The Politics of Ontology

by Martin

Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen

PUBLISHED ON January 13, 2014 CITE AS Holbraad, Martin and Pedersen, Morten Axel. "The Politics of Ontology." Fieldsights - Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, January 13, 2014, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/461the-politics-of-ontology

Much energy has been devoted over the last decade to the so-called ontological turn in the social sciences, and in anthropology in particular. A number of statements, critiques, and discussions of this position are now available (e.g., Viveiros de Castro 2002; Henare et al. 2007; Jensen and Rdje 2010; Pedersen 2011; Holbraad 2012; Ishii 2012; Candea and Alcayna-Stevens 2012; Blaser 2013; Paleek and Risjord 2013; Scott 2013), and its implications for anthropological research are being concertedly explored and passionately debated (e.g., Venkatesan et al. 2009; Alberti et al. 2011; Viveiros de Castro 2011; Laidlaw 2012; Ramos 2012; Pedersen 2012; Strathern 2012). The following set of position papers represent contributions to a well-attended roundtable discussion held at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Anthropological in Chicago. The purpose of the roundtable was to explore the theoretical positions and methodological projects pursued under the banner of ontology, focusing particularly on the political implications of the turn, including its potential pitfalls. The participants were invited to address such questions as, Why have social scientists turned to the concept of ontology in the ways that they have? Why is the move as controversial as it is proving itself to be, at least among anthropologists? What explicit and implicit political projects does the turn to ontology (as well as various critiques of it) evince? Does the ontological turn open up new forms of cultural critique and progressive politics, or does it

represent a closet-culturalist and potentially dangerous rehearsal of past essentialisms? What, in short, does the ethnographic commitment to ontology dofor our engagements and collaborations with the people with whom we work, and for anthropologys role within the global intellectual and political landscape at large? To instigate the discussion, the sessions organizers, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, joined Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who also contributed to organizing and chairing the session, to write a position paper addressing these questions. The paper was distributed to the participants in advance (and in hard copy to members of the audience on the day of the discussion) as a concise and synthetic statement of the three authors position on the politics of the ontological turn. Inevitably, as is the way of jointly authored papers (and making full virtue of the necessary brevity of the genre), the position is more than one and less than many. Remaining faithful to the spirit of a roundtable discussion, the participants subsequent statements are reproduced here more or less as they were presented in Chicago, with the addition of similarly brief statements by Marisol de la Cadena, Matei Candea, and Annemarie Mol, who were unable to participate. Some participants chose to respond directly to the organizers position paper, while others refer to it only obliquely or not at all. In what follows, the statements appear in the order in which they were presented in Chicago, with the three further contributions added at the end, in alphabetical order. The table of contents for the statements appears below.

References
Alberti, Benjamin, Severin Fowles, Martin Holbraad, Yvonne Marshall, and Christopher Witmore. 2011. Worlds Otherwise: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference. Current Anthropology 52, no. 6: 896912. Blaser, Mario. 2013. Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology. Current Anthropology 54, no. 5: 54768. Candea, Matei, and Lys Alcayna-Stevens. 2012. Internal Others: Ethnographies of Naturalism. Cambridge Anthropology 30, no. 2: 3647.

Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ishii, Miho. 2012. Acting with Things: Self-Poiesis, Actuality, and Contingency in the Formation of Divine Worlds. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 37188. Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Kjetil Rdje, eds. 2009. Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology and Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. Laidlaw, James. 2012. Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of This Century, no. 4. Paleek, Martin, and Mark Risjord. 2013. Relativism and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43(1): 3-23. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews of the Ontological Turn. Anthropology of This Century, no. 5. Ramos, Alcida R. 2012. The Politics of Perspectivism. Annual Review of Anthropology41:48194. Scott, Michael W. 2013. The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4: 85972. Strathern, Marilyn. 2012. A Comment on the Ontological Turn in Japanese Anthropology. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 2: 4025. Venkatesan, Soumhya, Michael Carrithers, Karen Sykes, Matei Candea, and Martin Holbraad. 2010. Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 2: 152200. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths. Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 12845. Image credit: "Indra's Net," www.aethericnumerics.com/.

Posts in This Series

The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions
by Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

p. 5

What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean

by Eduardo Kohn

p. 12

Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance

by Peter Skafish

p. 15

Geontologies of the Otherwise

by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

p. 19

Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact

by Ghassan Hage

p. 22

The Political Ontology of Doing Difference . . . and Sameness

by Mario Blaser

p. 25

Practical Ontologies
by Casper Bruun Jensen

p. 28

Equal Time for Entities

by Michael W. Scott

p. 32

Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison as Ontology

by Helen Verran

p. 35

Onto-Methodology
by Tony Crook

p. 38

Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics of Materiality

by Benjamin Alberti

p. 41

The Ontology of the Political Turn

by Matei Candea

p. 45

The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through Ontological Openings
by Marisol de la Cadena

p. 49

Other Words: Stories from the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine p. 53
by Annemarie Mol

The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions

by Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

At first blush, ontology and politics make strange bedfellows. Ontology evokes essence, while politics, as modern, democratic, multiculturalist citizens tend to understand it, is about debunking essences and affirming in their stead the world-making capacities of human collectives. Yet this notion of a social construction of reality itself instantiates a particular ontology, and a powerful one at thatand here we also mean politically powerful. Still, as anthropologists we are attuned to the powers of the weakto the many complex connections, some of them crucially negative, between power differences (politics) and the powers of difference (ontology). For purposes of discussion, then, we begin with a broad distinction between three different manners in which ontology and politics are correlated in the social sciences and cognate disciplines, each associated with particular methodological prescriptions, analytical injunctions, and moral visions: (1) the traditional philosophical concept of ontology, in which politics takes the implicit form of an injunction to discover and disseminate a single absolute truth about how things are; (2) the sociological critique of this and other essentialisms, which, in skeptically debunking all ontological projects to reveal their insidiously political nature, ends up affirming the critical politics of debunking as its own version of how things should be; and (3) the anthropological concept of ontology as the multiplicity of forms of existence enacted in concrete practices, where politics becomes the non-skeptical elicitation of this manifold of potentials for how things could bewhat Elizabeth Povinelli (2012b), as we understand her, calls the otherwise. How might the otherwise be rendered manifest ethnographically? Here, we need to remind ourselves that ethnographic descriptions, like all cultural translations, necessarily involve an element of transformation or even disfiguration. A given anthropological analysis, that is, amounts to a controlled

equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) that, far from transparently mapping one discrete social order or cultural whole onto another, depends on more or less deliberate and reflexive productive misunderstandings (Tsing 2005) to perform its translations and comparisons, not just between different contexts, realms, and scales, but also within them. This, if anything, is what distinguishes the ontological turn from other methodological and theoretical orientations: not the dubious assumption that it enables one to take people and things more seriously than others are able or willing to,[1] but the ambition, and ideally the ability, to pass through what we study, rather as when an artist elicits a new form from the affordances her material allows her to set free, releasing shapes and forces that offer access to what may be called the dark side of things. Accordingly, while the ontological turn in anthropology has made the study of ethnographic difference or alterity one of its trademarks, it is really less interested in differences between things than within them: the politics of ontology is the question of how persons and things could alter from themselves (Holbraad and Pedersen 2009; Pedersen 2012b). Ontology, as far as anthropology in our understanding is concerned, is the comparative, ethnographically-grounded transcendental deduction of Being (the oxymoron is deliberate) as that which differs from itself (ditto)being-as-other as immanent to being-as-such. The anthropology of ontology is anthropology as ontology; not the comparison of ontologies, but comparison as ontology. This, in our understanding, is what the ontological turn is all about: it is a technology of description (Pedersen 2012a) designed in the optimist (nonskeptical) hope of making the otherwise visible by experimenting with the conceptual affordances (Holbraad, forthcoming) present in a given body of ethnographic materials. We stress that such material can be drawn from anywhere, anytime, and anyone; there is no limit to what practices, discourses, and artifacts are amenable to ontological analysis. Indeed, articulating what could be in this way implies a peculiarly non- or anti-normative stance, which has profoundly political implications in several senses. For a start, to subjunctively present alternatives to declarations about what is or imperatives about what should be is itself a political acta radical one, to the degree that it breaks free of the glib relativism of merely reporting on

alternative possibilities (worldviews, etc.), and proceeds boldly to lend the otherwise full ontological weight so as to render it viable as a real alternative. For example, the relativist reports that in such-and-such an ethnographic context time is cyclical, with the past ever returning to become the present. It is an evocative idea, to be sure. But strictly speaking, it makes no sense. To be past is precisely not to return to the present, so a past that does so is properly speaking not a past at all (in the same sense that a married bachelor is not a bachelor). By contrast, like a kind of relativist-turbo, the ontologicallyinclined anthropologist takes this form of e(qui)vocation as a starting-point for an ethnographically-controlled experiment with the concept of time itself, reconceptualizing past, present, being, etc., in ways that make cyclical time a real form of existence. In this subjunctive, could be experiment, the emphasis is as much on be as on could: Imagine a cyclical time! marvels the relativist; Yes, and here is what it could be! replies the ontological anthropologist. Furthermore, when such ontographic (Holbraad 2012) experimentations are precipitated by ethnographic exposures to people whose own lives are, in one way or other, pitted against the reigning hegemonic orders (state, empire, and market, in their ever-volatile and violent comingling), then the politics of ontology resonates at its core with the politics of the peoples who occasion it. In such a case, the politics of ontologically-inclined anthropological analysis is not merely logically contingent upon, but internally constituted by and morally imbricated with, the political dynamics in which the people anthropologists study are embroiled, including the political stances those people might themselves take, not least on the question of what politics itself could be. Indeed, one of the most oft-quoted (and criticized) mottoes of the ontological turn in anthropology is the notorious, Anthropology is the science of the ontological self-determination of the worlds peoples, and its corollary, to wit, that the disciplines mission is to promote the permanent decolonization of thought (Viveiros de Castro 2009; for an earlier version of the argument, see Viveiros de Castro 2013 [2002]). In this connection, the first (unproductive) misunderstanding that should be dispelled is the idea that this is equivalent to fighting for indigenous peoples rights in the face of the world powers. One does

