As Rex noted, I think the Anthropocene, as a concept, militates against multispecies perspectives, since it so keenly reinscribes an anthropocentric view—at a time when “posthumanists” accounts are revealing the Anthropos to be shot through with other forms of life that quite trouble our dreams of a freestanding human. But I do share the cheering reassurance in this issue that “the importance and relevance of anthropology rests on its traditional strengths”—empirical and analytic approaches that redeploy quite well in ethnographically accounting for nonhumans, as I’ve suggested in several of my posts this month. Just as importantly, the depiction of anthropology as “a discipline continually grappling with how to understanding the interactions of global, regional, and local variables” linked to climate change does little to preclude a principle attention to nonhumans. Perhaps the “thrown” quality of encountering anthropogenic landscapes will eventually achieve a shift in perspective similar to the interior recognition of manifold companion species in the form of the microfauna lining our guts.

Beyond Nature and Culture is an entirely different matter, and I’m drawn to it because Descola provides a useful template for the panoply of possible relations humans can have with nonhumans. Even though, it also shows how far beyond anthropology ethnographic accounts will have to extend in order to incorporate life forms broadly in our renderings of everyday life. At least you can see it from his pages, in the goal “to gain a better understanding of collective behavior” (113); with the addendum I’ll affix, that such collectives should include nonhuman forms of culture, along with copious squads of companions species.

Descola renders humanity in terms of four schemas: naturalism, totemism, analogism, and animism. Succinctly, “totemic and analogical collectives…contain a constitutive hybrid element” conflating the human and nonhuman—totemic groups “include men and women, parents and children, plants and animals, material entities and immaterial ones, all squeezed together in a complex and contradictory tissue of affects, interests, and obligations” (399). Contrastingly, analogical collectives, which can feature “a cascade of dependencies reaching all the way from plants and animals up to the summit of the pantheons,” “is a way of moderating the original disparity between the terms that it brings together through an illusion of equivalence in the obligations that fall to them when they engage in exchange” (401).

Offset against these are another set of paired terms. Animism: “unrestricted sociality that encompasses both humans and nonhumans in universal networks” (393); in contrast, naturalism, which though it “lays emphasis on the physical continuity between the world’s elements (all subjected to the laws of nature),” insists upon a “singularity ascribed to humans on account of their distinctive interiority,” sharply curtailing relations across this line. Such that, “some relations are deemed suitable for connections between humans, others for connections with nonhumans, but none has the power to schematize the principal interactions between all the world’s elements” (393, 395). Multispecies work, interestingly, vies against this ontology but arguably does so most powerfully by mobilizing the techniques and analytics of natural science.

Here Descola is highly useful for considering whether multispecies work can break through naturalism or “modern ontology,” in that he catalogues its resistance (in the guise of evolutionary psychologists and cognitive ethologists) to all arguments and indications of nonhuman cultures or language, simply by denying to animals the interiority of identity (178-185). His account of the “eruption of animal species into the domain of culture” (180) is rousing, though the scientific case (and cases) are advanced far beyond the few he samples. Still, he chides ethologists, who “do not, as yet seem to have taken full measure of this revolution,” yet laments that evidence of nonhuman cultures to date will not break “the defensive locks of naturalism” nor will they “cut naturalism down to size” (182).

This said, his tally offers an incisive view of where the breach opens for multispecies work: in eschewing that upon which naturalists double down—the “interior resources” of human subjectivity, the core of “anthropocentric prejudice” (184). As cultural analysis both extends to and draws from accounts of nonhumans, we have to leave behind an obsessive fixation on the subjective as the sole fulcrum for our analytical work.

Wisconsin and the Amazon

RG: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk. I really enjoyed How Forests Think. When I started it I was a little on the skeptical side, but I ended up thinking it was a mind-blowing book. I thought we could begin by discussing the background for the book and your training. I see the book as mixing biology, science studies (especially Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), and then some sort of semiotics. It seems like there are a lot of influences there. You got your PhD at Wisconsin, so how did that work out? Can you tell me a little about your background?

EK: The way I got into anthropology was through research, by which I mean fieldwork.  And I was always trying to find ways to do more fieldwork. I saw Wisconsin as an extension of this. When I was in college I did some field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I had a Fulbright to go back and do research after college, and only then did I go to grad school.   Although How Forests Think aims to make a conceptual intervention in anthropology, I think of our field as a special vehicle for engaging intensely with a place in ways that make us over and help us think differently. The preparation I got at Wisconsin was geared toward that. It immersed me in area studies in the broadest and most positive sense of the term. My advisor Frank Salomon is well versed in many facets of Andean history, prehistory, and ethnography, as well as in the Quechua languages including those spoken in Ecuador (where they are known as Quichua). I worked with, among others, the tropical botanist Hugh Iltis, the Latin Americanist geographers Bill Denevan, and Karl Zimmerer, the Latin American historian Steve Stern, and I studied Ecuadorian Quichua with Carmen Chuquín. There was a real sense that I was preparing myself intensely for an engagement with the field in terms of a multifaceted project which was going to include ecology, anthropology, history, and a serious appreciation for local languages. Of course I had graduate training in social theory and the history of anthropological thought, but I wasn’t trying to get training in a particular body of theory, it was more that I was trying to engage with a place.

