lamarre, Thomas. 2012. Afterword. Humans and Machines. In Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the
Transindividual, 79108. 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: 5260.

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, 297317. Translated by Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone
Books.

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

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