not need much anthropology to join the struggle against the political domination and economic exploitation of indigenous peoples across the world. It should be enough to be a tolerably informed and reasonably decent person. Conversely, no amount of anthropological relativism and old-hand professional skepticism can serve as an excuse fornot joining that struggle. Second, the idea of an ontological self-determination of peoples should not be confused with supporting ethnic essentialization, Blut und Boden primordialism, and other forms of sociocultural realism. It means giving the ontological back to the people, not the people back to the ontological. The politics of ontology as self-determination of the other is the ontology of politics as decolonization of all thought in the face of other thoughtto think of thought itself as always-already in relation to the thought of others. Third, the idea of the self-determination of the other means that a fundamental principle of anthropologists epistemological ethics should be, always leave a way out for the people you are describing. Do not explain too much, do not try to actualize the possibilities immanent to others thought, but endeavor to sustain them as possible indefinitely (this is what permanent means in the phrase, permanent decolonization of thought), neither dismissing them as the fantasies of others, nor by fantasizing that they may gain the same reality for oneself. They will not. Not as such, at least; only as-other. The selfdetermination of the other is the other-determination of the self. This brings us to a final point regarding the political promise held by ontologically-oriented approaches in anthropology and cognate disciplines; namely, that this promise can be conceived, not just in relation to the degree to which such approaches are in affinity with (or even actively promote) particular political objectives, or with the abiding need for a critique of the state and the turns of thought that underpin it, but also in relation to their capacity to enact a form of politics that is entailed in their very operation. Conceived of in this manner, the ontological turn is not so much a means to externally-defined political ends, but a political end in its own right. Recapitulating, to some extent, standing debates about the political efficacies of intellectual life (e.g. th,e ambivalent stance of Marxist intelligentsias to Communist Parties calls to political militancy in the 20th centuryAdorno, Sartre, Magritte, etc.), the

question is whether ontologically-oriented analyses render political the very form of thinking that they involve, such that being political becomes an immanent property of the mode of anthropological thought itself. If so, then the politics of ontography resides not only in the ways in which it may help promote certain futures, but also in the way that it figurates the future (Krijer forthcoming) in its very enactment. The major premise of such an argument might border on a cogito-like apodeicticity (sensu Husserl): to think is to differ. Here, a thought that makes no difference to itself is not a thought: thoughts take the form of motions from one position to another, so if no such movement takes place then no thought has taken place either. Note that this is not an ontological credo (e.g., compare with Levi Bryants recent [2011] ontic principle, which is pretty similar, but cast in the philosophical key of metaphysical claim-making). Rather, it is offered as a statement of the logical form of thinkinga phenomenology in Simon Critchleys (2012, 55) sense that is, moreover, apodeictic insofar as it instantiates itself in its own utterance. The minor premise, then, would be the (more moot) idea that to differ is itself a political act. This would require us to accept that such non-controversially political notions as power, domination, or authority are relative stances towards the possibility of difference and its control. To put it very directly (crudely, to be sure), domination is a matter of holding the capacity to differ under controlto place limits upon alterity and therefore, ipso facto (viz., by internal implication from the to-think-is-to-differ premise above) upon thought also. If these two premises are accepted, then a certain kind of politics becomes immanent to the ontological turn. For if it is correct to say that the ontological turn turns, precisely, on transmuting ethnographic exposures recursively into forms of conceptual creativity and experimentation, then ontologically-inflected anthropology is abidingly oriented towards the production of difference, or alterity, as such. Regardless (at this level of analysis) of the political goals to which it may lend itself, anthropology is ontologically politicalinasmuch as its operation presupposes, and is an attempt experimentally to do, difference as such. This is an anthropology that is constitutively anti-authoritarian, making it its business to generate alternative vantages from which established forms of

thinking are put under relentless pressure by alterity itself, and perhaps changed. One could even call this intellectual endeavor revolutionary, if by that we mean a revolution that is permanent in the sense we proposed above: the politics of indefinitely sustaining the possible, the could be.

Notes
[1] Although one could somewhat uncontroversially argue that to take other ontologies seriously is precisely to draw the political implications of how things could be for us, given how things are for those others who take these other ontologies seriously as a matter of fact.

References
Alberti, Benjamin, and Yvonne Marshall. 2009. Animating Archaeology: Local Theories and Conceptually Open-Ended Methodologies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3: 34456. Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press. Candea, Matei. Our division of the universe: Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics. Current Anthropology 52, no. 3: 30934. Critchley, Simon. 2012. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Crook, Tony. 2007. Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: Exchanging Skin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hage, Ghassan. 2012. Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Political Imaginary Today. Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 3: 285308. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin. 2013. Revolucin o muerte: Self-Sacrifice and the Ontology of Cuban Revolution. Ethnos. Holbraad, Martin. Forthcoming. Can the Thing Speak? Anthropology, Pragmatology, and the Conceptual Affordances of Things. Under review for Current Anthropology.

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Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Planet M : The Intense Abstraction of Marilyn Strathern. Anthropological Theory 9, no. 4: 37194. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Thinks. Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krijer, Stine. Forthcoming. Figurations of the Future: Forms and Temporality of Left Radical Politics in Northern Europe. Oxford: Berghahn. Mol, Annemarie. 2003. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012a. Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews of the Ontological Turn. Anthropology of This Century, 5. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012b. The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For the Motion. Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 5965. Povinelli, Elizabeth. A. 2012a. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. A. 2012b. The Will to be Otherwise / The Effort of Endurance. South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3: 45357. Scott, Michael W. 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham N.C.: Carolina Academic Press. Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipit: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 322. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Mtaphysiques cannibales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2013. The Relative Native. Translated by Julia Sauma and Martin Holbraad. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3: 473502. First published in 2002.

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What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean

by Eduardo Kohn
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Ontological anthropology seeks to open us to other kinds of realities beyond us. What are the stakes? Doing anthropology ontologically addresses this political question by reconfiguring both what the ends of such a practice might be as well as the means by which we could achieve them. All good anthropology has always been ontological in that it opens us to other kinds of realities. And it has also always been political. We undertake such an exploration for a reasonit is part of a critical ethical practice. But the kind of reality that anthropology has been so good at exploring has been restricted to onethat which is socially constructed. This, of course, is a real real, and we can tap its transformative potential. The problem is that it is a kind of reality that can make us blind to other kinds of realities and it is a kind of reality that, on this planet at least, is distinctively human. What is more, the political problems we face today in the Anthropocene can no longer be understood only in human terms. This ontological fact demands another kind of ethical practice. These observations put me somewhat at odds with the three takes on ontology laid out in the position paper by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro. These are: (1) ontology as the search for essential truthhow things are (characterized as bad); (2) anthropology as the critique of all such possible essenceshow things should be (also bad, because it relies on an unexamined ontologysocial construction); and (3) ontological anthropology as the exploration and potential realization of other realshow things could be, otherwise(good). Note that Ontology1 is a lot like Nature and Ontology2 a lot like Culture. Now, Ill be bad: What is the Ontology1 of Ontology2? What is the Nature of Culture? I think we can and need to be quite formally precise about what this is: Culture is that contingent system, wherever it is found (or wherever we project it), in which relata are co-produced by virtue of their relationships to an emergent

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system of other such relata. But what is the Nature of Nature? This is much more complicated. My concern is that when we discard this monolithic Nature, we actually, in this rejection, stabilize it. Nature for me would include all sorts of not-necessarily human dynamics and entities that are quite difficult to essentializelike the reality beyond humans of generals and constitutive absences; the generative logics of form; nonhuman modes of thought, which involve relational logics that do not work like culture or language; nonhuman kinds of value, telos, and selves; souls, and even spirits. These can, if we let them, emerge through ethnographicor, following Holbraad et al. ontographic engagement. I would say that they are real (Ontology1) but this is suggested to me by the ways their properties have come to work their ways through me in ways that remake me. I take Eduardo Viveiros de Castros (2009) call for the permanent decolonization of thought seriously, but what colonizes our thinking is language, or more specifically a form of thinking that is (on this planet) specific to humans. This is a mode of thinking that involves, technically speaking, symbolic reference, which is what produces things like social construction as well as the conceptual difficulty we have in relating to and harnessing what lies beyond social construction. The problem is that we cannot do this sort of decolonization by just thinking about it, or thinking with other humansthe Altersabout it, because this only recolonizes our thinking by a human way of thinking. (Im not arguing for a turn to phenomenology or panpsychism, but I do worry that we are thinking too much from within human thought.) Let me illustrate. My recent book (Kohn 2013) is an ethnographic/ontographic exploration of how certain humans, the Amazonian Runa, relate to the beings animals, ghosts, and spiritsof a tropical forest. This book is called, How Forests Think (Ontology1, perhaps), not How the Runa Think Forests Think (Ontology2). In this book I am not just telling you how it is that forests think (bad Ontology1). Rather, Im attempting a kind engagement with Runa thinking with thinking forests such that this sort of sylvan thinking (which is no longer human, and therefore not just Runa or mine) can think itself through usmaking us over in ways that could make us otherwise (Ontology3).

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In finding ways to allow thinking forests to think themselves through us, we cannot just walk away from Ontology1how things arebecause Ontology2 (social construction) is not just a western ontology, but a human one. The point is that we have to be able to say howthis is (Ontology1), so that in recognizing its limits we might open ourselves to that which lies beyond it and us (toward something much stranger than what we take monolithic Nature to be). Our human way of being is permanently being opened to that which lies beyond it. This is an ontological fact that, if recognized, can allow us to tap these other kinds of reals in order to develop another kind of ethical practice in the Anthropocene, one that could include, in some way or another, those many other kinds of beings that lie beyond us and with whom we make our lives.

