Ontology and Wonder - An Interview With Michael Scott

6/12/2014 Ontology and wonder: an interview with Michael W.
Scott | Savage Minds

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Not es and Queries in Ant hropology
Savage Minds
March 19, 2014

Rex
Ontology and wonder: an interview with
Michael W. Scott
Thanks to the incredible incredibilicity of our intern Angela, Im happy to
present an interview I recently did with Michael W. Scott. Michael is
currently an associate professor of anthropology at the London School of
Economics. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and his
book, The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a
Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands, appeared in
2007. Michael frequently uses the concept of ontology in his work, so I
sat down to talk with him today about this and other aspects of his
intellectual project. Ive broken the interview down into sections, so scroll
down to read Michaels thoughts on Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner,
wonder, whether reality exists, politics, and how to do fieldwork.
Intellectual Influences at Glasgow and Chicago
RG: Were going to talk a little bit about your work and how it relates to the
ongoing interest in ontology. We both know each other from the
University of Chicago where we were both graduate students together.
Maybe we could get started with you telling us what were your
intellectual influences at Chicago?
MS: Marshall Sahlinss focus on the relationship among cosmology,
ontology, and practice was most important for me. But my interest in
those themes goes back to when I was a masters student in Glasgow, in
sociology. I was taught there by Harvie Ferguson. Hes a sociologist of
modernity and a really wide-ranging, synthetic academic who couldnt be
easily compartmentalized. In his book, The Science of Pleasure, he made
6/12/2014 Ontology and wonder: an interview with Michael W. Scott | Savage Minds
connections between theology, philosophy, science, art, literature,
psychoanalysis, and traced a complex history of what he called cosmos
and psyche in the bourgeois worldview. He was trying to understand
modernity in terms of its cosmological coordinates and conundrums.
There was also Derek Sayer, a historical sociologist at Glasgow who has
been pretty influential in the development of my interest in ontology. He
introduced me to the work of Roy Bhaskar, the philosopher of science. In
his first book, A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar analyzed scientific
practice to discern what ontological assumptions underlie experimental
method. What kind of a world, or what kind of an ontology, is
presupposed by scientific experiments? His answer was: its a stratified but
a changing world, one with layers of ontological depth that science is
trying to mine more and more deeply. So these ideas really informed my
doctoral work and then my subsequent book, The Severed Snake.
RG: Right, and I remember in David Graebers book on value he has a
section on Bhaskar as well, so it sounds like Bhaskar has had influence in
a couple different places.
MS: Yes, I took that interest in Bhaskar to Chicago, and I remember
sharing it with Terry Turner, who was teaching both David and myself at
the same time.
RG: Ah, thats interesting. And of course Sayer wrote The Great Arch with
Philip Corrigan, which is sort of one of the precursors to the contemporary
ethnographies of the state.
MS: Thats right. But let me just return to Sahlins for a moment. He looked
at cosmogonic myth as that which reveals the ontological assumptions
which inform practice. But, I tried to look at everyday practice in my
research in the way that Bhaskar looked at experimental method in
science, and I was asking: what kind of ontological assumptions are
legible in practice?
RG: Right. Yes. And so, who else? Was Valerio Valeri an influence?
MS: Yes. He, like Harvie Ferguson, was a figure that impressed me very
much. As you know, he was very wide-ranging in his erudition, his
synthetic thinking. He was particularly attentive to diverse models of
cosmology and cosmogony and their ontological implications. Chicago is
a really vibrant intellectual context, and so I also had many conversations
with fellow students such as my now-wife, Krista Ovist, who was a
student in history of religions. She introduced me to the work of her
supervisor, Bruce Lincoln, and his studies of cosmogony and its social and
practical implications, and Krista remains an important partner in dialogue
for me.
RS: When I was doing the first chapter of my book, I had to trace out
cosmology, what does that term mean? We use it all the time, but where
does it really come from? And I found myself having to read a lot of
Eliade.
MS: Yes, I really discovered Eliade through Valeri and conversations with
Krista, and read a bit of Eliade then. Of course, I think Eliade has been
problematized because of, well, his right-wing political commitments.
