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Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe: Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology

October 2013
Current Anthropology 54(5):547-568

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Memorial University of Newfoundland

Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies, science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts as a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conflicts as a possibility, one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one single reality “out there.” This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, because ontological conflicts pose the challenge of how to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality “out there” being described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes sense.

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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013 547

Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of

Peoples in Spite of Europe

Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology

by Mario Blaser

Ontological conﬂicts (conﬂicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented

visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the

context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies,

science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conﬂicts as a polit-

icoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conﬂicts as a possibility,

one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the

assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one

single reality “out there.” This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological

conﬂict (i.e., a conﬂict between different realities). Second, because ontological conﬂicts pose the challenge of how

to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality “out there” being

described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and

its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes

sense.

Perhaps “ethnohistory” has been so called to separate it

from “real” history, the study of the supposedly civilized.

Yet what is clear from the study of ethnohistory is that the

subjects of the two kinds of history are the same. The more

ethnohistory we know, the more clearly “their” history and

“our” history emerge as the same history. (Wolf 1982:19)

Empieza una nueva era impulsada por los pueblos indı´-

genas originarios, dando luz a los tiempos de cambio, a los

tiempos de Pachakuti, en tiempos de la culminacio´n del

Quinto Sol. (A new age driven by the originary indigenous

peoples is beginning, giving birth to the times of change,

the times of Pachakuti, in times when the Fifth Sun is

coming to an end.)(Mandato de los Pueblos y Naciones

Indı´genas Originarios a los Estados del Mundo, Chimore´,

Cochabamba, Bolivia, October 12, 2007)

In his review of the now classic Europe and the People without

History, Talal Asad (1987:604) raised two questions to the

Wolﬁan assertion that “the global processes set in motion by

European expansion constitutes their [non-Europeans] his-

Mario Blaser is Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at

Memorial University of Newfoundland (Inco Innovation Centre,

Room 2003, P.O. Box 4200, 230 Elizabeth Avenue, St. John’s, NL

A1C 5S7, Canada [mblaser@mun.ca]). This paper was submitted 6

III 12, accepted 15 IX 12, and electronically published 27 VIII 13.

tory as well.” He asked, “(1) to what extent is that history

equally their history, and (2) is that history the only one that

can be written of them?” and then moved on to argue that

the story of world capitalism is the history of the dominant

world order within which diverse societies exist. But there

are also histories (some written, some yet to be written) of

the diverse traditions and practices that once shaped peo-

ple’s lives and that cannot be reduced to ways of generating

surplus or of conquering and ruling others. . . . Do we not

therefore need to understand the traditions and practices

by which people’s desires were once constructed if we are

to recount precisely how they made (or failed to make) their

own history? (Asad 1987:604)

Asad concluded the review by stating that

it is when we have anthropological accounts of what those

constructions were, and how they have changed, that we

may learn what the histories of peoples without Europe once

were, and why they cannot make those histories any longer.

We may then also understand better why and in what ways

so many peoples are now trying to make other histories both

within and against the hegemonic powers of modern capitalism

that had their origins in Western Europe. (Asad 1987:607,

emphasis added)

Insightful as it is, the centrality of the emphasized portion

1. See http://alainet.org/active/20160&langpes.

548 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

of the quote seems to have been lost under the weight of the

past tense that Asad uses to refer to the histories of people

without Europe. The Wolﬁan conclusion that, after the en-

counter with Europe, there has only been one historical tra-

jectory—that of the modern capitalist world system—seems

to have carried the day. Thus, other histories have come to

have little relevance for the present; they are things of the

past. Lost has been the importance of keeping in sight that

the (hi)story of the encounter with Europe is not the only

factor that shaped in the past, and continues to shape in the

present, the trajectories and the projects of various peoples

around the world; their own stories about such trajectories

and projects play a role as well. Granted, these cannot be

stories without Europe, but, I will argue, in many cases, they

can be and are stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that

are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.

Although I will later complicate this deﬁnition, let me for

now say that by stories I refer to narratives that embody

certain ideas about the world and its dynamics. In this sense,

any history is a story about the unfolding state of the world

told from the vantage point of a particular set of ideas about

the world and its dynamics; in other words, there is no in-

trinsic difference between the terms “history” and “story,” as

the former necessarily implies the latter. While this is what

the counterpoint offered by the epigraphs above intends to

highlight, it would not be surprising to have analysts and

commentators explaining the use of the Andean concept of

Pachakuti and the Mesoamerican idea of the Fifth Sun in the

indigenous statement as “stories” that symbolize ethnic pol-

iticking, a thoroughly modern historical development. Yet Pa-

chakuti and the Fifth Sun exceed modern categories of his-

toricity; they tell other stories about how the world unfolds

in time. What is being missed and what is being produced

when these kinds of stories are forced to ﬁt into a naturalized

(hi)story of modernity? In this article, I argue that what we

miss are ontological differences, thus producing the condi-

tions of possibility for disavowing ontological conﬂicts.

A brief example will help me illustrate what I mean by

ontological conﬂicts. In June 2004, in the province of British

Columbia, Canada, the Mowachat/Muchalaht First Nation

botched a carefully staged and scientiﬁcally approved plan by

Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans and environ-

mentalist groups to return a young lost orca whale, Luna, to

its pack. The First Nation insisted that the orca was Tsux’iit,

the abode of the spirit of their recently deceased chief, Am-

brose Maquinna, and that his desire to stay with his people

should be respected.

This was not a conﬂict between two

different perspectives on an animal but rather a conﬂict over

whether the “animal” of scientists, bureaucrats, and environ-

2. In this article, the term “Europe” operates as a metonym for mo-

dernity.

3. See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2004/06/16/orca_drums040616

.html; the story of Luna received a lot of media attention, and besides

news and blogs, now there are two feature ﬁlms about it: Spirit of the

Whale, which is a dramatization, and The Whale, a documentary.

mentalists was all that was there. Ontological conﬂicts thus

involve conﬂicting stories about “what is there” and how they

constitute realities in power-charged ﬁelds.

Leach, Scoones, and Wynne (2005:5–6) argue that onto-

logical conﬂicts that challenge “modernity and its hegemonist

scientiﬁc culture” seem to be almost deﬁnitive of our times.

Rather than being new, I contend, these kinds of conﬂicts

have gained unprecedented visibility and potentiality, in part

because the hegemony of the story of modernity is undergoing

a crisis. Such crisis provides both the context and the rationale

for political ontology, a loosely connected project emerging

from the convergence of ideas advanced in various scholarly

ﬁelds (indigenous studies, science and technology studies

[STS], posthumanism, and political ecology, among others),

which I seek to present here. However, in order to do this, I

will need to follow a circuitous path, as ontological conﬂicts

pose a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. First, in order

to even consider them as a possibility, one must question

some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the

social sciences and in dominant common sense. For instance,

the generalized assumptions that we are all modern and that

the cultural differences that exist are between perspectives on

one single reality “out there” rule out the possibility of mul-

tiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conﬂict

(i.e., a conﬂict between different realities). Second, ontological

conﬂicts pose the challenge of how to narrate them without

restating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a

reality out there being described. To tackle this politico-

conceptual problem, I begin by addressing the effects (and

the limits) of established assumptions about an all-encom-

passing modernity that engulfs cultural differences. I then

move on to present the political ontology project and offer

a plausible story of the present moment in which such a

project makes sense. But before unfolding my arguments, a

clariﬁcation is in order. I build this narrative largely in ref-

erence to indigenous peoples and Latin America because these

are the topical areas I am most familiar with. In this sense,

indigenous peoples and Latin America constitute ﬁelds in

which ontological conﬂicts have become visible as a problem-

atic for me rather than where the problematic is located per

se. In fact, I hope this article might prompt further explo-

rations of the multiple ﬁelds in which ontological conﬂicts

play out in the present conjuncture.

An All-Encompassing Modernity

The assumption of an all-encompassing modernity has come

to dominate both scholarly and political analysis to the point

that anything that might try to contest it is automatically

treated with contempt. For instance, the anonymous reviewer

of an article in which a colleague and I (Aparicio and Blaser

2008) referred to certain knowledge practices enacted by sec-

tors of indigenous movements in Latin America as “non-

modern,” wrote,

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 549

To say that indigenous knowledge is “non-modern” or exists

“outside of” modernity seems in fact to reinstate a colonial

legacy in which indigenous peoples are said to be backwards,

or islands of time untouched by history (see James Fabian’s

Time and the Other,orWolf’sEurope and the People without

History). This statement in fact ﬂies in the face of most

anthropological research (well, almost all) that tries to com-

bat colonial representations of indigenous peoples as not

engaged in the modern world.

Echoing our academic reviewer, the Bolivian vice president

and intellectual Alvaro Garcia Linera has accused some sectors

of the indigenous movement in that country of being ro-

mantic because they reclaim a role for indigenous cosmologies

in shaping the Bolivian state. Pointing to the 500 years of

interaction and mingling between them, he denied that such

cosmologies could be radically different from, or sustain a

relation of antagonism with, the dominant modern one: “En

el fondo todos quieren ser modernos” (Deep inside, everyone

wants to be modern) (Garcia Linera 2007:156–157).

While not fully explicated by it, the idea that modernity is

all-encompassing has some connections with the critiques to

which earlier notions of culture as systemic, organic, and

bounded were subjected from the 1970s onward. One of the

main thrusts of the critiques was that by deploying such no-

tions of culture, anthropology removed other (non-Western)

peoples from history and was blind to the actual consequences

of its own politics of representation (see Asad 1973; Clifford

and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Fox 1991; Hymes 1972; Wolf

1982). Showing that so-called traditional societies have never

been isolated, unchanging, backward, and out of history—in

short, that they have never been “traditional” in the terms

set by the modern imagination—these critiques reshaped the

notion of culture as something fuzzy, porous, dynamic, and,

fundamentally, always the emergent result of a history of in-

teractions. Yet, the consequences of these critiques went far

beyond a reconsideration of culture, for one of their corol-

laries has been that, if there are no really existing traditional

societies (i.e., those bounded, timeless, and unchanging so-

ciocultural units imagined by our anthropological ancestors),

then we are all modern in one way or another.

However, truly accepting the proposition that any given

culture is always the historical product of transformative in-

teractions with other cultures should raise the question as to

why we should call the present state of diverse cultures “mod-

ern.” The “modernness” that underlies contemporary cultural

differences would need to be proved rather than axiomatically

asserted, but, in order to do so, one would need some criteria

of what it means to be modern. If one attends to the debates

on the meaning of modernity, this seems to be an unrealistic

expectation. There is little agreement on whether the deﬁning

criteria are sociological, political, or cultural; whether mo-

dernity is singular or plural; whether it is essentially a Eu-

ropean phenomenon that was later globalized and “indigen-

ized”; or whether it was a global phenomenon from its

inception. If one were to seek a common denominator across

the various positions, the only one would be that the notion

of an all-encompassing modernity is somehow related to Eu-

ropean expansion and its effects.

In other words, all contem-

porary cultures are modern because they have engaged in

transformative interactions with Europe. The problem is that

this implies that the encounter with Europe is the single most

important constitutive factor in the historical trajectory of

any given culture. At best, this can be a hypothesis to be

investigated case by case, not a foregone conclusion.

Based on this aprioristic conclusion about the importance

of the encounter with Europe, the claim that all contemporary

cultures are modern is less than solid. But the problem be-

comes compounded because, while being primarily associated

with a historical event (i.e., European expansion, or more

generally the formation of a world system eventually domi-

nated by the North Atlantic nations), when the term “mod-

ern” is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference

from the present. Indeed, putting the very variable results of

the encounter with Europe within the common grid of mo-

dernity assumes that, once affected in such a way, a culture

enters the overarching historical trajectory of modernity that

dominates the present time.

Ironically, and as modernity be-

comes equated with the present, radical difference is (again)

mapped out against a temporal grid, for if something is said

to be nonmodern, its logical location is in the past. This

betrays one of the central intents of the critiques of earlier

notions of culture, foregrounding “coevalness as the prob-

lematic simultaneity of different, conﬂicting, and contradic-

tory forms of consciousness” (Fabian 1983:146).

In short, while the critiques of “tradition” revealed the

problematic nature of “Othering,” they left unquestioned

whose self becomes naturalized in a strategy of “Sameing,”

whereby everything contemporary in general ends up being

coded as modern.

How to overcome this Sameing that trans-

mutes the inherent hybridity of cultures into ethnographically

“thin” differences uniﬁed under the banner of modernity (be

this deﬁned as the capitalist world system or otherwise)?

Asad’s (1987:604–607) point that the “concept of culture is

crucial” in trying to keep in sight the relevance of differences

is apposite here. Yet, I will argue, this is not because the

concept of culture will allow us to retrieve differences from

the thinness imposed on them by an all-encompassing mo-

dernity, but rather because we must attend to culture—with

capital C—as an ontological category that together with the

category of nature naturalizes modernity, thus making it all-

encompassing in practice.

According to McGrane (1989), the concept of culture is

4. Even claims of other modernities cannot be constructed without

Europe being a referent in one way or another (see Gyeke 1997; Takeuchi

2005).