References
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Mtaphysiques cannibales: Lignes d'anthropologie post-structurale. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

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Anthropological Metaphysics / Philosophical Resistance

by Peter Skafish
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

One of the key political stakes of the ontological turn lies less in concrete, actual politics than in a certain at once philosophical and anthropological politicslets call it, remembering the Valeryian sense of metaphysics as a fantastic form of thought emphasized by Viveiros de Castro, a metaphysical politicsthat could be said to involve what Derrida once called philosophical resistance, a resistance through intellectual means to metaphysical structures themselves. Such resistance today takes place along three fronts, against what can be dubbed three different conceptualities: (1) the baseline anthropological metaphysics of the anthropologists; (2) the metaphysicsbecause, yes, thats what it isof modernity or the moderns (because, yes, the moderns exist and can be identified); and (3), finally, although we have no time to discuss it, the new metaphysics articulated by what are nonetheless some very old-school metaphysicians, by which I mean the metaphysics of speculative realism and allied currents in English and French philosophy. But this metaphysical politics also has an active, constructive side whose import lies in its superior comparativism and the transformations it can effect in the core of the metaphysical bases of the human sciences. I will make this last point apropos the work of Latour, Viveiros de Castro, and Descola, all of whom I take up here both because we in fact have well-developed ontologies and metaphysics within anthropology and to emphasize that discussion of these should be part of a conversation like ours. I say that we have to resist a certain baseline anthropological metaphysics because one of the signal contributions of a certain ontological turn in anthropologyone not necessarily reducible or identical to the current of thought usually associated with the termis that the old anthropological project of a comparative and critical specification of the modern (and its various cognates: liberalism, the natural sciences, technology, capitalism) can no longer, following Viveiros de Castro's Mtaphysiques Cannibales and the entire

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philosophical side of the Latourian corpus culminating in An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence, be segregated from the actual practice of metaphysics (an approach for which ontology is not exactly be the right word). In other words, like it or not, the anthropologists are becoming philosophers, and some of the only ones worth listening to. But if the new concepts they are laying out are not only to be understood but further deployed, very few people besides the anthropologists are going to be able to do it, which requires dispensing once and for all with the tacit metaphysics of anthropology, that poorly mixed, difficultto-swallow cocktail of the phenomenological Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and a little Marx, according to which everything human is constituted, in essence, from some mix of Zuhandenheit, lived experience, perceptual/cognitive forms, historical conditions, and that favorite metaphysical master concept of anthropology: practice. Unless that metaphysics is smoked out and exposed for what it is, the new, explicitly metaphysical metaphysics of anthropologythe other or alter-metaphysics of Viveiros de Castro and the empirical metaphysics of Latour, both quite aware that they are indeed metaphysics and of the distribution of the real they proposewill not be heard. What exactly does the new, avowedly metaphysical metaphysics of the anthropologists offer a philosophical politics? Three things, each of which is an aspect of its active, constructive, transformative side. The binding, first of all, of metaphysical ontology to a comparative, pluralist specification of the modern. Among the many remarkable things about Latours An Inquiry Into the Modes of Existence is that it lays out a series of metaphysical proposalsabout transcendence, beings, additions to their essences made to them by the various modes of existence, and transformationwithout necessarily universalizing them, and instead subordinating them to a question about who and what the moderns are. What this link between comparison and metaphysics does is overcome the entire philosophical tendency to presume that ontology can be undertaken without an account of how it relates to peoples and traditions of thought external or marginal to modernity and it seeks instead to make ontology a project of specifying the modern. Metaphysics instead becomes modernography, and cannot be undertaken outside it.

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As for the second political stake, the new anthropological metaphysics offers a means, perhaps unprecedented in philosophy, toward the transformation of modern, Western metaphysics, which is one of the most important points of Mtaphysiques Cannibales and the part of Viveiros de Castros thinking that follows it. If philosophy has become particularly stale, if we suffer, as Catherine Malabou has put it, from a certain kind of metaphysical exhaustion, this is perhaps because (I offer it as a hypothesis) metaphysical thought can no longer rely for its materials on the Western canon, whose conceptual resources have become depleted. Even its margins are becoming too well tread to provide the materials for philosophical invention. Understanding forms of life and thought based on conceptual/cosmological coordinates radically different from those of the moderns, as the Amazonian case shows, requires us to resituate and conceive anew our fundamental categories and whatever basic form of thought underlies them. What this means, concretely, is that (1) so-called subjects," "histories," and "truths," for example, that are marginal to, or not of, the modern West can be listened to and understood only if the concepts (i.e., of the subject, of history, and of truth) used to interpret them are profoundly transformed by the encounter. But something even more profound is also at stake: (2) the resultant transformations will effectively sustain philosophy by which I mean conceptual thinking, from whatever discipline, capable of being transposed into other disciplinesfar more than any originating merely from re-evaluations of the Occidental tradition. The best example of this in Viveiros de Castros work lies, I would say, in his notions of virtual affinity and the Amerindian other-structure, concepts with heavy consequences for the old Deleuzian virtual/actual couple and the notion of consciousness associated with them. While I can only gesture to this point, understanding Amazonian cosmology turns the philosophies of difference on their head while simultaneously continuing them. The third political stake of this new metaphysics could be called its externalist pluralism, or, to steal an idea of Patrice Manigliers, superior comparativism. This last point is evident in Descolas Beyond Nature and Culture, a statement that some will find surprising, but I want to make clear (before it is inevitably given a thin assessment in the post-theoretical United States) how far this book goes in migrating metaphysics away from its home territories. Although Beyond

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Nature and Culture can be taken as offering merely an explanatory typology, it takes very little imagination to also see it as the first geography of being, a term I use to suggest that its quartet of ontologies is like a group of Heideggers dispensations of being or Foucaultian epochs but with the very crucial difference that modern metaphysics is not assumed to be primarily legible with respect to the past of the West. By taking a step out of history and time and onto a synchronic, geographical plane, Descola shows that modernity can be rendered intelligible when its basic ontological arrangements are contrasted with others external to it (not with, that is, arrangements supposedly internal to its history and thus itself). He thereby provides an alternative to the approach of a rather large group of post-Heideggerian thinkers, which includes Foucault and Agamben, who presume that the character of now-global modern problematics can be assessed through an account of an exclusively Western historicality. This preference for lateral, geographical comparison opens, moreover, the possibility of a truly planetary metaphysics, in a double sense: one that would see all peoples as philosophys intercessors, and that would also take the planet as a whole as a comparable unit, such that this world would be but one variant of others and thus not limited to the political-economic-ecological-collectivist possibilities imagined for it by the present neoliberal global order.

References
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 2013. An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. n.d. [2012]. The Other Metaphysics, and The Metaphysics of the Others. Unpublished paper. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Forthcoming. Cannibal Metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Press.

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Geontologies of the Otherwise

by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Words are dear here where we are charged with commenting on the potential of the concept of ontology for contemporary anthropologythus the condensed and clipped nature of my writing. In what follows, I begin by stating some of my major disagreements with the programmatic statement organizing our discussion and then outline what I believe are the three nested conditions to any productive conversation about an ontologically-informed anthropology of the otherwise. The Major Disagreements First, I do not agree that ontology necessarily evokes essence. Numerous philosophies would demonstrate otherwise. We need only say Martin Heidegger to remember one major philosophical treatise that did not (existence, remember, precedes essence). Second, I do not agree that the opposite of ontological essence is multicultural social constructionism. One would have to understand the complex thinking of Spinoza, Peirce, Deleuze, et cetera, as multiculturalism, something that seems awkward to me. Finally, engaging the literatures on ontology does not necessitate engaging in a translation exercise. One could, for instance, be engaged in a transfiguration exercise (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Povinelli 2011). The Preconditions First is a position on the sources of the otherwise. Before I can assess what an ontology of the otherwise can do for anthropology, I need to know whether ontology is situated in an immanent, transcendental, or trans-immanent framework. Of course, significant philosophical debates rage within each of these grossly-characterized positions about who is an example of which and what will be meant by any of them. But some basic groundwork needs to be laid so that we know whether we believe that we are dealing with essences or existents, first and fundamentally. Thus, for the record, if ontology concerns me, it concerns me as an arrangement of existents at/on/in the plane of existence. We are, in other words, grappling with a meta-existenceexistence dynamic.

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Entities and their arrangements are immanent to the plane of existence. But the plane of existence is also immanent in relation to itself and the entities it produces. In other words, the plane of existence is not one plane of existence. It is always more than one, even as it is becoming hegemonic or maintaining its hegemony. Why? The plane of existence is the given order of existents-asarrangement. But every arrangement installs its own possible derangements and rearrangements. The otherwise is these immanent derangements and rearrangements. Michel Serres (1987) explored a compatible understanding of how the otherwise is built into every arrangement of existenceto build is to build the building and its noise. To raise a glass is to build into existence the possibility it will fallor floatwhen let go. Second are the definitions of power, politics, and ethics that arise from this approach to the ontology of the otherwise. If any arrangement of existents/existence builds its own otherwise, then ontology presupposes a study of power, politics, and ethics as analytically separate problematics. Power is understood as that which enables arrangements to maintain their apparent unity and reproduce this apparent unity over time, no matter that these arrangements are continually creating their own otherwises. Politics is the adventure of the otherwise as it becomes (or does not) a self-referential, extended, and dominant entity-arrangement. This process can be summarized: What is initially dispersed noise comes to enclose itself through self-reference (and thus an initial this-that differentiation), creating its differential qualities and skin, and, in the process, pulling in and altering that which surrounds it. The analytic study of power and politics asks why, given that the otherwise is everywhere, some existents-existences stay in place? Ethics is a practice of effort oriented to the formation of new existents and new planes of existence. This ethics does not have an externaltranscendent/transcendental point of view to/about any given plane of existence. It cannot, given that an immanent ontology does not allow for adjudication external to the plane of existence. How and why, therefore, the ethical subject puts effort here or there, on this or that, now or then, must be understood outside the comfort of normative adjudication. Even the Habermasian notion of a regulatory ideal (Habermas 1984) is merely a practice of ethics raised to the level of a politics of existence.