I should mention that Nancy Munn was also an important formative
influence for me at Chicago, particularly her emphasis on place, and that
is very apparent in my work: my focus on peoples relationship to land and
processes of emplacement.
RG: Can you talk a little bit about her work, because I think it can be
difficult because of the language and because of the density. Whats her
approach?
MS: I think shes been fundamentally influenced by phenomenology, and
is interested in the ways in which people extend themselves through
space and time. Actually, thats how she says they create space and time
through movement.
RG: When you say people extending themselves through time and space,
you dont mean them getting older and fatter. How would you explain that
to people?
MS: I think it develops a general model thats been influential in
Melanesianist anthropology whereby people are conceptualized as what
Marilyn Strathern calls partible. They arent just exchanging or giving
away things that they own as alienable objects. Those objects are
fundamentally part of themselves, and so when they give them away, its
almost as if theyre extending part of themselves existentially, beyond the
bounds of their own bodies. And those objects are vehicles of
themselves, and can travel quite widely. And of course Nancy Munns key
study is of the Kula exchange ring in the Trobriand Islands in Papua New
Guinea. She focuses on the ways in which the objects which are
exchanged around the islands are extensions of the island in which she
did fieldwork, Gawa.
RG: Yes, thats a great explanation.
MS: If were still on my influences, heres another: Id have to say that,
during our time at Chicago, the anthropology department was an
important center for the development of historical anthropology. And
historical research has always been a very important part of my own
work, trying to situate my interlocutors in Solomon Islands within the
longest historical context that archival documents might allow.
Studying Poly-ontology in Solomon Islands
RG: So you had a lot of ideas to work with, a really rich intellectual context
both at Glasgow and Chicago. What did you find when you hit the
Solomon Islands?
MS: I work on the ethnography of Arosi speakers on the island of Makira
in the southeast Solomons. And when I was a doctoral student in the early
90s, I was working predominantly with Anglican Christians. I was puzzling
over the pervasiveness of latent land disputes between matrilineally-
defined claimants the Arosi are matrilineal. I was trying to understand
why land disputes were simmering beneath the surface of everyday life,
but were unmentionable and didnt develop into overt conflict. My hosts
seemed to feel a certain anxiety or insecurity about their disposition on the
land. They had a sense that their communities, and the principles on
which their communities were based, were in a state of confusion.
Many people wanted to set things straight by asserting that theirs was the
rightful land-holding matrilineage, but they couldnt voice their claims
because that would be too divisive. But at the same time they were afraid
that someone else might make a claim that would be recognized instead
of their own. I thought the Arosi were dealing with a kind of classic
paradoxical situation. On the one hand, their ideal notion of what
constitutes customary village life required that there be a recognized
land-holding matrilineage at a given place, serving as a kind of focal point
of authority, with the chief that would defend the interests of the land
holders and bring people together to construct a multilineal polity. And
that idea needed to be clear and transparent.
Yet, on the other hand, people from different matrilineages seemed to be
locked in a sort of quiet competition over that position, but they couldnt
voice their competing claims openly, not without alienating others and
placing the synthetic nature of the polity in jeopardy. To do that is to be
regarded as extremely anti-social, as sort of proof that you arent actually
the legitimate landholders after all. What landholder, they would say,
would be so ungenerous and overbearing?
RG: Just to clarify, when you say the synthetic nature of the polity, you
mean that in these areas there are people from many matrilineages living
in the same place, and so the residential group has got to be kept
together even though one part of it may claim to have a greater right to
the land?
MS: Thats precisely right.
RG: How did ontology come into that?
MS: The analysis of this problem led me to scrutinize a whole range of
topics that are familiar to Melanesianists: origins, idioms of descent and
relatedness, relations with ancestral beings, naming practices and so forth.
This led me, in turn, to theorize that the ontological principles informing
the land dispute situation constitute what I call a poly-ontology, which is
a way of describing a pluralism.
In other words, its an atomistic cosmos in which matrilineages are
conceptualized as the bearers of independently arising and isolated
ontological categories that need to be brought into productive and
reproductive relations. Also, I analyzed how this poly-ontology has come
into dialogue with Christianity, and specifically with the Anglican Christian
cosmology that I found there, in mutually transforming ways.