5. Birth (2008:3) calls this the trap of homochronism “which subsumes

the Other into academic discourses of history.”

6. I borrow the wonderful term “Sameing” from Lesley Green (see

Green and Green 2010).

550 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

merely the most recent way in which the West conceived and

explained otherness. The successive movements in the un-

derstanding of the non-European Other from being poten-

tially devilish to lacking reason, then to represent backward

races and to ﬁnally being simply a human bearing a different

yet equally valid culture, marks at each stage an adjustment

of otherness against a new horizon of intelligibility (Chris-

tianity; the Enlightenment and reason; time and evolution;

and human exceptionalism or humanism). McGrane argues

that the epistemological relativism and pluralistic sensibility

associated with the concept of culture, far from being eman-

cipatory, brings about a new form of establishing the privileges

and hierarchy of those using it. For our culture

knows that it is one-among-many, knows that it is relative,

and further, it values this knowledge (this knowledge is one

of its basic values), i.e., it locates its own superiority (knowl-

edge) in this knowledge of its relativity, as it likewise locates

inferiority (ignorance) in ignorance of this relativity. Our

knowledge lies in the fact that we recognize . . . our relativity:

our relativity and their relativity, whereas their ignorance

lies now in their cultural absolutism. (McGrane 1989:120)

As Scott (2003:103–104) puts it in commenting on

McGrane’s work, the possibility of seeing all difference as

relative depends on an omniscient vantage from which all

difference is visible to a detached perspective that is not rel-

ative. The coordinates of such an omniscient epistemological

vantage point that distinguishes the culture that uses the con-

cept of culture to conceive otherness emerges from what La-

tour (1993) calls the modern great divide between nature and

culture:

We [moderns] are the only ones who differentiate absolutely

between Nature and Culture whereas in our eyes all the

others—whether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande

or Barouya—cannot really separate what is knowledge from

what is society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes

from Nature as it is from what their cultures require.(Latour

1993:99)

The point I want to stress here is that when the concept

of culture becomes the dominant diacritical for human dif-

ferences, it comes along with the ontological armature in

which it makes sense. As an ontological category, “Culture”

is related to but also different from “culture” as the concept

through which the otherness of humans is conceived. As an

ontological category, Culture works in tandem with nature to

set (among other things) the very basis of what moderns

understand by knowledge, that is, a relation of equivalence

between a cultural representation and a natural and auton-

omous reality “out there.” And here we come full circle back

to McGrane and Scott: the culture that uses culture to un-

derstand difference has a privileged status because it knows,

and it does so because it has a privileged access to reality, one

that is not clouded by culture (with lowercase c), and this

access is premised precisely on recognizing the ontological

difference between what is Culture and what is nature: a

distinction that other cultures do not have.

Summing up, then, culture contributes to naturalize the

very ontological assumptions that allow modernity to produce

an “autocentric picture of itself as the expression of universal

certainty” (Mitchell 2000:xi; see also Carrithers et al. 2010)

Through culture, we end up with a de facto all-encompassing

modernity, this time not by aprioristically assuming the rel-

ative relevance of the encounter with Europe but by assuming

that one of its categories can account for the differences in

the stories that exist about how things work, including the

effects of transformative interactions between different on-

tologies. Resituating culture as a category with which a par-

ticular world is being made constitutes a ﬁrst step toward

refusing to be captured by modernity and an attempt to re-

cuperate radical differences as something other than tradition.

Refusing Capture: Political Ontology

In the context of a debate (Carrithers et al. 2010) that carried

the suggestive title of “Ontology Is Just Another Word for

Culture,” Matt Candea has argued that, in anthropology, the

turn to ontology “comes from the suspicion that cultural

difference is not different enough, or alternatively that cultural

difference has been reduced by cultural critics to a mere effect

of political instrumentality. By contrast, ontology is an at-

tempt to take others and their real difference seriously” (Car-

rithers et al. 2010:175). Another participant in the debate,

Martin Holbraad, nails down what it means to take others

and their real difference seriously: to entertain the idea that

“the concepts we have at our disposal may be inadequate even

to describe our data properly, let alone to ‘explain’ or ‘inter-

pret’ it. Our task then must be to locate the inadequacies of

our concepts in order to come up with better ones” (Car-

rithers et al. 2010:180). I want to dwell for a moment on the

ideas of the inadequacy of concepts and of coming up with

better ones.

Culture is an inadequate concept for dealing with difference

not only because it is thin but also because it takes for granted

its own ontological status. In effect, while debates over the

concept of culture as a means to think about differences

among human groups have been almost canonical in an-

thropology since the mid-1980s, questions about the univer-

sality of the ontological armature composed by culture and

nature have remained somehow off center stage until very

recently. Yet these kinds of questions have been posed in

ethnographies that foregrounded the ontological assumptions

implicit in the practices of indigenous interlocutors, and

which thereby denaturalized those of the ethnographers (see

Descola 1996, 2005; Ingold 2000; Strathern 1992a, 1999; Viv-

eiros de Castro 1996, 1998). Yet, unfortunately, scholars con-

cerned with the interactions generated by the formation of a

European-dominated world system tended to consider these

works as having little actual relevance—this when not con-

sidering those works misguided in seeking to foreground dif-

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 551

ferences without giving a privileged attention to that partic-

ular (hi)story of “transformative interactions” that, as I have

argued before, assumes that everyone has come now into the

fold of modernity and its categories (see Starn 2011). I say

unfortunately because the ethnographic sensibilities displayed

in those works are crucial in addressing ongoing transfor-

mative interactions between different ontologies without be-

ing prey to the capture of an all-encompassing modernity.

And this is precisely because these works highlight how peo-

ples distribute what exists and conceive their constitutive re-

lations in different ways; or, posed otherwise, that modernity

is one way of making worlds among others and therefore that

the concepts generated within it (including that of culture)

can only go so far.

As a ﬁrst approximation, the ontological approach at the

very least raises a caution ﬂag as to the adequacy of our

established concepts. However, as Candea (Carrithers et al.

2010) warns, the move from culture to ontology does not

cancel some vexing questions that trailed behind the former

concept: namely, what is the nature of the distinction that

the terms seek to highlight, and what do we mean when we

speak of different ontologies? Is the term purported to be

merely heuristic or is it a description of a state of fact? These

questions are crucial and admittedly difﬁcult to tackle, pre-

cisely because the problem with ontology is that heuristics

and statements of facts constantly slip into each other.

Many of the ethnographies mentioned above introduce ca-

veats as to the heuristic character of the arguments they con-

tain regarding the indigenous ontologies under considerations

(and their contrasts with the Western/modern one), yet some-

times it is difﬁcult to shed the impression that one is being

presented with the description of an actually existing ontology

“out there.” If we take the ontological approach as simply

stating that there are a variety of describable ontologies out

there, we end up very much in the same place as where we

started with culture, that is, sneaking up the modernist on-

tological assumption that there is a world out there, in this

case a world made of ontologies rather than cultures. In con-

traposition to this, Holbraad (Carrithers et al. 2010:185) pro-

poses to take ontology as being “just a set of assumptions

postulated by the anthropologist for analytical purposes.” As

a heuristic device, ontology works with the contradictions

between a set of initial assumptions and some body of material

that appears to contradict it.

So what makes the ontological approach to alterity not only

pretty different from the culturalist one, but also rather

better, is that it gets us out of the absurd position of thinking

that what makes ethnographic subjects most interesting is

that they get stuff wrong. Rather, on this account, the fact

that the people we study may say or do things that to us

appear as wrong just indicates that we have reached the

7. Hence, the term “nonmodern” that I have used before was meant

as a placeholder, a carving out of space from the tenet that modernity

is all that exists.

limits of our own conceptual repertoire. ...Theanthro-

pological task, then, is not to account for why ethnographic

data are as they are, but rather to understand what they

are—instead of explanation or interpretation, what is called

for is conceptualization. . . . Rather than using our own

analytical concepts to make sense of a given ethnography

(explanation, interpretation), we use the ethnography to

rethink our analytical concepts. (Holbraad, quoted in Car-

rithers et al. 2010:184)

So here is ontology as a heuristic device, a tool to rethink

our analytical concepts. However, what is not self-evident is

why rethinking our analytical concepts is something that

should be pursued. For many espousing the ontological ap-

proach, it goes without saying that doing otherwise betrays

the existing multiplicity of worlds or realities. Holbraad (Car-

rithers et al. 2010:183) poses the point thus: “The alternative

[to assuming that differences are differences in the way people

represent the world] must be to reckon with the possibility

that alterity is a function of the existence of different worlds

per se.” But this seems to lead us back to ontology as a

statement of facts. The heuristic device then begins to trail

very close to relativism and its self-defeating paradox: if taking

different worlds seriously means that they cannot be wrong,

what do we do when facing the world that claims that the

world is only one and what we have are multiple represen-

tations of it? In another contribution (Alberti et al. 2011:902),

Holbraad seems to steer away from presenting the “ontolog-

ical claim” in such strong terms and further emphasizes its

heuristic nature: the turn to ontology is meant to address “the

analytical problem of how to make sense of things that seem

to lack one.” Apparently this move circumvents the problem

associated with making foundational claims, but actually just

postpones it. As Holbraad points out, anthropologists have

long been in the business of making sense of things that lack

one (It is their culture!); hence, the question is under what

premises making sense of things that seem to lack one emerge

as a renewed legitimate analytical problem. In other words, the

question of why the ontological approach might be better is

always waiting at the end of the road, and answering this ques-

tion seems to unavoidably require some sort of foundational

claim after all. And then we are back where we started.

Are we in a dead end? Not necessarily, if we consider an-

other possible take on ontology, one in which the heuristic

device contributes to enact the “fact,” or put otherwise, one

that allows us to articulate a foundationless foundational

claim. In this version, ontology is a way of worlding, a form

of enacting a reality. It is critical to stress, however, that the

understanding of reality being postulated here is one that,

building on some versions of STS, bypasses the nature/culture

(or subject/object; material/ideational) divide to arrive at a

material-semiotic formulation (see Haraway 2008; Latour

1999; Law 2004; Mol 1999). What does this mean? (a) That

we avoid the assumption that reality is “out there” and that

“in here” (the mind), we have more or less accurate cultural

552 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

representations of it; and (b) that reality is always in the

making through the dynamic relations of hybrid assemblages

that only after the fact are puriﬁed by moderns as pertaining

to either nature or culture. One way to grasp what is at stake

is starting from the idea that humans are involved in the

enactment of realities but not under conditions of their own

choosing. They have to grapple with an environment whose

features have been more or less sedimented and crystallized

through previous actions. But, crucially, the agents of those

actions are not humans per se, but heterogeneous assemblages

that we (moderns) conceptually purify and enact as humans

and nonhumans—along with an associated asymmetrical dis-

tribution of agency (see Law 2004).

If the ethnographies that foreground the diversity of ways

of conceiving what exists and its relations give substance to

the notion of multiple ontologies, understanding ontology as

performance or enactment brings to the fore the notion of

ontological multiplicity, which can be related but is not the

same as the former. Annemarie Mol’s (2002) work with ath-

erosclerosis is a good example of what ontological multiplicity

entails. She has shown how, in a Dutch hospital, atheroscle-

rosis emerges as a different entity depending on the practice

under consideration. Under the microscope and manipula-

tions of the pathologist, it emerges as a narrowing of the

artery. According to the records and interpretations of the

clinician, it emerges as the patient’s expressed pain. In turn,

in the graph of the radiologist, it emerges as differential blood

pressure in a limb. In each case, there is a different enactment

of atherosclerosis, a multiplicity that does not always add up

as pieces in a puzzle. Sometimes there is pain but not nar-

rowing of arteries, or there is differential blood pressure in a

limb without pain, and so on. This multiplicity is, at least

temporarily, rendered singular through a series of conceptual

and politico-managerial procedures, through which some ver-

sions of atherosclerosis are discarded or made to ﬁt uneasily

with each other. But the key point is that in practice, ath-

erosclerosis (or reality) is multiple because there are multiple

practices. This is ontological multiplicity. Now, let me re-

introduce the notion of multiple ontologies with a twist that,

for lack of a better term, I call storied performativity.

Enactments or practices are storied, and stories are them-

selves enacted. Let’s take Mol’s case again. As I pointed out,

she convincingly argues that atherosclerosis is multiple in

practice, but what interests me here is how the radiologist,

the clinician, and pathologist might conceive atherosclerosis.

8. These heterogenous assemblages may have different relational con-

ﬁgurations; thus, while the modern may have human and nonhumans,

others may have other kinds of entities.

9. Here we come to a full disclosure of the meaning of the term “stor y”

that I promised in the introduction.

10. Perhaps not the particular health practitioners that worked with

Mol, who, for this same reason, might now have different stories to tell

about atherosclerosis. Of course, this in itself would go a long way to

show the ways in which “the ontological approach” may intervene in

reality making, but this is not the point I want to stress now.

