Anthropology of Ontologies

Anthropology of Ontologies

Anthropology of Ontologies

Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 44, 2015

Eduardo Kohn

McGill University

Abstract

Theturntoontology,oftenassociatedwiththerecentworksofPhilippeDescola,

EduardoViveirosdeCastro,andBrunoLatour,butalsoemerginginmanyother places, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s formulation, “symptomatic” and “diagnostic”ofsomething. Itis,I hereargue,aresponsetothesensethat socioculturalanthropology, founded in the footsteps of a broad humanist “linguistic” turn, a field that takes social construction as the special kind of human reality that frames its inquiries, is not fully capableofgrapplingwiththekindsofproblemsthatareconfrontingusintheso called Anthropocene –an epoch in which human and nonhuman kinds and futures have become increasingly entangled to the extentthat ethical and political problems can no longer be treated as exclusively human problems. Attending to these requires new conceptual tools, something that a non-reductionistic, ethnographically inspired, ontological anthropology might be in a privileged position to provide.

Keywords

Ontology, Anthropological Theory, Anthropocene, Multinaturalism

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. The Broad Turn to Ontology

3. The Narrow Turn to Ontology

3.1 Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture

3.2Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics

3.3Latour’s Modes of Existence

4. Conclusion

While philosophy as a field was totally dependent on the concept of modernity, it appeared to me that anthropology could be an entry into the contemporary: precisely because it took ontology seriously at last. Not as symbolic representation. Not as those beliefs left on the wrong side of the modernizing frontier. But as a life and death struggle to have the right to stand in one’s own time and place.

Bruno Latour (2014a)

Introduction

Iherediscusstheturntoontologyinsociocultural anthropology. Thisturn, narrowlydefined,is closely tied to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism,” and a series of conversationsaroundhiswork. In the context of North American anthropology this turn is sometimes thought of as a “French” turn (Kelly 2014), which would, in addition, involve the recent works of Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour whose separateand originalontological projects are nonetheless in close dialogue with Viveiros de Castro’s. It is alsosometimesthoughtofasa “European”turn,whichwouldinvolvethewaysin which Viveiros de Castro’s work has been taken up in and around Cambridge, and elsewhere, especially in relation to the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988, 1991, 1995) and Roy Wagner (1981, 1991) (see especially Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell2007,Holbraad and Pedersen 2009,Holbraad 2012, 2013a, 2013b, Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; see alsoCorsín Jiménez and Willerslev 2007, Alberti and Bray 2009, Pedersen 2011,M. Scott 2013,Palečekand Risjord 2013,Morita 2014, Jensen 2014).However, this movement is part ofa broader turn to ontology in anthropology that cannot be circumscribed by any single intellectual or social context. If the narrow turn itself, as I will explain, cannot be so easily identified as a coherent movement, then this broader one is even more difficult to identify as such.

Nonethelessthevariousontologicalanthropologiesshare something important. They areresponses to certain conceptual problems and contradictions that arise as anthropological thought faces new challenges. They are, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s(2015) words both “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” of some sort of broader shift; they arereactions, at times explicit, to the specter ofa global ecological crisis. This crisis, with all its political valences, all of its attendant imaginaries, and all of the ways in which it is changingourunderstandingoftherelationswehumanshave to that which is otherthan human, is “ecologizing” (Latour 2013 [2012]) how we think about politicsinmanyfieldsrangingfrom history (Chakrabarty 2009, 2012, 2014) to political theory (Connolly 2013) to literature (Morton 2013). It is also forcing us to recognize that anthropology, as a humanistic science, for all of its insights, lackssome of the conceptualtoolsneeded tofacetheseproblems. Theturntoontologyinanthropology,then, is,Ibelieve, a response tothisbroaderproblem. I here seek to trace someofthecontours of a general ethnographically inspired ontological anthropology, both in its narrow and broad iterations, arguing that such an approach is uniquely poised to develop conceptual tools that can be part of an ethical practice that must also include and be transformed by our relation to the nonhuman (Kohn 2014).

