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978-1-107-10388-7 — The Ontological Turn

Martin Holbraad , Morten Axel Pedersen
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The Ontol o gical Turn

A recent and oten 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. his book provides the irst
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 as 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 on the broader
intellectual landscape of contemporary social theory.

MARTIN HOLBRAAD is Professor of Social Anthropology at University

College London (UCL). He is the author of Truth in Motion: he Recursive
Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012) and co-editor of hinking hrough
hings: heorizing Artefacts Ethnographically (2007). Having studied the
relationship between religious and political practices in Cuba since the late
1990s, he currently holds a European Research Council Consolidator Grant
for a ive-year project titled Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary
Politics, leading a team of researchers to chart comparatively the formation
of revolutionary personhood in selected countries of Latin America and the
Middle East and North Africa.

MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN is Professor of Social Anthropology at the

University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Not Quite Shamans: Spirit
Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (2011), which received
honourable mention for the Bateson Prize, and (with L. Højer) Urban
Hunters: Dreaming and Dealing in Times of Transition (in press). From
2011–2016 he held a Sapere Aude Research Leader Grant from the Danish
Research Council, sparking of his recent reseach on Lutheran Christian
movements and vernacular political theology in Denmark.

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NEW DEPARTURES IN ANTHROPOLOGY

New Departures in Anthropology is a book series that focuses on emerging

themes in social and cultural anthropology. With original perspectives
and syntheses, authors introduce new areas of inquiry in anthropology,
explore developments that cross disciplinary boundaries, and weight in on
current debates. Every book illustrates theoretical issues with ethnographic
material drawn from current research or classic studies, as well as from
literature, memoirs and other genres of reportage. he aim of the series is to
produce books that are accessible enough to be used by college students and
instructors, but will also stimulate, provoke and inform anthropologists at
all stages of their careers. Written clearly and concisely, books in the series
are designed equally for advanced students and a broader range of readers,
inside and outside academic anthropology, who want to be brought up to
date on the most exciting developments in the discipline.

Series Editorial Board
Jonathan Spencer, University of Edinburgh
Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

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he Ontological Turn
An Anthropological Exposition

MARTIN HOLBRAAD
University College London

MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN

University of Copenhagen

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Contents

List of Figures and Boxes page vii

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: he Ontological Turn in Anthropology 1

hree Ontological Turnings 9
An Overview of the Book 24

1 Other Ontological Turns 30

Philosophy and ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ 33
Science and Technology Studies 37
Alternative Ontology 46
Deep Ontologies 55
Our Ontological Turn 65

2 Analogic Anthropology: Wagner’s Inventions and

Obviations 69
American Convention 71
Culture as Invention 76
he Obviation of Meaning 87
Myth and Its Obviation Sequences 94
Wagner’s Ontology 104

3 Relational Ethnography: Strathern’s Comparisons

and Scales 110
Relations Everywhere 112
Comparison All the Way Down 121

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Contents

Postplural Abstraction 130

Deep Hesitation 140
Trans-temporal Comparison 145
Strathern and Ontology: An Awkward Relationship 151

4 Natural Relativism: Viveiros de Castro’s Perspectivism

and Multinaturalism 157
Amerindian Perspectivism 160
Savage Structuralism 166
Anthropology as Ontology 173
Taking People Seriously 184
Conceptual Self-determination 194

5 hings as Concepts 199

From Humanism to Posthumanism 201
hinking hrough hings 209
Rethinking hings 214
Powder and Its Conceptual Afordances 220
Talismans as hought 227
Pragmatology, or Art Backwards 238

6 Ater the Relation 242

Christian Conversion and the New Melanesian Ethnography 246
he Great Indoors: A Case of Christian Conversion 253
Taking Transcendence Seriously 264
Faith in Motion? A Speculative Illustration 271
How to Keep Turning 278

Conclusion 282
Post-critical Anthropology 288
he Politics of Ontology 293

Bibliography 299
Index 333

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Figures and Boxes

Figures
2.1 Wagner’s nature/culture reversal page 82
2.2 Wagner’s scheme of metaphoric invention 89
2.3 Wagner’s holographic model of obviation 97
2.4 Obviation sequence of Daribi myth about the origin of
food crops 101
3.1 Postplural abstraction 135
3.2 Trans-temporal comparison 149

Boxes
0.1 Why the ontological turn is not relativism 12
2.1 Part-whole relations in obviation and the hermeneutic circle 92
3.1 Strathern’s dialogue on perspectivism with Viveiros de Castro 152
4.1 Ontology in the mirror: Viveiros de Castro and Wagner 174
4.2 Viveiros de Castro, Deleuze and anthropology 182

