Ontology and ontologies. Theoretical, political, and methodological debates
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Antonela dos Santos
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Ontology and ontologies. Theoretical, political, and methodological debates
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Antonela dos Santos
2020/12/29
10.13125/americacritica/4478
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CONICET, Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Ontology and ontologies. Theoretical, political, and methodological debates
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                         América Crítica 4(2), 163–172, 2020, ISSN: 2532-6724, https://doi.org/10.13125/americacritica/4478




                           Ontology and ontologies.
               Theoretical, political, and methodological debates
                                             Florencia Tola and Antonela dos Santos1
                         1   CONICET, Instituto de Ciencias Antropológicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

                                                             Received: 08/04/2020
                                                             Accepted: 15/12/2020




 Abstract—The investigation of the self, of what exists, and of the ontological properties of the cosmos is nothing
new in the history of anthropology. In the last two decades, however, the discipline has undertaken an “ontological
turn.” This perspective focuses on how different societies define the entities that inhabit the world and the relationships
between them. The ontological turn is built upon the critiques of the Great Divide (nature/culture), and on Western
naturalism as the modern dominant ontology. It is also a reaction to the linguistic turn that began to dominate in the
1980s. In this paper we present the most salient traditions of the ontological turn (the English, French, and North
American), highlighting differences and similarities between them. — Ontological turn, political ontology, recursive
anthropology, nature/culture.

 Abstract—La investigación sobre el yo, acerca de lo que existe y sobre las propiedades ontológicas del cosmos no
es algo nuevo en la historia de la antropología. Sin embargo, en las últimas dos décadas, la disciplina ha emprendido
lo que ha venido a llamarse como "giro ontológico". Esta perspectiva se centra en cómo las diferentes sociedades
definen las entidades que habitan el mundo y las relaciones entre ellas. El giro ontológico se basa en las críticas a
la Gran División (naturaleza/cultura) y al naturalismo occidental como ontología moderna dominante. También es
una reacción al giro lingüístico que comenzó a dominar en la década de 1980. En este documento presentamos las
tradiciones más destacadas del giro ontológico (la inglesa, la francesa y la norteamericana), destacando las diferencias
y similitudes entre ellas. — Giro ontológico, ontología política, antropología recursiva, naturaleza/cultura.


                                                                          thropology of ontologies tends to avoid terms such as
                                                                          “representation” given its close connection with a cer-
I NTRODUCTION                                                             tain type of anthropology produced especially in the
                                                                          1980s. According to this one, cultural representations
      lthough the concern for the self, for what exists,
A       and for the ontological qualities of the cosmos is
nothing new in the history of anthropology, in the last
                                                                          constitute a system that is superimposed on a reality
                                                                          that exists on the outside and it is universal and objec-
                                                                          tive. Against this, defenders of the ontological turn ar-
two decades the so-called “ontological turn” has taken                    gue that the study of ontologies does not presuppose the
place. This new approach no longer aims to study cul-                     existence of a single nature and multiple cultures. As
tural representations or cultures, but to analyze the ways                a matter of fact, questioning the universality of the op-
in which each society defines existing entities and how                   position between nature and culture that is characteris-
they relate to each other. As we will state later on, an-                 tic of Western ontology and history, the ontological turn
                                                                          argues that a great part of non-European societies did
  Contact data: Florencia Tola, tobatola1@gmail.com                       not need to distinguish the exclusive domain of humans
164                                                                                                   América Crítica 4(2): 163–172

from another one populated by non-human beings (De-                         ple worlds “partially connected” (Strathern 2004). This
scola 1986, 2005; Ingold 20001 ; Latour 1991, 2004b,                        assertion requires accepting that there are different ways
Law and Lien 2018). Ethnographies developed in non-                         to compose the world, and that these compositions are
Western societies were of much relevance to rethink the                     not just different ways of representing it. These compo-
Great Divide and to show other ways of composing the                        sitions imply, in fact, different ontologies.