For the purposes of this essay I define “ontology” as the study of “reality” –one thatencompasses but is not limited to humanly constructed worlds. One could, alternatively, reserve the word “ontology” for the study ofBeing, in the Heideggerian senseand use “ontic” for reality, or one could think of ontology in terms of “becoming” (Deleuze andGuattari1987 [1980]). Onecouldalso,assomedo,thinkofontologyintermsofthe variable sets of historically contingent assumptions through which humans apprehend reality –a position that can make ontology nearly synonymous with culture (see Venkatesan et al. 2010).

An important related word is “metaphysics,” which I define as the systemicattentiontoorthedevelopmentofmoreorlessconsistentandidentifiablestyles or forms of thought that change our ideas about the nature of “reality.” Metaphysics is thus concerned with concepts. And, crucially, a metaphysics is not necessarily an epistemology. That is, it is not necessarily concerned with knowledge and its objects. Therearevariants of the turn to ontologythat are metaphysical but not ontological, as I have defined the term (e.g., Viveiros de Castro 2014 [2009], Holbraad 2012, Skafish n.d.). That is, these approaches systematically explore forms of thought without necessarily making claims about “reality” –forms of thought that also demonstrate that any reality claim isitself either distinct to one metaphysical framework, often associated with the West, or the product of a clash of metaphysical frameworks. If there is a “reality” here –and this is a term these metaphysically-oriented ontological anthropologiststend to avoid– it is inherently relational, comparative or recursive (Holbraad 2012, 2013a).

There are also ontological forms of anthropology that are not metaphysical. Thatis,theyexploremodesofbeing“madeover”byrealities not fully circumscribed by human worlds. They cultivate representational crafts that can amplify such transformations –holding, perhaps, that any systemic conceptual account of these modeswould “deflect” (Diamond 2008) our attention away from the actual possibility of being made over. One could call this approach an ontological poetics. It involves cultivating representational forms (poetics) that can tap into to some sort of broader generative creativity (poesis). In this sense Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s (2012) experimental ethnographic film Leviathan, which takes placeon, around, as well as under and above a deep-sea fishing vessel, isan example of anthropology as ontological poetics. Multiple cameras attached to bodies, thrust under water, or mounted on different parts of the ship disrupt any singular human perspective or narrative. The result is a disturbing dissolution of the self as we become enveloped in amonstrous marine world of piscine creatures, reeling boats, butchered bodiesand diving gulls. Leviathan presents no argument and certainly no metaphysics; rather it dissolves many of the conceptual structures that hold us together so that we can be made over by the unexpected entities and forces that emerge from the depths(see StevensonandKohn2015). The cultivation of representational craft as a way of becoming attuned to other kinds of realities, a hallmark of what I am calling ontological poetics, isalso evident in the writing of McLean (2009), Raffles (2012), Stewart (2012), Stevenson (2014), and Pandian (2015).

Thereare, in addition,ontologicalapproachesconcernedwithBeinginahumansense(e.g.,Jackson1989)andits“becoming”underadverseconditions(BiehlandLocke2010). Because its explorations are largely limited to the human in terms of the human, it is not a focus of this essay. Nonetheless, this approach can speak to distinctively human moral worlds in ways that can alsobe cognizant of the historically given sets of ontological assumptions that might frame these (Zigon 2014).

If we accept that ontologyconcerns thestudy ofreality, ontological anthropology becomes a particular but capacious way of studying reality that takes into account two key elements of our field: one methodological, the other theoretical. The major methodological innovation of our field is, of course, ethnographybywhichImean a practice ofimmersiveengagement withtheeverydaymessiness ofhuman lives and thebroader worlds in which humanslive, as well as the various more or less reflexive forms of voicing attention to that practice. By being ethnographic, and by developingconceptualresourcesoutofthisengagement,ontologicalanthropology,as Iwilldiscussbelow,makesauniquecontributiontowhatmightotherwiseseemtobe a topic best reserved for philosophy. The methodological focus also delimits the subject matter. Ontological anthropology isnot generically about “the world,” and it never fully leaves humans behind.It is about what we learn about the world and the human through the ways in which humans engage with the world. And attention to such engagements often undoes any bounded notion ofwhat the human is. Ontological anthropology is, for the most part post-humanist but that does not mean that it sidesteps humans and human concerns altogether.