I was also inspired by the way my advisor approached scholarship –particularly his sensibility to language; his sensibility to writing; how one can find ways to see the world afresh and capture that in writing. For example, he is very conscious not to adopt rhetorical styles, theories, or jargon from other people and he consciously tries to use writing as a way to create his own sort of engagement.  He’s a poet. I was very much influenced by this.

RG: I had no idea that Wisconsin had such a specialty in your area. Could you tell me more about your advisor’s work?

EK: Frank Salomon is a historical anthropologist with a broad specialty in Native Andean worlds and their relation to the colonial encounter. I knew him through his archival and ethnographic work in Ecuador (I had actually met him in Ecuador when I was a child and he was a PhD student!). Most of his work is now in Peru on khipus (knotted cords) and other non-written forms of representation.

RG: I thought perhaps there was some influence on your work there, in his work on unfamiliar forms of representation and your work on semiotics?

EK: There is, but when I was at Wisconsin in the early 90s, one of the big turns was historical anthropology and I was working with a historical anthropologist. Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of Histories had just come out. This was the thing to do, and I was doing it. I ended up having to choose between two field sites: one was in a cloud forest area that had a tremendously interesting colonial history, a history that was visible in oral traditions (and I was fascinated by the connections between those stories and the past). The other was an ecological project in the village where I ended up doing the work that became How Forests Think. It was Frank Salomon who said “Look, your heart is in this ecological stuff.” Frank is an historical anthropologist, you’d think he’d want to train his students in his thing. But he recognized that my real passion was for the forest and he allowed me to see that that’s where I really wanted to go.

RG: I’m not sure that every advisor would be so generous to a student.

EK: It was a real gift. He allowed me to do my thing, and ultimately this is what I try to give to my students. We’re motivated in the work we do by passions we don’t fully understand, and part of what we need to do as advisors is to allow our students to tap into that without losing a sense of what others around them are doing and thinking.  Frank got what I was into, and he saw that even in my historical work I was trying to answer the same fundamental question: I’ve always been dissatisfied with the culture concept, broadly defined, and I’m always trying to find ways to get beyond it without losing a sense for the reality of culture. All my projects have had that as their focus, and this concern has just been growing more explicit, which has forced me to be much more precise conceptually about what I’m doing.

The problem with culture

RG: I have to say, How Forests Think is theoretical and abstract at times, but there’s a clear awareness of history and of colonialism in the book, which is not necessarily what you would expect from high Francophone theory. It was refreshing to see you foregrounding colonial processes, especially towards the end of the book, where they became central to your argument. Could you tell me a little bit more about that critique of culture? How does that work? What makes you unhappy about culture?

EK: Some of my French colleagues think that they’re beyond culture and have never had to deal with the problems that the American culture concept has created; they feel that they can sidestep it completely. But what I mean by “culture” is a much broader thing and it applies to just about every approach in the social sciences. The social sciences as we know them are based on what I would call a “linguistic turn” (though it isn’t always explicitly phrased as such).

Think of Durkheim (who wasn’t especially oriented towards language).  Society for him was a relational system: One institution can only be understood in terms of another; social facts are to be understood only in terms of other social facts; you can’t, for example, explain social reality psychologically. The Boasian approach of course is much more overtly linguistic. But in both you get a system with the same kinds of properties. Certain things can only be understood in terms of their contexts.

I was just rereading Boas’s famous article “On Alternating Sounds,” which was published in American Anthropologist in 1889.  It’s a brilliant essay in which he says, “look, philologists think Native American languages are primitive because their speakers use different sounds when pronouncing the same words.” And he was able to go back and say, “You can see that this is actually the effect of a lack of training in specific Amerindian languages.  The philologists are perceiving the sounds not based on the native phonemic context, but in terms of the languages they already know.”  Boas is making a profound argument about context.  We only “hear” those sounds that fit the phonemic contexts we know.

The goal of linguistic anthropology for Boas was to learn to get these contexts that are not necessarily our own.  And of course you can extend this argument to cultural and historical context as well.   And then, if you think about Saussure and the influence he had on structuralism and post-structuralism, and combine that with Durkheim and Boas, you get just about everybody who’s doing social theory in some way or other informed by concepts that have to do with how language works. The special realities that we’re dealing with in anthropology and related fields are relational ones, they’d say, and you can only understand them in terms of the complex networks that make them what they are. So any kind of relatum, whether we are talking about a social fact or cultural meaning –or even an actor in Actor Network Theory– is the product of the relationships that make it.

RG: Right. In the case of sounds, phonemic contrast is the result of the phonemic structure of the whole language, and it is internal to those structures. In Saussure, each sign has its meaning in relation to other signs, rather than anything outside the system.

EK: Yes. All of these approaches hold that the fundamental human reality is symbolic thinking, it structures our world, and it’s different from all the other things that one might study. It requires its own kind of science, a human science. This is not biology, and it’s not chemistry.

This is all good.  But the problem is that there’s no way to understand how these kinds of relational systems connect up to things that are not like them. That’s the big question: how are these open to the world? My engagement with culture is about addressing this problem. The STS literature, the animal studies literature and multispecies ethnography are all wonderful and profound, and are obviously finding ways to get outside of culture. But they often fall back analytically on something that I would still call “culture” in a formal sense. That’s clearest in Actor Network Theory. The relata may happen to be material things, but the formal system that’s mapped out, the network and the ways in which entities are made through the relationships that emerge there – well, no surprise, it exhibits the relational properties of human language.