I was also trying to make a contribution to the anthropology of Christianity
by highlighting the importance of interrogating Christian ontology in a field
context. In my view, the anthropology of Christianity really hasnt done
enough to explore Christian ontologies or to recognize more than one
possible Christian configuration of ontology. So, Id say that ontology is a
new way of approaching traditional topics such as kinship and myth, and
its revealing new things about them. Its a new way of talking about whats
interesting about these topics.
RG: And when you say ontology, youre talking about peoples theories of
the world, right? And in particular, you said something earlier, I just wanted
to clarify. You talked about how theres this atomistic poly-ontology.
Theres a sort of a sense that each individual lineage group is ontologically
distinct from each other one?
MS: Thats correct. Each matrilineage has its own essential being that is
fundamentally distinct from each of the other matrilineages. But I just
wanted to make a note here. You said ontology was different theories of
being, but in my understanding of ontology, its not simply a theory, its the
assumptions that underlie both discursive practice and non-discursive
practice. So, it might be implicit assumptions rather than an explicitly
articulated theory.
RG: Thats an important thing to note. It means that you have to engage in
a sort of a depth analysis. Its hard to say, I can see these ontological
assumptions, but its tacit. Its always a little bit of a trick to get other people
to see it.
MS: Thats right. The job of the anthropologist is to try to perform the
analysis. We begin to explicate some of those assumptions that underlie
what people say, but also really looking at what they do, quite closely.
RG: So your work sounds like its not really a call to totally redo
anthropology. It sounds like its very traditionally anthropological in its
focus on kinship, myth. Is that right?
MS: Its trying to rethink, to reconstrue, to reconceptualize, what
anthropology has always been interested in. So in a sense its dealing with
traditional issues, but in a new way.
On Wagner, Strathern, and Melanesian Sociality
RG: Your book also has a critique of the work of Roy Wagner and Marilyn
Strathern and their theories of kinship. It might be interesting to go over
that critique because I think when people hear the word ontology, they
think of that term as associated with people who have been educated by
Wagner and Strathern, not necessarily people who take issue with them.
MS: Well, I should clarify that I see my work as in dialogue with, rather
than opposed to, the ideas of Wagner and Strathern. If Im opposed to
anything its to the ways in which their models of Melanesian sociality are
sometimes presupposed as a kind of orthodoxy about a monolithic
Melanesia. Heres how I would put it. It seems to me that my engagement
with Wagner and Strathern, and where I may differ from them, as it were,
is shaping up into something analogous to the debates that have been
going on in philosophy between proponents of what is usually called
relationism, on the one hand, and those who have been developing so-
called object-oriented ontology, on the other.
When I make this comparison I dont mean to imply that Im in a debate
with Wagner and Strathern about a personal existential commitment to
one or the other of these ontologies. Rather, Im simply trying to suggest
that, whereas there may be some Melanesians whose ontological
assumptions are comparable in many ways to what philosophers call
relational ontology, there may also be Melanesians whose assumptions
are, at least in some ways, more like those of object-oriented ontology.
Briefly put, relationists argue that there are no autonomous essences,
only relations. Things are nothing but the relations that constitute them
and in which they participate. Object-oriented ontologists do not deny that
all things are made up of relations and inhere in relations, but they argue
that things nevertheless entail autonomous though not eternal
essences. Objects cannot be exhausted by their relations; they entail a
core proper being. In their own ways, in other words, Melanesians may be
debating the same kinds of questions that European philosophers are still
splitting hairs about.
RG: When we say a relational ontology, what does that mean? I want to
keep it nice and concreteyoure making a claim that their claims about
kinship and social structure dont apply to the Makiran case, is that right?
MS: Thats right. Their basic argument, as I read them, is that Melanesian
sociality presupposes relational continuity. Its a cosmos in which
everything is fundamentally related, and the major problem for social
agents within that cosmos is to create distinctions, to create or to cut
relational continuity, continuity of being.
And I find in the Solomon Islands case where I did my fieldwork, it
seemed precisely the inverse of that. People needed fundamentally to
create relations, to bring the elements of the cosmos, which were
originally unrelated, into relation, into productive and reproductive
relations. So thats a broad contrast that I draw in the introduction to the
book.
