Blaser

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013
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Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of

Peoples in Spite of Europe
Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology
by Mario Blaser
Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about what exists) are gaining unprecedented
visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the
context and rationale for political ontology, a project that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies,
science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts as a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conflicts as a possibility,
one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the
assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one
single reality out there. This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological
conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, because ontological conflicts pose the challenge of how
to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality out there being
described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and
its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes
sense.
Perhaps ethnohistory has been so called to separate it

from real history, the study of the supposedly civilized.
Yet what is clear from the study of ethnohistory is that the
subjects of the two kinds of history are the same. The more
ethnohistory we know, the more clearly their history and
our history emerge as the same history. (Wolf 1982:19)
Empieza una nueva era impulsada por los pueblos indgenas originarios, dando luz a los tiempos de cambio, a los
tiempos de Pachakuti, en tiempos de la culminacion del
Quinto Sol. (A new age driven by the originary indigenous
peoples is beginning, giving birth to the times of change,
the times of Pachakuti, in times when the Fifth Sun is
coming to an end.) (Mandato de los Pueblos y Naciones
Indgenas Originarios a los Estados del Mundo, Chimore,
Cochabamba, Bolivia, October 12, 2007)1
In his review of the now classic Europe and the People without
History, Talal Asad (1987:604) raised two questions to the
Wolfian assertion that the global processes set in motion by
European expansion constitutes their [non-Europeans] his-
Mario Blaser is Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at

Memorial University of Newfoundland (Inco Innovation Centre,
Room 2003, P.O. Box 4200, 230 Elizabeth Avenue, St. Johns, NL
A1C 5S7, Canada [mblaser@mun.ca]). This paper was submitted 6
III 12, accepted 15 IX 12, and electronically published 27 VIII 13.
tory as well. He asked, (1) to what extent is that history

equally their history, and (2) is that history the only one that
can be written of them? and then moved on to argue that
the story of world capitalism is the history of the dominant
world order within which diverse societies exist. But there
are also histories (some written, some yet to be written) of
the diverse traditions and practices that once shaped peoples lives and that cannot be reduced to ways of generating
surplus or of conquering and ruling others. . . . Do we not
therefore need to understand the traditions and practices
by which peoples desires were once constructed if we are
to recount precisely how they made (or failed to make) their
own history? (Asad 1987:604)
Asad concluded the review by stating that

it is when we have anthropological accounts of what those
constructions were, and how they have changed, that we
may learn what the histories of peoples without Europe once
were, and why they cannot make those histories any longer.
We may then also understand better why and in what ways
so many peoples are now trying to make other histories both
within and against the hegemonic powers of modern capitalism
that had their origins in Western Europe. (Asad 1987:607,
emphasis added)
Insightful as it is, the centrality of the emphasized portion

1. See http://alainet.org/active/20160&langpes.
2013 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2013/5405-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/672270
548
of the quote seems to have been lost under the weight of the
past tense that Asad uses to refer to the histories of people
without Europe. The Wolfian conclusion that, after the encounter with Europe, there has only been one historical trajectorythat of the modern capitalist world systemseems
to have carried the day. Thus, other histories have come to
have little relevance for the present; they are things of the
past. Lost has been the importance of keeping in sight that
the (hi)story of the encounter with Europe is not the only
factor that shaped in the past, and continues to shape in the
present, the trajectories and the projects of various peoples
around the world; their own stories about such trajectories
and projects play a role as well. Granted, these cannot be
stories without Europe, but, I will argue, in many cases, they
can be and are stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that
are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.2
Although I will later complicate this definition, let me for
now say that by stories I refer to narratives that embody
certain ideas about the world and its dynamics. In this sense,
any history is a story about the unfolding state of the world
told from the vantage point of a particular set of ideas about
the world and its dynamics; in other words, there is no intrinsic difference between the terms history and story, as
the former necessarily implies the latter. While this is what
the counterpoint offered by the epigraphs above intends to
highlight, it would not be surprising to have analysts and
commentators explaining the use of the Andean concept of
Pachakuti and the Mesoamerican idea of the Fifth Sun in the
indigenous statement as stories that symbolize ethnic politicking, a thoroughly modern historical development. Yet Pachakuti and the Fifth Sun exceed modern categories of historicity; they tell other stories about how the world unfolds
in time. What is being missed and what is being produced
when these kinds of stories are forced to fit into a naturalized
(hi)story of modernity? In this article, I argue that what we
miss are ontological differences, thus producing the conditions of possibility for disavowing ontological conflicts.
A brief example will help me illustrate what I mean by
ontological conflicts. In June 2004, in the province of British
Columbia, Canada, the Mowachat/Muchalaht First Nation
botched a carefully staged and scientifically approved plan by
Canadas Department of Fisheries and Oceans and environmentalist groups to return a young lost orca whale, Luna, to
its pack. The First Nation insisted that the orca was Tsuxiit,
the abode of the spirit of their recently deceased chief, Ambrose Maquinna, and that his desire to stay with his people
should be respected.3 This was not a conflict between two
different perspectives on an animal but rather a conflict over
whether the animal of scientists, bureaucrats, and environ2. In this article, the term Europe operates as a metonym for modernity.
3. See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2004/06/16/orca_drums040616
.html; the story of Luna received a lot of media attention, and besides
news and blogs, now there are two feature films about it: Spirit of the
Whale, which is a dramatization, and The Whale, a documentary.
mentalists was all that was there. Ontological conflicts thus

involve conflicting stories about what is there and how they
constitute realities in power-charged fields.
Leach, Scoones, and Wynne (2005:56) argue that ontological conflicts that challenge modernity and its hegemonist
scientific culture seem to be almost definitive of our times.
Rather than being new, I contend, these kinds of conflicts
have gained unprecedented visibility and potentiality, in part
because the hegemony of the story of modernity is undergoing
a crisis. Such crisis provides both the context and the rationale
for political ontology, a loosely connected project emerging
from the convergence of ideas advanced in various scholarly
fields (indigenous studies, science and technology studies
[STS], posthumanism, and political ecology, among others),
which I seek to present here. However, in order to do this, I
will need to follow a circuitous path, as ontological conflicts
pose a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. First, in order
to even consider them as a possibility, one must question
some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the
social sciences and in dominant common sense. For instance,
the generalized assumptions that we are all modern and that
the cultural differences that exist are between perspectives on
one single reality out there rule out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict
(i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, ontological
conflicts pose the challenge of how to narrate them without
restating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a
reality out there being described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I begin by addressing the effects (and
the limits) of established assumptions about an all-encompassing modernity that engulfs cultural differences. I then
move on to present the political ontology project and offer
a plausible story of the present moment in which such a
project makes sense. But before unfolding my arguments, a
clarification is in order. I build this narrative largely in reference to indigenous peoples and Latin America because these
are the topical areas I am most familiar with. In this sense,
indigenous peoples and Latin America constitute fields in
which ontological conflicts have become visible as a problematic for me rather than where the problematic is located per
se. In fact, I hope this article might prompt further explorations of the multiple fields in which ontological conflicts
play out in the present conjuncture.
An All-Encompassing Modernity
The assumption of an all-encompassing modernity has come
to dominate both scholarly and political analysis to the point
that anything that might try to contest it is automatically
treated with contempt. For instance, the anonymous reviewer
of an article in which a colleague and I (Aparicio and Blaser
2008) referred to certain knowledge practices enacted by sectors of indigenous movements in Latin America as nonmodern, wrote,
Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe
To say that indigenous knowledge is non-modern or exists

outside of modernity seems in fact to reinstate a colonial
legacy in which indigenous peoples are said to be backwards,
or islands of time untouched by history (see James Fabians
Time and the Other, or Wolfs Europe and the People without
History). This statement in fact flies in the face of most
anthropological research (well, almost all) that tries to combat colonial representations of indigenous peoples as not
engaged in the modern world.
Echoing our academic reviewer, the Bolivian vice president

and intellectual Alvaro Garcia Linera has accused some sectors
of the indigenous movement in that country of being romantic because they reclaim a role for indigenous cosmologies
in shaping the Bolivian state. Pointing to the 500 years of
interaction and mingling between them, he denied that such
cosmologies could be radically different from, or sustain a
relation of antagonism with, the dominant modern one: En
el fondo todos quieren ser modernos (Deep inside, everyone
wants to be modern) (Garcia Linera 2007:156157).
While not fully explicated by it, the idea that modernity is
all-encompassing has some connections with the critiques to
which earlier notions of culture as systemic, organic, and
bounded were subjected from the 1970s onward. One of the
main thrusts of the critiques was that by deploying such notions of culture, anthropology removed other (non-Western)
peoples from history and was blind to the actual consequences
of its own politics of representation (see Asad 1973; Clifford
and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Fox 1991; Hymes 1972; Wolf
1982). Showing that so-called traditional societies have never
been isolated, unchanging, backward, and out of historyin
short, that they have never been traditional in the terms
set by the modern imaginationthese critiques reshaped the
notion of culture as something fuzzy, porous, dynamic, and,
fundamentally, always the emergent result of a history of interactions. Yet, the consequences of these critiques went far
beyond a reconsideration of culture, for one of their corollaries has been that, if there are no really existing traditional
societies (i.e., those bounded, timeless, and unchanging sociocultural units imagined by our anthropological ancestors),
then we are all modern in one way or another.
However, truly accepting the proposition that any given
culture is always the historical product of transformative interactions with other cultures should raise the question as to
why we should call the present state of diverse cultures modern. The modernness that underlies contemporary cultural
differences would need to be proved rather than axiomatically
asserted, but, in order to do so, one would need some criteria
of what it means to be modern. If one attends to the debates
on the meaning of modernity, this seems to be an unrealistic
expectation. There is little agreement on whether the defining
criteria are sociological, political, or cultural; whether modernity is singular or plural; whether it is essentially a European phenomenon that was later globalized and indigenized; or whether it was a global phenomenon from its
549
inception. If one were to seek a common denominator across

the various positions, the only one would be that the notion
of an all-encompassing modernity is somehow related to European expansion and its effects.4 In other words, all contemporary cultures are modern because they have engaged in
transformative interactions with Europe. The problem is that
this implies that the encounter with Europe is the single most
important constitutive factor in the historical trajectory of
any given culture. At best, this can be a hypothesis to be
investigated case by case, not a foregone conclusion.
Based on this aprioristic conclusion about the importance
of the encounter with Europe, the claim that all contemporary
cultures are modern is less than solid. But the problem becomes compounded because, while being primarily associated
with a historical event (i.e., European expansion, or more
generally the formation of a world system eventually dominated by the North Atlantic nations), when the term modern is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference
from the present. Indeed, putting the very variable results of
the encounter with Europe within the common grid of modernity assumes that, once affected in such a way, a culture
enters the overarching historical trajectory of modernity that
dominates the present time.5 Ironically, and as modernity becomes equated with the present, radical difference is (again)
mapped out against a temporal grid, for if something is said
to be nonmodern, its logical location is in the past. This
betrays one of the central intents of the critiques of earlier
notions of culture, foregrounding coevalness as the problematic simultaneity of different, conflicting, and contradictory forms of consciousness (Fabian 1983:146).
In short, while the critiques of tradition revealed the
problematic nature of Othering, they left unquestioned
whose self becomes naturalized in a strategy of Sameing,
whereby everything contemporary in general ends up being
coded as modern.6 How to overcome this Sameing that transmutes the inherent hybridity of cultures into ethnographically
thin differences unified under the banner of modernity (be
this defined as the capitalist world system or otherwise)?
Asads (1987:604607) point that the concept of culture is
crucial in trying to keep in sight the relevance of differences
is apposite here. Yet, I will argue, this is not because the
concept of culture will allow us to retrieve differences from
the thinness imposed on them by an all-encompassing modernity, but rather because we must attend to culturewith
capital Cas an ontological category that together with the
category of nature naturalizes modernity, thus making it allencompassing in practice.
According to McGrane (1989), the concept of culture is
4. Even claims of other modernities cannot be constructed without
Europe being a referent in one way or another (see Gyeke 1997; Takeuchi
2005).
5. Birth (2008:3) calls this the trap of homochronism which subsumes
the Other into academic discourses of history.
6. I borrow the wonderful term Sameing from Lesley Green (see
Green and Green 2010).
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merely the most recent way in which the West conceived and
explained otherness. The successive movements in the understanding of the non-European Other from being potentially devilish to lacking reason, then to represent backward
races and to finally being simply a human bearing a different
yet equally valid culture, marks at each stage an adjustment
of otherness against a new horizon of intelligibility (Christianity; the Enlightenment and reason; time and evolution;
and human exceptionalism or humanism). McGrane argues
that the epistemological relativism and pluralistic sensibility
associated with the concept of culture, far from being emancipatory, brings about a new form of establishing the privileges
and hierarchy of those using it. For our culture
knows that it is one-among-many, knows that it is relative,
and further, it values this knowledge (this knowledge is one
of its basic values), i.e., it locates its own superiority (knowledge) in this knowledge of its relativity, as it likewise locates
inferiority (ignorance) in ignorance of this relativity. Our
knowledge lies in the fact that we recognize . . . our relativity:
our relativity and their relativity, whereas their ignorance
lies now in their cultural absolutism. (McGrane 1989:120)
As Scott (2003:103104) puts it in commenting on

