Field of Difference: Limitations of the Political in Ontological Anthropology. Commentary on Cultural Anthropology Fieldsight series "The Politics of Ontology" (long) (original) (raw)

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.