For them, it goes without saying that they are treating with

a single entity/disease. Moreover, the assumption of singu-

larity is crucial to the very practices through which they per-

form atherosclerosis. This enacted assumption can be storied

thus: there is an objective reality out there (the disease ath-

erosclerosis), and there are (more or less accurate) subjective

or disciplinary perspectives on it. This is the succinct version

of the modern “myth” telling us what kinds of things (e.g.,

subjects and objects) and relations (e.g., of perspective) make

up this particular world. Of course, the connections can be

narrated in the reverse order, and we can move from one of

the various storied versions of the modern myth to its en-

actment in practice. This is the road taken many times by

ethnographers when showing how myths are enacted in the

practices and embedded in the institutions of the peoples they

work with.

Storied performativity underscores the connection between

stories and practices (which in turn stresses the extent to

which the terms ontologies,worlds/worlding, and stories are

synonyms). But the most important point that can be drawn

from the concept is something numerous indigenous philos-

ophers and intellectuals have insisted on (see Archibald 2008;

Burkhart 2001; Cajete 2000; Wilson 2008): stories are not

only or not mainly denotative (referring to something “out

there”), nor are they fallacious renderings of real practices.

Rather, they partake in the performance of that which they

narrate. One implication of this is that the stories being told

cannot be fully grasped without reference to their world-

making effects, for different stories imply different worldings;

they do not “ﬂoat” over some ultimate (real) world. The

corollary is that, indeed, some ethnographic subjects (or sto-

ries/worldings/ontologies) can be wrong, not in the sense of

a lack of coincidence with an external or ultimate reality, but

in the sense that they perform wrong: they are/enact worlds

in which or with which we do not want to live.

Multiple ontologies, ontological multiplicity, and storied

performativity constitute the resources with which what I call

political ontology tries to perform the pluriverse. The term

political ontology is meant to simultaneously imply a certain

political sensibility, a problem space, and a modality of anal-

ysis or critique. The political sensibility can be described as

a commitment to the pluriverse—the partially connected

(Strathern 2004) unfolding of worlds—in the face of the im-

poverishment implied by universalism. Of course, the plu-

riverse is a heuristic proposition, a foundationless founda-

tional claim, which in the context of the previous discussion,

means that it is an experiment on bringing itself into being.

The problem space can then be characterized as the dynamics

through which different ways of worlding sustain themselves

even as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other.

Finally, and in contrast with other modalities of critique or

analysis, political ontology is not concerned with a supposedly

external and independent reality (to be uncovered or depicted

accurately); rather, it is concerned with reality making, in-

cluding its own participation in reality making. In short, po-

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 553

litical ontology is concerned with telling stories that open up

a space for, and enact, the pluriverse. Before moving forward

to tell one of these stories—one constructed as context and

rationale for the project—I will ﬁrst address equivocations

about political ontology that, paraphrasing some critical in-

terlocutors, I will call “homogenizing,” “exoticizing,” and “old

wine in a new bottle.”

The “homogenizing equivocation” would assume that po-

litical ontology postulates as homogeneous the multiple ex-

periences of indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and of the

modern West, on the other. What we must bear in mind here

is that one of political ontology’s concerns is how to operate

in a terrain dominated by conceptions of an all-encompassing

modernity. As discussed in the previous section, one of the

ways of doing this is by shrinking modernity to make it some-

thing more speciﬁc and contrastable, thus liberating the con-

ceptual-ontological space for something else to exist.

Yet

shrinking modernity to allow for contrast with other ways or

worlding does not mean that political ontology is blind to

variations and/or dissent within modernity; it is just that for

the speciﬁc purpose of highlighting the existence of something

other than modernity, such variations are not analytically rel-

evant. It is in the speciﬁcity of the ethnographic case (and the

intended intervention) where the relevance of variations within

modernity (or any other way of worlding) can be brought to

the fore.

Still, someone may ask, are you not homogenizing when

you say that all Westerners operate according to the nature/

culture divide? Or that indigenous peoples live in a different

ontology? Here the cart is put in front of the horse. It is

assumed that political ontology attributes a given ontology or

set of practices to a given group—Westerners, indigenous

peoples, or what have you. In fact, political ontology is con-

cerned with practices, performances, and enactments and not

with speciﬁc groups. One can speak of a given worlding or

ontology as long as one can trace its enactment. Moreover,

practices do not need to be entirely self-coherent and con-

sistent, although one may ﬁnd more or less coherence and

consistency in some situations than in others. Yet, the lack of

coherence or consistency neither implies that all worldings

are modern, nor that the term modern cannot be used to label

and single out a particular way of worlding. In short, the

attribution of modernness would go hand in hand with spe-

ciﬁc practices and not with a speciﬁc group. For instance, I

would feel unwarranted to call modern the practices of mid-

11. An article by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) brought to my

attention the appropriateness of the term “equivocation” for the kind of

problems I am tackling here. In effect, equivocation is not a misunder-

standing about some “thing,” but a failure to understand that at stake

in a disagreement are different “things.” I will return to this concept

later.

12. In this sense, the project of “eventualizing” modernity (i.e., at-

tending to the actual practices that are articulated around the appellative

“modern”) proposed by Eduardo Restrepo (2011) appears as a potential

complement to political ontology.

dle-class white women involved in Wicca. Likewise, neither

indigenous identity automatically translates into an other-

than-modern ontology, nor does indigenous involvement

make a conﬂict an ontological one. As indicated in the in-

troduction, if the notion of multiple ontologies appears closely

associated with indigenous peoples in this article, it is due to

my professional trajectory and experience rather than to an

implicit claim that there is an inherent association between

them.

For some interlocutors, talking of worlds may recall ex-

oticizing ﬁctions about native life as somehow existing in a

time-space continuum outside our own. Granted, the term

might not be the best, but it should not be the grounds for

an equivocation that misses the centrality that performance

and enactment have in political ontology’s deﬁnition of on-

tologies/worlds. “Shrinking” modernity to one particular way

of worlding, and thus regaining a space for the positivity of

other worldings, does not mean that we must fall back into

notions of discrete and clearly bounded entities that interact

with each other. Rather, in talking about particular worldings

or ontologies, the image I would like to convey is of enact-

ments complexly entangled in non-Euclidian fashion; they

might take place in the same spatiotemporal location but not

always interfere with each other.

This is a pluriverse con-

stituted by intra-acting (Barad 2007) worldings that share

partial connections (Strathern 2004). Thus, while these world-

ings are coemergent, they do not share an overarching prin-

ciple that would make their entanglement a universe. Rather,

their partial connections often constitute the sites in which

it is possible to discern how what is brought into existence

by a certain worlding might interfere and conﬂict with what

is brought into existence by another.

The “old wine in a new bottle” equivocation is a version

of the seeming contradiction in the use of the term ontology

as heuristic device and statement of fact that I discussed be-

fore, and it would say something like this:

Fine, your worlds are constituted through diverse enact-

ments and they are not isolated but mutually entangled, yet

at the bottom, it seems that you are just changing one term

(ontology) for another (culture), you are still capturing dif-

ference from your own “perspective” (call it ontological

rather than cultural as you may wish). Indeed, the passage

from Scott about culture quoted above can be perfectly

applied to your “ontology.” In saying that “in reality” what

we have is a diversity of worlds/ontologies rather than cul-

tures, you situate yourself in an “omniscient epistemological

vantage point from which (and of course in relation to

which) all difference is simultaneously available to a de-

tached, surveying gaze which itself is not relative.” What is

new in all this?

The key to the equivocation here is in the reference to “re-

13. For this understanding, I variously build on Haraway (1997), La-

tour (2005), Law (2004), Law and Mol (2002), and Strathern (1996).

554 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

Figure 1. The modern myth.

ality.” As Mol (1999:77) says, “talking about reality as multiple

depends [not on the metaphors] of perspective and construc-

tion, but rather those of intervention and performance. This

suggests a reality that is done and enacted rather than ob-

served.” This reinforces the point raised before that political

ontology’s concern is with efﬁcacy rather than accuracy. And

efﬁcacy is tied to plausibility, which is just another way of

referring to the actual environment that has been brought

into being from the inﬁnite possibilities of the pluriverse.

Political ontology does its work at the interstice between the

possible and the plausible that the foundationless founda-

tional claim of a pluriverse opens. And thus, the claim of the

pluriverse (or multiple ontologies) is not concerned with pre-

senting itself as a more “accurate” picture of how things are

“in reality” (a sort of meta-ontology); it is concerned with

the possibilities that this claim may open to address emergent

(and urgent) intellectual/political problems. Central among

these problems is the extent to which those of us (persons

and institutions) who have been shaped by an ontology that

postulates/performs a “one-world world” are ill prepared to

grapple with its increasing implausibility.

Why Political Ontology: A (Plausible) Story of

the Present?

In the introduction, I advanced the argument that ontological

conﬂicts are becoming more visible in part because the he-

gemony of the story of modernity (or the modern ontology)

is in crisis.

After having prepared the terrain, I can now

substantiate my point. In ﬁgure 1, we have a sketch showing

how the modern story hinges upon a speciﬁc arrangement of

three elements: an ontologically stark distinction between na-

ture and culture, a dominant tendency to conceive difference

(including the difference between nature and culture) in hi-

erarchical terms, and a linear conception of time. The domain

of culture has been further subdivided into several “cultures”

as the key diacritic to establish differences among humans.

The place of “modern culture” in relation to its others (nature

and other cultures) is more or less explicitly linked to a hi-

erarchical system mapped out against the background of lin-

ear time. In effect, between the sixteenth and eighteenth cen-

turies, the two great divides (between nature and culture and

between moderns and nonmoderns) were increasingly un-

derstood by moderns in terms of a story that makes modernity

not only different but also the spearhead of the evolving his-

tory of humanity.

And while in the past, this progressive

14. Law (2011) uses the term “one-world world” for the way of world-

ing that proposes that reality is one, that ontology cannot but be in

singular.

15. Helen Verran’s (2002) work has provided much inspiration to

conceive and plot my arguments as a story.

16. The arrow of time was mainly understood as a progression, al-

though it could be understood as a sort of regression too, as the Romantics

did. Not surprising, then, that any contestation to dominant notions of

progress are still labeled romantic and often equated to a desire for the

past (see Hindess 2007).

story was conceived as a description of the path that every-

body would eventually follow, now it is conceived as a fait

accompli; modernity is “the present” and thus, as Giddens

(1990) says, from now on is modernity all the way down.

Notice that I speak of an arrangement of the three elements:

it is not the nature/culture divide, a hierarchical understand-

ing of the differences between (modern) self and (nonmod-

ern) others, or linear time per se that makes the story of

modernity speciﬁc; what constitutes the speciﬁcity of mo-

dernity in a context of multiple ontologies/stories is the par-

ticular way in which these elements are storied/enacted as

being related to each other. The arguments of the Latin Amer-

ican research program on modernity/coloniality and de-

colonial thought (MCD) are useful to explicate the point.

MCD foregrounds that the modern ontological armature de-

scribed above emerged progressively in a series of speciﬁc

locations in western Europe along with the unfolding of the

colonial experience and needs inaugurated by the Spanish

conquest of the New World (see Dussel 1995; Mignolo 2000).

Thus, the two great divides (nature/culture and modern/non-

modern) and its correlated temporal matrix are not just his-

torically coemergent, they are cosustaining. The implication

being that performing a modern world in which this arrange-

ment of threads constitutes the ontological bedrock neces-

sarily involves keeping at bay the threat posed to it by the

radically different ways of worldings with which it is never-

theless entangled. And this has been done, ﬁrst by denying

these other worldings any veracity and, later on, even real

existence, to the point that true conﬂicts (i.e., where parties

17. Under this research program, a heterogeneous groups of scholars

located in both Latin America and the United States have been discussing

since the 1990s the constitutive relations between modernity and colo-

niality, on the one hand, and between these and nonmodern societies,

on the other hand (for a more detailed discussion of this research pro-

gram, see Escobar 2007a; Mignolo 2007).

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 555

recognize each other as adversaries) have been turned into

anomalies (i.e., where one of the parties has been simply

rendered a deviation from the norm embodied by the other;

see Latour 2002).

As long as the horizon of alterity in the encounter with

the New World was Christianity, the radical Otherness of the

natives’ worlding was recognized as potentially threatening

and the site of an open antagonism (i.e., the Indians were

minions to the devil either willingly or because they had fallen

prey to his lies), but as reason displaced faith in the consti-

tution of the modern regime of truth, this antagonism was

progressively muted: Indians were just ignorant, they were at

an earlier stage of evolution, or, as of late, they just had

another culture (which, critically, lacked the concept of cul-

ture; de la Cadena 2010). In its latest modality, modernity

exorcises the threatening difference of other worldings by

taming them and allowing them to exist just as cultural per-

spectives on a singular reality. In other words, all the different

ontologies described by ethnographers are shrunk and made

to ﬁt into one of the little squares labeled “Other culture” in

ﬁgure 1.

What I am “storying” here is the enactment of a modern

world that actively produces other ontologies or worlds as

absences (see Santos 2004). Yet, it is my contention that mo-

dernity has been able to make this absenting story plausible

as long as it has maintained hegemony. I follow Guha (1997:

23) in using the term hegemony to refer to “a condition of

Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of D,

Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C).” In this sense, a key

element in building and maintaining the hegemony of mo-

dernity has been the spectacular feats afforded by the exper-

imental sciences since the sixteenth century onward. First,

they contributed plausibility to the emergent story of mo-

dernity as a progressive movement marked by the increasing

mastery of nature, and second, they became the anchor for

a regime of knowledge that we may call “universal science”

that claimed to be able to get to the Truth while disqualifying

all other ways of knowing as beliefs.