world (Descola 1986; Strathern 1988; Viveiros de Cas-                           An ontological perspective states that, when anthro-
tro 1992; Wagner 1972).                                                     pologists face ethnographic data and situations that they
    The ontological turn reacts against the ecological                      cannot easily understand, they should not consider them
crisis and the Anthropocene, and maintains that it is                       as representations, metaphors, or symbols of the reality
pertinent to question the nature/culture opposition in                      out there. Instead, they have to take them seriously and
order to analyze not only modern societies, but also                        try to unravel what those situations imply for indigenous
the new hybrids that emerge from transformed envi-                          interlocutors.
ronments (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2012; La-                             Classical anthropologists would probably argue that
tour 2015). The “new politics of nature” (Charbonnier,                      corporal fluids may be studied as representations or
Salmon, and Skafish 2017: 9) that the ontological turn                      symbols of domination and power (always instances that
proposes is not merely the intellectual interest of some                    the Other cannot glimpse). Perhaps they would also con-
researchers concerned with the reformulation of cate-                       sider that other people just imagine the body in a dif-
gories such as nature or culture. Neither is it a theo-                     ferent way (accepting that there is something that can
retical project developed against the background of the                     be objectively identified as a body). On the contrary,
environmental crisis. On the contrary, rethinking the na-                   anthropologist interested in ontologies recommend to
ture/culture opposition presupposes a revision of the on-                   make the effort to understand how other people concep-
tological principles that guide “the material and political                 tualize what our societies usually call “fluid” or “body”.
organization of modernity” (Charbonnier, Salmon, and                            . Most of these ideas were inspired by the “method
Skafish 2017: 8).                                                           of controlled equivocation” postulated by Eduardo
    This turn also represents an answer to the linguistic                   Viveiros de Castro (2004). As this Brazilian anthropol-
turn of the 1980s in which anthropology was considered                      ogist claims, homonymous terms do not necessarily de-
the science that interprets cultures, conceived as texts.2                  note identical realities. According to his approach, the
In the last decades, in an attempt to distinguish ontology                  aim of all research should not be to explain or to con-
from culture, different authors have pointed out the dif-                   textualize the ethnographic data, but to allow it to trans-
ficulties faced by an anthropology that tries to interpret                  form the categories that anthropologists usually apply to
artificial constructions of reality. For an ontological an-                 their analysis, showing that these categories are limited.
thropology, this approach entails the idea that a universal                 Doing so, anthropologists move from an interpretative
objective reality exists and that each culture provides a                   anthropology to another one wherein the goal is to con-
particular vision or worldview of this reality (that is, one                ceptualize from the ethnographic data.
nature/several cultures). Against this notion, the authors                      Although this ontological turn does not constitute a
of the ontological turn prefer to think in terms of multi-                  homogenous tradition in which all anthropologists adopt
                                                                            the same definition of ontology, or agree about the aim
1   Although Tim Ingold shares with the other authors included in           of the discipline, they do all share the post-humanist
    this article the theoretical interest of rethinking the division be-
                                                                            concern to incorporate more-than-human, non-humans,
    tween humanity and the environment, his research is strongly in-
    fluenced by phenomenology, which makes it different from the            hybrids, and transpecies into the analysis (Kohn 2012).
    rest of works analyzed here. In general terms, authors of the on-       Within Europe, France and England are the main
    tological turn agree in considering that ontologies are stabilized in   countries where scholars have begun to make ontolo-
    speeches and practices shared by a social group. On the contrary,       gies a theoretical preoccupation and an anthropological
    Ingold states that ontologies are “mere philosophies” (in Descola
    and Ingold 2014: 20). The anthropological preoccupation should          methodology.
    be, according to this scholar, the ontogenesis or, in other terms,          In France, Philippe Descola (2014b) in an exercise
    the ways in which every human and non-human being becomes               of “structural ontology” elaborated a theory with univer-
    themself in the always unfinished process of life development.          sal range. He systematized and conceptualized four dif-
2   See Willerslev (2016), Charbonnier, Salmon, and Skafish (2017:
    4-8) and Salmon (2017) in order to understand how the anthro-
                                                                            ferent ways of identification or ontologies. In dialogue
    pology of ontologies and the postmodern anthropology conceive           with his arguments, Bruno Latour (1991) showed the
    culture.                                                                properly Euro-American way of distinguishing between
Florencia Tola and Antonela dos Santos, Ontology and ontologies                                                     165

objects and subjects, non-humans and humans. Inter-          different countries (for example, Charbonnier, Salmon,
ested in the modern ontological constitution, Latour pro-    and Skafish 2017; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017). We
posed a new constitution that may reunite what the Great     also understand that big differences exist even between
Divide had separated. On the other hand, in England,         scholars working together in the same department, uni-
anthropologists influenced by the proposals of Wagner,       versity, or country. In fact, Latour’s work shares more
Strathern, and Viveiros de Castro, have been promoting       common ground with Viveiros de Castro than with De-
a methodological change in the discipline, focusing on       scola, even though both are part of a French tradition.