Anthropology’sdefining theoretical contribution is the culture concept, broadly construed, and ontological anthropology grapples critically and conceptually with its affordances and limitations in sophisticated ways. Thecultureconceptisananthropologicalrefinementofabroaderlinguistic,epistemological, representational, or correlationalturninphilosophy. Thatturn,oftenassociatedwith Immanuel Kant,shifts philosophical attention away from questions about the substance of the world itselfto thoseconditions under which humans know or represent the world (Meillassoux2008 [2006]). Inthesocialsciencesandanthropology,beginningwiththelargelymutually independent efforts of Émile Durkheimand Franz Boas, this attentionto epistemology is channeled in ways that explicitly or implicitly work with some of the ontological properties of linguistic representation. The hallmark of modern anthropology, as prefigured by these two scholars, is the recognition of the reality of phenomena that we canterm“sociallyconstructed.” Sociallyconstructedphenomenaaretheproductof contingent and conventional contexts, be they historical, social, cultural, or linguistic. The circular, reciprocal, co-constitutive nature of these constructions makes them language-like, regardless of whether the items related are explicitly treatedaslinguistic. TheBoasianapproach, however, istiedtolanguage in a fairly explicit way (e.g., Boas 1889; see Stocking 1974:58-59). This is evident in Geertz’s symbolicanthropology(Geertz1973a)aswellasitscritiques(CliffordandMarcus1986), which draw attention to the constructed nature of anthropological representations themselves, and thus amplify the linguistic even as they incorporate more sophisticated analyses of power and history. Durkheim’s approach (1938[1895]), although not linguistic in name, explores elements of social life that are essentially symbolic. His definition of a social fact bears all the formal properties of a symbolic representational system such as human language in which relata are produced by and contribute to the system through which they relate –a system that achieves a kind of closure, totality, and separation by virtue of this special kindofrelationality. Idesignateas“cultural”anyentitythatistreatedasexhibiting such properties, regardless of whether or not it is so named.

In the contemporary French tradition this linguistic turn is much more explicit, influencedasitisbythesemiologyofFerdinand de Saussure(1986 [1916]),especiallyasitwastakenup by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Saussurean tradition sees the sign, of which the human linguisticsignisconsideredtheprimeexample,asbotharbitraryandconventional. It is arbitrary in the sense that it has no direct connection to or motivation from its object of reference, and conventional, in the sense that its meaningor referential value isfixedinsteadbyasetofcodifiedrelationsithastoothersuchsignsinthe systemofsigns. Oneresultofthistakeonlanguageisthatwegetasharpdivision betweentheworldofsignsandtheworldtowhichthosesignsreferwithoutan accountofhowthesemightbeconnected. This is a problem for any anthropological approach that relies on Saussure for its theory of representation (Keane2003). Lévi-Strausssaw the dualism that the Saussurean gap implies as the human problem,anditisevidentalsointheworksofheirstothisstructuralisttradition such as Michel Foucault. When Foucault (1970 [1966]), for example, writes that “life itself” was unthinkable before the historical conditionsthat made such a concept possible, he is reflectingthe human reality that this broader turn to language and social construction reveals at the same time that he is voicing the difficulty, given an analytical framework built on human language, to conceptualize that which is outside of language or culture.