McGranes work, the possibility of seeing all difference as
relative depends on an omniscient vantage from which all
difference is visible to a detached perspective that is not relative. The coordinates of such an omniscient epistemological
vantage point that distinguishes the culture that uses the concept of culture to conceive otherness emerges from what Latour (1993) calls the modern great divide between nature and
culture:
We [moderns] are the only ones who differentiate absolutely
between Nature and Culture whereas in our eyes all the
otherswhether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande
or Barouyacannot really separate what is knowledge from
what is society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes
from Nature as it is from what their cultures require. (Latour
1993:99)
The point I want to stress here is that when the concept

of culture becomes the dominant diacritical for human differences, it comes along with the ontological armature in
which it makes sense. As an ontological category, Culture
is related to but also different from culture as the concept
through which the otherness of humans is conceived. As an
ontological category, Culture works in tandem with nature to
set (among other things) the very basis of what moderns
understand by knowledge, that is, a relation of equivalence
between a cultural representation and a natural and autonomous reality out there. And here we come full circle back
to McGrane and Scott: the culture that uses culture to understand difference has a privileged status because it knows,
and it does so because it has a privileged access to reality, one
that is not clouded by culture (with lowercase c), and this
access is premised precisely on recognizing the ontological
difference between what is Culture and what is nature: a

distinction that other cultures do not have.
Summing up, then, culture contributes to naturalize the
very ontological assumptions that allow modernity to produce
an autocentric picture of itself as the expression of universal
certainty (Mitchell 2000:xi; see also Carrithers et al. 2010)
Through culture, we end up with a de facto all-encompassing
modernity, this time not by aprioristically assuming the relative relevance of the encounter with Europe but by assuming
that one of its categories can account for the differences in
the stories that exist about how things work, including the
effects of transformative interactions between different ontologies. Resituating culture as a category with which a particular world is being made constitutes a first step toward
refusing to be captured by modernity and an attempt to recuperate radical differences as something other than tradition.
Refusing Capture: Political Ontology

In the context of a debate (Carrithers et al. 2010) that carried
the suggestive title of Ontology Is Just Another Word for
Culture, Matt Candea has argued that, in anthropology, the
turn to ontology comes from the suspicion that cultural
difference is not different enough, or alternatively that cultural
difference has been reduced by cultural critics to a mere effect
of political instrumentality. By contrast, ontology is an attempt to take others and their real difference seriously (Carrithers et al. 2010:175). Another participant in the debate,
Martin Holbraad, nails down what it means to take others
and their real difference seriously: to entertain the idea that
the concepts we have at our disposal may be inadequate even
to describe our data properly, let alone to explain or interpret it. Our task then must be to locate the inadequacies of
our concepts in order to come up with better ones (Carrithers et al. 2010:180). I want to dwell for a moment on the
ideas of the inadequacy of concepts and of coming up with
better ones.
Culture is an inadequate concept for dealing with difference
not only because it is thin but also because it takes for granted
its own ontological status. In effect, while debates over the
concept of culture as a means to think about differences
among human groups have been almost canonical in anthropology since the mid-1980s, questions about the universality of the ontological armature composed by culture and
nature have remained somehow off center stage until very
recently. Yet these kinds of questions have been posed in
ethnographies that foregrounded the ontological assumptions
implicit in the practices of indigenous interlocutors, and
which thereby denaturalized those of the ethnographers (see
Descola 1996, 2005; Ingold 2000; Strathern 1992a, 1999; Viveiros de Castro 1996, 1998). Yet, unfortunately, scholars concerned with the interactions generated by the formation of a
European-dominated world system tended to consider these
works as having little actual relevancethis when not considering those works misguided in seeking to foreground dif-
ferences without giving a privileged attention to that particular (hi)story of transformative interactions that, as I have
argued before, assumes that everyone has come now into the
fold of modernity and its categories (see Starn 2011). I say
unfortunately because the ethnographic sensibilities displayed
in those works are crucial in addressing ongoing transformative interactions between different ontologies without being prey to the capture of an all-encompassing modernity.
And this is precisely because these works highlight how peoples distribute what exists and conceive their constitutive relations in different ways; or, posed otherwise, that modernity
is one way of making worlds among others and therefore that
the concepts generated within it (including that of culture)
can only go so far.7
As a first approximation, the ontological approach at the
very least raises a caution flag as to the adequacy of our
established concepts. However, as Candea (Carrithers et al.
2010) warns, the move from culture to ontology does not
cancel some vexing questions that trailed behind the former
concept: namely, what is the nature of the distinction that
the terms seek to highlight, and what do we mean when we
speak of different ontologies? Is the term purported to be
merely heuristic or is it a description of a state of fact? These
questions are crucial and admittedly difficult to tackle, precisely because the problem with ontology is that heuristics
and statements of facts constantly slip into each other.
Many of the ethnographies mentioned above introduce caveats as to the heuristic character of the arguments they contain regarding the indigenous ontologies under considerations
(and their contrasts with the Western/modern one), yet sometimes it is difficult to shed the impression that one is being
presented with the description of an actually existing ontology
out there. If we take the ontological approach as simply
stating that there are a variety of describable ontologies out
there, we end up very much in the same place as where we
started with culture, that is, sneaking up the modernist ontological assumption that there is a world out there, in this
case a world made of ontologies rather than cultures. In contraposition to this, Holbraad (Carrithers et al. 2010:185) proposes to take ontology as being just a set of assumptions
postulated by the anthropologist for analytical purposes. As
a heuristic device, ontology works with the contradictions
between a set of initial assumptions and some body of material
that appears to contradict it.
So what makes the ontological approach to alterity not only
pretty different from the culturalist one, but also rather
better, is that it gets us out of the absurd position of thinking
that what makes ethnographic subjects most interesting is
that they get stuff wrong. Rather, on this account, the fact
that the people we study may say or do things that to us
appear as wrong just indicates that we have reached the
7. Hence, the term nonmodern that I have used before was meant
as a placeholder, a carving out of space from the tenet that modernity
is all that exists.
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limits of our own conceptual repertoire. . . . The anthropological task, then, is not to account for why ethnographic
data are as they are, but rather to understand what they
areinstead of explanation or interpretation, what is called
for is conceptualization. . . . Rather than using our own
analytical concepts to make sense of a given ethnography
(explanation, interpretation), we use the ethnography to
rethink our analytical concepts. (Holbraad, quoted in Carrithers et al. 2010:184)
So here is ontology as a heuristic device, a tool to rethink

our analytical concepts. However, what is not self-evident is
why rethinking our analytical concepts is something that
should be pursued. For many espousing the ontological approach, it goes without saying that doing otherwise betrays
the existing multiplicity of worlds or realities. Holbraad (Carrithers et al. 2010:183) poses the point thus: The alternative
[to assuming that differences are differences in the way people
represent the world] must be to reckon with the possibility
that alterity is a function of the existence of different worlds
per se. But this seems to lead us back to ontology as a
statement of facts. The heuristic device then begins to trail
very close to relativism and its self-defeating paradox: if taking
different worlds seriously means that they cannot be wrong,
what do we do when facing the world that claims that the
world is only one and what we have are multiple representations of it? In another contribution (Alberti et al. 2011:902),
Holbraad seems to steer away from presenting the ontological claim in such strong terms and further emphasizes its
heuristic nature: the turn to ontology is meant to address the
analytical problem of how to make sense of things that seem
to lack one. Apparently this move circumvents the problem
associated with making foundational claims, but actually just
postpones it. As Holbraad points out, anthropologists have
long been in the business of making sense of things that lack
one (It is their culture!); hence, the question is under what
premises making sense of things that seem to lack one emerge
as a renewed legitimate analytical problem. In other words, the
question of why the ontological approach might be better is
always waiting at the end of the road, and answering this question seems to unavoidably require some sort of foundational
claim after all. And then we are back where we started.
Are we in a dead end? Not necessarily, if we consider another possible take on ontology, one in which the heuristic
device contributes to enact the fact, or put otherwise, one
that allows us to articulate a foundationless foundational
claim. In this version, ontology is a way of worlding, a form
of enacting a reality. It is critical to stress, however, that the
understanding of reality being postulated here is one that,
building on some versions of STS, bypasses the nature/culture
(or subject/object; material/ideational) divide to arrive at a
material-semiotic formulation (see Haraway 2008; Latour
1999; Law 2004; Mol 1999). What does this mean? (a) That
we avoid the assumption that reality is out there and that
in here (the mind), we have more or less accurate cultural
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representations of it; and (b) that reality is always in the