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Third, we must double back onto ontological from the perspective of the entities it builds into dominant fields of knowledge production (ontic possibilities, savoir), including anthropology. These entities, I would suggest, are built on a foundational division within ontology as savoir. Since its inauguration as a field of philosophical reflection, ontology has been defined through the problems of being and nonbeing, finitude and infinitude, the zero and the (multiple) one, most of which create and presuppose a specific kind of entity-state, namely life. In the natural, social, and philosophical sciences, life acts as a foundational division between entities that have the capacity to be born, grow, reproduce, and die and those that do not: biology and geology, biochemistry and geochemistry, life and nonlife. Ontology is, thus, strictly speaking a biontology. Its power is its ability to transform a regional plane of existenceloosely speaking, Western understandings of those entities that have these capacitiesinto a global arrangement. Ethics is the practice of effort that opens the conditions and cares for the entities that are this divisions otherwise. And politics is, first, the struggle to demonstrate that this is simply one arrangement of many possible arrangements between biontology and geontology; and, second, the struggle to foster and extend the many names of the otherwise to this ontological division (climate change, anthropocene, Indigenous cosmologies, animism, vitalism, geontology) such that they are given life.

References
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. 2003. Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition. Public Culture 15, no. 3: 38597. Habermas, Jrgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Routes/Worlds. e-flux, no. 27. Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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Critical Anthropology as a Permanent State of First Contact

by Ghassan Hage
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

There is enough of the Marxist that remains in me to make me unable to think of politics without thinking about capitalism. So I want to use this intervention to reflect on the relation between the so-called ontological turn and capitalism. Eduardo Viveiros de Castros reflections on the way Amazonian perspectivism (multi-naturalism) differs from the dominant Western perspectivism (multiepistemological perspectivism, mono-naturalism) spurred me to think about the history of the western notion of perspective. Going back to the rise of perspective painting in renaissance Italy with Alberti and Bernuschelli, and looking at the circulation of notions of perspective from this architectural/artistic/religious milieu and into philosophy and the social sciences, one finds diverging conceptions of perspective that continue to mark the present-day debates associated with the ontological turn: * Mono-perspectivism and multi-perspectivism: many histories of perspective in art show how renaissance paintings mono-perspectival gaze was not the only form that perspectivism takes. The latter rose at the expense of a pre-existing multi-perspectivism that continued to exist as a minor form that took an artistically radical shape with the emergence of cubism. * Ontological and epistemological perspectivism: there has been an ongoing tension between a conception of perspective as a subjective take on a reality that is presumed to be always already "there," and an ontological perspectivism, which highlights the view that reality is the very relation to/perspective on otherwise undifferentiated surroundings. While in everyday life epistemological perspectivism has been dominant, in philosophy a long tradition has espoused various forms of ontological perspectivism. Key figures in this tradition run

22

from Leibniz and Spinoza, to von Uexklls influence on the phenomenological tradition, to Whitehead and Deleuze. * Visual perspectivism and experiential perspectivism: this denotes the difference in the popular imagination between perspective as a point of view or as a way of seeing, which highlights a visual imaginary, and perspective as walking in someone elses shoes, which emphasizes an experiential imaginary. The tension between the two is stressed in Jose Ortega y Gassets argument that while it is impossible to see an orange fully and simultaneously from all sides, it is not impossible to touch it or hold it three-dimensionally (Elkins 1994, 339). It can be argued that visual perspectivism is more aligned with epistemological perspectivism, while experiential perspectivism, denoting perspective as a mode of being enmeshed and existing in the world, has more affinity with ontological perspectivism. If that is the case, one has to ask if anthropology, particularly when it is phenomenologically-oriented, has not always favored, at least implicitly, an ontological conception of culture. * Finally, one has to point to an interesting, though minor, debate that emerged out of the well-known renaissance belief that optics, seen as the condition of possibility and the raw material with which perspective painting was executed, was one of the ultimate manifestations of Gods creation on earth. The interesting divergence here is that while some saw perspective, in its relation to optics, as a way of capturing the perfection of God, others saw perspective as a mode of touching the mystery of God. It is here, in the context of these debates and divergences, that one has to remember that the dominance of mono-naturalism and epistemological perspectivism was part of the dominance of the monotheistic, democratic, scientific and mercantilist assemblage that defined the rise of merchant capitalism. This assemblage brought together the intimately connected beliefs in monotheism and the one-ness of nature with the rising mercantilist desire of a unified mode of measurement of value and reality which was also at the core of the mono-naturalism of perspective painting. The abacus schools ( scuola dabbaco), or schools of commercial arithmetic, which emerged in Florence shaped the mono-naturalist habitus of both merchants and artists. This mononaturalism was complemented with a multi-epistemological perspectivism in

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politics (democracy as the co-existence of many points of view). All this, in a sense, defined the essence of democratic capitalist politics: talk and have as many points of view as you like, as long as capitalism and natureas the fundamental realities on which everything standsare left one and unchallenged. In light of the above, it is clear that the multi-naturalism and the ontological perspectivism that mark the ontological turn stand in opposition to the long tradition of mono-naturalism and epistemological perspectivism on which capitalism has rested. There is a clear radical political potential in an anthropology that is always in pursuit of ontological multiplicity and the highlighting of existing dominated and overshadowed modes of existence. But it would be a mistake to see in the highlighting of such minor realities an intrinsically anti-capitalist act. Minor realities offer new spaces of possibility but, nonetheless, such realities are merely arenas of political struggle rather than counter-hegemonic modes of existence in themselves. Likewise, one cannot forget that today, because of the threat of global warming, capitalism is decoupling itself from scientific mono-naturalism, and as such even multiple ontologies can end up being harnessed in the service of capitalism. But multi-naturalist anthropology is not only defined by ontological multiplicity. It has also situated itself in the tradition of the renaissance perspectivists we have noted earlier, who in opposition to those who saw in perspective a capturing of the perfection of God, saw themselves as always aiming to be in touch with the mystery of God. It is particularly here that the ontological turn is at its most radical, reinvigorating a long tradition of an anthropology defined by a continual encounter with radical alterity: anthropology as a permanent state of first contact.

References
Elkins, James. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press.

24

The Political Ontology of Doing Difference . . . and Sameness

by Mario Blaser
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

In this intervention I would like to contrast different ways in which some versions of science and technology studies (STS) and some versions of anthropology have explored ontological politics. Conversations like the one staged in this panel, composed to some extent by representatives of both, have been going on for sometime now so it is a bit unfair to make a strict distinction of camps. However, for the purpose of this discussion let me play with what I perceive as different initial emphases: on the one hand, the emphasis of STS on enactment; on the other hand, the emphasis of anthropology on alterity. The STSs emphasis on enactments has rendered for us, ontological multiplicity; a call to dwell on becomings rather than being; and a form of politics that is fundamentally concerned with how realities are shaped into a given form or another. The anthropological emphasis on alterity, in turn, has given us multiple ontologies (that is, ethnographic descriptions of the many-fold shapes of the otherwise); an injunction not to explain too much or try to actualize the possibilities immanent to others thought but rather to sustain them as possibilities; and, as a corollary, a politics that initially hinges upon the hope of making the otherwise visible so that it becomes viable as a real alternative. What happens if we cross-check these emphases? From the perspective of an emphasis on alterity, STS-inflected notions of ontological multiplicity and becomings (expressed in terms of emergences, fluidity, material-semiotic assemblages and so on) seem to leave no way out for the people described: those are not necessarily the terms with which they would describe themselves! Conversely, from the perspective of an emphasis on enactments the anthropological penchant for foregrounding difference seems to put the cart in front of the horse: difference comes before an account of how it gets enacted. In the position paper shared by the organizers I notice an attempt to bring closer these emphases. The authors do pay attention to enactment, but in a recursive fashion and to make the point of why ontologically-oriented

25

anthropological analyses are intrinsically political: basically because they figurate the future through their very enactment, they do difference as such. This figuration of a future abundant in difference is presented to us as a good: this is the political value of doing ontologically-inflected anthropology. If I am correct in reading the position paper as advocating a certain good, then in spite of the authors argument to the contrary, ontologically-oriented analyses do not offer an alternative to imperatives about what it should be, they are one such imperative. And I am informed here by intellectual traditions often labeled Indigenous, which, in translation of course, will alert us that once you have associated ontology with enactment, it follows that any kind of analysis or account carries in its belly a certain imperative about what it should be. Hence, whether you do difference or sameness, and in more or less explicit ways, you are already enacting a certain imperative. Now, if we accept that all kinds of accounts are equivalent as enactments we come right back to the fundamental political question of STS inspired analyses: what kinds of worlds are being done through particular accounts and how do we sort out the good from the bad. As you may have noticed, if we accept that all accounts are enactments we also end up in a position that is problematic for the ontologically-inclined anthropologist: in making accounts equivalent as enactments, we are doing sameness and leaving no way out for our interlocutors, partners and circumstantial political foes who would not describe their accounts as enactments. Here is where the injunctions not to describe too much or actualize other possibilities try to make their mark... But then, how do we provide an account that makes a case for the good being offered by ontologically-informed anthropology? It seems to me that the circularity of the problem has to do with an impossible demand: that ontologically-informed anthropology should enact an account devoid of any imperative of what it should be. It seems to me that, no matter how much we may try to elude it, the implicit imperatives that come along with our accounts unavoidably interrupt, redirect, clash and otherwise intermingle with other accounts and their imperatives. Anthropology is ontologically political inasmuch as its operation presupposes this many-fold consequential intermingling. Then, in my view, the challenge lies not so much in devising ways

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to indefinitely sustain the possible but contributing to actualize some possibilities and not others. One of these possibilities (but not the only one) might precisely be a worlding (so to speak) where the possible is indefinitely sustained. Contributing to actualize some possibilities and not others entails refusing a wholesale embrace of either difference or sameness. Granted, in a context where doing sameness is the dominant modality, doing difference largely becomes an imperative. However I cannot shed from my mind what an Yshiro teacher and mentor once told me: not all stories (or accounts) are to be told or enacted just anywhere; every situation requires its own story. Telling just any story without attending to what the situation requires is sheer recklessness. Thus, figuring out where, when and how to do difference and sameness as the circumstances require is to me the key challenge of doing political ontology.