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i

Preface and Acknowledgements

A controversial theoretical and methodological approach that resonates

with wider developments in contemporary philosophy and social theory,
the so-called ontological turn has been the subject of heated debates in
anthropology and cognate disciplines such as archaeology and Science
and Technology Studies over recent years. Drawing together and taking
stock of these debates, this book traces the origins of the ontological
turn in the history of anthropology and elucidates its emergence as a
distinct analytical method since the postmodern crises of the 1980s,
articulating its core theoretical tenets as well as its methodological,
ethical and political implications. Placing the ontological turn within the
broader intellectual landscape of both past and present anthropological
theorizing, the book addresses the following basic questions: What are the
key methodological and theoretical tenets of the ontological turn? What
critiques has it elicited, and what are the possible responses to them?
What are its wider epistemological, political and ethical ramiications?
his book’s central contention is that the ontological turn in anthro-
pology must be understood as a strictly methodological proposal – that
is, a technology of ethnographic description. As such, the ontological
turn asks ontological questions without taking ontology (or indeed
ontologies) as an answer. Far from prescribing and thus curtailing the
horizon of anthropological inquiry in the name of an ultimate reality or
essence that may ground it (i.e. providing an ‘ontology’ in the substantive

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Preface and Acknowledgements

sense), the ontological turn is the methodological injunction to keep this

horizon perpetually open. Above all, it is the injunction to keep con-
stitutively open the question of what any given object of ethnographic
investigation might be and, therefore, how existing concepts and theo-
ries have to be modulated in order the better to articulate it. What are
the objects and manners of anthropological inquiry, and what could they
become, are the abidingly ontological questions that lend the ‘turn’ its
name. he ontological turn is not concerned with what the ‘really real’
nature of the world is or similar orthodox philosophical or metaphysical
agendas oten associated with the word ‘ontology’. Rather, the ontologi-
cal turn poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems.
Only, as we shall see, it so happens that epistemology in anthropology
has to be about ontology, too.
So, anthropology has always engaged with ontological questions, even
if this has not always been clear to the authors of ethnographic texts
or their readers. Indeed, another core claim of this book is that rather
than a revolutionary rupture from the anthropological past, the turn
to ontology with which its chapters are concerned involves releasing in
their fullest form analytical potentials that have always been at the heart
of the discipline’s project, and which can be recognized in some of the
greatest exponents of the distinct mode of thinking we call anthropolog-
ical, including, say, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss and Schneider.
More precisely, the ontological turn involves three analytical practices
that have been characteristic of the anthropological project possibly
since its inception, namely relexivity, conceptualization and experi-
mentation, each of which can be recognized in theoretical developments
within, and engagements between, the discipline’s three so-called great
national traditions, namely, the American, the British and the French.
While a thorough account of this trans-Atlantic traic in anthropologi-
cal ideas and perspectives will have to be provided elsewhere, this book
seeks to trace the core theoretical developments and genealogies that
eventually congealed into the ontological turn, represented in the work,

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Preface and Acknowledgements

respectively, of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Eduardo Viveiros de

Castro.
Setting forth these intellectual developments systematically and in
clear language, and scrutinizing their basic theoretical and methodo-
logical assumptions, the ambition of the book is to provide a general
introduction to a body of literature that is oten regarded as esoteric and
diicult to read, contributing also to setting the agenda for its potential
future development. he hope is that such a discussion of the ontologi-
cal turn’s place in the broader intellectual landscape might help to move
the debate about it away from the divisive and earth-scorching manner
so characteristic of ‘irst generation’ discussions about ontology within
anthropology, including some of our own writings. Far from stoking the
ire by putting forward another debating piece written in the rhetori-
cal and provocative style characteristic of hot academic controversy, the
ambition is to engage with the critics of the ontological turn by clarifying
potential misunderstandings and making explicit assumptions that have
hitherto remained largely tacit. Certainly, there is need for a thorough
and, ideally, straightforward exposition of what this theoretical orienta-
tion is all about, conveying its core tenets and surveying its analytical
possibilities as well as potential pitfalls. It is up to the reader to decide
whether we have gone some way towards meeting this goal.
he idea to write this book was irst conceived over lunch conversa-
tions with Matei Candea, Eduardo Kohn and Patrice Maniglier at the
Comparative Metaphysics Colloquium at Cerisy, Normandy, in August
2013 (see Charbonnier, Salmon & Skaish 2016). We thank them and
other scholars participating in this seminal event, including its three
organizers Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon and Peter Skaish, as well
as Philippe Descola, for inspiration and encouragement. For their sup-
port we would also like to thank the editors of this book series, Michael
Lambek and Jonathan Spencer, as well as our Cambridge University
Press editor Andrew Winnard and other people from the Press, includ-
ing Bethany Gaunt and Mary Catherine Bongiovi. hanks also to Flora