making through the dynamic relations of hybrid assemblages
that only after the fact are purified by moderns as pertaining
to either nature or culture. One way to grasp what is at stake
is starting from the idea that humans are involved in the
enactment of realities but not under conditions of their own
choosing. They have to grapple with an environment whose
features have been more or less sedimented and crystallized
through previous actions. But, crucially, the agents of those
actions are not humans per se, but heterogeneous assemblages
that we (moderns) conceptually purify and enact as humans
and nonhumansalong with an associated asymmetrical distribution of agency (see Law 2004).8
If the ethnographies that foreground the diversity of ways
of conceiving what exists and its relations give substance to
the notion of multiple ontologies, understanding ontology as
performance or enactment brings to the fore the notion of
ontological multiplicity, which can be related but is not the
same as the former. Annemarie Mols (2002) work with atherosclerosis is a good example of what ontological multiplicity
entails. She has shown how, in a Dutch hospital, atherosclerosis emerges as a different entity depending on the practice
under consideration. Under the microscope and manipulations of the pathologist, it emerges as a narrowing of the
artery. According to the records and interpretations of the
clinician, it emerges as the patients expressed pain. In turn,
in the graph of the radiologist, it emerges as differential blood
pressure in a limb. In each case, there is a different enactment
of atherosclerosis, a multiplicity that does not always add up
as pieces in a puzzle. Sometimes there is pain but not narrowing of arteries, or there is differential blood pressure in a
limb without pain, and so on. This multiplicity is, at least
temporarily, rendered singular through a series of conceptual
and politico-managerial procedures, through which some versions of atherosclerosis are discarded or made to fit uneasily
with each other. But the key point is that in practice, atherosclerosis (or reality) is multiple because there are multiple
practices. This is ontological multiplicity. Now, let me reintroduce the notion of multiple ontologies with a twist that,
for lack of a better term, I call storied performativity.9
Enactments or practices are storied, and stories are themselves enacted. Lets take Mols case again. As I pointed out,
she convincingly argues that atherosclerosis is multiple in
practice, but what interests me here is how the radiologist,
the clinician, and pathologist might conceive atherosclerosis.10
8. These heterogenous assemblages may have different relational configurations; thus, while the modern may have human and nonhumans,
others may have other kinds of entities.
9. Here we come to a full disclosure of the meaning of the term story
that I promised in the introduction.
10. Perhaps not the particular health practitioners that worked with
Mol, who, for this same reason, might now have different stories to tell
about atherosclerosis. Of course, this in itself would go a long way to
show the ways in which the ontological approach may intervene in
reality making, but this is not the point I want to stress now.
For them, it goes without saying that they are treating with
a single entity/disease. Moreover, the assumption of singularity is crucial to the very practices through which they perform atherosclerosis. This enacted assumption can be storied
thus: there is an objective reality out there (the disease atherosclerosis), and there are (more or less accurate) subjective
or disciplinary perspectives on it. This is the succinct version
of the modern myth telling us what kinds of things (e.g.,
subjects and objects) and relations (e.g., of perspective) make
up this particular world. Of course, the connections can be
narrated in the reverse order, and we can move from one of
the various storied versions of the modern myth to its enactment in practice. This is the road taken many times by
ethnographers when showing how myths are enacted in the
practices and embedded in the institutions of the peoples they
work with.
Storied performativity underscores the connection between
stories and practices (which in turn stresses the extent to
which the terms ontologies, worlds/worlding, and stories are
synonyms). But the most important point that can be drawn
from the concept is something numerous indigenous philosophers and intellectuals have insisted on (see Archibald 2008;
Burkhart 2001; Cajete 2000; Wilson 2008): stories are not
only or not mainly denotative (referring to something out
there), nor are they fallacious renderings of real practices.
Rather, they partake in the performance of that which they
narrate. One implication of this is that the stories being told
cannot be fully grasped without reference to their worldmaking effects, for different stories imply different worldings;
they do not float over some ultimate (real) world. The
corollary is that, indeed, some ethnographic subjects (or stories/worldings/ontologies) can be wrong, not in the sense of
a lack of coincidence with an external or ultimate reality, but
in the sense that they perform wrong: they are/enact worlds
in which or with which we do not want to live.
Multiple ontologies, ontological multiplicity, and storied
performativity constitute the resources with which what I call
political ontology tries to perform the pluriverse. The term
political ontology is meant to simultaneously imply a certain
political sensibility, a problem space, and a modality of analysis or critique. The political sensibility can be described as
a commitment to the pluriversethe partially connected
(Strathern 2004) unfolding of worldsin the face of the impoverishment implied by universalism. Of course, the pluriverse is a heuristic proposition, a foundationless foundational claim, which in the context of the previous discussion,
means that it is an experiment on bringing itself into being.
The problem space can then be characterized as the dynamics
through which different ways of worlding sustain themselves
even as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other.
Finally, and in contrast with other modalities of critique or
analysis, political ontology is not concerned with a supposedly
external and independent reality (to be uncovered or depicted
accurately); rather, it is concerned with reality making, including its own participation in reality making. In short, po-
litical ontology is concerned with telling stories that open up

a space for, and enact, the pluriverse. Before moving forward
to tell one of these storiesone constructed as context and
rationale for the projectI will first address equivocations
about political ontology that, paraphrasing some critical interlocutors, I will call homogenizing, exoticizing, and old
wine in a new bottle.11
The homogenizing equivocation would assume that political ontology postulates as homogeneous the multiple experiences of indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and of the
modern West, on the other. What we must bear in mind here
is that one of political ontologys concerns is how to operate
in a terrain dominated by conceptions of an all-encompassing
modernity. As discussed in the previous section, one of the
ways of doing this is by shrinking modernity to make it something more specific and contrastable, thus liberating the conceptual-ontological space for something else to exist.12 Yet
shrinking modernity to allow for contrast with other ways or
worlding does not mean that political ontology is blind to
variations and/or dissent within modernity; it is just that for
the specific purpose of highlighting the existence of something
other than modernity, such variations are not analytically relevant. It is in the specificity of the ethnographic case (and the
intended intervention) where the relevance of variations within
modernity (or any other way of worlding) can be brought to
the fore.
Still, someone may ask, are you not homogenizing when
you say that all Westerners operate according to the nature/
culture divide? Or that indigenous peoples live in a different
ontology? Here the cart is put in front of the horse. It is
assumed that political ontology attributes a given ontology or
set of practices to a given groupWesterners, indigenous
peoples, or what have you. In fact, political ontology is concerned with practices, performances, and enactments and not
with specific groups. One can speak of a given worlding or
ontology as long as one can trace its enactment. Moreover,
practices do not need to be entirely self-coherent and consistent, although one may find more or less coherence and
consistency in some situations than in others. Yet, the lack of
coherence or consistency neither implies that all worldings
are modern, nor that the term modern cannot be used to label
and single out a particular way of worlding. In short, the
attribution of modernness would go hand in hand with specific practices and not with a specific group. For instance, I
would feel unwarranted to call modern the practices of mid11. An article by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) brought to my
attention the appropriateness of the term equivocation for the kind of
problems I am tackling here. In effect, equivocation is not a misunderstanding about some thing, but a failure to understand that at stake
in a disagreement are different things. I will return to this concept
later.
12. In this sense, the project of eventualizing modernity (i.e., attending to the actual practices that are articulated around the appellative
modern) proposed by Eduardo Restrepo (2011) appears as a potential
complement to political ontology.
553
dle-class white women involved in Wicca. Likewise, neither

indigenous identity automatically translates into an otherthan-modern ontology, nor does indigenous involvement
make a conflict an ontological one. As indicated in the introduction, if the notion of multiple ontologies appears closely
associated with indigenous peoples in this article, it is due to
my professional trajectory and experience rather than to an
implicit claim that there is an inherent association between
them.
For some interlocutors, talking of worlds may recall exoticizing fictions about native life as somehow existing in a
time-space continuum outside our own. Granted, the term
might not be the best, but it should not be the grounds for
an equivocation that misses the centrality that performance
and enactment have in political ontologys definition of ontologies/worlds. Shrinking modernity to one particular way
of worlding, and thus regaining a space for the positivity of
other worldings, does not mean that we must fall back into
notions of discrete and clearly bounded entities that interact
with each other. Rather, in talking about particular worldings
or ontologies, the image I would like to convey is of enactments complexly entangled in non-Euclidian fashion; they
might take place in the same spatiotemporal location but not
always interfere with each other.13 This is a pluriverse constituted by intra-acting (Barad 2007) worldings that share
partial connections (Strathern 2004). Thus, while these worldings are coemergent, they do not share an overarching principle that would make their entanglement a universe. Rather,
their partial connections often constitute the sites in which
it is possible to discern how what is brought into existence
by a certain worlding might interfere and conflict with what
is brought into existence by another.
The old wine in a new bottle equivocation is a version
of the seeming contradiction in the use of the term ontology
as heuristic device and statement of fact that I discussed before, and it would say something like this:
Fine, your worlds are constituted through diverse enactments and they are not isolated but mutually entangled, yet
at the bottom, it seems that you are just changing one term
(ontology) for another (culture), you are still capturing difference from your own perspective (call it ontological
rather than cultural as you may wish). Indeed, the passage
from Scott about culture quoted above can be perfectly
applied to your ontology. In saying that in reality what
we have is a diversity of worlds/ontologies rather than cultures, you situate yourself in an omniscient epistemological
vantage point from which (and of course in relation to
which) all difference is simultaneously available to a detached, surveying gaze which itself is not relative. What is
new in all this?
The key to the equivocation here is in the reference to re13. For this understanding, I variously build on Haraway (1997), Latour (2005), Law (2004), Law and Mol (2002), and Strathern (1996).
554
ality. As Mol (1999:77) says, talking about reality as multiple

depends [not on the metaphors] of perspective and construction, but rather those of intervention and performance. This
suggests a reality that is done and enacted rather than observed. This reinforces the point raised before that political
ontologys concern is with efficacy rather than accuracy. And
efficacy is tied to plausibility, which is just another way of
referring to the actual environment that has been brought
into being from the infinite possibilities of the pluriverse.
Political ontology does its work at the interstice between the
possible and the plausible that the foundationless foundational claim of a pluriverse opens. And thus, the claim of the
pluriverse (or multiple ontologies) is not concerned with presenting itself as a more accurate picture of how things are
in reality (a sort of meta-ontology); it is concerned with
the possibilities that this claim may open to address emergent
(and urgent) intellectual/political problems. Central among
these problems is the extent to which those of us (persons
and institutions) who have been shaped by an ontology that
postulates/performs a one-world world are ill prepared to
grapple with its increasing implausibility.14
Why Political Ontology: A (Plausible) Story of

the Present?
In the introduction, I advanced the argument that ontological
conflicts are becoming more visible in part because the hegemony of the story of modernity (or the modern ontology)
is in crisis.15 After having prepared the terrain, I can now
substantiate my point. In figure 1, we have a sketch showing
how the modern story hinges upon a specific arrangement of
three elements: an ontologically stark distinction between nature and culture, a dominant tendency to conceive difference
(including the difference between nature and culture) in hierarchical terms, and a linear conception of time. The domain
of culture has been further subdivided into several cultures
as the key diacritic to establish differences among humans.
The place of modern culture in relation to its others (nature
and other cultures) is more or less explicitly linked to a hierarchical system mapped out against the background of linear time. In effect, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the two great divides (between nature and culture and
between moderns and nonmoderns) were increasingly understood by moderns in terms of a story that makes modernity
not only different but also the spearhead of the evolving history of humanity.16 And while in the past, this progressive
14. Law (2011) uses the term one-world world for the way of worlding that proposes that reality is one, that ontology cannot but be in
singular.
15. Helen Verrans (2002) work has provided much inspiration to
conceive and plot my arguments as a story.
16. The arrow of time was mainly understood as a progression, although it could be understood as a sort of regression too, as the Romantics
did. Not surprising, then, that any contestation to dominant notions of
progress are still labeled romantic and often equated to a desire for the
past (see Hindess 2007).
Figure 1. The modern myth.
story was conceived as a description of the path that everybody would eventually follow, now it is conceived as a fait
accompli; modernity is the present and thus, as Giddens
(1990) says, from now on is modernity all the way down.
Notice that I speak of an arrangement of the three elements:
it is not the nature/culture divide, a hierarchical understanding of the differences between (modern) self and (nonmodern) others, or linear time per se that makes the story of
modernity specific; what constitutes the specificity of modernity in a context of multiple ontologies/stories is the particular way in which these elements are storied/enacted as
being related to each other. The arguments of the Latin American research program on modernity/coloniality and decolonial thought (MCD) are useful to explicate the point.17
MCD foregrounds that the modern ontological armature described above emerged progressively in a series of specific
locations in western Europe along with the unfolding of the
colonial experience and needs inaugurated by the Spanish
conquest of the New World (see Dussel 1995; Mignolo 2000).
Thus, the two great divides (nature/culture and modern/nonmodern) and its correlated temporal matrix are not just historically coemergent, they are cosustaining. The implication
being that performing a modern world in which this arrangement of threads constitutes the ontological bedrock necessarily involves keeping at bay the threat posed to it by the
radically different ways of worldings with which it is nevertheless entangled. And this has been done, first by denying
these other worldings any veracity and, later on, even real
existence, to the point that true conflicts (i.e., where parties
17. Under this research program, a heterogeneous groups of scholars
located in both Latin America and the United States have been discussing
since the 1990s the constitutive relations between modernity and coloniality, on the one hand, and between these and nonmodern societies,
on the other hand (for a more detailed discussion of this research program, see Escobar 2007a; Mignolo 2007).
recognize each other as adversaries) have been turned into