My goal is to try to leave the human, to try to get beyond that kind of thing. So when I say “culture” I refer not only to the traditional anthropological concept but also to the sets of assumptions about relationships that inform Foucault, so much of Science Studies, as well as other posthumanist approaches.  They all explore the properties of what I would call culture in this formal sense even when they aren’t dealing explicitly with humans or the culture concept.

RG: It’s interesting you should mention Boas. I would just note that for some Boasians, culture is a unique object, which requires a unique science. That’s Kroeber’s argument. But that’s not the argument of Sapir, and it’s not the argument of Boas. I think it’d be interesting if we focused a little bit more on the Sapirian alternative, which is to understand science as defined by its level of particularity, rather than its object of study. Boas also takes this line in The Study of Geography: He doesn’t think that there’s something called “culture,” and we have a unique science, which must study it. He’s doing something much weirder. I feel like we should take a look at this again.

EK: You’re absolutely right. I didn’t get into the technical semiotic stuff until my post doc. Before that one of the major sources for me to get outside language (along with the work of the anthropological linguist Janis Nuckolls) was Sapir. He’s got these beautiful essays on sound iconism. He would interview children about invented words and ask “which of these refers to the big table and which refers to the little table?” And words that have very elongated vowels would invariably be linked to the larger object.  And of course Sapir was interested in poetics. Boas, on the other hand, took evolution very seriously. I remember in grad school I wrote an essay about Boas as an evolutionary anthropologist, and one of my teachers criticized me: “How can you say that! He was fighting against scientific racism!” But Boas clearly was in profound ways dealing with humans as biological organisms, and I appreciate that tradition.

But the Boasian legacy as it’s been taken up has ended up moving from a focus on a context that includes the environment to studying contexts that are much more restricted to humans, like meaning systems.  And then you get Margaret Mead’s concept of culture, which we still adopt, even when we reject her approach, or when we bring in historical process.

RG: I think that’s really true, and it speaks to the kind of fieldwork that gets done. Maureen Molloy points out that Mead was one of the first problem-based fieldworkers. Her ethnographies were not appreciated by Kroeber because they weren’t particularistic. She would go into a place, do the ethnography, move somewhere else. You kind of wonder, maybe if she’d hung around a little bit longer she would have started asking “what are these bugs?”

Anyway, you were just now talking about how you got interested in biology. Was that as a post-doc?

EK: I’ve been apprenticing myself to tropical biologists since I was in college. I did a tropical ecology graduate course in Costa Rica as part of my graduate training. I took plant systematics classes and forestry statistics. I was always interested in finding ways to get into forest ecology without necessarily going through humans.

RG: Your book doesn’t speak the language of evolutionary biology, but it seems informed by a deep awareness of the forest that comes both from doing fieldwork with Runa people and having that science background. It’s necessary for your project.

EK: And different projects require different kinds of skills, but yes, that’s what I needed for this project.

Terrence Deacon and Charles Sanders Peirce

RG: The work of Terrence Deacon is a major influence on your book. How did you come across him? Was that during your post-doc?

EK: Basically, I’d done this research in the Amazon. I wrote a dissertation, got thinking about articles, and was formulating an article that was to stake out what I would be doing in the book.   This was “How Dogs Dream,” which came out in American Ethnologist in 2007. I was working on that at Berkeley, and the year that I came there Terry arrived from the Boston area and we had offices right next to each other. We started talking. I would go into his office at four in the afternoon and come out at nine at night…

Terry’s life project has been to understand the origins of mind. His first book was about the evolution of symbolic capacities in humans and his most recent book Incomplete Nature is about the emergence of mind from matter.  So when I was at Berkeley I got very much involved with that, and it was the most intellectually exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.   Academically, that is.  Of course doing fieldwork in the tropical world was exhilarating in its own right.  But in terms of the academic world, I’d never been exposed to such an interesting set of ideas that was so new to me but that fit so completely with what I was already doing. I don’t get to California that much, but he has an ongoing seminar and whenever I can, I try to participate in it and it’s still very exciting to me.

RG: Peirce is a major part of your book. I think of Peirce as someone who informs semiotic anthropology, for instance the circle that includes Michael Silverstein and others. But you don’t let Silverstein own Peirce, you’re drawing on… Deacon talking about Peirce? Is that where you got him? Or do you read Peirce alongside Deacon?

EK: Deacon has been thinking about Peirce for a long time. When anthropologists use Peirce they tend to collapse certain things and not deal with certain elements of Peirce, like his interest in evolution, and they tend to frame a lot of his work in terms of something you can think of as culture.

RG: For people who aren’t super familiar with Peirce’s biography, he was a favored son of Boston Brahmins and then ended up going off on his own way, and I think at one point had to earn a living by drawing mazes for people to do in the back of newspapers. He had a very strange life. His work is really a whole philosophy of the universe, it’s not just about language, it’s very philosophical and I guess bizarre in some sense.

