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Ways to Be Understood: The Ontological Turn and Interpretive Social Science
Abstract
The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things (and persons) themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive social science—one that wishes to understand social phenomena as human kinds in the vein of Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon.
... In this context, the concept of land extends beyond issues of identity, ancestral land rights, food insecurity, or autonomy as explored in land-grab studies (De Vos 2019;McMichael 2014). It is the very essence that gives rise to individuals through a continuous interaction with their environment, as suggested by the literature on the ontological turn (Bormpoudakis 2019;Pickering 2017;Sivado 2020). Rice cultivation is, therefore, an interaction that involves a deep engagement with cosmic energy or semongat, akin to the process of 'becoming-with' . ...
During the past two decades, Indonesia has transformed a third of its rainforest into oil palm plantations. Although attention has been paid to the environmental consequences, the connection between oil palm cultivation and the evolving use of alcohol within local communities has received little attention. Studies conducted within rural communities have demonstrated that significant environmental changes frequently result in increased drug and alcohol consumption. Through an ethnographic study of an Indonesian village, this article reveals how the changing living and working environments have not only altered people’s ‘place-world’ but also their sense of identity and position in the world, leaving many disoriented and lost in the homogenous expanse of oil palm plantations. This has seemingly led to increased alcohol use among the village community. This finding offers a fresh and updated way to understand and interrogate the challenges with regard to present-day human-nature relations in agricultural interventions in Indonesia and beyond.
Ancient Egyptian ontologies have been commonly approached as related to order and chaos. Associated with the latter are the concepts of existence and non-existence, which may be expressed by the verb wn ‘to be’ and its derivatives, as well as the substantive n.tyt ‘what is’ and its negation iw.tyt ‘what is not’. The earliest attestations of n.tyt and iw.tyt are found in the Pyramid Texts, reflecting the importance of (non)existence in cosmic and funerary beliefs. By the Middle Kingdom, n.tyt and iw.tyt occur in titles and epithets of officials, some of whom were involved in boundary formation and traversal. This paper provides an overview of these developments and their insights on Middle Kingdom conceptions of the world. Exploring the role of transregional activities, it questions whether ‘what is’ and ‘what is not’ may reflect an ontology of boundaries connected with socio-political shifts of the early second millennium BCE.
[Formula: see text]
Anthropologists of the ontological turn claim that certain entities, processes, and relations are in principle inaccessible to outsiders of specific communities. Philosophers of ethnobiology see a challenge to the integration of scientific and ethnoscientific knowledge of nature in this claim. They propose to negotiate integration within a framework of overlapping ontologies. I explicate the methodology of the ontological turn and claim that it offers a better understanding of knowledge integration than does the philosophers’ framework. Based on two case studies, I argue for a revised notion of knowledge integration that takes scientific change and mutual influence between communities into account.
This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of terms like “systematizing” and “inter-objectivity” adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one.
This paper develops an outline for conceptualising the ontology of automobility. It does so not through engaging with traditional metaphysical ontological discourses but by focusing on the politics of ontology construction. That which goes by the name "automobility" is a political order, it is argued, that may be described as an ontocracy. Spatially, automobility circumscribes an ontosphere. The science through which automobility represents, constitutes and reproduces itself is ontology. The practitioners and personnel of this science may be described as ontologists, the agents who perform the routine work of sustaining what we call "the ontos of automobility. " Ontography is the work of reality inscription, of écriture, by which the political ontology of automobility is constituted and sustained. All the above are intertwined with, components of, made possible through, the exercise of ontopower, a form of constitutive power. Collectively, these terms allow for the identification of the ontopolitical activities and practices, agencies and properties, through which the automobility ontos is constituted, of which they are each reflexively components. The political ontology of automobility that is outlined in this paper is not unique to automobility, but is one example of, manifestation of, constituent element of, something larger, the political ontology of the late-Anthropocene. The concluding section of the paper contrasts the political ontology that is outlined here with the claim that the ontology we inhabit is a "mobilities ontology. "
This article offers a reassessment of the main import of Peter Winch’s philosophy of the social sciences. Critics argue that Winch presented a flawed methodology for the social sciences, while his supporters deny that Winch’s work is about methodology at all. Contrary to both, the author argues that Winch deals with fundamental questions about methodology, and that there is something substantial to learn from his account. Winch engages methodological questions without being committed to social ontology. Instead, Winch’s work on methodology is best described as a descriptive metaphysics of social inquiry. This alternative reading clarifies the close link between Winch’s argument for the autonomy of the social sciences and R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history.