This regime of knowl-

edge in turn became ingrained into a modern governmentality

where a concern with shaping life progressively displaced a

focus on the “right to kill” (Foucault 1991), contributing thus

to give shape to a societal project that can be described as an

“escape to the future.” By this I mean to signal the attitude

and assumption that, with the guarantee of science, a sort of

paradise waits at the “end of the road” and that the human

and nonhuman sacriﬁces of the present are somehow insig-

niﬁcant from the perspective of those who can anticipate such

paradise.

However, from the “extirpation of idolatries” to

18. By universal science, I refer to an assemblage of knowledge prac-

tices that, associating themselves but distorting the very speciﬁc nature

of the truths produced by the experimental sciences, claimed to know

reality “as it is” (see Latour 2004; Stengers 2000b).

19. In her recent book, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) provides a very

detailed account of how different modulations of tense such as this give

shape to late liberalism.

the multicultural “cunning of recognition” (Povinelli 2002),

coercion has never disappeared regardless of how persuasive

the scape to the future may have appeared to many; rather,

it has been crucial in containing radical difference to then

submit it to the domain of governmentality (Ghosh 2006).

In effect, even within a paradigm claiming that different cul-

tures are equally valid perspectives on the world, the use of

coercion continues to be seen as legitimate when Others cross

the limits of what is commonly perceived as reasonable and

conceivable. This is exceedingly obvious when indigenous

peoples try to defend their worlds in the face of development

or conservation projects that, promoted from either right or

left political stances, assume that those complex assemblages

of relations are cultures and nature, that is, things or resources

that exist for the greater good of humans.

As Marisol de la Cadena (2010) has argued, in the modern

division of representational work, only universal science can

represent (speak for) nature, while politicians represent (speak

for) their human constituencies. Thus, the only “legitimate”

way in which peoples can defend their different worlds

(which, of course, include more than humans) is by way of

converting them into “cultures” that can be mobilized by

“ethnic politicians.” However, claims for the respect of cul-

tural differences can only go so far before the reality sanc-

tioned by universal science is brought up as the limit beyond

which cultural demands become unreasonable and therefore

deserving of the disciplinary force of coercion to keep them

in check (see Povinelli 2001).

But here is where the crisis

of hegemony mentioned at the beginning of the section enters

the scene, for it is becoming more difﬁcult to cloak the use

of disciplinary force as a reasonable response to defend the

modern story.

The symptoms and sources of the crisis are numerous, but

they converge in challenging the arrangement of the three key

elements that shape the modern story: the internal great divide

(nature/culture), the external great divide (modern/nonmod-

ern), and linear progressive time. Developments in science

and technology, from research on animal behavior that has

shaken ideas of human exceptionalism to the imbroglios of

techno-nature where nature and culture are impossible to

keep apart, have made the internal divide harder to sustain

(see Haraway 2008; Latour 2004). More important for our

story, universal science has begun to lose its capacity to com-

mand consent in the face of the consequences (particularly

20. The examples are myriad, but the cases of Ecuador, Bolivia, and

Peru during 2009 and 2010 are particularly telling in that governments

from both the right and the left, and even one presided over by an

indigenous person (Evo Morales, in Bolivia), reacted with the same ar-

gument to indigenous demands. In effect, confronted with grassroots

indigenous movements that claimed that decisions on whether mining

and resource extraction in their territories should be left in their hands,

governments responded by claiming that the demands were irrational,

infantile, and conspired against the greater good of the nation (see http:

//insid e.org.au/garcia-peru, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4

-148063-2010-06-22.html, and http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/

elmundo/4-148319-2010-06-26.html.

556 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

environmental) of the “escape to the future” premised on the

certainty of the knowledge built on the nature/culture divide

(see Beck 1992; Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005). The chal-

lenge to this divide has opened the door to the consideration

of other ontologies as plausible and viable alternatives to the

modern one (see Escobar 2010; Law 2004; Latour 2010; Serres

2008; Stengers 2013

). In this sense, what Escobar (2007b)

calls the “ontological turn” (i.e., the increasing attention to

issues of ontology) in social theory is not an intellectual fad

but a symptom of the crisis.

But, again, it must be stressed that the challenge is not only

to the nature/culture divide. The “everyday forms of exis-

tence” and the struggles to maintain other worldings have

also been eroding the mechanisms through which modernity

forecloses the plausibility of other ontologies, centrally among

those mechanisms, the turning of difference into a hierarchy

(see Blaser 2010; Fox Tree 2010).

The challenge to the ex-

ternal great divide has been gaining momentum (albeit un-

evenly), in part along with the articulation of the international

indigenous movement. The symptom is the emergence of

multiculturalism, which, as Povinelli (2011) points out, has

been late liberalism’s response to anticolonial and new social

movements’ challenging of liberal forms of government. Of

course, as a governmental response, multiculturalism seeks to

contain that challenge within the sphere of policy so that

politics remain unchanged. But to what extent is multicul-

turalism successful at keeping challenges from transforming

politics? And exactly what is the politics being protected?

widely cited article by Charles Hale, “Rethinking Indigenous

Politics in the Era of ‘Indio Permitido’” (2004) provides an

anchor to grapple with these questions.

Indio permitido (allowed Indian) was the image used to

refer to the difference allowed by multiculturalism, which was

implemented in Latin America through the 1990s along with

other neoliberal reforms. The thrust of Hale’s argument was

a concern with the capacity of multiculturalism to put limits

on what was politically possible through granting spaces for

“cultural” difference of a limited character. Indio permitido

was the embodiment of this constrained Other, which was in

turn held in contrast with another Other: the undeserving,

dysfunctional Indian that protested and would not conform

to the delimited space offered by multiculturalism. Hale ar-

21. The lecture is available at http://sawyerseminar.ucdavis.edu

/resources.

22. In a playful counterpoint with James Scott’s “everyday forms of

resistance,” Erich Fox Tree (2010) has coined the phrase “everyday forms

of existence” to refer to those ever yday practices that through persevering

in their difference, and without being intended as resistance, defy mod-

ernizing processes.

23. One of the anonymous reviewers suggested that a question that

arises from here is what might count as political, ontologically speaking.

In other words, what would be the implications of ontological pluralism

for this question. I agree this is a crucial point, but a solid engagement

with it is beyond the aim of this article, which is precisely to stir con-

versations around these kinds of questions. But see Candea (2011) for

an excellent argument that starts to explore this point.

gued that in spite of its cunning, and as long as neoliberal

principles were critically scrutinized, the spaces opened by

multiculturalism could be fruitfully occupied to “ﬁght the

good ﬁght,” that is, to ﬁght about what was politically possible.

But, politically possible in regard to what? The article was

clear as to the core “thing” at stake: control over resources.

Fast-forward to the mid-2000s and one can see that mul-

ticulturalism was not enough to police the political. In places

like Bolivia and Ecuador, years of neoliberal reforms were

rolled back by popular uprisings in which indigenous move-

ments played key roles. But, in the wake of the mobilizations,

the redeﬁnition of “what is politically possible” went well

beyond what many analysts would have expected. In effect,

it seems that indio permitido had been the beachhead not only

for the dysfunctional Indian that will ﬁght for resources but

also for the indio aborrecido (abhorred Indian), the one that

to the surprise of everyone and the discomfort of many would

challenge the very idea that what is at stake in politics are

simply resources. For example, in Ecuador and Bolivia, in-

digenous movements pushed for the recognition of pacha-

mama (translated with much loss as mother nature) as a

subject with rights in the new constitutions that emergedfrom

the struggles that pushed back neoliberal agendas. As de la

Cadena (2010) points out, this is a major event, for it goes

beyond challenging neoliberal constitutions: it disrupts the

modern constitution in several fronts. For instance, the move-

ments challenged the modern constitution’s division of labor

between politics and science: who might be pachamama’s

spokesperson, a universal science that does not even recognize

it exists? Or are they yatiris,pacos (shamans), which, according

to the modern constitution, can speak for culture (politics)

but not for nature? Also, the recognition of pachamama comes

associated with notions such as sumak kawsay or suma qam-

an˜a (good living) that are advanced as alternative horizons

for societal projects to those offered by development and

progress (and their embedded premise of an escape to the

future).

As pointed out before, the potency and visibility of the

challenge to the external great divide is complexly uneven.

Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that challenges to the

story of modernity are mutually reinforcing and intimately

connected (albeit not through simple causality). Even where

the grip of cunning recognition is stronger, a loosening of the

nature/culture divide and a general devaluation on the pur-

chase power of the modern myth create opportunities to vi-

sualize ontological conﬂicts across the board. This is especially

the case where peoples struggle to sustain their worldings and

life projects (Blaser 2004; Escobar 2008) in the face of more

or less coercively imposed notions of progress and modern-

24. The notion of good living (buen vivir in Spanish) has become the

site of a very vibrant debate where indigenous, environmental, and post-

developmentalist intellectuals are contributing (see Gudynas 2011a,

2011b; Walsh 2010; Yampara 2001; see also the 2010 special issue of Alai:

http://www.alainet.org/publica/alai452w.pdf.

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 557

ization. To the extent that these conﬂictive encounters pro-

liferate (see Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005; Mander and

Tauli-Corpuz 2006), the modern story becomes increasingly

located in a position of “dominance without hegemony”

(Guha 1997). This does not mean that modernity has lost

dominance but that in sustaining it, the balance between co-

ercion and persuasion is shifting. Forty years ago, opposing

mining, oil extraction, or the increase of agricultural lands

for environmental reasons or because indigenous ways of life

would be profoundly disrupted would have been seen as sheer

irrationality by most citizens in a Latin American country;

not so now. The promise of modernization no longer appears

as persuasive (which does not mean totally unpersuasive ei-

ther), and thus a space gets opened to perform other stories

and other propositions about how different worldings might

relate.

Conclusions: Missing the Pachakuti

In 1991, Orin Starn wrote a biting indictment of anthropol-

ogists working in Peru who failed to see in the 1970s the

signs of the Shinning Path insurgency that were gathering in

front of their noses. In his reading, the failure stemmed from

a narrow focus on adaptation, ritual, and cosmology, as well

as on a regional version of Orientalist othering, Andeanism.

His characterization of anthropological practices in Peru sum-

marized many of the misgivings with former notions of cul-

tural difference as bounded, timeless, homeostatic, and un-

changing islands of history and made a forceful argument for

the urgency of situating ethnographies of indigenous realities

within the ﬂow of a modern “history of continuous and mul-

tilayered connections” built through a common “political

economy and the more subtle channels of representation and

self-imagination” (Starn 1991:85–86). But if, in the 1970s, the

problem was anthropological blindness to the political econ-

omy that prompted the insurgency of the Shining Path, at

the turn of the millennium, the problem is misrecognizing

the pachakuti that is taking place in the Andes and beyond.

The term pachakuti is a composite of the quechua words

pacha (world, time and space, or state of being) and kuti

(change, turn, or something that comes back on itself) (Steele

and Allen 2004:226) and thus makes reference to a veritable

turnaround. Interestingly, the effects of the powerful indig-

enous mobilization that have been taking place in the Andean

countries since the mid-1990s have been increasingly referred

to as a pachakuti, with several movements and organizations

adopting the word in their names. For some, the term seems

to be simply a synonym of social revolution, while others try

25. Mark Goodale (2006:636) has made a slightly similar argument,

pointing out the extent to which Starn’s call for a focus on political

economy ended up being “overemphasized at the expense of just the

type of ‘Andean’ discursivity that [he] believed had been inappropriately

romanticized.” The consequence, according to Goodale, is that analysts

will misread the current revolution in which the constitution of an in-

digenous cosmopolitanism is central.

to foreground the extent to which the term points toward a

profound challenge to modernity and its ontological as-

sumptions (see Burman 2011; Fernandez-Osco 2006).

The

difference is signiﬁcant, as it signals a struggle to deﬁne the

limits of the political. An acrimonious discussion that ﬂared

up over the Internet prompted by an article by Pablo Ste-

fanoni, the director of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Di-

plomatique, makes the stakes more evident. The article re-

ported on the World People’s Conference on Climate Change

and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia,

in April 2010 and called for by Bolivian President EvoMorales

in the wake of the disastrous United Nations climate change

conference in Copenhagen. Stefanoni wrote that the confer-

ence in Cochabamba

revealed something of relevance to the future: The process

of change [in Bolivia] is too important to be left in the

hands of the pachama´micos. The affectation of ancestral

authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tour-

ists in search of Latin America’s “familiar exoticism” and

even more so Bolivia’s . . . but it does not seem capable of

contributing anything signiﬁcant in terms of building a new

State, instituting a new model of development, discussing

a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and

mass participation. . . . So, instead of discussing how to

combine developmental expectations with an intelligent

eco-environmentalism, the pachama´mico discourse offers us

a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enig-

matic tone, and a naı¨ve reading of the crisis of capitalism

and western civilization. In Europe there is much greater

awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic

products) than there is in our country, where in many ways

everything remains to be done, and an informed and tech-

nically solid environmentalism seems much more effective

than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed

First Nations’ philosophy, often an excuse of some urban in-

tellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the

country.