ontological questions instead of epistemological ones.       The same applies to Holbraad, Pedersen, Willerslev, and
Finally, in the United States and Canada, investigations     Candea (although none of them is English, they all stud-
in ecology, political economy, and decolonial thought        ied in Cambridge 20 years ago).
were added to these European debates. This gave place            These considerations notwithstanding, we still argue
to a branch of the ontological turn that recognizes onto-    that the anthropological tradition and history of the cen-
logical plurality and its conflicts, and works towards the   tral countries greatly affect the theoretical and method-
constitution of what these thinkers call the “pluriverse.”   ological choices of the majority of the most innova-
    In this article we intend to expose the most salient     tive contemporary anthropological research. Such is the
traditions of the ontological turn, highlighting differ-     case of French anthropology, which recognizes its struc-
ences and similarities between them. In order to do so,      turalist inheritance and concentrates mainly on model-
first we present the English branch, then we character-      ing and generalization by means of a hypothetical de-
ize the French version of this interest in ontologies and,   ductive method. The same happens with the exponents
finally, we set out the particularities of the North Amer-   of the ontological turn formed in the United Kingdom,
ican ontological anthropology.                               who are strongly influenced by the strathernian preoccu-
    We do not ignore, however, that many of the ideas        pations about concepts. Or with the anthropologists in-
that this turn has incorporated into and articulated with    terested in ontologies in North America, who link these
other subjects of the discipline were somehow born in        questions with decolonial theories, tracing a continuity,
Latin America. In fact, it is in Brazil where the notion     in one way or another, with the traditional American fo-
of Amerindian perspectivism as an ontology was first         cus on agency and conflicts.
proposed (Viveiros de Castro and Stolze Lima). Be-               To sum up, although we understand that there are
sides, several Latin American authors, some of them          anthropologists working on ontologies in other coun-
currently living in central countries, have also reflected   tries (this being our case, as argentinian anthropolo-
on issues such as ontological conflicts, posthumanism,       gists), we continue to believe that distinguishing these
and ontological predation (Blaser, de la Cadena, Kohn,       three branches is useful in expository terms. It is not
Vilaça, among others). These initial debates of the 1990s    a question of perpetuating colonialist logics in science,
made such a refreshing change in Americanist anthro-         but of recognizing that, despite the great efforts of plenty
pology that, at present, most contemporary South Amer-       of anthropologists working from their own countries and
ican anthropological production still acknowledges the       regions, the circulation of ideas is still marked by some
legacy of those theories, concepts, and methodologies,       consolidated traditions.
and takes them as a basis for new developments. In spite
of this, as we have stated before, we organize our ex-       P ERSPECTIVIZING THE DISCIPLINE :                  E XER -
position following the theoretical production of central     CISES OF RECURSIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Canada,        In England, the interest toward ontologies started in
and the United States.                                       1998 when Viveiros de Castro was invited by the De-
    Three considerations must be taken into account re-      partment of Social Anthropology of the University of
garding our selection criteria. On the one hand, we do       Cambridge to give some lectures on multinaturalism
not deny that there are plenty of scholars working in        and Amazonian perspectivism (2015: 189-324). Those
other universities and countries who are fully engaged       lessons were programmatic for a group of students and
in these debates. On the other hand, we are aware            professors––Including Martin Holbraad, Morten Peder-
of the importance of international exchanges such as         sen, Matei Candea, and Rane Willerslev––who elabo-
conferences, lectures, and congresses whose results are      rated a critique that goes beyond the Amazonian context
clearly shown in the organization of meetings or in the      and seeks to rethink general ideas of the discipline (see
release of books edited and compiled by colleagues from      Holbraad and Pedersen 2017).