anomalies (i.e., where one of the parties has been simply
rendered a deviation from the norm embodied by the other;
see Latour 2002).
As long as the horizon of alterity in the encounter with
the New World was Christianity, the radical Otherness of the
natives worlding was recognized as potentially threatening
and the site of an open antagonism (i.e., the Indians were
minions to the devil either willingly or because they had fallen
prey to his lies), but as reason displaced faith in the constitution of the modern regime of truth, this antagonism was
progressively muted: Indians were just ignorant, they were at
an earlier stage of evolution, or, as of late, they just had
another culture (which, critically, lacked the concept of culture; de la Cadena 2010). In its latest modality, modernity
exorcises the threatening difference of other worldings by
taming them and allowing them to exist just as cultural perspectives on a singular reality. In other words, all the different
ontologies described by ethnographers are shrunk and made
to fit into one of the little squares labeled Other culture in
figure 1.
What I am storying here is the enactment of a modern
world that actively produces other ontologies or worlds as
absences (see Santos 2004). Yet, it is my contention that modernity has been able to make this absenting story plausible
as long as it has maintained hegemony. I follow Guha (1997:
23) in using the term hegemony to refer to a condition of
Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of D,
Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C). In this sense, a key
element in building and maintaining the hegemony of modernity has been the spectacular feats afforded by the experimental sciences since the sixteenth century onward. First,
they contributed plausibility to the emergent story of modernity as a progressive movement marked by the increasing
mastery of nature, and second, they became the anchor for
a regime of knowledge that we may call universal science
that claimed to be able to get to the Truth while disqualifying
all other ways of knowing as beliefs.18 This regime of knowledge in turn became ingrained into a modern governmentality
where a concern with shaping life progressively displaced a
focus on the right to kill (Foucault 1991), contributing thus
to give shape to a societal project that can be described as an
escape to the future. By this I mean to signal the attitude
and assumption that, with the guarantee of science, a sort of
paradise waits at the end of the road and that the human
and nonhuman sacrifices of the present are somehow insignificant from the perspective of those who can anticipate such
paradise.19 However, from the extirpation of idolatries to
18. By universal science, I refer to an assemblage of knowledge practices that, associating themselves but distorting the very specific nature
of the truths produced by the experimental sciences, claimed to know
reality as it is (see Latour 2004; Stengers 2000b).
19. In her recent book, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) provides a very
detailed account of how different modulations of tense such as this give
shape to late liberalism.
555
the multicultural cunning of recognition (Povinelli 2002),

coercion has never disappeared regardless of how persuasive
the scape to the future may have appeared to many; rather,
it has been crucial in containing radical difference to then
submit it to the domain of governmentality (Ghosh 2006).
In effect, even within a paradigm claiming that different cultures are equally valid perspectives on the world, the use of
coercion continues to be seen as legitimate when Others cross
the limits of what is commonly perceived as reasonable and
conceivable. This is exceedingly obvious when indigenous
peoples try to defend their worlds in the face of development
or conservation projects that, promoted from either right or
left political stances, assume that those complex assemblages
of relations are cultures and nature, that is, things or resources
that exist for the greater good of humans.
As Marisol de la Cadena (2010) has argued, in the modern
division of representational work, only universal science can
represent (speak for) nature, while politicians represent (speak
for) their human constituencies. Thus, the only legitimate
way in which peoples can defend their different worlds
(which, of course, include more than humans) is by way of
converting them into cultures that can be mobilized by
ethnic politicians. However, claims for the respect of cultural differences can only go so far before the reality sanctioned by universal science is brought up as the limit beyond
which cultural demands become unreasonable and therefore
deserving of the disciplinary force of coercion to keep them
in check (see Povinelli 2001).20 But here is where the crisis
of hegemony mentioned at the beginning of the section enters
the scene, for it is becoming more difficult to cloak the use
of disciplinary force as a reasonable response to defend the
modern story.
The symptoms and sources of the crisis are numerous, but
they converge in challenging the arrangement of the three key
elements that shape the modern story: the internal great divide
(nature/culture), the external great divide (modern/nonmodern), and linear progressive time. Developments in science
and technology, from research on animal behavior that has
shaken ideas of human exceptionalism to the imbroglios of
techno-nature where nature and culture are impossible to
keep apart, have made the internal divide harder to sustain
(see Haraway 2008; Latour 2004). More important for our
story, universal science has begun to lose its capacity to command consent in the face of the consequences (particularly
20. The examples are myriad, but the cases of Ecuador, Bolivia, and
Peru during 2009 and 2010 are particularly telling in that governments
from both the right and the left, and even one presided over by an
indigenous person (Evo Morales, in Bolivia), reacted with the same argument to indigenous demands. In effect, confronted with grassroots
indigenous movements that claimed that decisions on whether mining
and resource extraction in their territories should be left in their hands,
governments responded by claiming that the demands were irrational,
infantile, and conspired against the greater good of the nation (see http:
//inside.org.au/garcia-peru, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4
-148063-2010-06-22.html, and http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/
elmundo/4-148319-2010-06-26.html.
556
environmental) of the escape to the future premised on the

certainty of the knowledge built on the nature/culture divide
(see Beck 1992; Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005). The challenge to this divide has opened the door to the consideration
of other ontologies as plausible and viable alternatives to the
modern one (see Escobar 2010; Law 2004; Latour 2010; Serres
2008; Stengers 201321). In this sense, what Escobar (2007b)
calls the ontological turn (i.e., the increasing attention to
issues of ontology) in social theory is not an intellectual fad
but a symptom of the crisis.
But, again, it must be stressed that the challenge is not only
to the nature/culture divide. The everyday forms of existence and the struggles to maintain other worldings have
also been eroding the mechanisms through which modernity
forecloses the plausibility of other ontologies, centrally among
those mechanisms, the turning of difference into a hierarchy
(see Blaser 2010; Fox Tree 2010).22 The challenge to the external great divide has been gaining momentum (albeit unevenly), in part along with the articulation of the international
indigenous movement. The symptom is the emergence of
multiculturalism, which, as Povinelli (2011) points out, has
been late liberalisms response to anticolonial and new social
movements challenging of liberal forms of government. Of
course, as a governmental response, multiculturalism seeks to
contain that challenge within the sphere of policy so that
politics remain unchanged. But to what extent is multiculturalism successful at keeping challenges from transforming
politics? And exactly what is the politics being protected?23 A
widely cited article by Charles Hale, Rethinking Indigenous
Politics in the Era of Indio Permitido (2004) provides an
anchor to grapple with these questions.
Indio permitido (allowed Indian) was the image used to
refer to the difference allowed by multiculturalism, which was
implemented in Latin America through the 1990s along with
other neoliberal reforms. The thrust of Hales argument was
a concern with the capacity of multiculturalism to put limits
on what was politically possible through granting spaces for
cultural difference of a limited character. Indio permitido
was the embodiment of this constrained Other, which was in
turn held in contrast with another Other: the undeserving,
dysfunctional Indian that protested and would not conform
to the delimited space offered by multiculturalism. Hale ar21. The lecture is available at http://sawyerseminar.ucdavis.edu
/resources.
22. In a playful counterpoint with James Scotts everyday forms of
resistance, Erich Fox Tree (2010) has coined the phrase everyday forms
of existence to refer to those everyday practices that through persevering
in their difference, and without being intended as resistance, defy modernizing processes.
23. One of the anonymous reviewers suggested that a question that
arises from here is what might count as political, ontologically speaking.
In other words, what would be the implications of ontological pluralism
for this question. I agree this is a crucial point, but a solid engagement
with it is beyond the aim of this article, which is precisely to stir conversations around these kinds of questions. But see Candea (2011) for
an excellent argument that starts to explore this point.
gued that in spite of its cunning, and as long as neoliberal

principles were critically scrutinized, the spaces opened by
multiculturalism could be fruitfully occupied to fight the
good fight, that is, to fight about what was politically possible.
But, politically possible in regard to what? The article was
clear as to the core thing at stake: control over resources.
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s and one can see that multiculturalism was not enough to police the political. In places
like Bolivia and Ecuador, years of neoliberal reforms were
rolled back by popular uprisings in which indigenous movements played key roles. But, in the wake of the mobilizations,
the redefinition of what is politically possible went well
beyond what many analysts would have expected. In effect,
it seems that indio permitido had been the beachhead not only
for the dysfunctional Indian that will fight for resources but
also for the indio aborrecido (abhorred Indian), the one that
to the surprise of everyone and the discomfort of many would
challenge the very idea that what is at stake in politics are
simply resources. For example, in Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous movements pushed for the recognition of pachamama (translated with much loss as mother nature) as a
subject with rights in the new constitutions that emerged from
the struggles that pushed back neoliberal agendas. As de la
Cadena (2010) points out, this is a major event, for it goes
beyond challenging neoliberal constitutions: it disrupts the
modern constitution in several fronts. For instance, the movements challenged the modern constitutions division of labor
between politics and science: who might be pachamamas
spokesperson, a universal science that does not even recognize
it exists? Or are they yatiris, pacos (shamans), which, according
to the modern constitution, can speak for culture (politics)
but not for nature? Also, the recognition of pachamama comes
associated with notions such as sumak kawsay or suma qamana (good living) that are advanced as alternative horizons
for societal projects to those offered by development and
progress (and their embedded premise of an escape to the
future).24
As pointed out before, the potency and visibility of the
challenge to the external great divide is complexly uneven.
Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that challenges to the
story of modernity are mutually reinforcing and intimately
connected (albeit not through simple causality). Even where
the grip of cunning recognition is stronger, a loosening of the
nature/culture divide and a general devaluation on the purchase power of the modern myth create opportunities to visualize ontological conflicts across the board. This is especially
the case where peoples struggle to sustain their worldings and
life projects (Blaser 2004; Escobar 2008) in the face of more
or less coercively imposed notions of progress and modern24. The notion of good living (buen vivir in Spanish) has become the
site of a very vibrant debate where indigenous, environmental, and postdevelopmentalist intellectuals are contributing (see Gudynas 2011a,
2011b; Walsh 2010; Yampara 2001; see also the 2010 special issue of Alai:
http://www.alainet.org/publica/alai452w.pdf.
ization. To the extent that these conflictive encounters proliferate (see Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005; Mander and
Tauli-Corpuz 2006), the modern story becomes increasingly
located in a position of dominance without hegemony
(Guha 1997). This does not mean that modernity has lost
dominance but that in sustaining it, the balance between coercion and persuasion is shifting. Forty years ago, opposing
mining, oil extraction, or the increase of agricultural lands
for environmental reasons or because indigenous ways of life
would be profoundly disrupted would have been seen as sheer
irrationality by most citizens in a Latin American country;
not so now. The promise of modernization no longer appears
as persuasive (which does not mean totally unpersuasive either), and thus a space gets opened to perform other stories
and other propositions about how different worldings might
relate.
Conclusions: Missing the Pachakuti