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Practical Ontologies
by Casper Bruun Jensen
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

This panel urges consideration of what an ethnographic commitment to ontology does, and specifically of the politics of ontology. This seems an important question at a time when the notion appears with increasing frequency in anthropological discussions. To be in a position to address that question, however, first requires some disentanglement as regards the notion itself. Such disentanglement could no doubt be the topic of book-length treatises, but I will limit myself to observing that a preoccupation with ontology has emerged more or less simultaneously within science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology. In the former, ontology has been discussed at least since the mid1990s in the works of Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, Andrew Pickering, and Helen Verran, whereas in the latter, key inspirations include Marilyn Strathern, Roy Wagner, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. I do not think the more or less simultaneous emergence of ontology in these fields is fortuitous, since the figures mentioned share certain genealogies and they are affiliated in various complex ways. I also do not think the views of ontology propagated within each are antithetical or incommensurable; indeed I think they can be mutually enriching. However, they are different and those differences are important to bear in mind in order to consider the implications of an ontological politics. To draw the most schematic contrast possible, consider the following two claims: Viveiros de Castro (2011, 34) says that anthropological explanation must take place at the level of the (cultural) structures of ontological presupposition. Andrew Pickering argues that the very nature of the world is subject to transformation due to ongoing interactions between multiple human and nonhuman agents. What we need is an ontological theory of the visible, dealing with this dance of agency (Pickering 1995). It appears to me these views pull in different directions in terms of ontological politics. If Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad, etc., in spite of their protestations and clarifications, are repeatedly accused of culturalizing ontology and essentialising people, it is probably due to the focus on cultural structures of ontological

28

presuppositions. In contrast, ontology in STS generally leads to an interest in elucidating ways in which new forms of subjects and objects are formed in assemblages, which certainly include peoples thoughts but no less the technologies and other materials with which they continuously engage (Jensen 2010; Jensen and Winthereik 2013). Rather than essentialising, such studies are often seen as dangerously relativistic, since culture is here hardly held stable at all and ontology is basically never spoken about in the singular. It is always an issue of ontologies, even within what appears to be limited settings. Where does that leave us, politically speaking? Since the conveners have encouraged us to speak directly, let me offer a direct view. It seems to me that in some of its anthropological guises, like Martin Holbraads (2012) work, we find very interesting ontological experiments, but basically nothing resembling a politics. Viveiros de Castro (2011) is quite different, in that he is explicit about his aim to decolonize Indian thought. Other recent anthropological explorations, like Mario Blasers (2009) and Marisol de la Cadenas (2010) also use ontological argumentation to support particular forms of politics, namely those of specific indigenous people. But from which pre-ontological domain comes the necessity or inclination to support just those people and agendas? After all, we might say, states, colonizers, and mining companies also have ontologies. We just tend not to like them. We might therefore say that in these cases the politics (as contrasted with the choices of ethnographic description) is not ontological, it is a more or less regular politics extended to operate also on the terrain of nonhuman beings. If, on the other hand, ontologies are manifest in transformations at the level of the visible, so that one can always witness ontological contests or choreographies (Cussins 1998) ethnographically, what then? In that case, rather than using ontology as a leverage point for doing politics on behalf of a group of people, ontological politics is evinced descriptively and conceptually as new sociomaterial constellations that may include forms of science, governance, livelihoods, myths, infrastructures, and so on. Such constellations, we might say, are literal construction sites for divergent, practical ontologies. They have effects that go considerably beyond culturally structured presuppositions. This is already an important reason to give attention to them.

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In terms of the anthropological politics of studying ontology, we might say that studying forms of world-making in situations where many people, projects, and technologies clash, tends to make obvious that Westerners and moderns themselves are very different, both from what they think they are (modern and rational, for example) and what anthropologists tend to claim they are (reductive and dualist, for example). Ontologies thus multiply the uss and thems of which the world is composed and render all of them more exotic, simultaneously. Finally, note the recursive implication of this view of ontology for anthropology as discipline or project. If ontology is evinced in front of our noses in the shape of all kinds of world-making projects, then anthropological practice can itself be conceived as an ontological form. The kinds of topics we like to talk about as epistemological thus collapse into ontology, and fieldwork, writing, and argumentation begins to look like small machines for intervening in this or that part of the world, for performing the world in this or that marginally different or novel way (Jensen 2012). In that sense, we are invariably part of ontological politics, but not of any politics given by the ontologies of those we study or work with. Viewed thus, ontological politics relieves from anthropology the burden and, as Deleuze might say, shame of speaking for others. But it creates new obligations in terms of articulating the ways in which anthropologists feel qualified to speak and their reasons for speaking as they do.

References
Blaser, Mario. 2009. The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program. American Anthropologist 111, no. 1: 10 20. Cussins, Charis. 1998. Ontological Choreography: Agency for Women Patients in an Infertility Clinic. In Differences in Medicine: Unraveling Practices, Techniques, and Bodies, edited by Marc Berg and Annemarie Mol, 166 202. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond Politics. Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4: 33470.

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Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Human Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2010. Ontologies for Developing Things: Making Health Care Futures Through Technology. Rotterdam: Sense. Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2012. Motion: The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations.Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 4753. Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Brit Ross Winthereik. 2013. Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Infrastructures and Partnerships. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th Century Brazil. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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Equal Time for Entities

by Michael W. Scott
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The turn to ontology has established at least one indispensable insight: it has called attention to the fact that entities are intra-relational as well as interrelational. It has compelled us to recognize that entities are intrinsically multiple, or self-differing. Without retreating from this insight, my contribution to this discussion will be to question whether intrinsic multiplicity necessarily implies an ontologicaland therefore politicalasymmetry between relations and entities. It has become axiomatic in some quarters that relations are logically prior to and encompass entities (e.g., Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2013; Pedersen 2012; Viveiros de Castro 2010). The fact that entities comprise relations has been taken to mean that there can be no simultaneously autonomous things. Intrinsic multiplicity is presumed to constitute an invisible extensive pre-connectivity. But this asymmetry, I want to suggest, is not only unwarranted; it may also be politically undesirable. To illustrate my point, I ask you to picture the image of Indras net, as developed in Chinese Buddhism. As many of you will know, Roy Wagner (2001) has invoked this image as an aid to conceptualizing what he calls the holographic worldview. Wagner tells us that the negative spacesthe holes in Indras net are not really empty at all, but are gems that reflect one another so perfectly that they do not know whether they are one or many (2001, 13, quotation unattributed). Wagner (2001, 13) suggests that this image instantiates what he calls the absolute identity of part and whole. His use of this image looks, in other words, like an example of what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2010) describes as a virtual connection between Wagners thought and the philosophy of Deleuze. Indras net is Wagners way of expressing what Deleuze and Guattari (2004, 23) call the magic formula: PLURALISM = MONISM. In both cases, the ontology indexed is one of infinite invariant fractality, what Wagner (1991, 163, 166) elsewhere describes as the whole cloth of universal congruence or integral

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relationship replicated across all scales. Everything contains everything else, at least in potentia. Now, in my view, there are many potential problems with this holographic ontology, at least as methodological presupposition. For one thing, there is, at present, no evidence that the universe is comprehensively fractallet alone fractal to the degree of invariant self-similarity across all scales. I am concerned that we have simply been wonderstruck by the apparent congruence between a few aesthetically powerful examples of invariant fractalityas described by scientists and mathematiciansand the familiar macrocosmmicrocosm correlations found in many ancient, indigenous, and alter-modern cosmologies. But the main point I want to make is this: if, like many of the ancient, indigenous, and alter-modern cosmologies we study, we posit an asymmetry between an all-pervasive relational background (whatever we call it) and entities, conceptualized as figures emerging from it, we risk reinventingor lending support toclaims that some entities are either closer to, or somehow have greater access to their inner capacities for infinite becoming than others. Accordingly, if we return to the image of Indras netas good to think if not to embrace as methodological ontologywe must acknowledge its absolute ambiguity. It is a classic figureground composition, but one that must be read alternately as either a radicalor a partial duality (con. Viveiros de Castro 2010). It cannot be both at once only; a both/and formulation alone gives permanent ontological ascendancy to the whole cloth of relations over entities. Wagner says that the gems do not know whether they are one or many. But it is equally the case, I suggest, that they do not know whether they are entities or relations. They do not know whether they are autonomous terms with their own core intra-relational essences, or nothing but nexuses in an infinite web. After all, if the negative spacesthe holes in Indras netcan be seen as positive, it is equally the case that the positive spacesthe ligaturescan be seen as negative, as gaps between the gems, rather than links. Indras net can instantiate a thoroughly essentialist ontologyone that posits autonomous multiplicities at every scale. More importantly, intrinsic multiplicitywhether this means internal relations that are isomorphic at every scale, or (what is more likely) internal relations that

33

are

contingent

and

unique

to

every

entityneed

not

preclude a

priori autonomy. The insight that entities are composed of relations does not necessitate the asymmetrical privileging of relations over entities. People can and, indeed, some people dosee the gems first as independent complexities in need of swerve, in need of external connections to start up a cosmos. At the very least, then, such a privileging of intrinsically multiple yet always already autonomous entities needs to be sustained indefinitely as a possibility, both in anthropological theory and in ethnographic contexts.