Postmodernizm ve sömürgecilik sonrası eleştiriler antropolojinin farklı toplumları anlama misyonunun sorgulanmasına neden olmuştur. Aydınlanmacı modernist kabuller üzerinde temellenen materyalist, seküler ve antroposentrik antropoloji yaklaşımları felsefe ve eleştirel teoriden, bilim ve kuantum fiziğine kadar pek çok disiplin tarafından ciddi eleştirilere maruz bırakılmaktadır. Kültürel antropolojinin içinde yer alan din antropolojisi de daha geniş alanda antropoloji içinde yaşanan gelişmelerden birinci dereceden etkilenmektedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, din antropolojisinde son dönemde ortaya çıkan ve ontoloji vurgusu yapan eleştirel yaklaşımın, farklı toplumların dinî deneyim ve uygulamalarını anlayabilmek için sunduğu potansiyeli ortaya koymaktır. Bu yaklaşım isimlendirilirken, ontoloji kavramı İngilizce’de turn (dönüş) kelimesi ile birleştirilerek ontological turn (ontolojiye dönüş) ifadesi kullanılmaktadır. Çalışmamızda ilk olarak, antropolojinin kuruluşundan bu yana geçirdiği değişimler ele alınarak, ontolojiye dönüşün üzerine oturduğu temel ortaya konulmaktadır. Antropoloji disiplinin şekillenmesinde önemli rol oynayan sosyal yapısalcılık ve Representationalizm’in kabulleri, doğayı ve insanı anlama çabalarını da büyük ölçüde şekillendirmiştir. Antropolojide yaygın kullanıma sahip bu kabullere göre, insan evrensel ve sabit doğa kanunlarına bağlı olan dünyanın işleyişini anlamaya çalışırken, zihninde doğada var olanlar hakkında temsiller oluşturmaktadır. Fakat sadece bir tane doğa olduğuna göre, onun doğru anlaşılmasını ve yansıtılmasını sağlayan temsili de bir tane olmalıdır. Representationalist yaklaşımın, dünyayı temsiller üzerinden anlama çabası kültürel antropolojinin öncülerinden olan Edward Tylor’un inanç, bilgi ve zihin gibi kavramlarının arka planını oluşturmaktadır. Zihin insanın rasyonel kapasitesini ifade ederken inanç (belief) insanın pragmatik olarak ihtiyaç duyduğu, fakat temsil ettiğini iddia ettiği gerçekliklerden tamamen bağımsız temsillerin oluşturduğu bir alandır. Dinî kabuller ve pratikler inanç başlığı altında toplanarak, doğanın rasyonel ve bilimsel olmayan, dolayısıyla yanlış temsilleri olarak sınıflandırılmış olmaktadır. İnanç kavramı Tylor sonrasında da modernitenin dışında kalan toplulukları ve dinî uygulamaları anlamak için din antropolojisinde sıkça başvurulan bir kavram olmuştur. Ontolojiye dönüşün, kavramsal çerçeveye getirdiği eleştirilerle amaçladığı şey Batı merkezli tek bir realite algısının diğer kültürleri hâkimiyeti altına almasını engellemektir. Dolayısıyla en çok vurgu yapılan şeylerden birisi realitenin birden fazla olabileceğidir. Ontolojiye dönüşün bu yaklaşımı her şeyi olduğu gibi ciddiye alma şeklinde ifade edilmiştir. Muhatapların deneyimlerini ve kullanımlarını da içine alacak şekilde yapılan yeni tanımlamalar muhatapları ciddiye almak anlamına gelmektedir. Antropoloğun, muhatapların dünyayı anlarken kullandığı kavramların farklılığını kabul etmesi onların realitelerinin bizimkinden farklı olduğunu kabul etmesidir. Bu anlamda, tanımlama ve kavram oluşturma eylemi aslında farklı realiteler oluşturmaktır. Etnografik araştırmaların çoğunda, araştırmacı alana girmeden önce kullanacağı kavramları belirlemiş olmakta ve bu kalıplar zihninde iken alana girmektedir. Bu da alan araştırmasında karşılaşılan farklılıkların var olan kavramların içine sığdırılmaya çalışılması ve var olan düşüncelerin farklı açılardan onaylanması anlamına gelmektedir. Etnografik materyalin kendi kavramları ile anlaşılması veya etnografik fenomenlerin analiz edilmesi, açıklanması veya yorumlanmasını sınırlayan ön kabullerin bertaraf edilmesi gibi konular her zaman antropolojinin gündeminde olmuştur. Hatta bu