In 1991, Orin Starn wrote a biting indictment of anthropologists working in Peru who failed to see in the 1970s the
signs of the Shinning Path insurgency that were gathering in
front of their noses. In his reading, the failure stemmed from
a narrow focus on adaptation, ritual, and cosmology, as well
as on a regional version of Orientalist othering, Andeanism.
His characterization of anthropological practices in Peru summarized many of the misgivings with former notions of cultural difference as bounded, timeless, homeostatic, and unchanging islands of history and made a forceful argument for
the urgency of situating ethnographies of indigenous realities
within the flow of a modern history of continuous and multilayered connections built through a common political
economy and the more subtle channels of representation and
self-imagination (Starn 1991:8586). But if, in the 1970s, the
problem was anthropological blindness to the political economy that prompted the insurgency of the Shining Path, at
the turn of the millennium, the problem is misrecognizing
the pachakuti that is taking place in the Andes and beyond.25
The term pachakuti is a composite of the quechua words
pacha (world, time and space, or state of being) and kuti
(change, turn, or something that comes back on itself) (Steele
and Allen 2004:226) and thus makes reference to a veritable
turnaround. Interestingly, the effects of the powerful indigenous mobilization that have been taking place in the Andean
countries since the mid-1990s have been increasingly referred
to as a pachakuti, with several movements and organizations
adopting the word in their names. For some, the term seems
to be simply a synonym of social revolution, while others try
25. Mark Goodale (2006:636) has made a slightly similar argument,
pointing out the extent to which Starns call for a focus on political
economy ended up being overemphasized at the expense of just the
type of Andean discursivity that [he] believed had been inappropriately
romanticized. The consequence, according to Goodale, is that analysts
will misread the current revolution in which the constitution of an indigenous cosmopolitanism is central.
557
to foreground the extent to which the term points toward a

profound challenge to modernity and its ontological assumptions (see Burman 2011; Fernandez-Osco 2006).26 The
difference is significant, as it signals a struggle to define the
limits of the political. An acrimonious discussion that flared
up over the Internet prompted by an article by Pablo Stefanoni, the director of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, makes the stakes more evident. The article reported on the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change
and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
in April 2010 and called for by Bolivian President Evo Morales
in the wake of the disastrous United Nations climate change
conference in Copenhagen. Stefanoni wrote that the conference in Cochabamba
revealed something of relevance to the future: The process
of change [in Bolivia] is too important to be left in the
hands of the pachamamicos. The affectation of ancestral
authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin Americas familiar exoticism and
even more so Bolivias . . . but it does not seem capable of
contributing anything significant in terms of building a new
State, instituting a new model of development, discussing
a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and
mass participation. . . . So, instead of discussing how to
combine developmental expectations with an intelligent
eco-environmentalism, the pachamamico discourse offers us
a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enigmatic tone, and a nave reading of the crisis of capitalism
and western civilization. In Europe there is much greater
awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic
products) than there is in our country, where in many ways
everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective
than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed
First Nations philosophy, often an excuse of some urban intellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the
country.27 (Emphasis added)
Diatribes like this are not isolated; rather, they are quite
common in Bolivia and beyond when anything unfitting to
modernist parameters of reasonability surfaces as something
with more pretensions than simply being folklore for tourist
consumption. Whether in incendiary op-ed commentaries or
in more subtle scholarly analyses, the rationale of the disqualification seems to follow the same pattern:
(1) Premise: cultural differences are folkloric and superficial because we all now live in the modern world (a product
of five centuries of global intermingling and transformative
26. Mignolo and Schiwy (2003:9) point out that, not surprisingly, the
situation created by the arrival of the Spaniards was referred to as pachakuti. Millones (2007) in turn points out that pachakuti does not refer
to a return to a pre-Hispanic state of the world, but to the creation of
a new one.
27. Some of the articles that composed the debate, including the one
cited here, are available online at http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?pp1228.
558
interactions) and therefore, at the bottom, the world is the

same for everyone.
(2) Demonstration: show me a claim of radical difference
and I will show you an indigenous intellectual who uses computers and the Internet to invent a tradition for the consumption of guilt-ridden, exoticism-seeking white people.
(3) Consequence: radically different worlds are not real,
claims of radical difference are empty posturing, and therefore
they have nothing to say in any serious conversation about
how to deal with real and urgent problems. All that needs to
be attended to is captured by political economy and ethnic
politicking (with the ammunition of culture). In other words,
our established categories reflect current processes and
problems (including the affectations of ancestral authenticity) well enough to handle them.
The assumption that our established categories are
enough is perhaps the most insidious way in which claims of
an all-encompassing modernity do Sameing while seeking to
articulate a passionate, yet sober, commitment to differences
without inequalities. As pointed out by Elizabeth Povinellli
in an article that I consider to be a precursor of political
ontology concerns, although political economy is understood
as a framework for analyzing unequal relations and access to
cultural and material resources and power, important questions remain:
Is there an internal limit to political-economic approaches
to the cultural construction of economics? If culture is a
lens through which the local group mediates the practices
and policies of the larger system . . . then what of the lens
of the larger system and its practices of knowing? . . . In
any case, how are these beliefs and practices in conflict with
[indigenous] ways of knowing the human-environmental
nexus? And how are the cultural assumptions underlying
political economy linked to dominant institutions of power?
Is this cultural underpinning reinscribing dominant power
over local minority communities even as the researcher is
trying to empower local sociocultural practices . . . ? (Povinelli 1995:506)
Nadasdy (2007:37) provides some answers to these questions when he argues that, to the extent that our theories deny
the ontological assumptions on which other peoples base their
conceptions of the world, we provide a powerful justification
for the dismissal of certain beliefs and practices as just cultural
constructions (which, although perhaps relevant in the realm
of cultural politics, cannot provide the factual basis for development or resource management). One could add, following de la Cadena (2010), that from a modern perspective,
these ontological assumptions cannot provide a basis for serious politics either. In part due to this, argues Poirier (2008:
83), many indigenous peoples conceal those aspects that are
considered, from the point of view of modernist (and Cartesian) ontology and epistemology, as a radical alterity, those
that are not considered seriously and at face value, and just
as mere beliefs. Most often, I suspect, many indigenous pol-
iticians find few avenues to contribute to sustaining or protecting their worlds other than through the use of (our)
widely available categories and symbols of alterity (or Sameing)such as that of the ecologically noble savage, the original
communist, or the original entrepreneurwhich, with all the
perils that the move entails, are palatable to different audiences and circumstantial allies.28 Further remarks are not necessary to bring home the point that, with regard to ontological
differences, the current relations of force make equivocations
even more pervasive, almost endemic. In this sense, we cannot
assume that self-representations through established categories exhaust the radical differences that may or may not be
at stake. In fact, those self-representations tell us more about
the status of the hegemony of the categories being used, and
the asymmetrical relations between worlds, than about the
existence of those radical differences. Thus, when a cataract
of words in an indigenous language starts to appear on the
public political stage, it might be an indication that the corset
that dominant categories impose upon radical differences
might be exploding at the seams.
Worlding is a contested, arduous, and not entirely coherent
process and never takes place in a vacuum without connections to other ways of worlding. Yet the connections do not
cancel their radical differences. Radically different worlds are
being enacted in front of our noses, even if they now involve
computers and the Internet, along with older (which does
not mean unchanging) other nonhumans! And while they
might be taking place in front of our noses, these enactments
are not spectacles geared to achieve the ulterior purposes that
our categories allow us to imagine (control of resources, political positioning, and so on). They are doing worlds themselves.
Discussions about the proper protocols to engage powerful
nonhumans in changing circumstances, inquiries into the collective memory to repair and/or recreate practices wounded
by colonial policies, and efforts to relearn or create languages
and concepts that can better express and materialize visions
of what a decolonized life means are taking place along with
other everyday forms of existence away from an audience that
28. The ecologically noble savage and the original communist are
well-known and widely debated labels of alterity (see Harkin and Lewis
2007; Krech 1999; Lee 1990; Wilmsen 2009); a little less known is the
original entrepreneur label, most visibly promoted by neoliberal intellectual and pundit Hernando de Soto and his Institute for Liberty and
Democracy (see http://www.ild.org.pe). For all their differences, all these
symbols tend to play the same role in the modern political terrain: being
incarnated by those supposedly closest to natural man, they lend an
aura of naturalness to the positions and arguments associated with them.
Yet as Nasdasdy (2005) cogently argued in the case of the ecologically
noble savage, none of these labels capture what is at stake in many
indigenous understandings of nonhumans, and, I will add, well-being or
justice, for that matter.
could be moved by the appeal of the exotic.29 And in many

cases, these processes bring to the fore radical differences.
Sometimes these differences are voiced by indigenous (among
others) spokespersons who alternatively might be either derided as spurious or embraced as authentic, depending on
whether the alterity displayed can be made to fit existing and
interested preconceptions. In turn, nonindigenous commentators or analysts who take these claims seriously, and want
to slow down thinking to hear what is being said and what
would be the consequences before embracing or rejecting
them, are automatically sniggered at.30 Naive, exoticist, and
essentialist when not patronizing are some of the epithets
proffered. Of course, if the project of a political ontology can
take flight and grow, it will have to deactivate this automatic
response. I hope to have made some strides on that direction,
at least with respect to the accusations of navete, exoticism,
and essentialism. But I want to raise a final point about the
patronizing accusation.
Political ontology is intended neither as a pedagogic project
to illuminate a reality that deficient theorizing cannot grasp,
nor as a proselytizing project to show the virtues of other,
nonmodern blueprints for a good life. Such reading would
confuse an attempt to carve out a space to listen carefully to
what other worldings propose with an attempt to rescue and
promote those worldings as if we knew what they are about.31
Political ontology is closer to hard-nosed pragmatism than
to liberal desire to understand everyone; the pax moderna no
longer holds (if it ever truly did), and dominance without
hegemony is a costly proposition when ontological differences
become politically active. And here I have in mind not only
the activation of indigenous and other land-based worldings
but also that of worldings in which it is unacceptable that
God play no role in politics, worldings where the killing of
animals in the pursuit of human purposes is infinitely more
complicated than usually assumed, in short, the varied ways
in which other ontologies than the modern one are staking
a claim to exist and, in some cases, occupy the dominant role
that modernity has played so far. In this context, carving out
a space to listen is also carving out a space to tell another
story to (and about) ourselves, to engage in other kinds of
worlding that might be more conducive to a coexistence based
on recognizing conflicts rather than brushing them off as
irrelevant or nonexistent. Certainly there are no guarantees
29. A volume edited by the Bolivian Periodico Pukara is telling in this
regard. The volume collected the presentations of several key figures and
intellectuals of the Bolivian indigenous movement, some of whom focused on retrieving the meaning and scope of Aymara concepts as crucial
to understanding where the movement is and what it needs to do. The
volume is available online: http://periodicopukara.com/archivos/historia
-coyuntura-y-descolonizacion.pdf.
30. I take the idea of slowdown thinking from Isabelle Stengerss
(2005) cosmopolitical proposal.
31. By listening carefully, I mean something closer to what Viveiros
de Castro (2004) calls translation as controlled equivocation than to the
expectation of finding in my world a representation that will be the perfect
equivalent of what those other worlds propose.
559
for such an attempt, but we cannot even begin to tell such a

story well without engaging the stories of others seriously.
Acknowledgments
This piece has been on the make for almost 5 years, and the
debts accrued are plenty. First and foremost, I must state upfront that the idea of political ontology has been taking shape
more directly through collective thinking with Marisol de la
Cadena and Arturo Escobar. As part of this collaboration, we
organized two seminars. One of them (Politica Mas alla de
la Politica), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, took
place in July of 2009 in Santandercito (Colombia); the other
(Pluriverse and the Social Sciences), funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, took
place in September 2010 in St. Johns, Newfoundland. The
participants in both seminars were enormously generous in
engaging with some of the ideas presented here; in particular,
I want to thank Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Janet Conway, Harvey
Feit, Larry Grossberg, Eduardo Gudynas, Alex Khasnabish,
John Law, Brian Noble, Isabelle Stengers, Eduardo Restrepo,
Dianne Rocheleau, Axel Rojas, and Elena Yehia. I am also
thankful to Michael Asch, Damian Castro, Alberto Corsin
Jimenez, Lesley Green, Martin Holbraad, Justin Kenrick, Josh
Lepawsky, Charles Mather, Annemarie Mol, Claire Poirier,
Sylvie Poirier, Colin Scott, Helen Verran, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro for insightful conversations on various aspects
of the arguments presented here.
Comments
Claudia Briones
Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de
Cambio (IIDyPCa), Universidad Nacional de Ro Negro-CONICET, B. Mitre 630 5 Piso, (8400) San Carlos de BarilocheRo
Negro, Argentina (cbriones@unrn.edu.ar). 19 III 13
It has to be celebrated that anthropologists keep debating