EK: It’s an architecture of the universe. It’s a huge opus.  He’s got 80,000 manuscript pages out there. But there are some really consistent questions that come up over and over again. He has a “continuist” framework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related to everything else and philosophical frameworks that posit radical breaks are problematic. Dualisms of all kinds are problematic. So any attempt to understand humans without relating humans to other entities that aren’t human is a problem for Peirce. He’s worked out all sorts of ways to move across those kinds of boundaries.

The other thing that’s really important is that his philosophy is directional. By which I mean that he sees certain processes as nested within other more basic processes.  And this is very problematic for us as anthropologists because we want to see complexity and freedom and indeterminacy. Peirce also makes space for spontaneity, but he’s very much interested in the formal qualities of things. One of the places to see the nested nature of his approach is in his semiotics. You can have indexical reference without symbolic reference (as is manifest in the biological world) but you can’t have a symbolic system without indices. Symbols are nested within indices, and a Peircean framework can allow you to see that. These are the kinds of things that are unpopular. In fact, they get collapsed in a lot of the ways in which Peirce is used in anthropology. Anthropologists tend to think about icons and indices within the context of cultural systems.  Now, of course you do get iconic and indexical processes that are framed within historically contingent systems, but what’s interesting to me are the things that can move in and out of symbolic systems, and how outsides connect to insides.

So when I was at Berkeley I was reading a lot of Peirce, and I was talking about it with Terry but also with Bill Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, and others. The standard way to domesticate Peirce is: “Peirce, he’s your theoretician, you apply him to your field site.” Or you say, “Oh yeah, Peirce, he had his own social context just like everybody else.” Both of these statements are true, but Peirce is also in some ways more like a mathematician. He is extracting things from properties in the world and he’s predicting formal properties that the world will exhibit. If he’s correct you will see these properties in the world. And in fact what happened is that I realized that the ethnographic problems I had isolated were already semiotic problems and they were also about the connections we humans have with processes that are not fully circumscribed by humans. The Runa were dealing with other kinds of communicative worlds, the worlds of spirits and animals.  This is a problem for them as it was for Peirce. The material I was dealing with was semiotic. The reason why Peirce and the Runa meet is because they’re being made over by the same world.

RG: So you’re doing explanatory work in two directions: first, you’re using Peirce to explain the Runa. But you also use Runa ethnography to help explain Peirce as a thinker. One of the things you’re doing in the ethnography is saying: “All of that stuff in Peirce that we had to ignore in order to make him a linguistic theorist, it makes sense and can be used.” The book helps us see Peirce as a complete figure and makes sense of him intellectually rather than just having a massive part of him that we ignore or that we don’t find interesting or think it’s too weird to deal with.  You give us a more complete picture of him.

EK: That’s right. In fact, one of our colleagues at the University of Toronto, Alejandro Paz, calls this other part, “the weird Peirce.”

The other thing that’s interesting is how concepts can acquire lives of their own.  For example, go back to Darwin. Darwin had profound insights about how you get designs without a designer. It doesn’t matter whether or not he believed in God. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t understand genetics or got some things wrong. It doesn’t matter because he discovered a property of evolutionary dynamics that has a life of its own.

You can say the same thing about Peirce. Somebody can say, “you see, Peirce thought that crystals think’” or whatever. And he may have said that. But I can show you in Peircean terms and on Peircean grounds how that doesn’t necessarily make sense. He’s no longer the owner of these concepts. I don’t want to out-Peirce Peirce. There’s a lot of stuff about him that I don’t understand, and there are many experts on him, and I’m not necessarily one of them. But there’s a way in which there’s a fundamental logic about certain things I can get because the world is doing it, and Peirce was able to tap into that and I’m also able to tap into that. What we’re tapping into exceeds both of us.

RG: Right, and the animals tap into that as well, and plants tap into it too. I was so surprised at the end of the book to find that you were critical of the culture concept. I thought: “This is it! This book provides a scaffold to understand how culture articulates with biology and biological science, and it provides an argument about the reality of cultural phenomena even though they’re immaterial.” So much of our idea of reality is tied up in materiality, right? There are things that are real and emergent (for instance form, or what Sahlins would call structure) even though they don’t have physical bodies. That is a powerful way to talk about culture as a force without reifiying it as a substance.

EK: I am not anti-culture. I think culture is a real thing. But there are two problems with how we deal with culture. First, it’s very difficult to see how culture relates to the non-cultural. Second, we tend to make culture the only domain where generality and abstraction occur. What I’m trying to show is that there are other areas where generalities are produced. This is an anti-nominalist book. Humans are not the only producers of generals in the world. It doesn’t mean that culture isn’t a unique phenomenon that creates unique realities and unique kinds of structures and categories. But I don’t think that, for example, these spirits of the forest who I discuss in chapter six are necessarily only cultural phenomena. In some ways they’re a product of culture, but they’re an emergent product of other things, including the semiosis of the forest, which is not fully subsumed by a cultural or symbolic framework.

RG: And you have a way to understand culture as real without having to fall back on some weird 19th-century spiritualist position. You connect it with the framework of modern biology.

EK: I lay this out in the first chapter. It’s called “the open whole,” in contrast to the traditional Tylorian definition of culture as a “complex whole.” I want to say, yes, it’s a complex whole, but it’s also an open one. That opening is what’s so interesting to me. Culture has the real effect and property of closure, but it’s also open, and how this works is one of the things I’m trying to write about in the book.