References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Position paper for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For the Motion. Critique of Anthropology 32, no. 1: 5965. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2010. Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance. InDeleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology, edited by Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rdje, 21953. Oxford: Berghahn. Wagner, Roy. 1991. The Fractal Person. In Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia, edited by Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, 15973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wagner, Roy. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject: Holographic Worldview in New Guinea and Its Meaning and Significance for the World of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Anthropology as Ontology is Comparison as Ontology

by Helen Verran
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

A claim that emerges about at about the halfway mark of Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castros (2013) paper provides my beginning: The anthropology of ontology is anthropology as ontology; not the

comparison of ontologies, but comparison as ontology. I complement the claim that anthropology as ontology . . . is comparison as ontology by insisting that the entities we deal with in doing anthropology are themselves comparisons. The exemplar I have in mind here is numbers, like those multiple numbers I met in Nigerian classrooms. Numbers are formalized comparisons, solidified clots of relations; all the more solid for being formalisms. As things, numbers are familiar comparison participants in many collectives My claim, that the entities we deal with and through in anthropology are comparisons, can lead us to recognize ontic tensions, which might become an ontological politics. However, that passage from recognizing entities as comparisons participant in ontic tensions, to recognizing the possibility of ontological politics, differs from the insight that anthropology as ontology is comparison as ontology. The latter acknowledgement amounts to recognizing that anthropology is a political ontology, one of several acting in any collective in which ethnography is pursued. It is within the force fields of those political ontologiesincluding anthropologys, that the ontic tensions of a collective might (or might not) emerge as ontological politics. That emergence of an ontological politics in a collective in which an ethnographer is participant can be felt as a disconcertment. I see this experience as a form of epistemic disconcertment, when negotiations around what is known and how it is known become evident as fluid. I felt this in Nigerian classrooms as I describe in my beginning stories inScience and an African Logic (2001). I met new numbers, brought to life by teachers who we might think of as ontic

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innovators. The new numbers that these teachers brought to life were participants in those classrooms, along with the official number of the primary school curriculum. Classroom routines were designed to ensure the dominance of that number but it did not stop Yoruba number entering the classroom. Many of the children dealt with and through Yoruba number in their out-of-school lives as young market vendors, and it still had influence, and the capacity to interrupt the smooth workings of the Western number of modern administration. In the re-performance of those classrooms in the writing of an ontologicallyfocused ethnography as an analytic text, yet another number came to life as participant comparison. This number was, like many of those the teachers brought to life in their experimenting, both and neither the number of the official primary school curriculum and Yoruba market number. But the ethnographers number differed from those of the experimenting teachers in having its metaphysical commitment made explicit. That making explicit, albeit in re-performance, is an expression of a political ontology. While perhaps a benign political ontology, which by making its metaphysical commitments explicit announces itself as proceeding in good faith, it is nevertheless a political ontology, one that takes its place in the tense political landscapes of those classrooms. It abuts and abrades the political ontology of the numbers promoted by the modernizing school curriculum, and the resisting and sometimes subverting political ontology that is forged and sanctioned in the Oonis palace at the center of town, and a perhaps inchoate political ontology enacted by the teachers who must manage their large classes of restless children with few resources. Recognizing contesting political ontologies, including that which enters with ethnography, makes clear that what was happening with numbers there in those Nigerian classrooms. I experienced disconcertment as immanent ontic tensions clotted in becoming as an ontological politics within the force fields of mutually interrupting political ontologies. And that tension zone is, it seems to me, exactly where an ontologically-sensitive ethnography is located and where it should stay in its re-performance as analytic text.

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Staying in that place of tension where ontic tensions clot (or not) as ontological politics within the force fields of political ontologies, the ethnographer has a chance of discriminating divergences and convergences: generative, or exploitative, or unfruitful doings of difference. So here we find the possibility of judgment, of critique. Meta-critique was rightly written out of ethnography, but ethnography located in that imagined zone of ontological tension can and should engage a form of infra-critique, gesturing at possible generative tensions, while explicitly refusing others.

References
Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Position paper for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago. Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Onto-Methodology
by Tony Crook
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Because we can only know in relation to something else, this discussion of the Politics of Ontology gets to the heart of the anthropological project. Ontology provides a relational view of method. Every ethnographic description is equally a description of the anthropology producing it. Anthropology's engagements with the political have been turned inside out over recent years. Any distinction or definition between textual representation and political representation has been collapsed. Speaking about can now be heard as speaking for. As much as what an ethnographic text or description might say, even the act of ethnographic description itself can make a political statement. But this roundtable is important for it provides an opportunity to separate out again these twinned politics of representation. And it also provides a space therefore, in which to leave aside the question of whether a discussion of anthropological method should be political or non-political. My book, Exchanging Skin (2007), derives from research in Bolivip village in Papua New Guinea. The book takes up the Min Problema long-standing analytical impasseand argues that the problem all along was one of Anthropology's own making. Intriguingly, the very peoples and places that, through Fredrik Barth's work on the Baktaman, came to stand for and exemplify secrecy and knowledge, have provided the discipline with one of its most critically demanding tests. Although analyses based on Euro-American conceptualizations of secrecy and knowledge were produced, they did not stack up with the ethnography in Bolivip. In Bolivip, knowledge implicates people in a double life by affording and bringing together divergent gendered perspectives: not so much revealing to a viewer their position in the composition of a field of knowledge, as newly revealing the composition of the knower and the subtleties of their personal capacities and relational supports. This is not so much being in the world (a figuring out of positions) as world in the being (a figuring of internal capacities). Revelations have the dual life effect of revealing that there is always more to

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things than one knowsand so it creates a relation that carefully positions a person in those new possibilities. Knowledge practices in Bolivip employ the imagery of relative positions on a tree: the muddled confusion of junior cultists is likened to the multiplicity of branches and leaves, whilst very senior cultists display their solidifying grasp of things in the way that the ever-branching stories of juniors seem always to come down to the same thing. There is a double-ontology in Bolivip: for juniors in the crown, words from seniors at the base appear to branch into multiple possibilities. Clearly, ontology is no one thing. As we've already heard, ontology can serve to describe an all-encompassing world view, and to describe an all-encompassing anthropological method. That ontology foregrounds and highlights this isomorphism between ethnographic object and anthropological method is its most important virtue. Of course, anthropologists are adept at discerning the wider cultural histories and metaphysical concerns at work in world views, and thus it is possible to discern contemporary Euro-American conceptual collapses of nature and culture such that things seem to have micro-ontologies (so every thing has a world, and a worldview, of its own), and to discern emergent Christian and process theologies which refashion the position and the mathematics of the Godhead (so that God and his believers are part of, and can pass through, each other). Ontology provides a relational view of method, and reminds us that a critical test for ethnographic knowledge-practices is the faithfulness with which they acknowledge that they are both enabled and constrained by the knowledge practices of our ethnographic subjects. For too long, the pretense of scrupulously separating data from theory had anthropology barking up the wrong tree, and afforded a privileged analytical position as if narrating from outside the ethnographic relation. I take it that looking for theory in the same place we look for data provides a crucial disciplinary and decolonizing turn. Every ethnographic description is equally a description of the anthropology producing it, then. Ontology is useful because it foregrounds our part in the relational and conceptual scheme, and reminds us of three important lessons:

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(1) Roy Wagner's (1981) enduring insight about our invention of culturethat is, the efficacy and contingency of using our concepts (such as culture or ontology) to apprehend, apportion to and describe the concerns of our ethnographic subjects. (2) Marilyn Strathern's (2011, 92) insights into exchanges between knowledge practicesthat is, to be perspectivalist acts out Euro-American pluralism, ontologically grounded in one world and many viewpoints; perspectivism implies an ontology of many worlds and one capacity to take a viewpoint. (3) As I understand Viveiros de Castro's (2004, 3) comparison between anthropologies, it is neither multiple natures nor singular cultures that require analysis, but a description of the metaphysics, potentials and affordances that find manifestation and expression in different forms. Any methodological insistence on these three lessons carries political force for the reproduction and transformation of the disciple. It may even save us from being dazzled and taken in by the effects of our own creativity, and allow the creativity of ethnographic subjects to further expand our understandings of being human.

References
Crook, Tony. 2007. Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea: Exchanging Skin. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 2011. Binary License. Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 87 103. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipit: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1: 322. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1975.