better ways of approaching concepts such as radical difference and otherness. These debates have been part of the
anthropological tool kit from the very beginning, always with
momentous consequences. Challenges include both how far
we are prepared to go, and the intended and unintended
effects of our updated approaches.
Insofar as I also work with indigenous peoples, their practices, and conflictive realities, I share many of Blasers discontents and reservations. I also find extremely relevant the
three theoretical moves that he proposes: (a) tackling different
ways of worlding not as mere contents/assumptions, but as
a practice; (b) making a clear distinction between practices
of worlding and practices of belonging (culture and identity?);
(c) reframing Fabians denial of coevalness (Fabian 1983:
560
146), as to question the claim that all contemporary cultures

are modern just because they are contemporaneous.
Building upon these convergences, I prefer to raise some
questions instead of commenting on the paper, in the hope
that they will invite Mario to develop his arguments further.
1. Morphological issues. According to Blaser, when the term
modern is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference
from the present. Now then, what are the effects of using
ontology/ontological both as an adjective and as a noun? Does
the act of naming his heuristic project in the singular (Political
Ontology) end up neutralizing ontological multiplicities? If
this name is adopted to emphasize the existence of ontological
conflicts, what is the space left to analyze ontological assumptions of our interlocutors that are neither enacted nor
disputed in public arenas?
In the article, Blaser speaks of (modern) self and (nonmodern) others, nonmodern blueprints for a good life,
nonmodern societies, as if the labeling modern/nonmodern
could be applied both to the self (identities) and to designs.
What are the effects of this use upon the analytical distinction
between practices of worlding and practices of belonging,
between culture and identity? Or which are the foreseen relationships between worlding and belonging?
Once stories and storied performativity become key concepts to perform realities and gain access to ontological differences (or differences we choose to consider ontological),
what is the role played by extradiscursive practices in the
Political Ontology project?
2. Radical difference as a matter of fact. What are the effects
of putting more emphasis on the domineering effects of the
politics of Otherness than on discourses about cultural differences? Are not the ideas of radical difference and of otherness part of the same Janus-faced reality created by modern
ontology in order to leave unmarked and universalize its own
practices and belongings? If the modernness that underlies
contemporary cultural differences would need to be proved
rather than axiomatically asserted and, to do so, one would
need some criteria of what it means to be modern, what
about the predicated nonmodernness of certain contemporary
cultural differences? Do they also need to be proved against
some criteria of what it means to be nonmodern? What are
these criteria then? How to discriminate between cultural differences and ontological differences and to discriminate any
cultural difference from radical difference? Or is any difference
radical?
3. Semantics and pragmatics. Even if the attention paid to
practice in the paper seems to indicate otherwise, the noun
radical difference seems to be related to the realm of semantics more than to that of pragmatics. A propos the tension
between semantic and pragmatic approaches, then, how
should we conceive the inherent hybridity of cultures? As
a collection of juxtaposed stories that constitute sometimes
modern, sometimes nonmodern realities? Or as stories that
constitute realities with modern and nonmodern features at
the same time? What difference does it make to state that the
research focus is the effects of transformative interactions

between different ontologies or, rather, the effects of transformative interactions between ontological differences?
4. Ontologies/epistemologies. Can the discussion of epistemological relativism solve all the epistemological issues involved? Is the awareness of the ways in which peoples distribute what exists and conceive their constitutive relations
(ontology) divorced from acknowledging the means by which
they acquire and approve such conceptualizations (epistemology)? Assuming the modernness of the ontological/epistemological divide, how should we think of the relationships
between both entities/realities? Can we grasp ontological differences by using our modern epistemology or must we also
consider epistemological differences? Moreover, if we do not
take also into account epistemological differences, how could
we guarantee that controlled equivocations do not end up
establishing an epistemological vantage point to measure up
ontological differences as epistemological relativism does?
Because it is very hard for me to abandon the anthropological wisdom of taking others and their real difference
seriously, as well as the disciplinary advice to be cautious
regarding the intended and unintended pragmatic consequences of anthropological discourses on cultural difference,
I look forward to reading Blasers reply. If the idea of radical
difference had not been used so extensively to justify oppression within the modern world system (in spite of repeated
anthropological efforts to redefine the concept), I would also
accept Stengerss invitation to relearn to laugh (2000a) and
wonder what it would mean in this case? Perhaps it would
imply a daring what if. What if the idea of radical difference
belonged to the realm of pragmatics instead of semantics?
What if we approached radical difference not as the unquestioned standpoint for symbolizing gaps of meaning but as a
disputed index, used in multifarious ways, in order to presuppose, create, and rank such gaps? Could this stance pave
a better way to perform controlled equivocations?
Anders Burman
Human Ecology Division, Department of Human Geography,
Lund University, Solvegatan 10, S-22362 Lund, Sweden
(anders.burman@hek.lu.se). 22 II 13
Mario Blaser provides us with an inspiring theoretical account

and justification of the ontological turn in anthropology
and the study of indigenous societies. The task he sets for
himself is indeed critical. He explores how to take radical
differences seriously without indulging in essentialist exoticism. This is a task I also have attempted (e.g., Burman 2012),
though not in such a theoretically initiated way as Blaser.
More urgently still, by framing his discussion as one of political ontology, Blaser attends to ontological differences
without losing sight of social struggle and political power.
Current political dynamics in Latin America, as discussed by
Blaser, manifest that any definite distinction between material/

political and cognitive/symbolic conflicts is based on a false
dichotomy. Ontological and epistemological aspects of human
existence are at the center of struggles over resources and
power since these are simultaneously struggles over meaning,
struggles over reality, over what there is.
By questioning our routine usage of the concept culture,
Blaser looks for ways of escaping the constraints of anthropological theory that supposedly prevent us from seeing beyond the notion of the world as constituted by one real reality
out there, and innumerous cultural interpretations and representations of it. This line of critique is, of course, not novel
in anthropology. Viveiros de Castro (1998) and others have
already questioned the universality of the notion of one naturemany cultures. Moreover, by a phenomenological attention to practice, Ingold (2000) has directed our attention
away from thinking of culture as mental representations of
the material world and toward a comprehension of lifeworlds
as emerging in peoples practical engagement with and within
the world. A core success of Blasers article stems from the
way he builds upon ideas such as these in order to reveal
their political dimensions and implications.
In many regards, Blasers text could be situated within the
coloniality/modernity literature, as articulated in different
ways by Dussel, Quijano, Mignolo, Lugones, Grosfoguel, and
others. Blaser questions the idea of an all-embracing modernity and argues, in line with Mignolo (2005:36), that the
conceptual straitjacket of modernity makes the world appear
to us according to what modern categories of thought allow
us to perceive. In this line of thought, epistemological queries
are dealt with under the label coloniality of knowledge,
existential dimensions are handled under the label coloniality
of being, and asymmetric power relations are scrutinized
under the label coloniality of power. What Blaser is articulating in an inspiring way in this article could be labeled the
coloniality of reality.
The coloniality/modernity literature has its undeniable
strength and critical verve but also its weak points. The latter
are found, I would argue, in some of Mignolos otherwise
thought-provoking writings (e.g., Mignolo 2000, 2005): a lack
of attention to peoples everyday concerns and practices,
sweeping generalizations about indigenous knowledge, and
disembedded references to a selection of indigenous concepts.
Blaser does not indulge in these errors. However, his theoretical arguments would have been even more powerful if
rooted more deeply in specific ethnographic contexts and
practices and not, as currently is the case, in more elusive
discussions about indigenous peoples and a few passing examples from Bolivia. It would have shown to the reader that
things are not only theoretically intricate but also socially and
politically complex on the ground. Blaser argues, for instance, that when indigenous discourse starts to appear on
the public political stage, it might be an indication that the
corset that dominant categories impose upon radical differences might be exploding at the seams. It might very well
561
be so. However, the current political context in Bolivia shows

that indigenous concepts such as suma qamana, pachakuti,
and pachamama are easily assimilated into dominant political
discourse and thereby defanged and commodified on the political market. This makes me question the profoundness of
the crisis of modernity that Blaser identifies. If by crisis we
mean the socio-environmental consequences of modernity,
then yeswe are certainly experiencing a crisis. Likewise, if
by crisis we mean that other worlds are making themselves
heard, even in spaces of parliamentary power, then yes
modernity would seem to be under attack. However, if by
crisis we mean a weakening of the hegemonic forces of modernity, then I believe the idea of a crisis is inflated. Modernity
selectively assimilates and disarms elements of alterity while
simultaneously striving to produce ontological absence where
ontological difference is detected, that is, denying the reality
of any other reality than the one stipulated by modernity.
Consequently, there is a critical role to play for Blasers inspired thinking on radical differences in questioning this
dominance. I remain convinced, however, that for a project
of political ontology to take flight, there is a need for anchoring this thinking more explicitly and deeply in specific
contexts and practices, also when engaging in theoretical debate. I look forward to following this process.
Arturo Escobar
Department of Anthropology, CB 3115, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, U.S.A. (aescobar@
email.unc.edu). 25 II 13
Mario Blasers article, and his work to date, constitutes a

major theoretical effort with important ethnographic and political implications; political and ethnographic inspiration are
in fact central to Blasers compelling proposal for what he
calls political ontology, a field that in 2009 he defined as
having two dimensions: On the one hand, it refers to the
power-laden negotiations involved in bringing into being the
entities that make up a particular world or ontology. On the
other hand, it refers to a field of study that focuses on these
negotiations but also on the conflicts that ensue as different
worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as
they interact and mingle with each other (Blaser 2009:11).
This political ontology framework links conversations in critical theory (particularly in indigenous studies and STS) with
momentous developments in socio-natural life (chiefly, Latin
American indigenous uprisings and struggles). In a welcome
reversal of the excessively theory-driven postconstructivist
scholarship, in Blasers work, the tacking back and forth between theory and social life finds its raison detre in the latter.
This is of utmost importance since, as Blaser mentions, critical
social theory comes short in furnishing the categories with
which we might visualize those practices that most radically
challenge dominant conceptions of the world. Given its re-
562
liance on the modern episteme, and despite more decided

attempts at moving away from the episteme over the past
decade, critical social theory today is insufficient to ask the
questions, let alone venture the answers, that could illuminate
effective paths toward the planets ontological reconstitution.
As Blaser suggests, we are likely to find clues to such paths
in the worlds made visible by indigenous struggles, but only
if we are willing to deepen our epistemic-ontological declassing, so to speak, and newly approach radical alterity
from the perspective of the ontological conflicts and stories
of peoples in spite of Europe.
For Blaser, critical theory is still trapped with the narrative
of modernity, thus missing important dimensions of alterity.
This fustigation is particularly telling for anthropology, the
field of radical alterity par excellence. As others have argued,
anthropology continues to contribute to the domestication of
alterity. Why he believes this to be the case, however, constitutes a novel contribution. The reason lies in a politicoconceptual problem that makes it impossible to take seriously expressions of radical alterity and entertain the idea of
multiple ontologies, or worlds beyond modernity. Some of
the main reasons for this inability are well known by now
(thanks to STSs deconstruction of the nature/culture divide
and the notions of partial connections and ontological multiplicity); others are newer, and newly insightful (e.g., Laws
critique of the One-World ontology, Povinellis analysis of
the deadly and meteoric spread of the liberal diaspora with
globalization, and the Latin American decolonial critiques).
Blasers additional contribution refers perhaps more to the
implications of the continued naturalization of modernity
social theorys inability to see that which refuses epistemic
and ontological capture, caused by the lingering assumption
of an all-encompassing modernity.
A number of contributions in the present article enrich the
notion of political ontology, already outlined in Blasers superb, albeit theoretically challenging, monograph (2010);
these include the notions of worlds, ways of worlding,
and, particularly, the pluriverse: the most sophisticated rendition to date, in this reviewers opinion, of how multiple
worlds interact, mingle, and at times coemerge, without being
reducible to one another; the preemptive maneuver against
the chronic realism prevalent in the academy (of course, Left
included) that invariably labels as romantic, localizing, or
essentializing any attempt at positing alterity in spite of Europe and modernity; the appeal to enaction (recalling Maturana and Varelas oeuvre, which, in my view, provides elegant solutions to some of the aporias of Western social
theory, still to be taken seriously); the notion of the foundationless foundational claim (which might nevertheless risk
becoming another version of antifoundationalism, but which
could be seen as in kinship with the masterful foundationless,
world-creating fictions by Borges or Calvino); and the nuanced critique of the concept of culture, although in this
regard I am left with the question of whether all notions of
culture are so inevitably tainted by their imputed reliance on
modernist truth arrangements, or whether the concept could