RG: You mentioned the masters of the forest in chapter six. I would gloss them as a structure of the longue durée that exists at the conjuncture of a bunch of different causal forces that include things like the natural environment –the stuff colonialism just kind of gets sucked into. Since, you know, colonialism is only 400 years old.

Theory, fieldwork, and ethnography

One of the things that strikes me about you in the course of this interview is that you’ve really learned and grown and developed throughout your intellectual career. You’ve taken on new influences at times when some other people would say, “I have my framework and I’m done.” Do you have any tips for students about how to stay active intellectually and remain able to embrace new ideas when the ideas that you already have might seem good enough for you?

EK: I think one of the things that helped, and this was a real luxury and it’s difficult for me now because I can’t do the kind of fieldwork I used to do, is to have ethnographic problems that are interesting to you, that you can’t fully resolve, that force you to ask questions.

That’s the beauty of our field that somehow it’s the ethnographic work that is making us over, and we then develop theories that might help us. We have problems that trouble us, and we don’t know how to talk about them, but we know that they’re important. I was interested in the human-animal relationships in the forest and all of a sudden I was then involved in this multi-species turn and having conversations with people like Donna Haraway. But I wasn’t a savvy graduate student, I didn’t even know who Donna Haraway was when I was in the field! I didn’t know what the trends were.  It was the world that eventually led me to Donna Haraway, not the other way around.

It’s the same with the “ontological turn.” It’s my work that leads me to pose questions ontologically (at a moment when people happen to be doing this) rather than a current trend driving my work. This is the advantage that we have as anthropologists. We are thinking with the world. That’s what’s going to keep our thinking fresh. What’s difficult for me now is that I need to go back and think with the world myself.

RG: I think there is something strange about the structure of our anthropological careers: there’s a period of intense immersive research, and then teaching and family, and then never going back to the field again. Sometimes, it feels like no matter how hard you try, that’s the sort of political economy of the professoriate. I think it has a tremendous effect on how anthropological theory works. When you can’t get back to the field, suddenly you’re interested in elaborating coherent theoretical frameworks from the top down, since you don’t have fresh data to lead you from the bottom up, like you were saying.

Is How Forests Think an ethnography? Is that the genre?

EK: That’s a great question. It’s not the standard ethnographic monograph –it’s not bounded by the Runa.  It’s not about getting their context.  So, it’s not an ethnography in that sense. Although after reading it I hope you do get some sense of having had an ethnographic immersion. But it doesn’t have that kind of boundedness in the sense that my concerns are not necessarily their concerns. My analytical framework is not restricted to their analytical framework. It’s not that mine is bigger, but just that my project only partially intersects with theirs. In that sense it’s not an ethnography.  Although it is a form of thinking that grows from ethnography.  And so it is empirical, or experiential.  So in this sense it is extremely ethnographic.

RG: I’m just trying to understand whether you’re using the ethnography to elaborate the theory, or using the theory to elaborate the ethnography. What’s the relationship between the theoretical intervention and the descriptive material?

EK: In the actual writing there’s a lot of back and forth. If one were to look at my dissertation, which has none of the theory, no engagement with semiotics, no engagement with multispecies ethnography or any of that stuff, one would find many of the same examples that I’m dealing with in the book as conundrums that allow me to explore the larger question of how to situate the human in some sort of larger non-human domain.

It really is driven by ethnography in that sense.  Ethnographic problems suggest a certain kind of conceptual thinking. But there were also moments in writing the book when I had an idea that grew out of a non-ethnographic settings, and I was like, “let me find an ethnographic example to illustrate that.” So there is a certain amount of artifice in crafting something like this, where you tack back and forth. But the general movement of this book is that the ethnography is demanding a certain kind of conceptual framework, and the ethnography and conceptual frameworks are coming together because they’re drawing on a shared world.

Is theory political?

RG: A lot of anthropologists in the States would insist that there has to be a political intervention in ethnography. You close the book making the argument that Michael Scott and other thinkers, like Latour, would make: that it’s politically important to think outside of our established frameworks. I just imagine there are anthropologists out there who would say, “that’s the lousiest definition of politics that I’ve ever heard!” How would you respond to that kind of position?

EK: There’s a passage in Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift where she says that radical politics is always linked to intellectual conservatism because to act radically you have to have agreement on what you’re taking a stand on, and radical intellectual thought creates a certain kind of political conservatism because once you’re taking all sorts of things apart, it’s very hard to act based on shared established categories.

It’s a real problem. On the one hand I feel I can isolate ways of thinking about political agency that are different. I can contribute to conversations about things like resistance, and I can think about problems of environmental politics in different ways, but ultimately, I’m not necessarily doing a kind of political work like….

RG: …Terry Turner?

EK:  Yes. Or some form of witnessing a kind of injustice to which I have to find some way to attend. I’m not doing that.  Yet, the question for me politically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? This is where I’m headed.  And in the book I begin to think about this political problem.  But how does that articulate with what’s happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Who might be doing something like this? I don’t know. It’s very abstract right now, but that’s where the political part of this would go.