166                                                                                                       América Crítica 4(2): 163–172

    Their attempt at “perspectivizing” anthropology––an                     ble translation. See for example, Pickering (2017) who
attempt that has been described as “reverse ethnocen-                       studies the way of proceeding in certain sciences and
trism” (Vigh and Sausdal 2014: 53)––supposes the                            in Taoism, Zen and Shamanism as conceived by Davi
adoption of the basic premises of this Amazonian ontol-                     Kopenawa. This researcher proposes comparative tran-
ogy as a method (Holbraad 2013: 469).3 Amerindian                           sitions between those different worlds in order to take
multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro 1996) postulates                        them all seriously.
that the world is composed by a set of elements whose                           Anthropology appears here to be a methodological
nature varies according to the identity of the subject that                 intervention whose goal is to rethink the ethnographic
perceives them. There are not variable representations of                   data through its own concepts (and not under categories
a single world, but multiple worlds per se; all the exist-                  forged for other realities or regions).5 The British on-
ing beings perceive in the same way––through the same                       tological turn proposes to make an inversion between
categories and values––but the objective correlate seen                     empiria and concepts: instead of treating data as the
by them varies.4                                                            object of analytical procedures, anthropologists should
    To take these Amazonian ideas as a method allows                        treat them as sources of transformation for their con-
us to approach alterity as the expression of plural points                  ceptual repertoires, in order to produce descriptions that
of view on worlds that are also plural. If “powder is                       do not reduce data to mere explanatory or interpretative
power,” as the practitioners of the Ifá divinatory cult ar-                 schemes developed under Western ontological history.
gue (Holbraad 2007), or if “twins are birds,” from the                      If our concepts are not able to make ethnographic reali-
Nuer’s point of view, what we should do is describe                         ties intelligible, then they should be replaced.
the particular worlds where those concepts of “powder,”                         Inadequacy is, in fact, a cornerstone in these anthro-
“power,” “twins,” and “birds” are possible. In short, the                   pological projects. This term is related to Viveiros de
fundamental contribution of these authors is to have no-                    Castro’s proposals concerning controlled equivocation
ticed that “anthropologists may accept either that their                    as a method (2004) and to the idea of “a new anthropol-
ethnographic subjects think differently about things or                     ogy of the concept” (Viveiros de Castro 2014: 43). This
that they have entirely different things to think about”                    one consists of the incrimination of “oneself in the ef-
(Fowles 2011: 906, in Alberti et al. 2011), and that                        fort to forge an anthropological theory of the conceptual
the anthropological project should be to reformulate the                    imagination, one attuned to the creativity and reflexivity
strategies of writing and describing.                                       of every collective, human or otherwise” (Viveiros de
    As part of wider discussions about the scope of the-                    Castro 2014: 43). In the reappropriation done by Hol-
oretical constructions in anthropology, the interest for                    braad, these proposals become an ontographic method
ontologies in British scholarship focuses on concepts.                      (2012: 255-259) that follows some clearly identifiable
What is the relationship between fieldwork and the cate-                    steps. First of all, it is necessary to have an exhaus-
gories that the researcher uses to grasp it? What ontolog-                  tive description of the ethnographic material in order to
ical assumptions underlie ethnographic realities and an-                    track logical contradictions. Then, we should find in our
thropological concepts? Comparison as a method plays                        ethnographies those elements which seem irrational to
a central role in these researches. As Marilyn Strathern                    us. By doing so, we confront ourselves with alterity and
had already argued (1988), concepts have always a con-                      it becomes possible to make explicit the conceptual con-
crete place of origin from which we cannot get rid of. In                   flicts.
order to use those concepts in other contexts, it is nec-                       Suggestive as it may seem, since it inverts the objec-
essary to put them in relation to the concepts that were                    tive of the anthropological project that confers to field-
originated there, compare them and then essay a possi-                      work a great weight, this method is not free from dif-
                                                                            ficulties. Although it is worthy to emphasize “taking
3   The idea of elevating certain way of thinking to “[. . . ] a critical   seriously” native ideas and praxis, and the reluctance
    instrument of the totality of western cosmology” (Descola 2014:         of reducing them to concepts coming from our ontol-
    49, in Descola and Ingold 2014) presupposes that ontologies are         ogy (Venkatesan 2010: 154), the recursive character of
    something that people adopt or discard intentionally. On the con-
    trary, for Descola each ontology is associated to the historical
                                                                            this method has been object of severe criticism. Vigh
    circumstances that gave rise to it.                                     and Sausdal, for example, consider that to take the field
4   Viveiros de Castro’s attempt of moving “[. . . ] from ‘worldviews’
    to ‘worlds of vision’” (Vigh and Sausdal 2014: 53) implies that         5   An antecedent of this way of working in anthropology is the al-
    “‘visions’ are not beliefs, not consensual views, but rather worlds         ready classic text by Seeger, da Matta, and Viveiros de Castro
    seen objectively [. . . ]” (Viveiros de Castro 2015: 80).                   (1979) for the Amazonian indigenous societies.