My version of ontological anthropology, based on the ethnography of humanrelationstorainforestbeingsinEcuador’sUpperAmazon,addresses the problem of language directly (Kohn 2013). I argue that the best way to reconfigure anthropology’s relationship to language is through the ethnographic study of howhumanscommunicatewithahostofnonhumanbeingsinaworld thatisitselfcommunicativebut notsymbolic or linguistic. Thisallowsustoseelanguage “from the outside,” so to speak, by looking at its relationship to a broader series of forms of communication that are representational but not language-like, and whose unique properties emerge ethnographicallyatthesametimeastheyrevealwhatmakeslanguagespecial. The semiotic framework that is helpful here is that of19th century philosopher and logicianCharles Peirce (e.g., Peirce 1955), rather than Saussure’s, because it can situate human representational processes vis-à-vis nonhuman ones (Hoffmeyer 1996, 2008,Hornborg 1996, Deacon 1997) in ways that allow for what Peirce calls the “Outward Clash” (cited in Keane 2003) with that which lies beyond human forms of representation. I am interested in understanding how these kinds of realities make us over once the grip of languageis loosened. I argue that doing this is crucial for anthropology, since it reveals how so many ofour conceptual assumptions(e.g., about difference, context, relationality and commensurability) are drawnfromlanguageanditsproperties,eveninpost-humanistapproaches. Getting right this relationship of language to non-language, especially via the route of the representational-but-not-linguistic, as revealed in the complex communicative ecologiesoftropicalforests,will,Ibelieve,helpuscreatetheconceptualresources we will need as we learn to “ecologize.”

The broad ontological turn in anthropology has an affinity with a related turn today in philosophy, which is also trying to free itself from the Kantian reorientation of philosophy as the study of human thought. This orientation has, according toQuentin Meillassoux (2008 [2006]), kept philosophy from appreciating what he calls the “great outdoors” –the world beyond human representation (see also Bryant 2011; Bryant, Srnicek,and Harman 2011; Harman 2012).

I do not think it is warranted to see the turn to language, which provides the foundationsforanthropology,as“wrong.” Quitetheopposite;itgetsatsomething fundamentalabouttherealityofhumanlife.Ittoo,inthissenseisontological. And yet by attending to a certain aspect of reality it forecloses attention to others. So, in brief, ontological anthropology, as I define it, is the non-reductive ethnographic exploration of realities that are not necessarily socially constructed in ways that allow us to do conceptual work with them. I see this as a response to a conceptual, existential, ethical and political problem –how tothinkabouthumanlifeinaworldin whichakindoflifeandfuturethatisboth beyond the human and constitutive of the human is, today, in jeopardy.

The Broad Turn to Ontology

If culture is that which is socially constructed, then “nature,” whatever it is, can be defined as that which is not. Of course the idea of nature is certainly historically contingent and need not exist at a given time or in a given place. And yet ontological anthropologists would hold that an exclusive focus on social construction, such that, if we can talk about nature, it is only as culture, is a problem.

There are many anthropologistswhose work refuses that solution in ways that orient their work toward ontology. Many of these precede the narrow turn to ontology. Gregory Bateson (2000 [1972], 2002 [1979]), in his insistenceonlookingathumansaspartsoflarger“ecologiesofmind,”andwhosawa globalenvironmentalcrisisastheconsequenceofour inability tograspthese broader relationsisoneimportantontological anthropologist.

Ontological concerns seem to be difficult to avoid in certain arenas of inquiry. As much as our anthropological responsibility is to demonstrate the historical constructionofnatureorlandscapeorforests(Balée1989, Raffles2002),thereare alsoforces that move in the other direction, and conceptualizing these issomehow inescapable when dealing anthropologically with the environment or ecology (Helmreich2009,Choy2011). Similarly,asimportantasitistofocusonthesocial life ofthings (Appadurai1986), there is something about ethnographic attention to materiality thatproblematizes the relationship between human (social) subjects and nonhumanobjects(Miller2005). Andwhenanthropologiststurntheirattentionto medicine, as important as it is to use the analytic ofsocial construction to question the authority ofmedical and scientific knowledge and institutions,thereissomethingaboutthebodythatforcesthem onto ontological terrain (Lock 1993; Mol 2002; Thompson 2007; Roberts 2014). And, although attention toembodied experience has largelybeen a humanistic concern (Jackson 1996), phenomenology provides one way to break down distinctions between humans and nonhumans by bypassing the messy problem of humanly exceptional forms ofrepresentation (Ingold2000, 2007, 2011; see also Hallowell 1960). Finally, if religion can be treated as a cultural system (Geertz 1973b [1966]), taking spirits seriously forces us onto ontological terrain (Chakrabarty 2000, Singh 2015).