sorular o kadar yaygın olarak sorulur ki sıradan sorular olarak görülebilmektedir. Dolayısıyla ontolojiye dönüşün farkı bu soruları sorması değil, bu sorulara yaklaşırken epistemolojik problemleri çözmek için ontolojik sorular sormasıdır. Bu anlayışın benimsenmesindeki sebep antropoloğun bakış açısını şekillendiren şeyin sosyal veya kültürel etkiler değil ontolojiye dair kabullerinin olduğu düşüncesidir. Dolayısıyla sorulması gereken soru da bir antropoloğun dünyanın ne olduğu konusundaki kabullerini nasıl bertaraf edebileceği hakkında olmalıdır. Sonuç olarak, ontolojiye dönüşün her şeyi olduğu gibi ciddiye alma fikri, etnografinin konusu olanlar ile etnografik verileri analiz edenler arasındaki hiyerarşiyi ortadan kaldırmayı amaçlamaktadır. Modern kategoriler aracılığı ile etnografiyi antropolojik analizlerin objesi olarak görmek yerine, yeni kavram ve analiz teknikleri oluşturmak için gerçek kaynak olarak görmeyi önermektedir.
This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologies. The established reading of perspectivism emphasizes this radical difference by focusing upon the objects of difference in perspectivism (bodies, for example, rather than souls). This article experiments instead with reading perspectivism as radically resembling Euro-American thought in its conceptualization of the nature of difference, that is, the form that difference takes as a relation. It argues that in schematic representations of Amerindian and Euro-American cosmologies, difference for both is always a matter of institution and construction, and resemblance is a matter of essence and necessity. Thus, paradoxically, arguments about radical difference may in fact be read to assert an underlying essentialism as to the nature of difference itself. I conclude by proposing that we abandon conceptions of the nature of difference, in favor of a focus on “styles” of difference, and discuss some non-anthropological examples of this approach, as well as instances of different “styles” of difference from my own fieldwork.
In this article I discuss different scientific and non-modern worlds as they appear in a performative (rather than representational) idiom, situating my analysis in relation to the recent ontological turns in science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology. I propose an ontology of decentered becoming that can help us take seriously the multiplicity of ‘found’ ontologies. A key concept is that of ‘islands of stability’, which enables a comparative transition between the worlds of science and shamanism. This offers an opportunity to reflect back critically and politically on modernity, while highlighting the problems of anthropological translation that surface in a performative apprehension of non-modern worlds. In conclusion, I touch on scientific and nonscientific worlds (complexity theory, cybernetics, Taoism, Zen) that do not center themselves on islands of stability.
This chapter examines a blasphemy trial on Lombok in 2010, in which a Muslim who claimed to have received revelations from the Angel Gabriel was charged with the offense of “insulting Islam” and accused of pretending to be a “false prophet”. Probing the ontological conflicts involved in this case, the chapter argues that courts are important sites of contemporary “religion-making”. Using this trial to show incommensurable worlds are being coproduced by courts and religious authorities, the chapter engages critically with anthropological positions that ontologize difference, suggesting that such approaches risk feeding into a violent politics of religious difference, being ill-suited for capturing the deep plurality within translocal religious traditions, such as Islam.