Florencia Tola and Antonela dos Santos, Ontology and ontologies                                                                       167

seriously seems to be a mere “conceptual trampoline”               business to generate alternative vantages from which es-
(2014: 62) to generate new theories, in a procedure that           tablished forms of thinking are put under relentless pres-
does not necessarily produce useful proposals for the              sure by alterity itself, and perhaps changed. One could
people that are involved in the research. Assuming the             even call this intellectual endeavor revolutionary” (Hol-
risk of being narcissistic, the extreme version of ontog-          braad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro 2014: w/p). As
raphy dictates that anthropologists have to go beyond the          they notice, this ontologically-oriented anthropology is
limits of their own thought and force themselves to work           internally constituted by and morally overlapped in the
outside them. As Holbraad expresses in reference to the            political aspects of the life of those people with whom
famous postulate by Tim Ingold,6 anthropology is phi-              we work. To decolonize thought and to recognize that
losophy without the people in, since the axis is not in the        our ideas are always related to others is to involve our-
people, but rather in their ideas and the way those ideas          selves in the process of returning ontology to people.
interact with ours. We observe here that the meaning of
the term ontology is slightly different: it is about the as-       T HE F RENCH  ONTOLOGICAL TURN : T HE
sumptions postulated by anthropologists with analytical            GREAT DIVIDE AS THE ENGINE OF THINKING
aims; an exercise of conceptual creativity that does not
necessarily involve the people. (Holbraad 2010: 185)               In its French branch, the ontological turn has three cen-
    There are other critics associated with the previous           tral exponents: Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Is-
one. In repeated occasions, it has been argued that                abelle Stengers.7 There are also philosophers, such as
the underlying assumption of the existence of a “radi-             Patrice Maniglier (2015), who take the main proposals
cal alterity” (Povinelli 2001) reduces the complexity of           of Viveiros de Castro to rethink Western philosophy. Fi-
the interconnected worlds by considering them transpar-            nally, in the book symposium “Beyond Nature and Cul-
ent, internally homogenous, and externally incommen-               ture (Philippe Descola) published in 2014 (HAU Journal
surable (Bessire and Bond 2014; Harris and Robb 2012;              4(3): 363-443), several anthropologists, many of them
Vigh and Sausdal 2014). For the detractors of the on-              French, debate Descola’s ideas, especially the concept
tological turn, the invitation to take the ideas and pre-          of ontology and its uses in anthropology.
occupations of the Other seriously seems to lose great                 In general terms, for Descola (2014b: 113, 117) the
part of the revolutionary ethical and political compo-             aim of anthropology is to elaborate models of intelligi-
nent it supposedly has. In privileging fieldwork mo-               bility for the diverse uses of the world and the different
ments of radical alterity, anthropologists are contribut-          ways of composing and inhabiting it. In its French vari-
ing to the ontologization and exotization of the Other.            ation, ontologies are conceived not as a methodological
Therefore, when these authors talk about the “ontologi-            tool nor as a political device, but as a model that does
cal self-determination of the other” (Viveiros de Castro           not seek to describe any particular society, but to resolve
2009), they do not consider how and who defines “peo-              problems of the general anthropological order (Descola
ple” and “ontology,” nor do they notice the way these              2014b: 223). In this sense, its objective is not to study
definitions entail practices of power. (Vigh and Sausdal           culture, but to make models that would make possible
2014: 63)                                                          the rethinking of concepts that social scientists use. As
    As we will see, all these aspects are more strongly            Descola himself says, these concepts are the product of
problematized by some anthropologists of Canada and                a singular social and cultural history (2014b: 242).
