[The following is an anonymous reader letter I received in response to some of the recent discussions about anthropology & the ontological turn.]

I don’t get the ontological turn, to be honest.  Oh, I get it intellectually, this struggle to understand how we can understand the other yet also incorporate that into our philosophy, and to open up our thinking beyond just a mentalese version of culture (rules, symbols, etc.).  We’re material beings, we’re agents, the world is a material place, other people think differently than we do… You think that would all be common sense at this point for anthropologists, rather than a big existential crisis all over again.

Oh, I do think the ontological turn is doing interesting intellectual work; I like theory after all, and this is a struggle on the sociocultural side, a bit of an identity crisis about the loss of culture and the expansion of ethnography to just about everywhere.  But I also see it as doing a fair amount of disciplining work, of promoting a high-intellectual agenda, of saying there’s serious stuff going on, and that’s what really matters.

It would be simpler to say, philosophers, we love you, you’re really smart, well trained, good at debate.  But you’re also royally screwed, and experimental philosophy, that won’t really save you.  And then just to claim philosophy as our own.  I’ve often thought that, that anthropology is really an empirical, grounded philosophy, an investigation of how people think and act based on what they actually do and say.  It’s like going back to the Greek philosophers.  But we’re not doing that.  Rather, the new ontologists are trying to act daring enough to claim that ground, but really don’t seem well-versed enough to get into that fight. Continue reading →