The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays.
The paper has two parts: First, I describe a relatively popular thesis in the philosophy of propositionalattitudes, worthy of the name “taking tense seriously”; and I distinguish it from a family of views in the metaphysics of time, namely, the A-theories (or what are sometimes called “tensed theories of time”). Once the distinction is in focus, a skeptical worry arises. Some A-theorists maintain that the difference between past, present, and future, is to be drawn in terms of what exists: growing-blocktheorists eschew ontological commitment,to future entities; presentists, to future and past entities. Others think of themselves as A-theorists but exclude no past or future things from their ontology. The metaphysical skeptic suspects that their attempt to articulate an “eternalist” version of the A-theory collapses into merely “taking tense seriously” — a thesis that does not imply the A-theory. The second half of the paper is the search for a stable eternalist A-theory. It includes discussion of temporary intrinsics, temporal parts, and truth. 2 2
A new and often controversial theoretical orientation that resonates strongly with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory, the so-called 'ontological turn' is receiving a great deal of attention in anthropology and cognate disciplines at present. This book provides the first anthropological exposition of this recent intellectual development. It traces the roots of the ontological turn in the history of anthropology and elucidates its emergence as a distinct theoretical orientation over the past few decades, showing how it has emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Viveiros de Castro, as well a number of younger scholars. Distinguishing this trajectory of thinking from related attempts to put questions of ontology at the heart of anthropological research, the book articulates critically the key methodological and theoretical tenets of the ontological turn, its prime epistemological and political implications, and locates it in the broader intellectual landscape of contemporary social theory. Offers the first overview of the ontological turn in anthropology. Provides an intellectual genealogy of the traffic in ideas between the three main national anthropological traditions over the last 3-4 decades. Engages with most important critiques made of the ontological turn, and how one might respond to them. Sketches the framework for future theoretical and methodological developments.
The book offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality-a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox addressed is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, the author identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. The author explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. The author then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.
Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. The chapters in this book draw on insights from feminist and critical race theory to develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. The central chapters of the book offer critical social realist accounts of gender and race. These accounts function as case studies for a broader approach that draws upon notions of ideology, practice, and social structure developed through interdisciplinary engagement with research in social science. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional chapters in the book situate a critical realist approach in relation to philosophical methodology, and to debates in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
This lecture gives a proposed framework within which to think about making up people as well as the looping effect. It elaborates on the kinds of people that will not be discussed, such as those belonging to different classifications called ‘ethnic’. The focus of this lecture is in the ways the social, medical and biological sciences create new classifications and new knowledge. The engines of discovery and autism are two of the topics covered by the lecture.
This article, which was delivered as the 2014 Annual Marilyn Strathern Lecture, outlines both some of the stimuli that led to the 'ontological turn' in anthropology and some of its implications. Ontology is outlined here by the author as an anti-epistemological and counter-cultural,
philosophical war machine.
This article takes a critical look at 'the ontological turn'. Illuminating 'the turn's' theoretical point of departure, and clarifying its anthropological implications, the article argues that two key problems arise if the theory is to be taken at face value. It points, first of all, to the difficulty in studying 'radical alterity', in the manner proposed by the new understanding of ontology within anthropology. If anthropology is, as the ontological turn advocates, not a study of multiple 'world-views' but of essentially different 'worlds' altogether, how, we ask, does one approach this methodologically? Put in other words, if we really believe in radically essential, fundamental ontological difference with what registers can we, then, conceive and describe ontological others in ways that do them ethnographic justice? Secondly, the article ponders the issues of radical essentialism and immanence advocated by the ontological turn, and shows how an anthropological endeavour that advocates incommensurable difference, as an analytical point of departure, may be problematic in relation to the impact that anthropology has outside academia. As history has so vividly shown us, anthropological constructions of radical alterity and ontological difference offer themselves, in social terms, all too easily to political constructions of Otherness. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
Martin Paleek and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropologyarguing that to become a true alternative to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections.