Latour, especially in his development, along with others, of what has come to be known asActorNetworkTheory(ANT)(Latour1988 [1984],Callon, Law, and Ripp1986,Callon1999 [1986]) has been central in allowing anthropologists working withnonhumans,theenvironment,materiality,medicine,science,technology,andthebody,a way tobringnatureintocultureandcultureintonature and much of the broader turn to ontology in our field relies in some way or another on this framework. ANT is sometimes thought ofmethodologically as “symmetrical anthropology”(Latour1993 [1991]:103)initsrefusaltogiveexplanatoryprioritytoone actor or entity over another; its metaphysical correlate would be a “flat ontology,” (Bryant 2011): the world is the product of many kinds of agencies, none of which is necessarily moreimportantthananyother. ANTseekstoovercomethemind/bodydualismby assuming that everything has mind-like agential as well as matter-like properties. Thiskindofrelationality,whererelata do not precede their relating, has a Saussurean flavor to it, and is treated as explicitly language-likeinsomeversionsofScienceandTechnologyStudies(seeLawandMol2008:58).

Even if she would resist appeals tothe gendered authoritative foundations that terms like metaphysicsandontologycan imply,Donna Haraway is one of the most important voices in the anthropological turn to ontology. As a trained biologist she insists on the responsibility of getting the sciences “right,”evenasshe interrogates Science’sclaimstotruth–questioninganysharplinebetweenfactand“fabulation”(Haraway1991a,1991b). And she is dedicated to living well with other kinds of beings, something that she drawsfromher dailylifewithhercaninecompanions(Haraway2003,2008). Sheholds these commitmentsin generative tensionwith a sensitive attunement to politics and history. ShehasacomplexandsubtleengagementwiththeMarxian and feministtraditionthat allowshertotrackpower,desireandthegenderedhistoricalstructuresthatchannelthese. Inshort,iftheturntoontologyiscriticizedforbeingapolitical, reactionary, too focused on exotic alters (Bessire and Bond 2014) –a claim with some foundation but one that I will critically evaluate in my discussion of the narrowturn against which it is raised– then it is certainly not one that can be leveled against Haraway. And Haraway’s project is profoundly ontological in the sense that she insists on getting other kinds of beings into our anthropological accountswith the hopes of imagining and enacting a kind of ethics and politics that can make room for these other kinds of beings. Haraway’s approach has been extended in “multi-species ethnography” (Kirksey and Helmreich2010), which takes on the question of what kind of hope is possible in what Anna Tsing (2014) calls “blasted landscapes” (see Kirksey 2014; for explorations related to transgender, gender, and race see Hayward 2013, Weaver 2013, and Agard-Jones 2013).

The Narrow Ontological Turn

The narrow ontological turn associated with the recently translated books of Descola(2013 [2005])ViveirosdeCastro(2014[2009]),andLatour(2013[2012])isinsomeways aFrenchturn. Anditistheonethatisproducingthemostinterest(andanxiety)in North American anthropology. This turn shares with so much of anthropology certain assumptions about representation that come from Saussurean linguistics as it wasadopted by Lévi-Strauss. Theseassumptionsareevidenteveninthevarious critiques these approaches pose to social construction. Lévi-Strauss, however, is important in another way. He is, perhaps, the originalontologicalanthropologistinhisinsistencethatnativethoughtisconceptual in its own right, and in ways that undermine western metaphysical concepts (Lévi-Strauss 1966), and also in his even more radical insistence that thought itself (which becomes visible in our anthropological attempts to think with the thoughts of others) revealsontologicalpropertiesoftheuniverse(Lévi-Strauss1992 [1955]:56). IfIrefer tothe recent work of Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Latouras the “narrow” ontological turn, it is in no way to disparage it as limited. One goal of this essay is to appreciate just how varied and sophisticated theirprojects are.