the United States. However, Holbraad, Pedersen, and                    This project of “conceptual hygiene” (Descola
Viveiros de Castro (2014) respond indirectly to these              2014b: 240) was nourished by Descola’s fieldwork
critics. They declare that ontology is not associated to           among the Achuar people, and also by a profound eth-
essential and stable things and, therefore, opposed to             nological research that guided him from the Amazon to
politics and agency. The ontological project has deep              the north up to central Asia and Siberia. Par-delà nature
political concerns, because by presenting other alterna-           et culture (2005) is still severely critiqued because of its
tives to the assumptions about what exists and confer-             ambition for global knowledge and synthesis. Neverthe-
ring them ontological weight, these other alternatives             less, as Descola remarks, his aim is not to universalize,
become possible. In their terms: “[t]his is an anthropol-          but to make different ontologies symmetrical (2014b:
ogy that is constitutively anti-authoritarian, making it its
                                                                   7   For a revision of the anthropology of ontologies in its French vari-
                                                                       ant, see Salmon and Charbonnier (2014), Keck, Regehr and Wa-
6   “Anthropology is philosophy with the people in” (1992: 696).       lentowits (2015) and Kohn (2015).
168                                                                                                   América Crítica 4(2): 163–172

252): he aspires to put in a plane of conceptual equal-                     the contrary, we can see throughout history progressive
ity anthropologists and those with whom we work.                            transitions between ontologies and even hybridizations
    This French scholar defines ontology as “a concrete                     resulting from diverse factors of historical or structural
expression of how a particular world is composed, of                        order.
what kind of furniture it is made of, according to the                          Showing that modernity is a particular ontological
general layout specified by a mode of identification”                       formation and that there are other possible ways of up-
(2014a: 437) that people establish between themselves                       dating sensory properties is a project that recognizes the
and others. Two aspects are central in his theory: the                      political character of anthropology. The ontological turn
role of schemas, and the contrast between interiority                       states that it is necessary to rethink the categories that
and physicality. On the one hand, ontologies are de-                        Europe forged in its neo-colonial project of absorbing
fined as types of integrating schemas. If ethnography                       within Western ontology people who had “to translate
allows us to describe processes and events, the “way                        their ways of life into our own way of life and be grate-
in which those processes are going to become stabi-                         ful to us for providing them the tools to do so” (Descola
lized in systems of interaction” (Descola 2013: 503) es-                    2014a: 436). As we have seen, Descola proposes, on the
capes the fieldwork. On the other hand, the identification                  contrary, not to extend mechanically the European cate-
is conceived as a general schema acquired during pri-                       gories to the study of non-European realities.
mary socialization that allows humans to establish dif-                         His study of the dimensions that precede the world-
ferences and similarities between them and others, based                    ing process and his interest in ontologies conceived as
on physical appearance and internal states. As we may                       an elementary analytical level not dependent on cultural
see, ontologies are strongly anchored in the experience                     variations entails a political commitment not always rec-
of subjects that perceive, compose a world, and act on                      ognized as such, i.e. to put on stage all those entities that
it. Worlding is, therefore, the process by which quali-                     are a fundamental part of the world, history, and com-
ties, phenomena, and relations are perceived, selected,                     mon life. They had remained in the shadow due to our
and grouped according to “ontological filters” (Descola                     difficulty to accept that we compose different worlds,
2014c: 273).                                                                and now they question “the imperialistic universalism of
    Descola’s model is, in fact, the hypothetical-                          naturalists” (Latour 2011: 175).