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Preface and Acknowledgements

Botelho and Neil Wells for their help with preparing the manuscript and
the index for publication.
For reading and commenting on drats of our chapters we are enor-
mously grateful to Benjamin Alberti, Kristofer Albris, Mikkel Bille,
Tom Boellstorf, Matthew Carey, Igor Cherstich, Jo Cook, David Cooper,
Iracema Dulley, Alice Elliot, Astrid Grue, Agnieszka Halemba, Casper
Bruun Jensen, Stine Krøijer, Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Morten Nielsen,
Adam Reed, Joel Robbins, Julia Sauma, Mario Schmitt, Michael Scott,
Charles Stewart, Soumhya Venkatesan and James Weiner, as well as mem-
bers of the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture (CROC) research
group at University College London (UCL), students in the Contemporary
Anthropological heory class at the University of Copenhagen and the
Advanced Cultural heory seminar at the University of California Santa
Cruz and participants in seminars, workshops and conferences held in
the United Kingdom, Denmark and other parts of Europe, the United
States, Cuba, Mongolia and Japan where diferent versions of the argu-
ments developed in this book have been presented.
In Chapters  2, 3, 5 and 6 we have drawn liberally on the follow-
ing previously published works:  pp 37–46 of Holbraad’s monograph
Truth in Motion:  he Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); sections of our co-written
article “Planet M:  the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern,” pub-
lished in two diferent versions, in Cambridge Anthropology Volume 28,
Issue 3, pp. 43–65 (2009) and Anthropological heory Volume 9, Issue 4,
pp. 371–394 (2009); sections of Holbraad’s article “Can the thing speak?,”
irst published online on the Open Anthropology Cooperative Press
(Working Papers Series #7, 2011), with further versions published in
Savage Objects, edited by G. Pereira (Guimaraes: INCM, 2013), pp. 17–30,
and Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion, edited by P. Harvey
et al. (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 228–237; sections of Chapter 4 in
Pedersen's monograph Not Quite Shamans:  Spirit Worlds and Political
Lives in Northern Mongolia (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2011);

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Preface and Acknowledgements

sections of Pedersen's article “he task of anthropology is to invent rela-

tions” published in Critique of Anthropology Volume 32, Issue 1, pp. 59–65
(2012), and Holbraad’s commentary “Response to Bruno Latour’s ‘hou
shall not freeze-frame’,” written in 2004 and available online at abaetenet.
net/nansi. Where relevant, we thank the publishers of these works for
permission to draw on them here.
Holbraad would like to record his gratitude to successive cohorts of
students at UCL who interrogated early versions of many of the ideas
developed in this book (this is ‘anthropology B’!); to colleagues at the
Instituto de Filosoia in Havana, as well as Leo, Nely and Maryanis for
hosting him during ieldwork made possible by his ERC Consolidator
grant, ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP; and to Alice for her intellectual
stimulation and all-round love and support throughout the period of
the book’s preparation. In addition to thanking Kimi, Sophie and Ines
for their patience, support and love, Pedersen also wishes to thank
his colleagues and especially his former and current doctoral stu-
dents (Dan, Antonia, Christian, Stine, Ida, Lise, Sandra and My) at
the Department of Anthropology in Copenhagen for comments, criti-
cism, reading suggestions and stimulating ideas that have contributed
to the formulation and reinement of this book’s approach and argu-
ment, as well as the University of California Santa Cruz anthropol-
ogy department for a visiting professorship and the Danish Research
Council of the Humanities for a Sapere Aude Research Leader grant
which made his 2014 visit to California inancially possible and intel-
lectually stimulating.
We thank all these people as well as all those whom we may have omit-
ted here by mistake: this book truly could not have been written without
them. We reserve special thanks to Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro and Roy Wagner who generously read and commented on the
chapters presenting their work. he standard proviso about all responsi-
bility for errors of interpretation or other inaccuracies being entirely our
own is particularly apt in this case.

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