RG: So in the case of Makira, the question is, how are these matrilineages
going to be able to relate to one another? We want them to relate to one
another so we can build harmonious communities. How can they relate to
each other when theyre just fundamentally, ontologically distinct?
Something like that?
MS: Thats correct.
RG: And then, in the case of Strathern and Wagner, the argument is that
people already think theyre related, so then they try to make themselves
different what would be a good example of that, Michael? In terms of a
concrete kinship practice?
MS: Well, the ways in which Wager and Strathern and those most
strongly influenced by them depict Melanesian sociality is, I think,
probably nicely captured in the work of Jadran Mimica among the Iqwaye
in the New Guinea highlands. Mimica presents a striking model of cosmic
origins from a primordial figure, a figure who is sort of self-contained, and
is the source of all things in their universe.
RG: Thats like a mythological person, you mean.
MS: Thats right, yes. Everything in the universe is conceptualized as
coming from that one figure. And everything needs to be differentiated
out of that figure. So this process of differentiation and bifurcation is kind
of the fundamental cosmogonic or cosmological process that informs all
of being there.
RG: So its a different kind of cosmology or worldview. Its a different kind
of ontological assumption than what you discovered in Makira.
MS: Thats correct. James Weiner has written about the Foi, also in the
New Guinea highlands. He talks about a world of immanent continuity;
that the world for the Foi, in his understanding, is one is which theres a
fundamental relation of resemblance and that resemblance needs to be
denied. The given connections between things need to be cut for the
social world to be developed. The moral foundation of human action is
really to draw contrasts.
RG: I see that in the area of Papua New Guinea where I worked. You can
be a member of more than one cognatic stock there, so a lot of times at
weddings by giving food to one side of the wedding youre showing that
youre a member of the other side, since you could theoretically be both.
MS: Yes, precisely, those kinds of processes.
Does reality exist?
RG: When people hear the word ontology, they assume that people
who advocate an ontology-oriented approach in anthropology have a
radical program to destroy the idea that there is one reality out there and
that we just have different cultural ways of understanding a single shared
universe. Ontologists seem to claim that there are multiple universes out
there, and thats a claim a lot of people just dont understand or think
couldnt possibly be true. Is that a kind of claim that youre interested in
making in your work?
MS: Well, this may seem like a fudge, but I dont think that one is best
placed to be the judge of ones own ontological presuppositions if, as I
tend to think, peoples discursive and non-discursive practices index and
then transform their ontological assumptions. It seems to me that what
one does, especially in ones anthropological practice, is likely to belie
ones carefully crafted philosophy.
That said, were I to carefully craft my philosophy of being, Id suggest a
kind of realism that says there are things that actually exist a reality is
not incompatible with the possibility that everyone is in their own world. It
seems to be me that it may be the case that there are noumena in the
Kantian sense of things in themselves, the really real but that these
are never experienced or known directly in themselves by anything
human or otherwise. This would mean that everything is, in a sense,
creating its own world based on its own capacities to translate information
from other beings and other entities into a world that it inhabits.
But in my work, by ontology, I generally mean the assumptions about the
nature of reality that shape peoples ways of doing things. Basically, Ive
been interested in trying to discern the way ontological assumptions
inform the lives of my interlocutors in Solomon Islands.
Wonder
RG: Could we turn to some of your more recent writing about wonder,
this discussion about wonder is about people being exposed to new
ontological assumptions.
MS: I first started wondering about wonder after a stint of fieldwork in the
Solomons in 2006. During this period I encountered what I call wonder
discourses, which is to say, stories, speculations, rumors and claims about
things people described as amazing, baffling, miraculous, and wonderful.
The biggest of these is the idea that theres a hidden underground realm
inside the island of Makira. This is envisioned as a kind of high-tech army
base-cum-metropolis thats run by white people, chiefly Americans, in
league with beings known as kakamora these are thought of as small
super-powerful autochthonous beings. It seemed to me that these
wonder discourses had to do with what I would call an ontological crisis
or, the undermining of older ontological assumptions and the emergence
of new possibilities for becoming. But they were also possibly techniques
or methods for precipitating ontological transformation, for participating in
it. The particular transformation in question seemed to involve a rupturing
of the plurality of poly-ontological matrilineal categories within a new
underlying insular category of Makiran being that seemed previously to
been denied.