(Emphasis added)

Diatribes like this are not isolated; rather, they are quite

common in Bolivia and beyond when anything unﬁtting to

modernist parameters of reasonability surfaces as something

with more pretensions than simply being folklore for tourist

consumption. Whether in incendiary op-ed commentaries or

in more subtle scholarly analyses, the rationale of the dis-

qualiﬁcation seems to follow the same pattern:

(1) Premise: “cultural” differences are folkloric and super-

ﬁcial because we all now live in the modern world (a product

of ﬁve centuries of global intermingling and transformative

26. Mignolo and Schiwy (2003:9) point out that, not surprisingly, “the

situation created by the arrival of the Spaniards was referred to as pa-

chakuti.” Millones (2007) in turn points out that pachakuti does not refer

to a return to a pre-Hispanic state of the world, but to the creation of

a new one.

27. Some of the articles that composed the debate, including the one

cited here, are available online at http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?pp1228.

558 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

interactions) and therefore, at the bottom, the world is the

same for everyone.

(2) Demonstration: show me a claim of radical difference

and I will show you an indigenous intellectual who uses com-

puters and the Internet to invent a tradition for the con-

sumption of guilt-ridden, exoticism-seeking white people.

(3) Consequence: radically different worlds are not real,

claims of radical difference are empty posturing, and therefore

they have nothing to say in any serious conversation about

how to deal with real and urgent problems. All that needs to

be attended to is captured by political economy and ethnic

politicking (with the ammunition of culture). In other words,

“our” established categories reﬂect current processes and

problems (including the “affectations of ancestral authentic-

ity”) well enough to handle them.

The assumption that “our” established categories are

enough is perhaps the most insidious way in which claims of

an all-encompassing modernity do Sameing while seeking to

articulate a passionate, yet sober, commitment to differences

without inequalities. As pointed out by Elizabeth Povinellli

in an article that I consider to be a precursor of political

ontology concerns, although “political economy is understood

as a framework for analyzing unequal relations and access to

cultural and material resources and power,” important ques-

tions remain:

Is there an internal limit to political-economic approaches

to the cultural construction of economics? If culture is a

lens through which the local group mediates the practices

and policies of the larger system . . . then what of the lens

of the larger system and its practices of knowing? . . . In

any case, how are these beliefs and practices in conﬂict with

[indigenous] ways of knowing the human-environmental

nexus? And how are the cultural assumptions underlying

political economy linked to dominant institutions of power?

Is this cultural underpinning reinscribing dominant power

over local minority communities even as the researcher is

trying to empower local sociocultural practices . . . ? (Pov-

inelli 1995:506)

Nadasdy (2007:37) provides some answers to these ques-

tions when he argues that, to the extent that our theories deny

the ontological assumptions on which other peoples base their

conceptions of the world, we provide “a powerful justiﬁcation

for the dismissal of certain beliefs and practices as just cultural

constructions (which, although perhaps relevant in the realm

of cultural politics, cannot provide the factual basis for de-

velopment or resource management).” One could add, fol-

lowing de la Cadena (2010), that from a modern perspective,

these ontological assumptions cannot provide a basis for “se-

rious politics” either. In part due to this, argues Poirier (2008:

83), many indigenous peoples “conceal those aspects that are

considered, from the point of view of modernist (and Car-

tesian) ontology and epistemology, as a radical alterity, those

that are not considered seriously and at face value, and just

as mere beliefs.” Most often, I suspect, many indigenous pol-

iticians ﬁnd few avenues to contribute to sustaining or pro-

tecting their worlds other than through the use of (“our”)

widely available categories and symbols of alterity (or Same-

ing)—such as that of the ecologically noble savage, the original

communist, or the original entrepreneur—which, with all the

perils that the move entails, are palatable to different audi-

ences and circumstantial allies.

Further remarks are not nec-

essary to bring home the point that, with regard to ontological

differences, the current relations of force make equivocations

even more pervasive, almost endemic. In this sense, we cannot

assume that self-representations through established catego-

ries exhaust the radical differences that may or may not be

at stake. In fact, those self-representations tell us more about

the status of the hegemony of the categories being used, and

the asymmetrical relations between worlds, than about the

existence of those radical differences. Thus, when “a cataract

of words” in an indigenous language starts to appear on the

public political stage, it might be an indication that the corset

that dominant categories impose upon radical differences

might be exploding at the seams.

Worlding is a contested, arduous, and not entirely coherent

process and never takes place in a vacuum without connec-

tions to other ways of worlding. Yet the connections do not

cancel their radical differences. Radically different worlds are

being enacted in front of our noses, even if they now involve

computers and the Internet, along with older (which does

not mean unchanging) other nonhumans! And while they

might be taking place in front of our noses, these enactments

are not spectacles geared to achieve the ulterior purposes that

our categories allow us to imagine (control of resources, po-

litical positioning, and so on). They are doing worlds them-

selves.

Discussions about the proper protocols to engage powerful

nonhumans in changing circumstances, inquiries into the col-

lective memory to repair and/or recreate practices wounded

by colonial policies, and efforts to relearn or create languages

and concepts that can better express and materialize visions

of what a decolonized life means are taking place along with

other everyday forms of existence away from an audience that

28. The “ecologically noble savage” and the “original communist” are

well-known and widely debated labels of alterity (see Harkin and Lewis

2007; Krech 1999; Lee 1990; Wilmsen 2009); a little less known is the

original entrepreneur label, most visibly promoted by neoliberal intel-

lectual and pundit Hernando de Soto and his Institute for Liberty and

Democracy (see http://www.ild.org.pe). For all their differences, all these

symbols tend to play the same role in the modern political terrain: being

incarnated by those supposedly closest to “natural man,” they lend an

aura of naturalness to the positions and arguments associated with them.

Yet as Nasdasdy (2005) cogently argued in the case of the ecologically

noble savage, none of these labels capture what is at stake in many

indigenous understandings of nonhumans, and, I will add, well-being or

justice, for that matter.

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 559

could be moved by the appeal of the exotic.

And in many

cases, these processes bring to the fore radical differences.

Sometimes these differences are voiced by indigenous (among

others) spokespersons who alternatively might be either de-

rided as spurious or embraced as authentic, depending on

whether the alterity displayed can be made to ﬁt existing and

interested preconceptions. In turn, nonindigenous commen-

tators or analysts who take these claims seriously, and want

to slow down thinking to hear what is being said and what

would be the consequences before embracing or rejecting

them, are automatically sniggered at.

Naive, exoticist, and

essentialist when not patronizing are some of the epithets

proffered. Of course, if the project of a political ontology can

take ﬂight and grow, it will have to deactivate this automatic

response. I hope to have made some strides on that direction,

at least with respect to the accusations of naı¨vete´, exoticism,

and essentialism. But I want to raise a ﬁnal point about the

patronizing accusation.

Political ontology is intended neither as a pedagogic project

to illuminate a reality that deﬁcient theorizing cannot grasp,

nor as a proselytizing project to show the virtues of other,

nonmodern blueprints for a good life. Such reading would

confuse an attempt to carve out a space to listen carefully to

what other worldings propose with an attempt to rescue and

promote those worldings as if we knew what they are about.

Political ontology is closer to hard-nosed pragmatism than

to liberal desire to understand everyone; the pax moderna no

longer holds (if it ever truly did), and dominance without

hegemony is a costly proposition when ontological differences

become politically active. And here I have in mind not only

the activation of indigenous and other land-based worldings

but also that of worldings in which it is unacceptable that

God play no role in politics, worldings where the killing of

animals in the pursuit of human purposes is inﬁnitely more

complicated than usually assumed, in short, the varied ways

in which other ontologies than the modern one are staking

a claim to exist and, in some cases, occupy the dominant role

that modernity has played so far. In this context, carving out

a space to listen is also carving out a space to tell another

story to (and about) ourselves, to engage in other kinds of

worlding that might be more conducive to a coexistence based

on recognizing conﬂicts rather than brushing them off as

irrelevant or nonexistent. Certainly there are no guarantees

29. A volume edited by the Bolivian Periodico Pukara is telling in this

regard. The volume collected the presentations of several key ﬁgures and

intellectuals of the Bolivian indigenous movement, some of whom fo-

cused on retrieving the meaning and scope of Aymara concepts as crucial

to understanding where the movement is and what it needs to do. The

volume is available online: http://periodicopukara.com/archivos/historia

-coyuntura-y-descolonizacion.pdf.

30. I take the idea of slowdown thinking from Isabelle Stengers’s

(2005) “cosmopolitical proposal.”

31. By listening carefully, I mean something closer to what Viveiros

de Castro (2004) calls translation as controlled equivocation than to the

expectation of ﬁnding in my world a representation that will be the perfect

equivalent of what those other worlds propose.

for such an attempt, but we cannot even begin to tell such a

story well without engaging the stories of others seriously.

Acknowledgments

This piece has been on the make for almost 5 years, and the

debts accrued are plenty. First and foremost, I must state up-

front that the idea of political ontology has been taking shape

more directly through collective thinking with Marisol de la

Cadena and Arturo Escobar. As part of this collaboration, we

organized two seminars. One of them (Politica Mas alla de

la “Politica”), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, took

place in July of 2009 in Santandercito (Colombia); the other

(Pluriverse and the Social Sciences), funded by the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, took

place in September 2010 in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The

participants in both seminars were enormously generous in

engaging with some of the ideas presented here; in particular,

I want to thank Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Janet Conway, Harvey

Feit, Larry Grossberg, Eduardo Gudynas, Alex Khasnabish,

John Law, Brian Noble, Isabelle Stengers, Eduardo Restrepo,

Dianne Rocheleau, Axel Rojas, and Elena Yehia. I am also

thankful to Michael Asch, Damian Castro, Alberto Corsin

Jimenez, Lesley Green, Martin Holbraad, Justin Kenrick, Josh

Lepawsky, Charles Mather, Annemarie Mol, Claire Poirier,

Sylvie Poirier, Colin Scott, Helen Verran, and Eduardo Viv-

eiros de Castro for insightful conversations on various aspects

of the arguments presented here.

Comments

Claudia Briones

Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de

Cambio (IIDyPCa), Universidad Nacional de Rı´o Negro-CONI-

CET, B. Mitre 630 5º Piso, (8400) San Carlos de Bariloche—Rı´o

Negro, Argentina (cbriones@unrn.edu.ar). 19 III 13

It has to be celebrated that anthropologists keep debating

better ways of approaching concepts such as “radical differ-

ence” and “otherness.” These debates have been part of the

anthropological tool kit from the very beginning, always with

momentous consequences. Challenges include both how far

we are prepared to go, and the intended and unintended

effects of our updated approaches.

Insofar as I also work with indigenous peoples, their prac-

tices, and conﬂictive realities, I share many of Blaser’s dis-

contents and reservations. I also ﬁnd extremely relevant the

three theoretical moves that he proposes: (a) tackling different

ways of worlding not as mere contents/assumptions, but as

a practice; (b) making a clear distinction between practices

of worlding and practices of belonging (culture and identity?);

560 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

146), as to question “the claim that all contemporary cultures

are modern” just because they are contemporaneous.

Building upon these convergences, I prefer to raise some

questions instead of commenting on the paper, in the hope

that they will invite Mario to develop his arguments further.

1. Morphological issues. According to Blaser, “when the term

‘modern’ is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference

from the present.” Now then, what are the effects of using

ontology/ontological both as an adjective and as a noun? Does

the act of naming his heuristic project in the singular (Political

Ontology) end up neutralizing ontological multiplicities? If

this name is adopted to emphasize the existence of ontological

conﬂicts, what is the space left to analyze ontological as-

sumptions of our interlocutors that are neither enacted nor

disputed in public arenas?

In the article, Blaser speaks of “(modern) self and (non-

modern) others,” “nonmodern blueprints for a good life,”

“nonmodern societies,” as if the labeling modern/nonmodern

could be applied both to the self (identities) and to designs.

What are the effects of this use upon the analytical distinction

between practices of worlding and practices of belonging,

between culture and identity? Or which are the foreseen re-

lationships between worlding and belonging?

Once stories and storied performativity become key con-

cepts to perform realities and gain access to ontological dif-

ferences (or differences we choose to consider ontological),

what is the role played by extradiscursive practices in the

Political Ontology project?

2. Radical difference as a matter of fact. What are the effects

of putting more emphasis on the domineering effects of the

politics of Otherness than on discourses about cultural dif-

ferences? Are not the ideas of radical difference and of oth-

erness part of the same Janus-faced reality created by modern

ontology in order to leave unmarked and universalize its own

practices and belongings? If “the ‘modernness’ that underlies

contemporary cultural differences would need to be proved

rather than axiomatically asserted” and, to do so, “one would

need some criteria of what it means to be modern,” what

about the predicated nonmodernness of certain contemporary

cultural differences? Do they also need to be proved against

some criteria of what it means to be nonmodern? What are

these criteria then? How to discriminate between cultural dif-

ferences and ontological differences and to discriminate any

cultural difference from radical difference? Or is any difference

radical?