not be retrieved for strategic usage. That said, in my view,
the articles main contribution is to make us newly aware of
the fact that much of what goes on in the world today can
be described as an ontological war on relational worlds and
that, conversely, the struggles by those worlds to persevere
and sustain the pluriverse are signs of the unraveling of the
alleged all-encompassing modernity. This is a hopeful and
empowering imagining of how things are and might get to
be.
Lesley Green
School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701,
Cape Town, South Africa (lesley.green@uct.ac.za). 4 III 13
In gathering together relatively disparate strands of anthropology over the past few decadesindigenous activism, science and technology studies, the critiques of the idea of culture and modernist thoughtBlaser offers a succinct
statement of what a decolonial anthropology might look like.
Read in the context of South Africa, the argument speaks
to ongoing debate in public life and the humanities on the
difficulties of finding agreement about the place of science in
a postcolonial democracy. The history of the critical humanities in the South Africa of the 1990s was that of destabilizing
certainties over apartheids imagined culturalist collectivities:
culture, race, tribe, ethnicity, tradition among them, yet the
same argument has been able to offer very little to a parliament that has, at times, been determined to contest the hegemony of science, or the western version of nature (which
has never itself been singular) in the name of either culture
or political economy. For this reason, the turn to an anthropology that engages questions about both nature and culture
is valuable.
The question is whether the theoretical, conceptual, and
political project that is proposed here is broad enough to
frame an agenda for decolonial research. It is, as Blaser notes,
very easy to put the old wine of culture into a new wine bottle
of ontology, and while I value deeply the performative emphasis that Blaser offers in his attention to storying, enacting,
and worlding, the very word ontology has difficulty holding
the emphasis on emergence, precisely because it proposes to
make of these worldings, and so on, things. For Afro-Martiniquan postcolonial thinker Aimee Cesaire, thingification
in the sense of objectificationis the core of the colonial project
(Cesaire 1972). Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language
that is attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging.
While the notion of the politicoconceptual implies the
enacted emergence of things (or matters of concern, in the
sense used by Bruno Latour), its frame of reference remains
a matter of mind, culture, and ideology. Where, in this view,
are different relationships to materiality? Modernity is not
only a set of ideas, but a way of relating to material realities

and technological affordances, which in turn are transformative of those realities and the relationships they imply. The
humble refrigerator changes the relationship that a hunter has
with prey, and with neighbors, and with the economy, and
space and time, and indeed personhood too. Knowledge, in
other words, is constantly emerging and transforming in relation to material relations, which offer different reasons to
know.
This recognition prompts a second set of questions: Does
the concept ontology itself not imply a version of the idea of
presence that is written into modernist thought? Does the
worlding implied in the word allow sufficient space for shades
and spectresDerridas hauntologythe presences to
which, or to whom, the language of being is inhospitable?32
How might different registers of affects and sensibilities find
a place at the table of knowledge? Does the word ontology
itself not occludeor at least prejudgedifferent ways of
combining the arts of the sensory? It would be an unusual
court of law in which a midwife defending her reading of a
birthing belly with her hands finds herself on equal footing
with an obstetrician who can produce several meters of lines
printed by a fetal heart-rate monitor, yet both rely on that
elusive sensory combination called clinical skill. Certainly,
valorization of some senses more than others is central to the
modernist project, and different attunements to bodily perceptual skills generate different resources for knowing.
There are roughly a dozen usages of the term knowledge
in the paper, and their relative lack of theorization (e.g., by
comparison to the work put into the notion culture) is a
clue to where the conversation might yet proceed. In The
Five Senses, philosopher of science Michel Serres (2009) describes three tongues of knowing: the tongue of reasonable
and rational speech, which speaks to a disaggregative analytic
of the world; the tongue of taste, attuned to the compositional
arts that do not yield to the logic of disaggregative abstractionthe bouquet of a wine; the alloys of metallurgy; and
the tongue of desire, ecstasy and passion. Serress critique is
that the idea of knowledge defaults to the first. The implication: an anthropology of ways of knowing could yet
stretch its tent.
Martin Holbraad
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14
Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom
(m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk). 11 III 13
Mario Blasers argument for political ontology is perhaps an

augur that debates about the so-called ontological turn in
anthropology may be at the point of reaching maturity. Rather
than merely defending the turn to ontology against its many
32. I am grateful to Artwell Nhemachena for this insight.
563
detractors, joining in what is beginning to look like a slinging

match of competitive exasperation, Blasers piece is devoted
mainly to sifting through and consolidating some of the lines
of thinking this theoretical move has engendered. In this connection, and for obvious reasons, I find particularly helpful
the way in which Blaser contrasts his core suggestion that
political ontologies be conceived as storied performances
that provide their own foundationless foundation with my
own contention that the turn to ontology in anthropology is
best understood as a heuristic one. The contrast speaks directly to what I think Blaser takes the political stakes of the
ontological turn to be, as well as what I, as a fellow ontotraveler, think may be wrong with Blasers line of argument.
If I understand him correctly, the reason for which Blaser
insists on the foundationless character of ontologies is identical to the reason for which I have argued that they are best
conceived as heuristic devices that pertain, not to the nature
of existence in the world (or worlds) at large,33 but rather to
the economy of anthropological argument itself. Both suggestions are meant to respond to the same basic problem,
namely, that if anthropology stands or falls by its capacity to
register difference in its own terms, then it must find a way
to stop delimiting the scope of difference by deciding in advance what it must look like. Thus, I think Blaser and I can
agree that what is wrong with concepts such as culture or
society (and I would add network, being-in-the-world,
and possibly even relation to the list) is that their capacity
to register alterity is hampered by founding this capacity in
a prior story about how alterity may or may not behave as a
feature of the world(s). By contrast, conceiving of alterity in
ontological terms (i.e., as a matter of what things, including
alterity itself, may be) is a way of giving it free rein to be as
different as it wants. Unlike saying that differences are social
or cultural, saying that they are ontological leaves constitutively open the question of what they might be, allowing logical
space for it to be answered differently in any given instance.
What is ontology is itself an ontological questiona virtuous
circularity that keeps anthropological horizons open, and, by
that virtue, makes anthropology irreducibly political too, rendering it inherently antithetical to forms of domination that
rely on delimiting the coordinates within which differences
may operate (the old point about hegemony).
I have no space here to explain why I think that it is so
important to be clear on the heuristic status of this argument
(Holbraad 2012:237265; Pedersen 2012; cf. Holbraad, forthcoming). Suffice it to say that such a tack seeks to bear out
the key idea that the problem of difference is a function, not
of some prior theory of what may or may not count as difference in the world(s), but rather of the peculiar properties
33. Along with others, I have in past writings made the mistake of
associating the notion of ontological difference with the image of multiple
worlds (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007)a highly misleading
reification of an essentially analytical procedure, which I have since come
to regret immensely.
564
of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, namely, that registering difference in its own terms (i.e., as difference proper)
is what is at issue in it (Viveiros de Castro 2002).
It is just on this point that I am in doubt about Blasers
position: notwithstanding the caveats about their enacted and
performative character, which do lend political ontologies a
highly fluid and provisional nature, I fail to see how this is
not ultimately yet another argument that operates by grounding the possibility of difference in a prior story of how the
world(s) must work, namely, in this case, the world(s) as a
terrain in which ontological differences are ever-emerging,
fluid, and tentative. Sure, as Blaser emphasizes, the merit of
this way of parsing difference is that, in instantiating (enacting, performing) the very understanding of ontology it proposes, this argument must itself be fluid and tentative. Nevertheless, at least for the time being and for as long as it lasts,
the argument seems to cut against itself. How is the possibility
of different differences (again, differences proper) not canceled by Blasers prior story of what differences must look
likethat is, the image of ever-emergent worldings, enacted
and performed fluidly, tentatively, and so on? The fact that
in many of its elements the story itself is not altogether unfamiliar (those truly in search of ontological difference are
probably unlikely to find it among such modish concepts as
emergence, performance, fluidity, and so on) may lend some
weight to this worry about the capacity of Blasers political
ontologies truly to differ.
Helen Verran
The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, Yellow Building 1, Level 2, Ellengowan Drive, Casuarina, Northern Territory
0909, Australia (hrv@unimelb.edu.au). 8 III 13
An Ontological Politics of Politics?

Could there be an ontological politics of Politicsthe sort of
Politics associated with government and the state? Serious
politics about, say, whose land gets dug up for iron ore mines,
and who gets the profits, and which whales where get slaughtered, about which PPPs (public-private partnerships) are
contracted, and under what terms? These are topics we often
think of as politics over economic decisionspolitical economy. The question helps us see a politicoconceptual problem, suggests Mario Blaser. What this capital P Politics is
has been defined by a modern humanism, at home solely in
categories deriving from the metaphysical commitments of
European traditions of thought. The notion of ontological
politics is nonsense according to this comfortable and comforting modern state of being. Of course, ruling out a politics
around onticsaround what there isdoes not mean that
modern politics are tame, not at all. Skeptics, insisting that
categories are historically, socially, and/or culturally generated,
have ensured a lively critical humanist politics for hundreds
of yearsand claim a lineage for this political theory with