This got me thinking about wonder discourses in anthropology and
academic writing more generally. And Ive noticed and written about two
things. Firstly, Ive analyzed how many contributors to the anthropology of
ontology have not only theorized indigenous ontologies as relational, but
have presented them as morally preferable to the Euro-American
ontology they call Cartesian dualism or Kantian dualism or
representationism. And theyve suggested that one of the key indicators
of the moral advantages of relationism is its capacity for wonder, its open
orientation to the unpredictable, the astonishing flow of becoming. And
here I am thinking of authors such as Tim Ingold or Deborah Bird Rose or
Terence Evens.
And secondly, Ive suggested that this apparent enthusiasm for relational
ontology and its orientation to wonder could be described as religious, as
an expression of post-biblical religion and an appetite for re-enchantment
in the so-called secular world. So in short, as on Makira, it seems to me
that, within anthropology, the pursuit and production of wonder
accompanies a bid for ontological transformation. In this case, from the
supposed dualism of modernity toward the uptake of relationism.
RG: So the goal of anthropology is to recreate a sense of wonder and to
change our worldview, not necessarily to explain what causes human
behavior or to decipher or interpret cultural texts?
MS: For some people thats correct. I detect in some of the anthropology
of ontology a particular agenda thats engaged with the problems of the
world today. Its about re-thinking anthropology as a form of ethics, or de-
colonization of thought, or a morally responsible form of being in the
world. Its responding to things like environmental crisis, so its not simply
sitting back and trying to analyze or interpret, no.
Power
RG: Im just trying to imagine sort of an old-school Marxist looking at a
book like Holbraads Truth in Motion, which can be very difficult to read,
saying, thats an ethical response to climate change and political crisis?
Shouldnt we instead be trying to affect the world by understanding how it
works and then trying to change it? For a lot of American anthropology
you have to be discussing politics, you have to be taking a concrete stand
on particular issues. But this doesnt seem to be doing that, so many
people would be surprised that it would be called a political form of
anthropology.
MS: I think that perhaps people are operating with a very narrow definition
of the political. And some anthropologists who are interested in questions
of being are not prejudging what politics might be. Surely there could be
nothing more political than trying to think in new ways about the nature of
being, and expanding the possibilities for thinking about being. That would
seem to me to be a fundamentally political project.
RG: I guess maybe it would be sort of like a kind of consciousness-raising
in the way that people might have talked about consciousness-raising in
the 60s and 70s: widening your horizon, questioning expectations that
youve taken for granted, maybe something like that?
MS: Yes, fundamentally questioning your assumptions about the nature of
things. And also recognizing that in any attempt to change the world for
the better there may be an unexamined problem of whose ontological
assumptions are going to inform policy.
RG: Where do you think this literature is going, can I ask you? Where do
you see this going in the future, including your work or the work you see?
Youre in London, you must get a sense of what people are thinking about
currently that maybe hasnt seen print yet.
MS: Its pretty hard for me to say in what directions some of my
colleagues interested in ontology may be going at the moment. I think
that the interest in ontology in this country is maturing.
Ontology really sort of began to come into its own in the United Kingdom
in about 2006, 2007. And so now theres this well-known stream of
thought in this country, so it was surprising to go to the American
Anthropological Association in November last year and find that so many
people there were unaware of it. From the perspective of the UK, this is a
debate or set of debates that have been ongoing for quite some time
now. I know that some figures were sort of moving away from these
kinds of issues and looking in different directions.
RG: Ah, yes, were behind the times.
MS: I dont think thats true. I think its just different intellectual interests,
different disciplinary foci. The kinds of debates that drive anthropology in
the UK are slightly different from those in the US.
Fieldwork
RG: What are some good rules for practice that you see really emerging
from your approach? What do you think is valuable for people to do in the
field and when they are writing up?
MS: Ive tried to model an approach that asks questions about the
ontological assumptions that are implicit in what we encounter in the field.