3. Semantics and pragmatics. Even if the attention paid to

practice in the paper seems to indicate otherwise, the noun

“radical difference” seems to be related to the realm of se-

mantics more than to that of pragmatics. A propos the tension

between semantic and pragmatic approaches, then, how

should we conceive “the inherent hybridity of cultures”? As

a collection of juxtaposed stories that constitute sometimes

modern, sometimes nonmodern realities? Or as stories that

constitute realities with modern and nonmodern features at

the same time? What difference does it make to state that the

research focus is “the effects of transformative interactions

between different ontologies” or, rather, the effects of trans-

formative interactions between ontological differences?

4. Ontologies/epistemologies. Can the discussion of episte-

mological relativism solve all the epistemological issues in-

volved? Is the awareness of the ways in which “peoples dis-

tribute what exists and conceive their constitutive relations”

(ontology) divorced from acknowledging the means by which

they acquire and approve such conceptualizations (episte-

mology)? Assuming the modernness of the ontological/epis-

temological divide, how should we think of the relationships

between both entities/realities? Can we grasp ontological dif-

ferences by using our modern epistemology or must we also

consider epistemological differences? Moreover, if we do not

take also into account epistemological differences, how could

we guarantee that controlled equivocations do not end up

establishing an epistemological vantage point to measure up

ontological differences as epistemological relativism does?

Because it is very hard for me to abandon the anthropo-

logical wisdom of taking “others and their real difference

seriously,” as well as the disciplinary advice to be cautious

regarding the intended and unintended pragmatic conse-

quences of anthropological discourses on cultural difference,

I look forward to reading Blaser’s reply. If the idea of radical

difference had not been used so extensively to justify op-

pression within the modern world system (in spite of repeated

anthropological efforts to redeﬁne the concept), I would also

accept Stengers’s invitation to “relearn to laugh” (2000a)and

wonder what it would mean in this case? Perhaps it would

imply a daring “what if.” What if the idea of radical difference

belonged to the realm of pragmatics instead of semantics?

What if we approached radical difference not as the unques-

tioned standpoint for symbolizing gaps of meaning but as a

disputed index, used in multifarious ways, in order to pre-

suppose, create, and rank such gaps? Could this stance pave

a better way to perform controlled equivocations?

Anders Burman

Human Ecology Division, Department of Human Geography,

Lund University, So¨lvegatan 10, S-22362 Lund, Sweden

(anders.burman@hek.lu.se). 22 II 13

Mario Blaser provides us with an inspiring theoretical account

and justiﬁcation of “the ontological turn” in anthropology

and the study of indigenous societies. The task he sets for

himself is indeed critical. He explores how to take radical

differences seriously without indulging in essentialist exoti-

cism. This is a task I also have attempted (e.g., Burman 2012),

though not in such a theoretically initiated way as Blaser.

More urgently still, by framing his discussion as one of “po-

litical ontology,” Blaser attends to ontological differences

without losing sight of social struggle and political power.

Current political dynamics in Latin America, as discussed by

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 561

Blaser, manifest that any deﬁnite distinction between material/

political and cognitive/symbolic conﬂicts is based on a false

dichotomy. Ontological and epistemological aspects of human

existence are at the center of struggles over resources and

power since these are simultaneously struggles over meaning,

struggles over reality, over “what there is.”

By questioning our routine usage of the concept “culture,”

Blaser looks for ways of escaping the constraints of anthro-

pological theory that supposedly prevent us from seeing be-

yond the notion of the world as constituted by one real reality

out there, and innumerous cultural interpretations and rep-

resentations of it. This line of critique is, of course, not novel

in anthropology. Viveiros de Castro (1998) and others have

already questioned the universality of the notion of “one na-

ture—many cultures.” Moreover, by a phenomenological at-

tention to practice, Ingold (2000) has directed our attention

away from thinking of culture as mental representations of

the material world and toward a comprehension of lifeworlds

as emerging in people’s practical engagement with and within

the world. A core success of Blaser’s article stems from the

way he builds upon ideas such as these in order to reveal

their political dimensions and implications.

In many regards, Blaser’s text could be situated within the

coloniality/modernity literature, as articulated in different

ways by Dussel, Quijano, Mignolo, Lugones, Grosfoguel, and

others. Blaser questions the idea of an all-embracing moder-

nity and argues, in line with Mignolo (2005:36), that the

conceptual straitjacket of modernity makes the world appear

to us according to what modern categories of thought allow

us to perceive. In this line of thought, epistemological queries

are dealt with under the label “coloniality of knowledge,”

existential dimensions are handled under the label “coloniality

of being,” and asymmetric power relations are scrutinized

under the label “coloniality of power.” What Blaser is artic-

ulating in an inspiring way in this article could be labeled the

“coloniality of reality.”

The coloniality/modernity literature has its undeniable

strength and critical verve but also its weak points. The latter

are found, I would argue, in some of Mignolo’s otherwise

thought-provoking writings (e.g., Mignolo 2000, 2005): a lack

of attention to people’s everyday concerns and practices,

sweeping generalizations about “indigenous knowledge,” and

disembedded references to a selection of indigenous concepts.

Blaser does not indulge in these errors. However, his theo-

retical arguments would have been even more powerful if

rooted more deeply in speciﬁc ethnographic contexts and

practices and not, as currently is the case, in more elusive

discussions about indigenous peoples and a few passing ex-

amples from Bolivia. It would have shown to the reader that

things are not only theoretically intricate but also socially and

politically complex “on the ground.” Blaser argues, for in-

stance, that when indigenous discourse “starts to appear on

the public political stage, it might be an indication that the

corset that dominant categories impose upon radical differ-

ences might be exploding at the seams.” It might very well

be so. However, the current political context in Bolivia shows

that indigenous concepts such as suma qaman˜a, pachakuti,

and pachamama are easily assimilated into dominant political

discourse and thereby defanged and commodiﬁed on the po-

litical market. This makes me question the profoundness of

the “crisis of modernity” that Blaser identiﬁes. If by crisis we

mean the socio-environmental consequences of modernity,

then yes—we are certainly experiencing a crisis. Likewise, if

by crisis we mean that other worlds are making themselves

heard, even in spaces of parliamentary power, then yes—

modernity would seem to be under attack. However, if by

crisis we mean a weakening of the hegemonic forces of mo-

dernity, then I believe the idea of a crisis is inﬂated. Modernity

selectively assimilates and disarms elements of alterity while

simultaneously striving to produce ontological absence where

ontological difference is detected, that is, denying the reality

of any other reality than the one stipulated by modernity.

Consequently, there is a critical role to play for Blaser’s in-

spired thinking on radical differences in questioning this

dominance. I remain convinced, however, that for a project

of political ontology to take ﬂight, there is a need for an-

choring this thinking more explicitly and deeply in speciﬁc

contexts and practices, also when engaging in theoretical de-

bate. I look forward to following this process.

Arturo Escobar

Department of Anthropology, CB 3115, University of North Caro-

lina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, U.S.A. (aescobar@

email.unc.edu). 25 II 13

Mario Blaser’s article, and his work to date, constitutes a

major theoretical effort with important ethnographic and po-

litical implications; political and ethnographic inspiration are

in fact central to Blaser’s compelling proposal for what he

calls political ontology, a ﬁeld that in 2009 he deﬁned as

having two dimensions: “On the one hand, it refers to the

power-laden negotiations involved in bringing into being the

entities that make up a particular world or ontology. On the

other hand, it refers to a ﬁeld of study that focuses on these

negotiations but also on the conﬂicts that ensue as different

worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as

they interact and mingle with each other” (Blaser 2009:11).

This political ontology framework links conversations in crit-

ical theory (particularly in indigenous studies and STS) with

momentous developments in socio-natural life (chieﬂy, Latin

American indigenous uprisings and struggles). In a welcome

reversal of the excessively theory-driven postconstructivist

scholarship, in Blaser’s work, the tacking back and forth be-

tween theory and social life ﬁnds its raison d’eˆtre in the latter.

This is of utmost importance since, as Blaser mentions, critical

social theory comes short in furnishing the categories with

which we might visualize those practices that most radically

challenge dominant conceptions of the world. Given its re-

562 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

liance on the modern episteme, and despite more decided

attempts at moving away from the episteme over the past

decade, critical social theory today is insufﬁcient to ask the

questions, let alone venture the answers, that could illuminate

effective paths toward the planet’s ontological reconstitution.

As Blaser suggests, we are likely to ﬁnd clues to such paths

in the worlds made visible by indigenous struggles, but only

if we are willing to deepen our epistemic-ontological “de-

classing,” so to speak, and newly approach radical alterity

from the perspective of the ontological conﬂicts and stories

of peoples “in spite of Europe.”

For Blaser, critical theory is still trapped with the narrative

of modernity, thus missing important dimensions of alterity.

This fustigation is particularly telling for anthropology, the

ﬁeld of radical alterity par excellence. As others have argued,

anthropology continues to contribute to the domestication of

alterity. Why he believes this to be the case, however, con-

stitutes a novel contribution. The reason lies in a “politico-

conceptual problem” that makes it impossible to take seri-

ously expressions of radical alterity and entertain the idea of

multiple ontologies, or worlds beyond modernity. Some of

the main reasons for this inability are well known by now

(thanks to STS’s deconstruction of the nature/culture divide

and the notions of partial connections and ontological mul-

tiplicity); others are newer, and newly insightful (e.g., Law’s

critique of the “One-World” ontology, Povinelli’s analysis of

the deadly and meteoric spread of “the liberal diaspora” with

globalization, and the Latin American decolonial critiques).

Blaser’s additional contribution refers perhaps more to the

implications of the continued naturalization of modernity—

social theory’s inability to see that which refuses epistemic

and ontological capture, caused by the lingering assumption

of an all-encompassing modernity.

A number of contributions in the present article enrich the

notion of political ontology, already outlined in Blaser’s su-

perb, albeit theoretically challenging, monograph (2010);

these include the notions of “worlds,” “ways of worlding,”

and, particularly, the “pluriverse”: the most sophisticated ren-

dition to date, in this reviewer’s opinion, of how multiple

worlds interact, mingle, and at times coemerge, without being

reducible to one another; the preemptive maneuver against

the chronic realism prevalent in the academy (of course, Left

included) that invariably labels as romantic, localizing, or

essentializing any attempt at positing alterity “in spite of Eu-

rope” and modernity; the appeal to enaction (recalling Ma-

turana and Varela’s oeuvre, which, in my view, provides el-

egant solutions to some of the aporias of Western social

theory, still to be taken seriously); the notion of the “foun-

dationless foundational claim” (which might nevertheless risk

becoming another version of antifoundationalism, but which

could be seen as in kinship with the masterful foundationless,

world-creating ﬁctions by Borges or Calvino); and the nu-

anced critique of the concept of culture, although in this

regard I am left with the question of whether all notions of

culture are so inevitably tainted by their imputed reliance on

modernist truth arrangements, or whether the concept could

not be retrieved for strategic usage. That said, in my view,

the article’s main contribution is to make us newly aware of

the fact that much of what goes on in the world today can

be described as an ontological war on relational worlds and

that, conversely, the struggles by those worlds to persevere

and sustain the pluriverse are signs of the unraveling of the

alleged all-encompassing modernity. This is a hopeful and

empowering imagining of how things are and might get to

be.

Lesley Green

School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguis-

tics, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701,

Cape Town, South Africa (lesley.green@uct.ac.za). 4 III 13

In gathering together relatively disparate strands of anthro-

pology over the past few decades—indigenous activism, sci-

ence and technology studies, the critiques of the idea of cul-

ture and modernist thought—Blaser offers a succinct

statement of what a decolonial anthropology might look like.

Read in the context of South Africa, the argument speaks

to ongoing debate in public life and the humanities on the

difﬁculties of ﬁnding agreement about the place of science in

a postcolonial democracy. The history of the critical human-

ities in the South Africa of the 1990s was that of destabilizing

certainties over apartheid’s imagined culturalist collectivities:

culture, race, tribe, ethnicity, tradition among them, yet the

same argument has been able to offer very little to a parlia-

ment that has, at times, been determined to contest the he-

gemony of science, or “the western version of nature” (which

has never itself been singular) in the name of either culture

or political economy. For this reason, the turn to an anthro-

pology that engages questions about both nature and culture

is valuable.

The question is whether the theoretical, conceptual, and

political project that is proposed here is broad enough to

frame an agenda for decolonial research. It is, as Blaser notes,

very easy to put the old wine of culture into a new wine bottle

of ontology, and while I value deeply the performative em-

phasis that Blaser offers in his attention to storying, enacting,

and worlding, the very word “ontology” has difﬁculty holding

the emphasis on emergence, precisely because it proposes to

make of these worldings, and so on, things. For Afro-Marti-

niquan postcolonial thinker Aimee Ce´saire, “thingiﬁcation”—

in the sense of objectiﬁcation—is the core of the colonial project

(Ce´ saire 1972). Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language

that is attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging.