its particular set of analytic categoriesthat goes back to
ancient Greece. The assumption that goes with this claimed
lineage is universality.
Not so argues Blaser. The politics that creates critical skepticism is not enough; not even half the story. It ignores all
those extant stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that
are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.
We need to find a way to recognize and negotiate the ontics
and ontological politics of Politics and devise ways to make
that recognition an integral part of our ordinary, serious politics. One would assume, and by publishing this manifesto in
Current Anthropology Blaser does indeed seem to, that anthropology and anthropologists might contribute to, or even
initiate, such an undertaking. In supporting and encouraging
that, here I point to a resource.
Bruno Latour has been making thought experiments
around modern politics for many years. Leaving the empiricism of early actor-network theory behind, he has for some
time been urging a new constitution, and he has begun to
imagine its politics. Now, I am not at all convinced about
new constitutionsor much impressed by manifestos for that
matterbut Latours insights on politics are a useful beginning. Political enunciation remains an enigma in modernity,
Latour claims. It cannot gain traction in a truth regime dominated by sciences representationism. Recognizing that we
have a lot of learning to do about politics, Latour wants to
explain the truth regime of the new constitutions politics
clearly from the outset, two aspects in particular. First, in the
truth regime of the new constitutions politics, there is no
separation of nature and its representation. Second, the enunciation of this politics has a double click communication
at its core: the political circle . . . which is [a]bout transforming the several into one . . . and subsequently, through a
process of retransformation, of the one into several (Latour
2003:149).
Now, to me this describes beautifully the truth regime of
the capital P Politics we already havethe one Blaser wants
to reform. But, crucially, Latour has missed one really core
element in his description, an element that I first learned to
see under the tutelage of my Yolngu Aboriginal Australian
instructors. The political circle is not a circle. Rather, it is
a figure eight. (My Yolngu teachers have much more useful
names for this important figure, as you would expect.) And
the process of the crossover, the process by which several is
turned into one . . . is turned into several, is a form of
ontological eversion. A holographic moment lies at the core
of the truth regime of politics. Interestingly, and confirming
the view that anthropologists have something important to
offer here, Strathern explains how she learned to use a very
similar figuration under instruction from her Melanesian interlocutors in Mt. Hagen (Strathern 1992b:245).
So what might anthropologists contribute to ontics and
ontological politics? First of all, they might contribute by
collectively imagining and storying it in some detail. Words
lined up as stories are the means here, for stories can even
evade the ontics and ontological politics that necessarily come
along with words themselves. But I do not have space for
stories, and heres the rubin serious politics too, the space
for stories is highly constrained. Stories bring in difference
that works unpredictably, as, several turns into one . . . turns
into several, they exaggerate contingency in moments of
eversion.
Reply
Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language that is
attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging. This
phrase from Lesley Greens commentary captures an important aspect of what political ontology is up against, and I am
enormously grateful to the commentators for their insightful
prodding to further refine the language of this project. In this
line, it might be useful to begin by clarifying the strategy/
concern that led me to use some terms in certain ways and
to shape the text in its present form.
Although I agree with Martin Holbraad that the ontological turn might be reaching maturity, it is also the case that
many colleagues in the discipline are skeptical if not worried
about the implications of the proposal because, to paraphrase
Claudia Briones, the othering associated to the idea of radical
difference has often justified oppression within the modern
world system. The text was thus conceived as an invitation,
which included those skeptical and worried colleagues, to (a)
think about the equally dangerous Sameing that goes under
the banner of an all-encompassing modernity and (b) consider a proposal that might circumvent both Othering and
Sameing by tackling the differences apprehended as culture
in terms of ontologies. But in order for this to work, I imagined, the argument would have to progressively move from
the more familiar language of hybrid cultures (with its concomitant thingification) to the language of political ontology, which while still in the making is decidedly on the side
of practices, emergences, and pragmatism. It is in this context
that much of the slippage between words used alternatively
as nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be understood. I intended
that by the end of the paper the reader would understand
that, for example, nouns have been reworked to imply something other than things and that, in the same way, stories
imply more than discursive practices. The limited success to
achieve this, as evidenced in some of Brioness and Greens
commentaries and questions, underscores the challenge of
finding a proper language to express the project. While recognizing this, it is also important to make a clear distinction
between what may be my failure to articulate a clear language
and the projects grounding on the pragmatist figuration of
an emergent ontology that I call pluriverse.
It will not be possible in this short reply to provide answers
565
to each of the many questions Briones poses; I think, however,

that the readers can figure some of them out by keeping in
mind the remarks I just made above. Thus, I will concentrate
on questions whose answers might be harder to figure out. I
will start with a clarification: in political ontology, radical
difference does not name a specified content; one could not
tell in advance what is a radical difference other than it is
a relation in which the terms cannot be reduced to each other
without doing violence. It is precisely such reductionist moves
that political ontology seeks to address, and casting the project
in the singular responds to this intention, for it indicates the
situatedness (Haraway 1991) of the project. The proposal of
the pluriverse as articulated by political ontology is self-advisedly a particular one; it does not pretend to include in its
formulation all ontological multiplicities, thereby reducing
them to its own terms.
Speaking of ontological differences in contrast to cultural
differences points to an analytical and pragmatic decision
about how to address difference, not to kinds of differences.
Yet, the language of culture to refer to the differences that
political ontology seeks to treat as ontological is evidently
dominant. It is not only analysts, but also the subjects of
those analyses, who render ways of worlding into culture and
mobilize it in practices of belonging (identity). Yet, we must
not lose sight of the fact that both the rendering of difference
as culture and the practices of belonging that require culture
respond to the dominance of a particular way of worlding,
which I call here modern. Thus, to some extent, these practices
of belonging contribute to the worlding of modernity. I say
to some extent because this is not a perfect cybernetic loop.
As I pointed out when discussing Hales indio permitido, the
mobilization of culture in practices of belonging has in some
cases helped to create conditions in which the irreducibility
of radical differences are harder to be ignored. This speaks
to Escobars question about the strategic use of culture. Either
strategically or not, I think culture can and will continue to
be used; the trick is not to lose sight of its role in the worlding
of modernity and consequently the need to infiltrate the
term so that it can do other kinds of work.
Trying to get it to do work that it does not do now is at
the center of my laboring the term ontology. Let as it is,
ontology can do all sort of things that are antithetical to the
project presented here. The implication is that, through the
attention paid to practice (Briones), my attempts to infiltrate the term with performative emphasis (Green) or enacted and performative character (Holbraad) are not secondary aspects or caveats in my argument. If that labor is
minimized or disregarded, the whole point is missed and we
end up discussing points in which there is no disagreement.
Something of the sort I feel with some of Greens remarks,
and in particular with regard to modernity not being just a
set of ideas but also a way of relating to material realities
and technological affordances. My invocation of an STSinspired material-semiotic formulation of reality to refurbish
the meaning of ontology not only underscores this point but
566
also questions the very distinction between ideal and material

realities. By the same token, ontology refurbished as performance or worlding disavows the classical distinction between
ontology and epistemology, itself premised on a particular
ontology that proposes ways of knowing as something that
can be variously related to, and yet distinguishable from, the
world. In this context, it is not clear to me what an anthropology of ways of knowing could be if not also an anthropology of ways of worlding, which will always imply fraught
coworldings.
In principle, political ontology could be seen as an anthropology of fraught coworldings, but this anthropology figures itself in active contraposition to the coloniality of reality, to use Burmans neat label. Thus, I cannot but agree
with this commentator that the full force of the project will
come from anchoring it in specific contexts and practices, for
not withstanding its universalist claims, the worlding of modernity succeeds or fails in specific places, and so it is with
the pluriverse. Thus, when I speak of crisis of hegemony of
modernity, I am not invoking a teleology, as if assuming that
what is an ongoing and open-ended process has already played
out; rather, the point is to signal the conjunctures in which
a space opens up for the pluriverse to become plausible where
before it was not. Whether and how these spaces remain open,
expand, proliferate, or get closured again varies from one
circumstance to the next and is and will remain uncertain.
As Escobar points out, the fate of the conjunctures I am
invoking here constitutes the raison detre of political ontology, and it is perhaps here where we can grasp the differences
between the performative and purely heuristic versions of
ontology. The raison detre for Holdbraads heuristic hinges
on a foundational claim of what anthropology is about; this
avowedly circumscribed world is concerned with registering
difference in its own terms. I will leave for others the opportunity to discuss the point of a project to register difference
in its own terms. For the sake of the argument, let us assume
that a project to register difference in its own terms is relatively
unproblematicalthough, in its strict sense, it appears as an
oxymoron (i.e., would that not imply the end of the difference
as it stood before the registering of it?) and concentrates on
the antropology-world that Holbraad has defined. Once registering difference in its own terms has been postulated as
what this world is about, the ontological approach as heuristic
is not only better, it is the only one that makes sense and
very much like as in the holographic moment Helen Verran
evokes through the figure eight, the heuristic indeed ends up
worlding anthropology as the register of difference in its own
terms. This perfect circularity is all fine if you conceive anthropology in a gamelike fashion, the purpose of the game
being no other than playing it. In such a case, there is no
point in bringing extraneous concerns to it; either you play
or you dont. But by the same token, the game has nothing
to say outside of itself. Of course, few colleagues would settle
for such an insular conception of the discipline, Holbraad
included, and so he signals the import (i.e., the value) of
playing the discipline as the registering of difference in its

own terms: it makes it inherently antithetical to forms of
domination that rely on delimiting the coordinates within
which differences may operate. Here, the pursuit of heuristic
purity starts to run into trouble, for such a statement immediately raises the question, why would it be important to
be antithetical to these forms of domination?
In order to grasp the full consequence of the question, let
us first remind ourselves that delimiting the coordinates
within which difference may operate is not universally assumed to be equal to domination. In fact, in the form of
worlding I have called modernity, such limits constitute the
very possibility for political society. And thus, many if not
most anthropologies are played informed by this assumption. These anthropologies would likely define their purpose
as something closer to discovering similarities beneath differences than to registering difference in their own terms. The
point is this: when confronted with such anthropologies
(themselves a particular way of worlding), the value assumed
in being antithetical to delimiting the coordinates in which
difference can operate is far from obvious. Such value can
only be attributed in relation to some story of how the
world(s) must work. In short, and even if never fully articulated, in his pursuit for heuristic purity, Holbraad ends up
smuggling this kind of story as if it were a tacit agreement
that requires no further discussion. This to me conspires
against any possibility of keeping the anthropological horizon
open, and more so when at issue is not just registering difference in its own terms but figuring out how anthropological
practice can partake in the fraught coworlding I call the pluriverse. As Helen Verran tells us, in that holographic moment
that the figure eight traces, when the several turns into one
. . . turns into several, stories exaggerate contingency. Stories
told in some detail open themselves to such contingency; they
provide anchor points to grapple and twist them so that they
can become something else at the moment of eversion. Here
is why, again, it is crucial to understand that the enacted and
performative character of my story of how the world(s) must
work is not a caveat but constitutive. The challenge of keeping
the horizon open for difference cannot be met by denying
that our practices tell stories about the world but rather by
finding the way to tell stories that perform a world with such
openness.
Mario Blaser
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of

Perhaps ethnohistory has been so called to separate it

Mario Blaser is Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at

tory as well. He asked, (1) to what extent is that history

Asad concluded the review by stating that

Insightful as it is, the centrality of the emphasized portion

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

mentalists was all that was there. Ontological conflicts thus

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

To say that indigenous knowledge is non-modern or exists

Echoing our academic reviewer, the Bolivian vice president

inception. If one were to seek a common denominator across

As Scott (2003:103104) puts it in commenting on

The point I want to stress here is that when the concept

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

difference between what is Culture and what is nature: a

Refusing Capture: Political Ontology

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

So here is ontology as a heuristic device, a tool to rethink

representations of it; and (b) that reality is always in the

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

litical ontology is concerned with telling stories that open up

dle-class white women involved in Wicca. Likewise, neither

ality. As Mol (1999:77) says, talking about reality as multiple

Why Political Ontology: A (Plausible) Story of

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

Figure 1. The modern myth.

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

recognize each other as adversaries) have been turned into

the multicultural cunning of recognition (Povinelli 2002),

environmental) of the escape to the future premised on the

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

gued that in spite of its cunning, and as long as neoliberal

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

Conclusions: Missing the Pachakuti

to foreground the extent to which the term points toward a

interactions) and therefore, at the bottom, the world is the

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

could be moved by the appeal of the exotic.29 And in many

for such an attempt, but we cannot even begin to tell such a

It has to be celebrated that anthropologists keep debating

146), as to question the claim that all contemporary cultures

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

research focus is the effects of transformative interactions

Mario Blaser provides us with an inspiring theoretical account

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

Blaser, manifest that any definite distinction between material/

be so. However, the current political context in Bolivia shows

Mario Blasers article, and his work to date, constitutes a

liance on the modern episteme, and despite more decided

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

modernist truth arrangements, or whether the concept could

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

only a set of ideas, but a way of relating to material realities

Mario Blasers argument for political ontology is perhaps an

detractors, joining in what is beginning to look like a slinging

An Ontological Politics of Politics?

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

of yearsand claim a lineage for this political theory with

Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe

to each of the many questions Briones poses; I think, however,