deductive expression of the possible combination be-                            In Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (1991), Latour
tween physicality and interiority based on continuities or                  also approaches the question of the entities that inhabit
discontinuities existing between the world and the per-                     the world and how they relate to each other. His intellec-
ceptual agent.8 Having reduced all the possibilities to                     tual trajectory is, however, different: just as anthropol-
a chart of four options, Descola has been severely criti-                   ogy has shown that in non-modern societies myths, eco-
cised because of his apparently ahistorical approach that                   logical aspects, rites, politics and economy coexist, and
supposes a total absence of political and ethical com-                      must be studied as an ensemble, philosophy of science
mitment towards indigenous people (Bessire and Bond                         argues that in the modern world everything is also, and at
2014; Harris and Robb 2012). Nevertheless, many of                          the same time, real, narrated, and social. Nevertheless,
these reviews arise from partial or tendentious interpre-                   because of the constitution that governs us (one that has
tations of his work, as long as he himself indicates that                   distinguished by purification non-humans from humans
none of the possible combinations of the “hypothetical                      and, in parallel, has created science as the proper way
invariant” is preeminent (2014b: 235), and that there                       to represent non-humans and politics as the exclusive
is not an evolutionarily relationship between them. On                      sphere of humans), we have not been able to conceive of
                                                                            nature-cultures as not dissociated. Latour’s research was
8   Possible combinations are: a. humans and non-humans share the           very important in the development of Science and Tech-
    same interiority but their physicalities are different (animism),       nology Studies that reformulates politics, conceived now
    b. humans and non-humans have the same physicality and dif-             as the construction of a cosmos in which we all could
    fer in their interiority (naturalism), c. interiority and physicality   live or, in other words, a “common world” (Latour 2007:
    are shared among a group of humans and non-humans that dif-
    fer from another groups that are constituted by the same logic
                                                                            811-812). Research developed in laboratories has shown
    (totemism) or d. humans and non-humans differ in their interi-          that it is necessary to extend the set of humans and non-
    orities and physicalities and, therefore, each element is a singu-      humans that we recognize as existing and to accept that
    lar entity that establishes with others relations of analogy, giving    politics exists even outside the traditional political char-
    place to groups organized by systems of correspondences (De-
    scola 2014b: 214).
                                                                            acters, the usual spaces of political work, and the pas-
Florencia Tola and Antonela dos Santos, Ontology and ontologies                                                       169

sions typically associated to politicians. (Latour 2007:       tence of multiple forms of knowledge and the idea that
811-812)                                                       all of them are sustained in different ontological com-
    In a similar way, Stengers (2005) argues that, refram-     mitments and particular ways of “world-making.” If this
ing notions as “agency,” “entity,” or “ensemble,” and          is the case, the Western universalist narrative and the di-
questioning the idea of mononaturalism, science allows         chotomies associated to it are no longer appropriate. Un-
us to rethink who can speak, who can be the spokesman          like other traditions of the ontological turn, in which the
of what, and who can represent whom. Nevertheless,             political aspect is not so crucial, these authors focus on
for her science is still unable to put aside political cate-   it in order to develop an approach that they call “politi-
gories that were exclusively produced by Western mod-          cal ontologies” (Blaser 2013, Escobar 2014). On the one
ern tradition. Against it, Stengers invites us to doubt the    hand, this field emphasizes the idea that every ontology
“common world”: how can we imagine political scenes            supposes a particular form of conceptualizing and doing
that go beyond “the fiction that ‘humans of good will de-      politics. On the other hand, they consider that political
cide in the name of the general interest’”? (2005: 1002).      conflicts are usually a product of disagreement regard-
How to encourage us to take into account those other           ing the existing entities and the way in which they are
agents that have been traditionally disqualified because       related to each other.