While the notion of the “politicoconceptual” implies the

enacted emergence of “things” (or matters of concern, in the

sense used by Bruno Latour), its frame of reference remains

a matter of mind, culture, and ideology. Where, in this view,

are different relationships to materiality? Modernity is not

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 563

only a set of ideas, but a way of relating to material realities

and technological affordances, which in turn are transfor-

mative of those realities and the relationships they imply. The

humble refrigerator changes the relationship that a hunter has

with prey, and with neighbors, and with the economy, and

space and time, and indeed personhood too. Knowledge, in

other words, is constantly emerging and transforming in re-

lation to material relations, which offer different reasons to

know.

This recognition prompts a second set of questions: Does

the concept ontology itself not imply a version of the idea of

presence that is written into modernist thought? Does the

worlding implied in the word allow sufﬁcient space for shades

and spectres—Derrida’s “hauntology”—the presences to

which, or to whom, the language of “being” is inhospitable?

How might different registers of affects and sensibilities ﬁnd

a place at the table of knowledge? Does the word “ontology”

itself not occlude—or at least prejudge—different ways of

combining the arts of the sensory? It would be an unusual

court of law in which a midwife defending her reading of a

birthing belly with her hands ﬁnds herself on equal footing

with an obstetrician who can produce several meters of lines

printed by a fetal heart-rate monitor, yet both rely on that

elusive sensory combination called “clinical skill.” Certainly,

valorization of some senses more than others is central to the

modernist project, and different attunements to bodily per-

ceptual skills generate different resources for knowing.

There are roughly a dozen usages of the term “knowledge”

in the paper, and their relative lack of theorization (e.g., by

comparison to the work put into the notion “culture”) is a

clue to where the conversation might yet proceed. In “The

Five Senses,” philosopher of science Michel Serres (2009) de-

scribes three tongues of knowing: the tongue of reasonable

and rational speech, which speaks to a disaggregative analytic

of the world; the tongue of taste, attuned to the compositional

arts that do not yield to the logic of disaggregative abstrac-

tion—the bouquet of a wine; the alloys of metallurgy; and

the tongue of desire, ecstasy and passion. Serres’s critique is

that the idea of “knowledge” defaults to the ﬁrst. The im-

plication: an anthropology of ways of knowing could yet

stretch its tent.

Martin Holbraad

Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14

Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom

(m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk). 11 III 13

Mario Blaser’s argument for political ontology is perhaps an

augur that debates about the so-called ontological turn in

anthropology may be at the point of reaching maturity. Rather

than merely defending the turn to ontology against its many

32. I am grateful to Artwell Nhemachena for this insight.

detractors, joining in what is beginning to look like a slinging

match of competitive exasperation, Blaser’s piece is devoted

mainly to sifting through and consolidating some of the lines

of thinking this theoretical move has engendered. In this con-

nection, and for obvious reasons, I ﬁnd particularly helpful

the way in which Blaser contrasts his core suggestion that

political ontologies be conceived as “storied performances”

that provide their own “foundationless foundation” with my

own contention that the turn to ontology in anthropology is

best understood as a heuristic one. The contrast speaks di-

rectly to what I think Blaser takes the political stakes of the

ontological turn to be, as well as what I, as a fellow onto-

traveler, think may be wrong with Blaser’s line of argument.

If I understand him correctly, the reason for which Blaser

insists on the “foundationless” character of ontologies is iden-

tical to the reason for which I have argued that they are best

conceived as heuristic devices that pertain, not to the nature

of existence in the world (or worlds) at large,

but rather to

the economy of anthropological argument itself. Both sug-

gestions are meant to respond to the same basic problem,

namely, that if anthropology stands or falls by its capacity to

to stop delimiting the scope of difference by deciding in ad-

vance what it must look like. Thus, I think Blaser and I can

agree that what is wrong with concepts such as “culture” or

“society” (and I would add “network,” “being-in-the-world,”

and possibly even “relation” to the list) is that their capacity

to register alterity is hampered by founding this capacity in

a prior story about how alterity may or may not behave as a

feature of the world(s). By contrast, conceiving of alterity in

ontological terms (i.e., as a matter of what things, including

alterity itself, may be) is a way of giving it free rein to be as

different as it wants. Unlike saying that differences are social

or cultural, saying that they are ontological leaves constitu-

tively open the question of what they might be, allowing logical

space for it to be answered differently in any given instance.

What is ontology is itself an ontological question—a virtuous

circularity that keeps anthropological horizons open, and, by

that virtue, makes anthropology irreducibly political too, ren-

dering it inherently antithetical to forms of domination that

rely on delimiting the coordinates within which differences

may operate (the old point about hegemony).

I have no space here to explain why I think that it is so

important to be clear on the heuristic status of this argument

(Holbraad 2012:237–265; Pedersen 2012; cf. Holbraad, forth-

coming). Sufﬁce it to say that such a tack seeks to bear out

the key idea that the problem of difference is a function, not

of some prior theory of what may or may not count as dif-

ference in the world(s), but rather of the peculiar properties

33. Along with others, I have in past writings made the mistake of

associating the notion of ontological difference with the image of multiple

worlds (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007)—a highly misleading

reiﬁcation of an essentially analytical procedure, which I have since come

to regret immensely.

564 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, namely, that reg-

istering difference in its own terms (i.e., as difference proper)

is what is at issue in it (Viveiros de Castro 2002).

It is just on this point that I am in doubt about Blaser’s

position: notwithstanding the caveats about their enacted and

performative character, which do lend political ontologies a

highly ﬂuid and provisional nature, I fail to see how this is

not ultimately yet another argument that operates by ground-

ing the possibility of difference in a prior story of how the

world(s) must work, namely, in this case, the world(s) as a

terrain in which ontological differences are ever-emerging,

ﬂuid, and tentative. Sure, as Blaser emphasizes, the merit of

this way of parsing difference is that, in instantiating (enact-

ing, performing) the very understanding of ontology it pro-

poses, this argument must itself be ﬂuid and tentative. Nev-

ertheless, at least for the time being and for as long as it lasts,

the argument seems to cut against itself. How is the possibility

of different differences (again, differences proper) not can-

celed by Blaser’s prior story of what differences must look

like—that is, the image of ever-emergent “worldings,” enacted

and performed ﬂuidly, tentatively, and so on? The fact that

in many of its elements the story itself is not altogether un-

familiar (those truly in search of ontological difference are

probably unlikely to ﬁnd it among such modish concepts as

emergence, performance, ﬂuidity, and so on) may lend some

weight to this worry about the capacity of Blaser’s political

ontologies truly to differ.

Helen Verran

The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, Yellow Build-

ing 1, Level 2, Ellengowan Drive, Casuarina, Northern Territory

0909, Australia (hrv@unimelb.edu.au). 8 III 13

An Ontological Politics of Politics?

Could there be an ontological politics of Politics—the sort of

Politics associated with government and the state? Serious

politics about, say, whose land gets dug up for iron ore mines,

and who gets the proﬁts, and which whales where get slaugh-

tered, about which PPPs (public-private partnerships) are

contracted, and under what terms? These are topics we often

think of as politics over economic decisions—political econ-

omy. The question helps us see “a politicoconceptual prob-

lem,” suggests Mario Blaser. What this “capital P” Politics is

has been deﬁned by a modern humanism, at home solely in

categories deriving from the metaphysical commitments of

European traditions of thought. The notion of ontological

politics is nonsense according to this comfortable and com-

forting modern state of being. Of course, ruling out a politics

around ontics—around what there is—does not mean that

modern politics are tame, not at all. Skeptics, insisting that

categories are historically, socially, and/or culturally generated,

have ensured a lively critical humanist politics for hundreds

of years—and claim a lineage for this political theory with

its particular set of analytic categories—that goes back to

ancient Greece. The assumption that goes with this claimed

lineage is universality.

Not so argues Blaser. The politics that creates critical skep-

ticism is not enough; not even half the story. It ignores all

those extant “stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that

are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.”

We need to ﬁnd a way to recognize and negotiate the ontics

and ontological politics of Politics and devise ways to make

that recognition an integral part of our ordinary, serious pol-

itics. One would assume, and by publishing this manifesto in

Current Anthropology Blaser does indeed seem to, that an-

thropology and anthropologists might contribute to, or even

initiate, such an undertaking. In supporting and encouraging

that, here I point to a resource.

Bruno Latour has been making thought experiments

around modern politics for many years. Leaving the empir-

icism of early actor-network theory behind, he has for some

time been urging a new constitution, and he has begun to

imagine its politics. Now, I am not at all convinced about

new constitutions—or much impressed by manifestos for that

matter—but Latour’s insights on politics are a useful begin-

ning. Political enunciation remains an enigma in modernity,

Latour claims. It cannot gain traction in a truth regime dom-

inated by science’s representationism. Recognizing that we

have a lot of learning to do about politics, Latour wants to

explain the truth regime of the new constitution’s politics

clearly from the outset, two aspects in particular. First, in the

truth regime of the new constitution’s politics, there is no

separation of nature and its representation. Second, the enun-

ciation of this politics has “a double click communication”

at its core: the “political circle . . . which is [a]bout trans-

forming the several into one . . . and subsequently, through a

process of retransformation, of the one into several” (Latour

2003:149).

Now, to me this describes beautifully the truth regime of

the “capital P Politics” we already have—the one Blaser wants

to reform. But, crucially, Latour has missed one really core

element in his description, an element that I ﬁrst learned to

see under the tutelage of my Yolngu Aboriginal Australian

instructors. The “political circle” is not a circle. Rather, it is

a ﬁgure eight. (My Yolngu teachers have much more useful

names for this important ﬁgure, as you would expect.) And

the process of the crossover, the process by which “several is

turned into one . . . is turned into several,” is a form of

ontological eversion. A holographic moment lies at the core

of the truth regime of politics. Interestingly, and conﬁrming

the view that anthropologists have something important to

offer here, Strathern explains how she learned to use a very

similar ﬁguration under instruction from her Melanesian in-

terlocutors in Mt. Hagen (Strathern 1992b:245).

So what might anthropologists contribute to ontics and

ontological politics? First of all, they might contribute by

collectively imagining and storying it in some detail. Words

Blaser Ontological Conﬂicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 565

lined up as stories are the means here, for stories can even

evade the ontics and ontological politics that necessarily come

along with words themselves. But I do not have space for

stories, and here’s the rub—in serious politics too, the space

for stories is highly constrained. Stories bring in difference

that works unpredictably, as, “several turns into one . . . turns

into several,” they exaggerate contingency in moments of

eversion.

“Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language that is

attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging.” This

phrase from Lesley Green’s commentary captures an impor-

tant aspect of what political ontology is up against, and I am

enormously grateful to the commentators for their insightful

prodding to further reﬁne the language of this project. In this

line, it might be useful to begin by clarifying the strategy/

concern that led me to use some terms in certain ways and

to shape the text in its present form.

Although I agree with Martin Holbraad that the “ontolog-

ical turn” might be reaching maturity, it is also the case that

many colleagues in the discipline are skeptical if not worried

about the implications of the proposal because, to paraphrase

Claudia Briones, the othering associated to the idea of “radical

difference” has often justiﬁed oppression within the modern

world system. The text was thus conceived as an invitation,

which included those skeptical and worried colleagues, to (a)

think about the equally dangerous Sameing that goes under

the banner of an all-encompassing modernity and (b) con-

sider a proposal that might circumvent both Othering and

Sameing by tackling the differences apprehended as culture

in terms of ontologies. But in order for this to work, I imag-

ined, the argument would have to progressively move from

the more familiar language of hybrid cultures (with its con-

comitant “thingiﬁcation”) to the language of political ontol-

ogy, which while still in the making is decidedly on the side

of practices, emergences, and pragmatism. It is in this context

that much of the slippage between words used alternatively

as nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be understood. I intended

that by the end of the paper the reader would understand

that, for example, nouns have been reworked to imply some-

thing other than “things” and that, in the same way, stories

imply more than discursive practices. The limited success to

achieve this, as evidenced in some of Briones’s and Green’s

commentaries and questions, underscores the challenge of

ﬁnding a proper language to express the project. While rec-

ognizing this, it is also important to make a clear distinction

between what may be my failure to articulate a clear language

and the project’s grounding on the pragmatist ﬁguration of

an emergent ontology that I call pluriverse.

It will not be possible in this short reply to provide answers

to each of the many questions Briones poses; I think, however,

that the readers can ﬁgure some of them out by keeping in

mind the remarks I just made above. Thus, I will concentrate

on questions whose answers might be harder to ﬁgure out. I

will start with a clariﬁcation: in political ontology, “radical

difference” does not name a speciﬁed content; one could not

tell in advance what is a “radical difference” other than it is

a relation in which the terms cannot be reduced to each other

without doing violence. It is precisely such reductionist moves

that political ontology seeks to address, and casting the project

in the singular responds to this intention, for it indicates the

situatedness (Haraway 1991) of the project. The proposal of

the pluriverse as articulated by political ontology is self-ad-

visedly a particular one; it does not pretend to include in its

formulation all ontological multiplicities, thereby reducing

them to its own terms.

Speaking of ontological differences in contrast to cultural

differences points to an analytical and pragmatic decision

about how to address difference, not to kinds of differences.