Id emphasize the importance of not assuming that we already know what
the prevailing configuration of ontology is, especially in regions where
certain theoretical models have become, well, synonymous with those
areas. The idea that we have relational Melanesians or perspectival
Amerindians always needs to be tested and not presumed.
One of the main questions that the anthropology of ontology has raised is
the role of philosophy in anthropology. Philosophy can be hugely
stimulating, but its also easy to get carried away and simply read your
ethnographic material in terms of the principles of a particular
philosopher. And, well, frankly, the wonder we experience when it seems
that the ontological assumptions legible in some myth or indigenous
practice correlate almost precisely with the ideas of a particular
philosopher can be, well, too compelling. So its always good to remind
ourselves that we are discovering a relationship of affinity, not identity.
I think we should always aspire to a kind of ethnographic particularism
this is something I took from Sahlins and Munn. Labels that we develop to
describe particular configurations of ontology like dualism, animism,
relationism or even poly-ontology can become as banal and blunt as
the old chestnuts of solidarity, resistance, and power, and they dont
necessarily shed light on anything unless you can locate them in the
details, unless you can show that a particular ontological configuration
motivates the logic of a particular magical technique, for example, or why
Blog post
interview, Michael W. Scott, ontology, Solomon Islands, University of Chicago
someone did X rather than Y in a particular situation. If theres really one
thing that I would highlight, what I tell my own students, is that its always a
good idea to attend to what your consultants in the field find puzzling and
problematic. What are they preoccupied with or struggling to understand
or trying to cope with? What do they wonder about?
Recently, some anthropologists interested in ontology have been
advocating that we should focus our work on what they call alterity. By
this they mean that we should concentrate on what doesnt make sense
to us, which usually means other peoples apparently irrational beliefs
things like how can they be fundamentalist Christians or how can they say
that they are red parrots? But I think we are bound to be puzzled by what
puzzles the people we meet in the field, so why pre-empt their
puzzlement with our own?
RG: I think that thats good advice. I agree with that. You and I must have
both gone to the same graduate school!
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Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Hawaii at Mnoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine
has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him
at rex@savageminds.org
View all posts by Rex
5 thoughts on Ontology and wonder: an interview with
Michael W. Scott

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A. J. West
(@AlWest13
)
Id suggest a kind of realism that says there are
things that actually exist a reality is not
incompatible with the possibility that everyone is
in their own world.
Its totally incompatible if you mean those words as other
people do.
It seems to be me that it may be the case that
there are noumena in the Kantian sense of
things in themselves, the really real but that
these are never experienced or known directly in
themselves by anything human or otherwise. This
would mean that everything is, in a sense,
creating its own world based on its own capacities
to translate information from other beings and
other entities into a world that it inhabits.
So if humans only indirectly know the real world through
sense data, that gives them sufficient freedom to create
their own worlds? Hmmm, no. Theyre not creating their
own worlds, theyre just interpreting their sense data about
the one world around them, which isnt the same thing.
They arent at liberty to live without regard to the world as it
actually is. People inhabit one world, and we all live there.
We just think about it differently.
March 20, 2014 at 4:19 am
John
Fascinating stuff. One question, though. Could we hear a bit
more about, how this poly-ontology has come into dialogue
with Christianity, and specifically with the Anglican Christian
March 21, 2014 at 6:56 pm
McCreery
cosmology that I found there, in mutually transforming
ways. I know it is perfectly silly of me to be sitting here
imagining Miss Marple in the Solomon Islands; but the
thought of church fetes as occasions for ritual exchanges
tickles my fancy and leads to serious questions about how
the local ontology fits with the one described in the Book of
Common Prayer.
Michael W.
Scott
Thanks to A.J. and John for their interest and responses.
Ill respond to A.J. first: I think youre right that in these
debates much depends on what one means by terms such
as real, world, and create. When I entertain the possibility
that all entities (including those often marked as inanimate)
may be creating their own worlds, I dont mean that they are
doing so to suit themselves as free agents. If thats what it
means to create, then perhaps nothing but a transcendent
god can create, either ex nihilo or by spontaneous
emanation. My threshold for what it means to create is
much lower than that. It seems to me that, even when we
try to replicate something exactly whether its someone
elses ideas or something more tangible we are always
creating something new, and I tend to agree with those who
argue that that something new has its own ontology. This is
not to deny that there are real things out there; it is rather to
try on a conceptual (if not practical) agnosticism about what
those real things are in themselves and whether or not they
hang together as a super-entity even if there is no
consciousness that can perceive them as such.