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Archaeology, Risk, and the Alter-Politics of Materiality

by Benjamin Alberti
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

Here are some things familiar to many archaeologists: thermoluminescence; electron spin resonance; X-ray fluorescence; scanning electron microscopy; inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry; neutron activation analysis; as well as shovels, barrows, dirt, line levels, and pencils. Some archaeologists are angry that they have not been included more in debates on the ontological turn. What could be more real, more ontologically weighty than the things archaeologists study and how they study them? This is not to imply that archaeology is all science and method. Though the big issue in archaeology is often seen to be, precisely, methodological: how to get through things to past human lives? We have an apparently endless sea of possible other worlds, but they are sand-bagged by the problem of confirmation. We can only conjure up such lives and worlds from their physical traces, translating differences in materials through practice. In this statement I make two interventions. The first takes the form of a question: What is the status of materials in our ontological accounts? Im going to wag my finger a little and claim materials back from their status as merely prosaic in the current debate. They are where alterity lies. Second, I argue that to get political enough, to get worlds otherwise out of archaeology, requires risk. We archaeologists can be very defensive about our things. In fact, one could argue that a new essentialism has emergeda return to things as thingsas a symptom of exhaustion in the face of the search for meaning. The claim is that there is something about a thing that is beyond signification, that cannot be captured or explained away. And it is the job of the archaeologist to care for our things, to ensure them their dignity (Olsen et al. 2012). We might, on this basis, rephrase Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: archaeology, we might say is the science of the ontological self-determination of the worlds things. This sounds faintly insulting, but bears thinking about. As I read the position statement of this panel by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (2013), the question

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that came to me repeatedly was: What about the alterity lodged in materials, in their indeterminacy? Materials are treated in the statement as prosaic ground rather than excess. I would ask Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro why they think materials afford anything at all. This is the central question for an ontologically oriented archaeology and its politics. How do things afford? Archaeologists are guilty of constantly passing through the material traces on their way to past peoples but rarely actually access the dark side of ontological alternatives. Instead, we find what were looking forabstractions, social structures, past ontologies-as-cultures because the ontological operation in the formation of the materials and how and what they afford is rarely questioned. My suggestion is that we can only elicit new forms from affordances of materials and forces if we refuse a commonsense understanding of them as somehow primitive. The politics of things before they emerge as such is what archaeologists ought to contend with. Alterity is prior to properties. It is becoming increasingly widely recognized that archaeology is onto-formative in its very practice. We dont uncover pasts but assemble them in the present (Fowler 2013). The gap between past worlds and material traces is only apparent. We now have rich and detailed descriptions of archaeological practiceseeing and doingas ontological in nature. The technologies of descriptions are recognized to include multiple non-human agencies, apparatuses, things. But because we are wonder-struck, as Scott describes it, by that realization we can overlook alterity. What about the difference that a focus on ontology should make? This is a question of politics and risk. Elizabeth Grosz (2005, 129) has written that politics, as much as life itself, is that which gives being to what did not exist. I dont think archaeology can participate in a critical political ontology while we operate at the scale of the meta-theoretical the search for a corrective to our faulty metaphysicswhich makes it difficult to admit to the necessary contingency of theoretical foundations. We have a new constituency of things to care for; but it is hard to leave a door ajar for alterity to enter. Sandy Budden and Jo Sofaer (2009) have argued that when potters made pots at the Bronze Age Tell of Szzhalombatta in Hungary they risked their social

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identities, as each performance of potting was judged by an audience of the potters community. If we include the material within the social, if what one is working onclay, materialsis seen as identical in kind to oneself, then far more is at risk. Such is the case, I have argued, with body-pots from northwest Argentina (Alberti 2014). A successful performance there involves both producing an efficacious transformative act (of the material) and convincing a far broader audience (of beings) of its success. The risk you run is ontological. Archaeological practice as ontological ought to be the same. It should throw the archaeologist and her materials into a state of vulnerability and risk. I think it no accident that those archaeologists willing to risk in this way have learned the lessons of contingent foundations from feminist, queer and Indigenous practice. Extracting worlds otherwise in archaeology involves admitting doubt and difference into our very specific examination of materials, including how they afford. With further apologies to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, could we characterize this effort, then, as the permanent decolonization of matter? Or, could we argue, even, for an alter-politics of the (pre)particulate?

References
Alberti, Benjamin. 2014. Designing BodyPots in the Formative La Candelaria Culture, Northwest Argentina. In Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold. Aldershot: Ashgate. Budden, Sandy, and Joanna Sofaer. 2009. Non-Discursive Knowledge and the Construction of Identity: Potters, Potting and Performance at the Bronze Age Tell of Szzhalombatta, Hungary. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 2: 20320. Fowler, Chris. 2013. The Emergent Past: A Relational Realist Archaeology of Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Position paper

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for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago. Lucas, Gavin. 2012. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Ontology of the Political Turn

by Matei Candea
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The position piece by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (2013) offers an engaging account of how politics and the ontological turn might fit together. The Deleuzian (or indeed Tardean) sounding thought that the ontological turn is an immanent politics of permanent differentiation appeals. It certainly captures much of what I for one have found attractive about this emerging bundle of arguments, while eschewing much of what is potentially problematic, such as the notionclearly rejected hereof ontologies tied to named groups of people, and hence of a new identity politics by ontological means. Similarly, the focus on permanent theoretical revolution wards offin principle at leastthe greatest danger which awaits any theoretical movement entering its second generation, by which I mean the moment when, as is currently beginning to happen, anthropologists are going to the field with a sense of the ontolog ical turn as a particular theoretical option. The danger this poses is the classic one of replicating results rather than methodological commitmentscrudely put, the danger of going out to the field bent on discovering that whoever one happens to be studying actually lives in a world in which there is no single nature, and happens to have a striking penchant for elements of a relational, non-dualist, immanent material vitalism. The ontological turn, defined as a commitment to an immanent politics of permanent conceptual differencing, couldnt possibly stand for that type of prejudged rediscovery of the same and that is all to the good. However, I will argue that the acid test of the resolution of the permanent conceptual revolutionary comes when she encounters the term politicsan immovable object if ever there was one. Indeed, put the ontological turn and politics side by side and you will soon find that the terms do not stay put for long. Very quickly, the latterpoliticsseems to want to pop up to a superordinate level, and we are drawn to talking and thinking about the politics of the ontological turn: what political project is implied by, or explicitly pursued by anthropologists who deploy ontology as a designator? The potential answers to this question are multiple, as the position piece makes clear, but its

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form is broadly stable. In other words, politics seems necessarily to be the bigger thing in terms of which the ontological turn can (and should) ultimately be called to account. Tellingly, for instance, when the position piece speaks of three different ways in which politics and ontology are correlated, it is in fact describing the politics of three ontological positions (broadly speaking a realist, a deconstructivist, and a performative one). But what if the scale were reversed? What if instead of asking about the politics of the ontological turn, the ontological turn were the superordinate entity and the political just one of the particular topics falling under its call for permanent revolution? The position piece makes some moves in this direction when it speaks, for instance, of the limitations of one (modern, multicultural, etc.) kind of politics. Here the ontological anthropologist might be able to show, by drawing (through engaged mutual misunderstandings) on the politics of the other, that an other politics is possible. But in that move, politics has again taken the upper hand and become the common denominator that sutures ontological difference. For how does the ontological anthropologist know an other politics when she sees it? Presumably, it would have to look like something other than what we currently know as (modern, multicultural, etc.) politicsalthough in another sense, it would have to look enough like politics in the widest definition given here (power differences). The ontological anthropologist would then presumably have to say that this, too, is politics, albeit not our version of it. And this, in turn, replicates and extends the classic move of political anthropology from the 1970s onwards, of showing the political to operate in seemingly un-political places (cf. Candea 2011b). That is why, from the perspective of permanent conceptual revolution, the political is the one ingredient that is hard to keep in the mix: it keeps floating up to the top, as it were. In another sense too: any argument about the political calls up a question about the politics of that argument. Thus politics still trumps ontology, and method, every time. The position piece deftly seeks to square that circle by rendering as political the ontological turns own methodological commitment to the constant production of difference. This is an elegant twist, and one that has a venerable line of predecessors from Foucault onwards, but it does seem that once again, the political ends up on top. Indeed, when we take

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the very fact of differing as political, we really have reached the horizon towards which political anthropology has been tending, in which everything (and therefore, in another sense, nothing) is political. And in that move, we are also getting further from the commitment to generating alternatives to established ways of thinking. After all, political anti-authoritarianismthe end-point of the pieceis itself a fairly well-established way of thinking, amongst Euro-American anthropologists at least. Adherents of the ontological turn have been repeatedly asked a conventional question (What are your politics?) and this ultimately requires a relatively conventional answer. In many respects, the primacy of the political, its ability to return us back to fairly grounded, conventional problems, is to be welcomed. Amongst other things, it forces the would-be permanent revolutionary to ask a question that has not yet, I think, been conclusively addressed in the ontological turn, namely that of interlocution: whom, precisely, is one taking seriously,[1] and what might a disagreement or response from them look like? That being said, consider how different the conversation would sound if, for instance, one asked instead about the religion rather than the politics of the ontological turn (cf. Scott 2013)that conversation might shake things up rather more and bring its own problems. But it would certainly provide a purview from which the political could emerge as just one topic among others. Perhaps we do sometimes need to suspend (however briefly) the question of the politics of ontological difference to genuinely bring into view the question of the ontological difference of politics. By this I mean both the possibility of an other politics and the possibility of there being things other than politics. To ask about this is to ask, in other words, how other the otherwise can be.

Notes
[1] I would maintain, pace the position pieces move away from the term, that the normative injunction to take seriously the worlds of others, and thereby to distort our own, remains a fairly apt description of the immanent politics of the ontological turn. It is particularly apposite precisely because of the fundamental ambiguity at the heart of the notion of taking seriously (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2011; Candea 2011a).

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References
Candea, Matei. 2011a. Endo/Exo. Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 14650. Candea, Matei. 2011b. Our division of the universe: A Space for the NonPolitical in the Anthropology of Politics. Current Anthropology 52, no. 3: 30934. Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Position paper for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago. Scott, Michael W. 2013. The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious

Science?). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4: 859 72. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2011. Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths. Common Knowledge 17, no. 1: 128 45.