RG: It’s funny, I can’t remember who said this; I think it was June Jordan? She said that the way that it works is that you do the activism first, and then the theory comes afterward –that the theoretical work comes out of the concrete political work of activism and social change. That position sounds Peircean to me, Eduardo Kohnian to me, because it emphasizes the process of being in the world, and is committed to the idea that praxis leads to theoretical innovation. That claim, I think, may run counter to the idea that there’s something intellectually conservative about radical politics.

EK: I like your formulation. There is some way in which I share affinities with activism, in the sense that I’m being made over first by the world and then finding ways to account for that, but it doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of politics in terms of addressing oneself to social injustices, per se, as the central focus.

RG: What are your future projects?

EK:  Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene through the logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians but also with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and I don’t know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live in the Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But I don’t know what that means on the ground.

The other project I’ve been working on –and this is with Lisa Stevenson– is also related to thinking forests. Well, for me at least.  Lisa is coming to it from a different place and she’s been working on it for much longer than I have.   But in terms of my work on thinking forests I’m interested in forms of representation that are non-language-like and non-symbolic. One of the areas where this crops up is in forms of ethnographic representation that are non-language like.  I’ve always been interested in photography (you can see a bit of this through the images in the book) and I’ve become increasingly interested in ethnographic film.  We’ve been working together on a few films that are trying to bring out some of this non-discursive representational logic and this is one of the directions I find the most inspiring at the moment.

RG: Right, Eduardo. Thanks very much for this interview!

EK:  Thank you!

Intellectual Influences at Glasgow and Chicago

RG: We’re going to talk a little bit about your work and how it relates to the ongoing interest in ontology. We both know each other from the University of Chicago where we were both graduate students together. Maybe we could get started with you telling us what were your intellectual influences at Chicago?

MS: Marshall Sahlins’s focus on the relationship among cosmology, ontology, and practice was most important for me. But my interest in those themes goes back to when I was a master’s student in Glasgow, in sociology. I was taught there by Harvie Ferguson.  He’s a sociologist of modernity and a really wide-ranging, synthetic academic who couldn’t be easily compartmentalized. In his book, The Science of Pleasure, he made connections between theology, philosophy, science, art, literature, psychoanalysis, and traced a complex history of what he called “cosmos and psyche in the bourgeois worldview.” He was trying to understand modernity in terms of its cosmological coordinates and conundrums.

There was also Derek Sayer, a historical sociologist at Glasgow who has been pretty influential in the development of my interest in ontology. He introduced me to the work of Roy Bhaskar, the philosopher of science. In his first book, A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar analyzed scientific practice to discern what ontological assumptions underlie experimental method. What kind of a world, or what kind of an ontology, is presupposed by scientific experiments? His answer was: it’s a stratified but a changing world, one with layers of ontological depth that science is trying to mine more and more deeply. So these ideas really informed my doctoral work and then my subsequent book, The Severed Snake.

RG: Right, and I remember in David Graeber’s book on value he has a section on Bhaskar as well, so it sounds like Bhaskar has had influence in a couple different places.

MS: Yes, I took that interest in Bhaskar to Chicago, and I remember sharing it with Terry Turner, who was teaching both David and myself at the same time.

RG: Ah, that’s interesting. And of course Sayer wrote The Great Arch with Philip Corrigan, which is sort of one of the precursors to the contemporary ethnographies of the state.

MS: That’s right. But let me just return to Sahlins for a moment. He looked at cosmogonic myth as that which reveals the ontological assumptions which inform practice. But, I tried to look at everyday practice in my research in the way that Bhaskar looked at experimental method in science, and I was asking: what kind of ontological assumptions are legible in practice?

RG: Right. Yes. And so, who else? Was Valerio Valeri an influence?

MS: Yes. He, like Harvie Ferguson, was a figure that impressed me very much. As you know, he was very wide-ranging in his erudition, his synthetic thinking. He was particularly attentive to diverse models of cosmology and cosmogony and their ontological implications. Chicago is a really vibrant intellectual context, and so I also had many conversations with fellow students such as my now-wife, Krista Ovist, who was a student in history of religions. She introduced me to the work of her supervisor, Bruce Lincoln, and his studies of cosmogony and its social and practical implications, and Krista remains an important partner in dialogue for me.

RS: When I was doing the first chapter of my book, I had to trace out cosmology, what does that term mean? We use it all the time, but where does it really come from? And I found myself having to read a lot of Eliade.

MS: Yes, I really discovered Eliade through Valeri and conversations with Krista, and read a bit of Eliade then. Of course, I think Eliade has been problematized because of, well, his right-wing political commitments.

I should mention that Nancy Munn was also an important formative influence for me at Chicago, particularly her emphasis on place, and that is very apparent in my work: my focus on people’s relationship to land and processes of emplacement.

RG: Can you talk a little bit about her work, because I think it can be difficult because of the language and because of the density. What’s her approach?

MS: I think she’s been fundamentally influenced by phenomenology, and is interested in the ways in which people extend themselves through space and time. Actually, that’s how she says they create space and time – through movement.

RG: When you say people extending themselves through time and space, you don’t mean them getting older and fatter. How would you explain that to people?

MS: I think it develops a general model that’s been influential in Melanesianist anthropology whereby people are conceptualized as what Marilyn Strathern calls “partible.” They aren’t just exchanging or giving away things that they own as alienable objects. Those objects are fundamentally part of themselves, and so when they give them away, it’s almost as if they’re extending part of themselves existentially, beyond the bounds of their own bodies. And those objects are vehicles of themselves, and can travel quite widely. And of course Nancy Munn’s key study is of the Kula exchange ring in the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea. She focuses on the ways in which the objects which are exchanged around the islands are extensions of the island in which she did fieldwork, Gawa.