Yet, the language of culture to refer to the differences that

political ontology seeks to treat as ontological is evidently

dominant. It is not only analysts, but also the subjects of

those analyses, who render ways of worlding into culture and

mobilize it in practices of belonging (identity). Yet, we must

not lose sight of the fact that both the rendering of difference

as culture and the practices of belonging that require culture

respond to the dominance of a particular way of worlding,

which I call here modern. Thus, to some extent, these practices

of belonging contribute to the worlding of modernity. I say

“to some extent” because this is not a perfect cybernetic loop.

As I pointed out when discussing Hale’s indio permitido,the

mobilization of culture in practices of belonging has in some

cases helped to create conditions in which the irreducibility

of radical differences are harder to be ignored. This speaks

to Escobar’s question about the strategic use of culture. Either

strategically or not, I think culture can and will continue to

be used; the trick is not to lose sight of its role in the worlding

of modernity and consequently the need to “inﬁltrate” the

term so that it can do other kinds of work.

Trying to get it to do work that it does not do now is at

the center of my laboring the term ontology. Let as it is,

ontology can do all sort of things that are antithetical to the

project presented here. The implication is that, through the

“attention paid to practice” (Briones), my attempts to inﬁl-

trate the term with “performative emphasis” (Green) or “en-

acted and performative character” (Holbraad) are not sec-

ondary aspects or caveats in my argument. If that labor is

minimized or disregarded, the whole point is missed and we

end up discussing points in which there is no disagreement.

Something of the sort I feel with some of Green’s remarks,

and in particular with regard to modernity not being just a

set of ideas but also “a way of relating to material realities

and technological affordances.” My invocation of an STS-

inspired material-semiotic formulation of reality to refurbish

the meaning of ontology not only underscores this point but

566 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013

also questions the very distinction between ideal and material

realities. By the same token, ontology refurbished as perfor-

mance or worlding disavows the classical distinction between

ontology and epistemology, itself premised on a particular

ontology that proposes ways of knowing as something that

can be variously related to, and yet distinguishable from, the

world. In this context, it is not clear to me what an “anthro-

pology of ways of knowing” could be if not also an anthro-

pology of ways of worlding, which will always imply fraught

coworldings.

In principle, political ontology could be seen as an an-

thropology of fraught coworldings, but this anthropology ﬁg-

ures itself in active contraposition to the “coloniality of re-

ality,” to use Burman’s neat label. Thus, I cannot but agree

with this commentator that the full force of the project will

come from anchoring it in speciﬁc contexts and practices, for

not withstanding its universalist claims, the worlding of mo-

dernity succeeds or fails in speciﬁc places, and so it is with

the pluriverse. Thus, when I speak of crisis of hegemony of

modernity, I am not invoking a teleology, as if assuming that

what is an ongoing and open-ended process has already played

out; rather, the point is to signal the conjunctures in which

a space opens up for the pluriverse to become plausible where

before it was not. Whether and how these spaces remain open,

expand, proliferate, or get closured again varies from one

circumstance to the next and is and will remain uncertain.

As Escobar points out, the fate of the conjunctures I am

invoking here constitutes the raison d’eˆ tre of political ontol-

ogy, and it is perhaps here where we can grasp the differences

between the performative and purely heuristic versions of

ontology. The raison d’eˆtre for Holdbraad’s heuristic hinges

on a foundational claim of what anthropology is about; this

avowedly circumscribed “world” is concerned with registering

difference in its own terms. I will leave for others the op-

portunity to discuss the point of a project to register difference

in its own terms. For the sake of the argument, let us assume

that a project to register difference in its own terms is relatively

unproblematic—although, in its strict sense, it appears as an

oxymoron (i.e., would that not imply the end of the difference

as it stood before the registering of it?) and concentrates on

the antropology-world that Holbraad has deﬁned. Once “reg-

istering difference in its own terms” has been postulated as

what this world is about, the ontological approach as heuristic

is not only better, it is the only one that makes sense and

very much like as in the holographic moment Helen Verran

evokes through the ﬁgure eight, the heuristic indeed ends up

worlding anthropology as the register of difference in its own

terms. This perfect circularity is all ﬁne if you conceive an-

thropology in a gamelike fashion, the purpose of the game

being no other than playing it. In such a case, there is no

point in bringing extraneous concerns to it; either you play

or you don’t. But by the same token, the game has nothing

to say outside of itself. Of course, few colleagues would settle

for such an insular conception of the discipline, Holbraad

included, and so he signals the import (i.e., the value) of

“playing” the discipline as the registering of difference in its

own terms: it makes it “inherently antithetical to forms of

domination that rely on delimiting the coordinates within

which differences may operate.” Here, the pursuit of heuristic

purity starts to run into trouble, for such a statement im-

mediately raises the question, why would it be important to

be antithetical to these forms of domination?

In order to grasp the full consequence of the question, let

us ﬁrst remind ourselves that delimiting the coordinates

within which difference may operate is not universally as-

sumed to be equal to domination. In fact, in the form of

worlding I have called modernity, such limits constitute the

very possibility for political society. And thus, many if not

most anthropologies are “played” informed by this assump-

tion. These anthropologies would likely deﬁne their purpose

as something closer to discovering similarities beneath dif-

ferences than to registering difference in their own terms. The

point is this: when confronted with such anthropologies

(themselves a particular way of worlding), the value assumed

in being antithetical to delimiting the coordinates in which

difference can operate is far from obvious. Such value can

only be attributed in relation to some story of how the

world(s) must work. In short, and even if never fully artic-

ulated, in his pursuit for heuristic purity, Holbraad ends up

smuggling this kind of story as if it were a tacit agreement

that requires no further discussion. This to me conspires

against any possibility of keeping the anthropological horizon

open, and more so when at issue is not just registering dif-

ference in its own terms but ﬁguring out how anthropological

practice can partake in the fraught coworlding I call the plu-

riverse. As Helen Verran tells us, in that holographic moment

that the ﬁgure eight traces, when the “several turns into one

. . . turns into several,” stories exaggerate contingency. Stories

told in some detail open themselves to such contingency; they

provide anchor points to grapple and twist them so that they

can become something else at the moment of eversion. Here

is why, again, it is crucial to understand that the enacted and

performative character of my story of how the world(s) must

work is not a caveat but constitutive. The challenge of keeping

the horizon open for difference cannot be met by denying

that our practices tell stories about the world but rather by

ﬁnding the way to tell stories that perform a world with such

openness.

—Mario Blaser

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capitalocenic dystopias and postdevelopmentalist utopia in the peruvian amazon: the recent novels of róger rumrrill

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Stefano Pau

Peruvian critic Ricardo González Vigil, in the presentation of Róger Rumrrill's novel Las estirpes amazónicas (2020), points out how it opens a new path in the analysis of Peruvian Amazonian literature, exploring what he calls the «Amazonian utopia», retaking and updating the concept of «Andean utopia» popularized mainly by the studies of Alberto Flores Galindo and Manuel Burga. Indeed, both in the aforementioned work and in the first chapter of the saga of La Virgen del Samiria (2012), Róger Rumrrill (Iquitos, 1938) explores the Amazonian reality over the last hundred and fifty years of economic and social history, proposing a route to change, a sort of messianic path to «The Land Without Evil» based on Tupi-Guarani mythology. In this paper, beyond analyzing this aspect, we will also show its trigger and specular vision: the progressive depredation and destruction of natural resources and Amazonian societies, in the context of the process that has led to the global and accelerated transformation of the Earth system, which in different disciplinary fields is defined as «Anthropocene» or -according to some critical views of this concept- «Capitalocene». We propose an ecocritical reading of the two works of the author, considering three fundamental themes: the process of progressive environmental destruction and the «ontological conflicts»; ecofeminism; and, finally, the critique of the capitalist model and the construction of an alternative to development.

INDIGENOUS WAYS OF WORLDING AS SYSTEMIC UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN INFLUENCE IN GENERATING WORLDS IN BECOMING

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Vivir Bien Policy in Post-Pandemic Bolivia: From Convivial Living to the Narrative of Economic Growth and Extractivism

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A pesar de su trascendencia desde los albores de la humanidad, la cuestión del vivir bien ha sido progresivamente marginada en la reflexión sobre el ser humano, siendo tratada a menudo de manera individual y privada, con poca atención a su dimensión colectiva y pública. En los últimos años, dos corrientes de pensamiento que gozan de gran acogida en el ámbito académico, el Sumak Kawsay o Suma Qamaña de los pueblos indígenas andinos y la Teoría de la Resonancia o sociología de la vida buena del sociólogo alemán Hartmut Rosa, se aproximan a la pregunta ética por antonomasia, ¿cómo vivir bien?, en conexión con una lógica relacional que va más allá del ámbito exclusivamente humano. En ambos enfoques, vivir bien evoca una forma de vida caracterizada por el encuentro no solo entre seres humanos, sino también entre estos y la naturaleza, los artefactos y lo existencial o sagrado. Si bien se reconoce esta afinidad, hasta la fecha no se ha establecido un diálogo entre ambas perspectivas. Este libro tiene como objetivo iniciar dicho diálogo de un modo transcultural e interdisciplinario, con la intención de fortalecer las bases teóricas de ambas corrientes y de ofrecer a investigadores e investigadoras una herramienta sólida para el trabajo empírico. Así pues, las contribuciones de este volumen debaten la cuestión del vivir bien desde las humanidades y las ciencias sociales, con un alcance regional y global, y bajo la convicción de que se necesitan diálogos intercontinentales para una nueva teoría crítica de la sociedad, una alternativa al desarrollo y un replanteamiento de lo humano y lo no humano.

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This contribution discusses ‚working together‘ as a method in a collaborative, co-laborative, experimental and multi-modal research practice and as a possible response to transformation processes in the Anthropocene. We further refer to co-laboration as a tool for social and cultural anthropological research on dynamic hydrosocial territories in Berlin-Brandenburg and illustrate new forms of transdisciplinary working practices. We argue that co-laboration can both provide access to the overarching challenges of our time and generate new impulses for reflection within anthropology itself through processes of interaction with diverse scientific experts and those from everyday life.

Umweltethnologie: Eine Einführung

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Apr 2025

Environmental anthropology, a subfield of social and cultural anthropology, explores the interactions between humans, nonhumans, technologies, and environmental phenomena. It examines how social and cultural dynamics shape nature-culture relationships, integrating approaches such as ecological anthropology, political ecology, and multispecies studies. Topics include climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice, and perspectives such as feminist and Marxist approaches. By providing theoretical and methodological tools, environmental anthropology offers theoretical and methodological tools to foster ecological transformations and promote societal participation in sustainable futures.

Umweltgerechtigkeit

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The term environmental justice is a political claim as well as an analytical perspective for investigating environmental distribution conflicts and an interdisciplinary field of research. We argue that the anthropological disciplines have the conceptual and methodological tools that are crucial for an in-depth engagement with the root causes of environmental (in)justice. The article introduces different dimensions of environmental justice and delves into social science perspectives, methods and concepts that are of particular relevance for environmental anthropologists interested in environmental justice.

Ontologische Anthropologie

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Apr 2025

In recent decades, social scientists and humanities scholars have turned their attention increasingly to questions of ontology and have intensively explored the multiple forms and structures of being and becoming. This theoretical reorientation had far-reaching consequences for environmental anthropology, in particular for its fundamental concepts of nature and culture. This article provides an initial overview of the now extensive debate and its significance for environmental anthropology. To this end, we present empirical and theoretical points of departure, examine current research and methodological implications and finally address critical perspectives on ontological anthropology.

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The first introduction to the Incas and their myths aimed at students and general readers, bringing together a wealth of information into one convenient resource. Full of hard to find information,Handbook of Inca Mythologyprovides an accessible introduction to the rites, beliefs, and spiritual tales of the Incas. It provides a concise overview of Incan civilization and mythology, a chronology of mythic and historical events, and an A–Z inventory of central themes (sacrifice, fertility, competition, reversaldualism, colors, constellations, giants, and miniatures), personages (Viracocha, Manco Capac, Pachackuti Inca), locations (Lake Titicaca, Corickancha), rituals, and icons. The last Native American culture to develop free of European influence, the Incas, who had no written language, are known only from Spanish accounts written after the conquest and archaeological finds. From these fragments, a vanished world has been reborn and reintroduced into modern Andean life. There is no better way into that world and its mind-bending mythology than this unique handbook.

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New Lit Hist

Bruno Latour

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D.J. Haraway

Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called "outstanding," "original," and "brilliant," by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.).

Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism

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Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other

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Bernard Mcgrane

Reflections on indigenous cosmopolitics - poetics

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Jan 2008

S. Poirier

This article is intended as an exploration into what I call indigenous cosmopolitics-poetics, in the metaphysical sense of the politics of the cosmos, and as an attempt to draw a parallel between these cosmopolitics and recent anthropological work on "relational ontology." Among the expressions of contemporary indigenous cosmopolitics, I explore: the notion of the person as "dividual" and of the self as "relational"; the concept of ancestrality; and translocal networks of ritual exchanges and gatherings. To explore these avenues, I draw from my work and experiences with two indigenous groups, namely the Kukatja (Australian Western Desert) and the Atikamekw (North-Central Quebec).

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Eduardo Restrepo

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