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The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through Ontological Openings
by Marisol de la Cadena
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

I want to engage the position paper by Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro (2013) by bringing to the fore an ethnographic moment that proposed itself as obliging analysis at the crossroads of ontology and modern politics. But first a comment on the opening line of the position paper: the bed-fellowship between ontology and modern politics is that of a pair of complementary opposites. Politics engages change, which its ontological makeup limits. To be smoothly efficient, they require a third partner: history, explaining it all change and limitand making it as it should be, rational and future-oriented. This, which also explains away the politics of modern politics, can be opened to critical view by what I (therefore) prefer to imagine as ontological opening rather than turn. Now to the ethnographic moment, briefly, because I have already narrated it elsewhere (de la Cadena 2010.) The setting was Cuzco (Peru), the year 2006, a time when neoliberal principles and the demand for minerals in certain parts of the world exacerbated the translation of nature into resources. The event was that of a mountain (perhaps replete of gold) that was also an earth-being (or an earth-being, also a mountain) participating in a political contest where one reality was more powerful than the other. The human participants in the conflict were environmentalists, Quechua indigenous-mestizos, and engineers working for a mining corporation. An alliance between the first two defeated the golden aspirations of the corporate engineers. The mountain won, the mining company lost: but to earn this victory, the earth-being was made invisible, its political presence recalled by the alliance that also defended it. In addition to political ecology and political economy, the above contest also transpired in the field of political ontology in two intertwined senses of the concept: (1) as the field where practices-entities-concepts co-constitute each

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other, make each other be; (2) as the enactment, within this field, of modern politics itself, obliging what is and what is not its matter. Yet, ontology was a subdued partner in the arena of contention: that the mountain was also an earth-being was an issue made irrelevant as the question unfolded politically. Modern politics swallowed it, while saving the mountain from being swallowed by the mining corporation. An ontological opening of modern politics can reveal the inevitability of this alliance as resulting from the specificity of modern politics. Modern politics has a politics that is ontologically specific: what/who it includes or excludeswho can/cannot parleyresults from what modern politics allegedly unquestionably is (and that, by becoming visible in events like the above, also becomes subject to interrogation). Modern politics is premised on representation (ideological, scientific, economic, cultural, and perhaps moral), hence it requires reality out there, usually as facts that can then become concerns. This is a requirement of modern politics, a condition of what it is, and how it makes the world one. And while culture can propose matters of concern, those proposals are not about facts and are therefore weaker as matters of concern when in tension with those presented by nature. Modern politics (liberalism and socialism) sustains nature and its facts through confrontations like the above that include the translation of the earth-being (exceeding nature and culture) into belief and hence not a political actor/concernor a weak one. That in this process the ontological make up of politicsor the politics of politicsoccupies a blind spot guarantees its hegemony. Opening that precise spot offers the possibility of eventalizing (cf. Foucault) modern politics, turningits own politics inside out to reveal how its seams, composed of both situated conditions and universal requirements, enable its uniform imposition, rather than its inevitable implementation. In this process, the hegemony of modern politics may be productively disconcertedto use Helen Verrans phrase (2013)as it is exposed to what it cannot deal with, to what may constitute its excess. An ontologically-inflected ethnography may open partial connections with excess if performed at the limit, which I conceptualize with R. Guha (2002, 7) as the first thing outside which there is nothing to be found and the first

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thing inside which everything is to be found. A caveat: this nothing is in relation to what sees itself as everything and thus exceeds itit is something. The limit is ontological; establishing it, a political-epistemic practice; beyond it is excess, a real that is nothing, or not-a-thing accessible through culture or knowledge of nature (as usual). At the limit, ways have to be invented, creating ontological openings, ethnographic sites to conceptualize otherwise, in partial connection with difference, which located at this complex site emerges as radical difference, Western or not. This may be what the position paper calls difference within, and which I phrase as the project to de-otherize difference, for other is how difference emerges and is made understandable within (or before) the limit, and hence within the same, even if a cosmopolitan (and tolerant) same, capable of relating from/at home with the other. Invented at the limit, conceived with a deliberately localized and ephemeral toolkit, a difficult partial connection between everything and nothing, conceptualizing radical difference-within politics (for example) is immanent to ethnographic moments like the above, which travel with difficulty and are hardly cosmopolitan. Instead, they offer the opportunity for cosmopolitical concepts that, rather than tolerance, can provoke an irritatingly localized capacity to provincialize nature and culture, and thus put them into political symmetry with what is neither (culture or nature.) Thus, ethnographically inquiring both within the cosmos and the political as usual, cosmopolitical concepts may propose a radically different (because immanent) notion and practice of politics capable of offering to that which politics as usual has evicted from its field, the possibility to engage in relationships of symmetric alliance or symmetric adversarialism and, as important, to emerge as nonpolitical or excessive to politics as well.

References
de la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Conceptual Reflections Beyond 'Politics.' Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2: 33470. Guha, Ranajit. 2002. History at the Limits of World History. New York: Columbia University Press. Holbraad, Martin, Morten Axel Pedersen, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2013. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions. Position paper

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for roundtable discussion. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Chicago. Verran, Helen. 2013. Engagements between Disparate Knowledge Traditions: Toward Doing Difference Generatively and in Good Faith. In Contested Ecologies: Dialogues in the South on Nature and Knowledge, edited by Lesley Green. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

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Other Words: Stories from the Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine
by Annemarie Mol
This article is part of the series The Politics of Ontology

The term ontology is sexy. These days, in parts of anthropology, it seems able to promise the possibility of escape, of running ahead, of allowing academic work to take a rollingavant-garde run. Ontology becomes a term by which to relate the beauties and pains ofdiffering to that other magic word, politics. By all means, if it inspires you, run with it. But allow me to tell you some stories. Story Number One For a long time, while anthropologists went out (from Cambridge or Rio de Janeiro) into the rest of the world to study other cultures, Nature stayed behind in the laboratory (in San Diego, Geneva, London) where it was studied by natural scientists. However, at the very moment that anthropologists who had gone elsewhere were finding that the Others did not necessarily have cultures (or natures), natural science laboratories got invaded by their own brand of ethnographers. And by the time we learned that some Others live with/in many natures rather than the singular Nature of the natural sciences, the lab-ethnographers emerged from the lab to say that what went on there had little to do with finding facts about Nature after all. Instead, it was about such specificities as purifying ferric chloride, measuring blood levels of thyrotrophinreleasing hormone, or hunting quarks. Hence, a variety of great divides (between scientists and primitives; the West and the Rest; culture and nature; facts and fiction) got more or less simultaneously messed with in various ways. The overall picture of how ethnographic studies of Others and ethnographic studies of laboratories relate was never quite drawn. Their various plots do not fit within a single scheme. There is no overall.

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Story Number Two After the lab studies had opened up facts, the clinic, too, looked different. Not that clinics were into fact-finding: their aim was to improve the health of patients, but this includes knowledge practices of varied kinds. I have done hospital fieldwork in the Netherlands since 1979. Here is an example of what came out of this work in the 1990s. What isanaemia? The textbook says it is a deviant bodily condition and that there are various methods for knowing it: listening to a patients complaints; observing her body; and measuring the levels of hemoglobin in her blood. All these methods approach anaemia in their own way. But do they? My fieldwork suggested otherwise. Rather than approachinga single object in different ways, each of these methods enacts an object of its own. In daily clinical practice, a patients complaints, the color of her eyelids, and her hemoglobin level are all real enough, but they do not neatly map onto each other. The different methods, rather than allowing for different perspectives on a single (forever elusive) object, follow from, and feed into, different (more or less painful) events. Other hospital ethnographers found similar things. We mobilized the term ontology to bring out what was going on here. In nineteenth-century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is. For reality, in the singular. But if each method enacts its own reality, it becomes possible to put realities, and indeed ontologies, in the plural. It was a delightful, frightful provocation. What did it provoke? Putting ontologies in the plural is not relativism. The point is notthat it all depends from which side you look at it. Instead, there is no longer a singular it to look at from different sides. And while putting ontologies in the plural indicates that reality is more than one, it may still be less than many. For while the theoretical term, ontologies, is put in the plural, the medical term, anaemia, is still singular. Our fieldwork showed that in medical practices a lot of work is done to coordinate between versions of reality. The politics, here, is not one of otherness. In a first instance, it is about fights; not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics of what). However, in a second instance, versions of reality that clash at one

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point turn out to be interdependent a little further along. Ontologies are not exclusive. They allow for interferences, partial connections. Sharing practices. Story Number Three Time goes on. In the twenty-first century, it appears (in my corner of academia) that there are many theoretical things that the term ontology cannot do. As originally this term got coined to designate what is, it was carefully emptied of what Western philosophy callsnormativity. This means that the value of what is does not form part of its essences, but relates to them as a secondary quality, an afterthought. And the ideals that take distance from what is, the counterfactuals suggesting what could be, do not form a part of ontologies at all. Thus, while ontologyput in the plural ontologieshelps to shake up monorealist singularities, it is ill-suited for talking about many other things. Such as the ways in which goods and bads are performed in practices, in conjunction with pleasures, pains, ecstasies, fears, ideals, dreams, passions. Or the various shapes that processes may take: causal chains; back-and-forth conversations; tinkering and caring; and so on. And what about theorizing how fingers taste when allowed to; what drugs afford to bodies and bodies do with drugs; migrant ambitions and guarded borders in the Mediterranean; garment factories on fire in Bangladesh; or soy for Dutch pigs being grown in the Amazon? To name just a few examples. In some cases, it might be wiser (more enlightening, more generative, more generous, and yes, even more provocative) to play with other words.

Implicit References
Cussins, Charis. 1996. Ontological Choreography: Agency through Objectification in Infertility Clinics. Social Studies of Science 26, no. 3: 575610. Despret, Vinciane. 2004. The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoogenesis. Body & Society 10, nos. 23: 11134. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.

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Haraway, ouse. London: Routledge.

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Jensen, Casper Bruun. 2012. Anthropology as a Following Science: Humanity and Sociality in Continuous Variation. NatureCulture 1, no. 1: 124. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructionist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. New York: Sage. Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 1998. Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Questions. In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by John Law and John Hassard. London: Blackwell. Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Strathern, Marilyn. 1980. No Nature, No Culture: The Hagen Case. In Nature, Culture and Gender, edited by Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, 17422. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1991. Partial Connections. Savage, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. Viveiros de Castro, Edwardo. 1992. From the Enemys Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazon society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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