RG: Yes, that’s a great explanation.

MS: If we’re still on my influences, here’s another: I’d have to say that, during our time at Chicago, the anthropology department was an important center for the development of historical anthropology. And historical research has always been a very important part of my own work, trying to situate my interlocutors in Solomon Islands within the longest historical context that archival documents might allow.

Studying Poly-ontology in Solomon Islands

RG: So you had a lot of ideas to work with, a really rich intellectual context both at Glasgow and Chicago. What did you find when you hit the Solomon Islands?

MS: I work on the ethnography of Arosi speakers on the island of Makira in the southeast Solomons. And when I was a doctoral student in the early 90s, I was working predominantly with Anglican Christians. I was puzzling over the pervasiveness of latent land disputes between matrilineally-defined claimants – the Arosi are matrilineal. I was trying to understand why land disputes were simmering beneath the surface of everyday life, but were unmentionable and didn’t develop into overt conflict. My hosts seemed to feel a certain anxiety or insecurity about their disposition on the land. They had a sense that their communities, and the principles on which their communities were based, were in a state of confusion.

Many people wanted to set things straight by asserting that theirs was the rightful land-holding matrilineage, but they couldn’t voice their claims because that would be too divisive. But at the same time they were afraid that someone else might make a claim that would be recognized instead of their own. I thought the Arosi were dealing with a kind of classic paradoxical situation. On the one hand, their ideal notion of what constitutes customary village life required that there be a recognized land-holding matrilineage at a given place, serving as a kind of focal point of authority, with the chief that would defend the interests of the land holders and bring people together to construct a multilineal polity. And that idea needed to be clear and transparent.

Yet, on the other hand, people from different matrilineages seemed to be locked in a sort of quiet competition over that position, but they couldn’t voice their competing claims openly, not without alienating others and placing the synthetic nature of the polity in jeopardy. To do that is to be regarded as extremely anti-social, as sort of proof that you aren’t actually the legitimate landholders after all. What landholder, they would say, would be so ungenerous and overbearing?

RG: Just to clarify, when you say “the synthetic nature of the polity,” you mean that in these areas there are people from many matrilineages living in the same place, and so the residential group has got to be kept together even though one part of it may claim to have a greater right to the land?

MS: That’s precisely right.

RG: How did ontology come into that?

MS: The analysis of this problem led me to scrutinize a whole range of topics that are familiar to Melanesianists: origins, idioms of descent and relatedness, relations with ancestral beings, naming practices and so forth. This led me, in turn, to theorize that the ontological principles informing the land dispute situation constitute what I call a “poly-ontology,”  which is a way of describing a pluralism.

In other words, it’s an atomistic cosmos in which matrilineages are conceptualized as the bearers of independently arising and isolated ontological categories that need to be brought into productive and reproductive relations. Also, I analyzed how this poly-ontology has come into dialogue with Christianity, and specifically with the Anglican Christian cosmology that I found there, in mutually transforming ways.

I was also trying to make a contribution to the anthropology of Christianity by highlighting the importance of interrogating Christian ontology in a field context. In my view, the anthropology of Christianity really hasn’t done enough to explore Christian ontologies or to recognize more than one possible Christian configuration of ontology. So, I’d say that ontology is a new way of approaching traditional topics such as kinship and myth, and it’s revealing new things about them. It’s a new way of talking about what’s interesting about these topics.

RG: And when you say ontology, you’re talking about people’s theories of the world, right? And in particular, you said something earlier, I just wanted to clarify. You talked about how there’s this atomistic poly-ontology. There’s a sort of a sense that each individual lineage group is ontologically distinct from each other one?

MS: That’s correct. Each matrilineage has its own essential being that is fundamentally distinct from each of the other matrilineages. But I just wanted to make a note here. You said ‘ontology’ was different theories of being, but in my understanding of ontology, it’s not simply a theory, it’s the assumptions that underlie both discursive practice and non-discursive practice.  So, it might be implicit assumptions rather than an explicitly articulated theory.

RG: That’s an important thing to note. It means that you have to engage in a sort of a depth analysis. It’s hard to say, I can see these ontological assumptions, but it’s tacit. It’s always a little bit of a trick to get other people to see it.

MS: That’s right. The job of the anthropologist is to try to perform the analysis. We begin to explicate some of those assumptions that underlie what people say, but also really looking at what they do, quite closely.

RG: So your work sounds like it’s not really a call to totally redo anthropology. It sounds like it’s very traditionally anthropological in its focus on kinship, myth. Is that right?

MS: It’s trying to rethink, to reconstrue, to reconceptualize, what anthropology has always been interested in. So in a sense it’s dealing with traditional issues, but in a new way.

On Wagner, Strathern, and Melanesian Sociality

RG: Your book also has a critique of the work of Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern and their theories of kinship. It might be interesting to go over that critique because I think when people hear the word “ontology”, they think of that term as associated with people who have been educated by Wagner and Strathern, not necessarily people who take issue with them.

