Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
A longitudinal review of the anthropological literature will show that usage of the concept of "ontology" has increased dramatically: Drawing on Google Scholar one can see that between 1960 and 1990 there were only eight articles published which had anthropology and ontologyrelated words in the title, while between 1990 and 2016 the number was approximately 90. And akin to the ontological maneuver of a reversal of perspectives, our impression is that these 90 merely comprise the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In other words, anthropology has literally become awash with debates invoking ontology in a myriad ways-and, crucially, in ways that are often mutually incompatible. Opening Google Scholar's gates of knowledge-or, more correctly, the digital sediments of research texts-will therefore lead you to "ontology" being inferred in what may seem as sprawling and ultra-diverse anthropological discourses.
Review article: Holbraad, M and M A Pedersen. The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition
2017
News of this book has been circulating well in advance of its publication, and it has been widely and eagerly anticipated. The many anthropologists who have been enthused and excited, as well as those who have been provoked or mystified, by various earlier manifestations of 'the ontological turn' have looked forward to a comprehensive and authoritative statement of its principles and programme. This book certainly provides that, and gives a virtuoso performance in doing so. It positively bristles with enthusiasm, energy, and new ideas. It is engaging and inventive, spirited, combative, self-consciously contentious, and clearly driven by a restless, proselytising spirit, but it also sets out not just to dazzle with its conspicuous cleverness but also to persuade by serious argument. It succeeds in a good deal of what it sets out to do, and even those who are least convinced will be given a good deal to think about along the way. It ought to be widely read-really, anyone who thinks seriously about the nature of anthropology will want to read it-and it will certainly change the terms of debate. This it will do for several reasons, not least that its contents will come to so many as a surprise. The prospect of nature being multiple, of the ethnographic record presenting us with multiple worlds of 'radical alterity' in places such as Amazonia, Melanesia, and northern Mongolia, each of which requires its own radically new concepts aligned with its radically other ontology: this was what many followers of 'the turn' have found most exciting and compelling. They are swiftly disabused of these fantasies in this book. From the outset, Holbraad and Pedersen are clear that this new updated version of the ontological turn makes no metaphysical claims. It is now a 'strictly methodological proposal' (p. ix), which may come as a shock to those who took away from Thinking Through Things (Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell 2007) the idea that 'epistemology' was little short of a human rights abuse. It is necessary, say Holbraad and Pedersen, to move on from debates around what they call the 'first wave' of manifestations of the turn, 'including some of our own writings'. Understandably, and on the whole justifiably, they do not dwell for long on just what in those earlier writings gave rise to such widespread 'misunderstandings' (although it may be going just a wee bit too far in self-exculpation to say that multiple worlds and plural ontologies were 'flirted with' [p. 156] in texts in which they occupied centre-stage theoretically, and often appeared in the titles). The important thing is that the revision be clear, and the new position understood. So Holbraad and Pedersen helpfully recommend that the word 'ontological' be used only adjectivally; 'never as a noun!' they almost shout from the page, and therefore never in the plural. The concept of 'the ontological' is now to serve wholly as a signal that the question of what kind of theoretical vocabulary we use should remain resolutely open, and open specifically to influence from ethnographic data. It is a call to a special and demanding form of
As a member of what Matei Candea terms "the second generation" of ontologically inclined anthropologists who are or will be in the field, I would like to address the need for ontological anthropology to disentangle its theoretical stakes, questions, and terminology from prior and other ongoing analytics, particularly the political. Politics should not be conflated with ontology to form the "politics of ontology" because politics and political analysis are, themselves, ontologies. They have distinct geneses, with distinct understandings of how the world works, and distinct orderings of things. Ontological anthropology can exercise political analysis and attend to politics so long as, as others have stated, the anthropologist recognizes that the choice of using a political lens, biases one's field of observation and analytical trajectory, limiting it to sets of terms and problematics laid out by the ontology of the analytic being employed. Even speaking theoretically of the potential of ontology for political engagement will skew the playing field.
Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on "Ontology"
The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 2012
This piece reflects on two 'ontological turns': the recent anthropological movement and that occasioned earlier in analytic philosophy by the work of W. V. O. Quine. I argue that the commitment entailed by 'ontology' is incompatible with the laudable aim of the 'ontological turn' in anthropology to take seriously radical difference and alterity.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2015
Understanding how the identity of a Hutu person is different from a Tutsi and why nearly a million people were murdered in the name of this difference is not handled adequately in the current literature. Drawing on parts of the world as different as Rwanda and Sri Lanka, this essay takes up this theme through three main arguments. Firstly, categorizations about identity, even when hardened into ugly typologies by processes of colonization or state formation, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Secondly, negotiating ontological difference is foundational to what it means to be human. We cannot simply hope for the end of such negotiation and wish away categories of identity such as nation, ethnicity, religion and tribe. These categories are not the problem, so much as the ways in which difference is negotiated, instrumentalized and shoved into typologies of hierarchical status. Negotiating the terms of identity through categories of difference is fundamental to questions of power, meaning, violence and creative social practice. Thirdly, while processes of categorization are part of the human condition, modern processes of typologizing serve all too often to reconstitute and destructively distort older layered forms of identity. This is the source of practices as diverse as racism, chauvinism and genocide. Sometimes tensions between ontological formations can be positive, but all too often instrumental use of these tensions in the contemporary world has led to aggressive violence and defensive mayhem. Running beneath all these arguments is the methodological proposition that, in order to get past either ‘clash of cultures’ descriptions or ‘flows of difference’ analyses, it is useful to develop a systemic understanding of ontological formations and their difficult intersection.
Back to Boas, Forth to Latour: An Anthropological Model for the Ontological Turn (Rodseth 2015)
Current Anthropology, 2015
How could Franz Boas, trained in physics and geography in Bismarck’s Germany, carry any weight for twenty-first century anthropology, given the theoretical upheavals of the past few decades? As early as 1887, I argue, Boas foreshadowed certain theoretical innovations of recent years, especially Bruno Latour’s ethnographic and philosophical analysis of science and modern society. My thesis is that Latourian and Boasian anthropologies are surprisingly alike, first in their rejection of “purified” high-modernist imagery, but more distinctively in their development of an ontologically “reckless” approach that traces the interwoven pathways of humans and nonhumans. Latour’s resonance with Boas has less to do with any direct Boasian influence on his thinking than with their parallel alignments against the same hegemonic rationalism, which reached its climax in the long century of high modernism (ca. 1880–1990). At the same time, I argue, Latour and Boas are sharply contrasting in their treatment of elite or esoteric doctrines as opposed to general or exoteric culture. This difference turns out to be instructive, as it suggests what a Latourian anthropology stands to gain from a neo-Boasian one and vice versa.