they do not have anything to propose? Latour shares                As we have already mentioned, those who critique
most of Stengers’ concerns (2004a: 455). He argues             the ontological turn argue that the emphasis on radi-
against Kant’s and the Stoics’ cosmopolitanism that pro-       cal alterity leads to standardize human groups and to
poses that, even if part of a nation-state, we are citizens    increase the distance between the West and the rest,
of the cosmos and we all share humanity and differ only        creating the sensation of incommensurability between
in our variable ways of representing what exists. Deny-        worlds. In an attempt to avoid these consequences, some
ing the idea that we have to develop a common char-            researchers––such as Blaser, de la Cadena, Poirier, and
acter in order to gain tolerance or construct peace, La-       those who published their research in the dossier 42 of
tour maintains that we are in a perpetual war in which         Recherches Amérindiennes au Quebec edited by Legoas,
the central question is what there is of common in the         de la Cadena, and Wyatt––, are interested in the con-
common world that we want to build. As we will show            nections between ontologies and in the ontological plu-
in the following section, this perspective was critically      ralism that exists inside nation-states. Because of that,
adopted by other scholars (Blaser 2016, 2019; de la Ca-        they study conflicts between ontologies in permanent
dena 2010) who state that the common thing is not some-        transformation and they are not so interested in classi-
thing we recognize in spite of superficial differences,        fications or systematizations of ontologies already stabi-
but rather something that we need to construct through         lized. For Sylvie Poirier, “relational ontologies” (2008:
diplomatic relations that involve not only humans but          77) are not entities nor metaphysical constructions, but
also non-human beings.                                         rather the result of located practices. As ways of world-
                                                               ing or enacting reality (Blaser 2009), ontologies are thus
F ROM ONTOLOGY TO POLITICAL ONTOLOGY:                          the result of experiences and concrete interactions be-
P LURIVERSE AND ONTOLOGICAL CONFLICTS                          tween humans and non-humans. (Poirier 2008: 77)
The interest for ontologies in the United States and               Such interactions, often problematic, are a locus of
Canada, especially in the universities of North Carolina,      privilege in this scholarship since political ontology is
California and Memorial is strongly related to studies         conceived as a field of investigation that focuses on con-
of modernity and colonialism and to fields like political      flicts that emerge when two or more ontologies are in
economy, cultural studies, and political ecology. In “an       contact (Blaser 2009: 11). They consider that in their
attempt to carve out a space for thinking other thoughts,      coexistence with the dominant society, indigenous peo-
seeing other things, writing in other languages” (Esco-        ple and other subaltern groups have learned to hide
bar 1997: 504), Escobar gets back on the challenge ex-         aspects that modern ontology considers radical alter-
pressed by the Subcommander Marcos, spokesman of               ity (Poirier 2008: 83). The immanence of ancestors,
the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, of “a world         non-human’s agency, and communication in dreams are
where many worlds fit.” Along with Mario Blaser and            some aspects that are markers of difference in modern
Marisol de la Cadena, Escobar proposes a line of re-           Western states. Multiple ontologies need to be negoti-
search called “Studies of the Pluriverse” (Escobar 2014:       ated in the present.
141). The starting point of these studies is the exis-             The research of Blaser (2010), Piergiorgio Di Gi-
170                                                                                        América Crítica 4(2): 163–172

miniani (2013), de la Cadena (2015), Tola y Medrano          der a single rubric, we consider that a common spirit is
(2020), among others, manifests the variety of realms        shared by all these colleagues: this turn is ontological
where these discussions may take place, and shows that       (because it focuses on the diversity of worlds denoted
ecology is becoming the preponderant locus where onto-       by concepts) as well as methodological (ontologies are
logical conflicts between indigenous people and nation-      considered heuristic tools) and political (since it argues
states are taking place. Different ways of enacting the      that any investigation with the people in (sensu Ingold)
world give place to conflicts, and these conflicts ques-     should lead us to imagine other possible worlds). The in-
tion the idea that everybody is modern (Blaser 2013),        terest in concepts includes questioning the scope of the
and that all people enact the same world. As the En-         researcher’s analytical tools, but it also means searching
glish branch of the ontological turn and Amerindian          for the concept of the Other, in an attempt to put West-
multinaturalism, Blaser reverses the formula “one na-        ern conceptual imagination and that of the people with
ture/many cultures” postulating the existence of inter-      whom we work on a symmetrical plane.
connected worlds.                                                Although not all anthropological research has to be
    We can distinguish other connections between these       ontological, it is productive for the discipline to take
developments and the other two branches of the ontolog-      into account the changes of perspective that the onto-
ical turn that we have distinguished previously. Beyond      logical turn proposes. Rather than adhere to the total-
differences, all the approaches promote the recognition      ity of postulates of the ontological turn identified in this
of ontological pluralism and work towards the construc-      text, we have attempted to present the diversity of defi-
tion of a pluriverse that would break the Western onto-      nitions of ontology, of proposals and trajectories which,
logical priority (naturalism). They also propose to intro-   as we have expressed, do not make this turn a coherent
duce in the political and social scene those entities de-    tradition or a doctrine. The review we have made leaves
nied by naturalism (indigenous people and non-humans)        us open the following question: what world could we,
and question the universality of the categories created      as anthropologists, compose if we thought in terms of
and imposed by modernity. Examples of this are the pro-      cosmopolitics rather than politics, ontology rather than
posals by Holbraad (2012) and Descola (2005, 2014b)          culture, and ontography instead of ethnography?
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