Over at Struggles Forever, Jeremy Trombley has an interesting post up on “the ontological turn” in anthropology or ethnography. I’ve been meaning to have a discussion with him about this as I think it’s an issue many of us are struggling with. For example, the core project of The Democracy of Objects— a project which I think many have missed –is to somehow reconcile some version of social constructivism with a realist ontology capable of making room for ecology (which requires realist and materialist positions as there’s a fact of the matter where global warming is concerned) as well as the role played by objective agencies in social assemblages such as technologies, infrastructure, features of geography, local climates, the growth cycles of plants and animals, waste, etc. Maybe we can try to organize some cross-blog event to discuss these issues. I certainly think they’re close to the heart of Jeremy, Michael of Archive Fire, Arran James, and a host of others.
As an aside, I’m beginning to realize how the different sites of the political I’ve been outlining— semiopolitics, thermopolitics, oikopolitics (political economy), geopolitics, eropolitics (the politics of sex and desire), biopolitics, and chronopolitics (and I’m sure there are other political sites!) –are drawing me away from traditional Marxism. Assuming that classical Marxism holds that economics or the conditions and relations of production are determinative of all other sites of the political, the various sites of the political that I’ve been outlining would lead to the conclusion that there is not one determinative base of the political. This would not require committing Marx to flames, but rather of recognizing the phenomenon of overdetermination, or of a variety of different entangled sites of the political.
But I digress. First, I find myself wondering what the ontological turn means in ethnography. Is it 1) the investigation of the different ontologies held/proposed by different cultures? E.g., the Aztecs believed that reality was structured in this way, while the Greeks in that way, and the ancient Chinese this way, etc? Or 2) Is it an investigation of how real entities– independent of cultural beliefs –influence cultural formations? Or is it a combination of both? A position that I would favor.
read on!
I raise the question because it’s a huge conundrum for me in my own work. I want to be pluralist and recognize that different groups of people have/propose different ontologies or different “theories of the world”. I think it’s deeply important to recognize this for a variety of reasons. However, as a realist and advocate of some version of the Enlightenment, I can’t, of course, believe that all of these ontologies are true depictions of being. I can appreciate the ethical and political commitments of my good friend, a liberal catholic Bishop (unaffiliated with Rome); however, I can’t share his views that God exists, that we have souls (or are anything more than some form of embodiment), that there’s an efficacy to pray beyond psychological benefits it might have, etc. The universe that I think is real and that can be argued for is just not a universe that contains these things. Then again, I’m not sure how important it is that we agree on these things. For example, I can share his admiration for the figure of Christ and see him as an important ethical and political model, while not sharing his belief that he is God incarnate or that he rose from the dead in anything other than a metaphorical sense (“his teachings will live on in the community of activists attending to others; and therefore he ‘rose’ from the dead”). In many instances, I’m not sure it matters much that people arrive at similar ethical and political commitments from different ontological presuppositions. So how do we simultaneously put together some form of pluralism with a realism?
We need a pluralistic– a pluralism that also recognizes different animal worlds as phenomenologically described by Uexkull –to cultivate compassion and proper ethical regard for others; a big part of which involves recognizing the limitations of ones own conceptual schemes, attempting to understand others, or at least recognize that they might inhabit worlds of meaning (in Heidegger’s sense) that differ substantially from our own. However, we need a realism because there are facts of the matter pertaining to what causes psychic maladies, climate change, how economy functions, etc., and when we get these things wrong we generate horrific practices. How, then, can these things be thought together? I don’t know. It seems I’m continuously trying to square circles.
Larval Subjects . 
January 23, 2014 at 6:07 pm
Hi Levi: When you say “I think it’s deeply important to recognize this for a variety of reasons. However, as a realist and advocate of some version of the Enlightenment, I can’t, of course, believe that all of these ontologies are true depictions of being.”
It almost sounds like too bring these together you would almost have to espouse some form of social construction of knowledge in which it truly is our culture that imposes its constructions or models of reality upon us, while what the Enlightenment project was trying to do was to deflate this and eliminate the models in hopes of discovering what is truly not a model or construction at all. So in that fact you would not show that both are true, but that we’ve been duped by cultural blinkers throughout time and that yes there are a plurality of cultural models for reality that have nothing actually to do with reality except as in relation to those specific socio-cultural and historical civilizations. Both cannot be true in the sense of realism that you are seeing in the Enlightenment, but can be true for the particular civilizations as part of their own defense and survival projects as collective bodies inhabiting social and political spaces that are modeled not of the truth of reality but on the human need.
At least that’s my take…
January 23, 2014 at 6:55 pm
“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 STS’s 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 other’s 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.” – Mario Blaser
Source: http://culanth.org/fieldsights/474-the-political-ontology-of-doing-difference-and-sameness
January 23, 2014 at 7:02 pm
Noir,
I’m not sure I follow. For me the situation seems to be exactly the opposite. The reason Enlightenment stances are difficult for the social constructivist is that they are realist, forthrightly claiming that certain pictures of the world are just wrong and mistaken. The Enlightenment thinker doesn’t say that the Aztec picture of the world is just one more valid social construction among others, but that it is false and mistaken. The route your proposing wouldn’t be a reconciliation of Enlightenment and social constructivism, but would be the abandonment of that realism in favor of a pan- social constructivism. That, I think, is an indefensible gesture or certainly not one I wish to make.
January 23, 2014 at 7:05 pm
No, no… what I was proposing was a clarification of the two stances not a reconciliation. Maybe I should have been clearer… Obviously the tow are at opposite ends of the pole. What I was proposing was showing and clarifying this angle in your work not its reconciliation. Does that make sense?
January 23, 2014 at 7:07 pm
In fact I was thinking more along the lines of Zizek’s concept of the parallax view: of keeping the two on their own trajectories, not dissolving them into each other but show their separate uses in as critical tools to apprehend certain socio-cultural on the one hand, and ontological on the other hand aspects of how our view of reality have a history.
January 23, 2014 at 7:09 pm
Ah, I understand. I’ll have to think about that.
January 24, 2014 at 4:51 am
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