This is in response to John: The Arosi speakers with whom
Ive been working on the island of Makira are a bit like Miss
Marple in the Solomon Islands in that theres more to them
March 25, 2014 at 4:09 am
than meets the eye. In many ways, Arosi look like regular
high church Anglicans (complete with incense, copes, and
mitres when the bishops visit), but they entertain ideas that
might surprise Anglicans elsewhere.
For example: traditional Arosi accounts of origins tell how
several different kinds of pre-human beings arose on
Makira and eventually produced humans by entering into
relations that prefigured the normal Arosi pattern of
matrilineal exogamy. For this reason, I describe Arosi
assumptions about human ontology as poly-ontological, i.e.
they posit a plurality of independently arising ontological
categories. In contrast, the biblical account of human origins
to which most Arosi attend tells how human beings arose
from the bifurcation of one being, Adam. For this reason,
biblical assumptions about humanity can be described as
mono-ontological, i.e. they posit an underlying continuity
rather than a discontinuity of being among all people. For
Arosi, this inevitably incestuous ontology implies a static
condition of non-differentiation that is inimical to the
formation of a generative cosmos.
As I discuss in an article (in Ethnos 70:1, 2005), I know an
Arosi Anglican priest who has sought creatively to reconcile
these two visions of human origins. He suggests that, in the
beginning, God created, not one set of primordial parents,
but four essentially different types of beings the bao, kuru,
kakamora, and the masi (four kinds of primordial beings
known from ancestral traditions). In this way, he adapts
Genesis to meet the Arosi demand for multiple unrelated
categories of being that intermarry to generate truly new
forms: matrilineally differentiated humans beings.
But, this is just one way in which Arosi clergy and laypeople
alike innovate distinctive ways of being Anglican. Not
everyone in Arosi would accept this priests version of
Genesis. Different people are engaged in often idiosyncratic
projects of exploring the moral and practical implications of
various Christian teachings. For some it is a serious struggle.
I call these projects ethno-theologies. Hope this helps.
John
McCreery
Michael, thanks very much. My original area of specialization
was Chinese popular religion, which is, in your terms,
decidedly mono-ontological, perhaps even more radically
so than Christian theology, where the Creator and his
Creation are distinct entities. Thus, for example, in the Dao
De Jing:
Dao gives birth to One
One gives birth to Two
Two give birth to Three
Three give birth to ten-thousand things
The ten-thousand things carry yin and embrace yang They
mix these energies to enact harmony.
In this cosmos deities, like ancestors, ghosts and the mortals
on whom all three are modeled, are all inside one all-
encompassing cosmos. The invisible Yin world and the
visible Yang world are complementary halves of the Whole.
The absence of a truly super supernatural created terrible
problems for Western missionaries and others who tried to
understand what was going on, with the interesting
consequence that China is the largest part of the world in
which there is both a landscape littered with temples,
festivals, rituals, etc., and the local elite agreed with the
missionaries that the Chinese had no religion. There was
nothing there but elite philosophies (Daoist, Buddhist,
Confucian, etc.) and popular superstition.
March 26, 2014 at 1:39 am
Be that as it may, your analysis has me wondering about
classical examples of syncretism, very common, for
example, in ancient Rome. Because, I suspect, of the
monotheistic bent of medieval and modern interpreters in
Europe, these are always presented as examples of
assimilation, with various pagan cults and rituals added to
and subordinated or absorbed by Christianity, Islam,
Buddhism, etc. I wonder to what extent your poly-
ontological perspective might hold in places like Mexico,
where elements of traditional cosmologies and Catholicism
are blended.
Andrew
Bolger
What a great discussion, proper anthropology
March 26, 2014 at 4:11 am

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6/12/2014 Ontology and wonder: an interview with Michael W.

Scott | Savage Minds

March 19, 2014

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