The book is organized around a flowchart comprising 16 key questions concerning truth, ranging from ‘Is truth a property?’ to ‘Is truth epistemically constrained?’. It expounds and engages with the ideas of many thinkers, from Aristotle and the Stoics, to Continental analytic philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, Frege, and Kotarbinski, to such leading figures in contemporary debates as Dummett, Putnam, Wright, and Horwich. In the course of this discussion, many important distinctions (between varieties of correspondence, for example, between different readings of ‘making true’, between various kinds of eternalism and temporalism) are emphasized that have so far been neglected in the literature.
According to our workaday concept of truth, what we think is true if and only if things are as we think they are. A ‘modest account’ of truth‐apt thinkables and of truth, in terms of higher‐order quantification over propositions, can spell out this platitude without invoking notions like correspondence, fact, or meaning. This account offers common ground to all parties in the realism/anti‐realism controversy concerning truth. In the final chapter, an argument from blind spots in the field of justification is used to support the alethic‐realist claim that truth outruns justifiability.
This piece reflects on two 'ontological turns': the recent anthropological movement and that occasioned earlier in analytic philosophy by the work of W. V. O. Quine. I argue that the commitment entailed by 'ontology' is incompatible with the laudable aim of the 'ontological turn' in anthropology to take seriously radical difference and alterity.
Social construction theorists face a certain challenge to the effect that they confuse the epistemic and the metaphysical: surely our conceptions of something are influenced by social practices, but that doesn't show that the nature of the thing in question is so influenced. In this paper I take up this challenge and offer a general framework to support the claim that a human kind is socially constructed, when this is understood as a metaphysical claim and as a part of a social constructionist debunking project. I give reasons for thinking that a conferralist framework is better equipped to capture the social constructionist intuition than rival accounts of social properties, such as a constitution account and a response-dependence account, and that this framework helps to diagnose what is at stake in the debate between the social constructionists and their opponents. The conferralist framework offered here should be welcomed by social constructionists looking for firm foundations for their claims, and for anyone else interested in the debate over the social construction of human kinds.
The anthropologist starts with an empty notebook and it seems that everything he writes in it is discovered empirically. But is it? I shall argue here that the fact that the natives are ‘rational’ in Mr. Lukes first or ‘universal’ sense is not discovered empirically and that this puts Mr. Lukes' philosophical problem in a different light.
Book description: Drawing upon the work of some of the most influential theorists in the field, Thinking Through Things demonstrates the quiet revolution growing in anthropology and its related disciplines, shifting its philosophical foundations. The first text to offer a direct and provocative challenge to disciplinary fragmentation - arguing for the futility of segregating the study of artefacts and society - this collection expands on the concerns about the place of objects and materiality in analytical strategies, and the obligation of ethnographers to question their assumptions and approaches.
The team of leading contributors put forward a positive programme for future research in this highly original and invaluable guide to recent developments in mainstream anthropological theory.
“Closing up the Corpses: Diseases of Sexuality and the Emergence of the Psychiatric Style of Reasoning.”
- A Davidson
“The Contingency of Concepts. Transcendental Deduction and Ethnographic Expression in Anthropological Thinking.”
- M Holbraad
Thinking through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically
- A Henare
- M Holbraad
- S Wastell
“Ontologically Challenged.”
- J Laidlaw
“One More Turn and You’re There.”
- J Laidlaw
- P Heywood
“Talisman of Thought: Shamanist Ontologies and Extended Cognition in Northern Mongolia.”
- M A Pedersen
Common Nonsense: A Review of Certain Recent Reviews of the ‘Ontological Turn
- M A Pedersen
Ontologically Challenged.” Anthropology of This Century
- J Laidlaw
One More Turn and You’re There.” Anthropology of This Century
- J Laidlaw
- P Heywood