MS: Well, I should clarify that I see my work as in dialogue with, rather than opposed to, the ideas of Wagner and Strathern. If I’m opposed to anything it’s to the ways in which their models of Melanesian sociality are sometimes presupposed as a kind of orthodoxy about a monolithic Melanesia. Here’s how I would put it. It seems to me that my engagement with Wagner and Strathern, and where I may differ from them, as it were, is shaping up into something analogous to the debates that have been going on in philosophy between proponents of what is usually called relationism, on the one hand, and those who have been developing so-called object-oriented ontology, on the other.

When I make this comparison I don’t mean to imply that I’m in a debate with Wagner and Strathern about a personal existential commitment to one or the other of these ontologies. Rather, I’m simply trying to suggest that, whereas there may be some Melanesians whose ontological assumptions are comparable in many ways to what philosophers call relational ontology, there may also be Melanesians whose assumptions are, at least in some ways, more like those of object-oriented ontology.

Briefly put, relationists argue that there are no autonomous essences, only relations. Things are nothing but the relations that constitute them and in which they participate. Object-oriented ontologists do not deny that all things are made up of relations and inhere in relations, but they argue that things nevertheless entail autonomous – though not eternal – essences. Objects cannot be exhausted by their relations; they entail a core proper being. In their own ways, in other words, Melanesians may be debating the same kinds of questions that European philosophers are still splitting hairs about.

RG: When we say “a relational ontology,” what does that mean? I want to keep it nice and concrete—you’re making a claim that their claims about kinship and social structure don’t apply to the Makiran case, is that right?

MS: That’s right. Their basic argument, as I read them, is that Melanesian sociality presupposes relational continuity. It’s a cosmos in which everything is fundamentally related, and the major problem for social agents within that cosmos is to create distinctions, to create or to cut relational continuity, continuity of being.

And I find in the Solomon Islands case where I did my fieldwork, it seemed precisely the inverse of that. People needed fundamentally to create relations, to bring the elements of the cosmos, which were originally unrelated, into relation, into productive and reproductive relations. So that’s a broad contrast that I draw in the introduction to the book.

RG: So in the case of Makira, the question is, how are these matrilineages going to be able to relate to one another? We want them to relate to one another so we can build harmonious communities. How can they relate to each other when they’re just fundamentally, ontologically distinct? Something like that?

MS: That’s correct.

RG: And then, in the case of Strathern and Wagner, the argument is that people already think they’re related, so then they try to make themselves different — what would be a good example of that, Michael? In terms of a concrete kinship practice?

MS: Well, the ways in which Wager and Strathern and those most strongly influenced by them depict Melanesian sociality is, I think, probably nicely captured in the work of Jadran Mimica among the Iqwaye in the New Guinea highlands. Mimica presents a striking model of cosmic origins from a primordial figure, a figure who is sort of self-contained, and is the source of all things in their universe.

RG: That’s like a mythological person, you mean.

MS: That’s right, yes. Everything in the universe is conceptualized as coming from that one figure. And everything needs to be differentiated out of that figure.  So this process of differentiation and bifurcation is kind of the fundamental cosmogonic or cosmological process that informs all of being there.

RG: So it’s a different kind of cosmology or worldview. It’s a different kind of ontological assumption than what you discovered in Makira.

MS: That’s correct. James Weiner has written about the Foi, also in the New Guinea highlands. He talks about a world of immanent continuity; that the world for the Foi, in his understanding, is one is which there’s a fundamental relation of resemblance and that resemblance needs to be denied. The given connections between things need to be cut for the social world to be developed. The moral foundation of human action is really to draw contrasts.

RG: I see that in the area of Papua New Guinea where I worked. You can be a member of more than one cognatic stock there, so a lot of times at weddings by giving food to one side of the wedding you’re showing that you’re a member of the other side, since you could theoretically be both.

MS: Yes, precisely, those kinds of processes.

Does reality exist?

RG: When people hear the word “ontology,” they assume that people who advocate an ontology-oriented approach in anthropology have a radical program to destroy the idea that there is one reality out there and that we just have different cultural ways of understanding a single shared universe. Ontologists seem to claim that there are multiple universes out there, and that’s a claim a lot of people just don’t understand or think couldn’t possibly be true. Is that a kind of claim that you’re interested in making in your work?

MS: Well, this may seem like a fudge, but I don’t think that one is best placed to be the judge of one’s own ontological presuppositions if, as I tend to think, people’s discursive and non-discursive practices index and then transform their ontological assumptions. It seems to me that what one does, especially in one’s anthropological practice, is likely to belie one’s carefully crafted philosophy.

That said, were I to carefully craft my philosophy of being, I’d suggest a kind of realism that says there are things that actually exist – a reality – is not incompatible with the possibility that everyone is in their own world. It seems to be me that it may be the case that there are noumena in the Kantian sense of “things in themselves,” – the really real – but that these are never experienced or known directly in themselves by anything human or otherwise. This would mean that everything is, in a sense, creating its own world based on its own capacities to translate information from other beings and other entities into a world that it inhabits.

But in my work, by ontology, I generally mean the assumptions about the nature of reality that shape people’s ways of doing things. Basically, I’ve been interested in trying to discern the way ontological assumptions inform the lives of my interlocutors in Solomon Islands.

Wonder

RG: Could we turn to some of your more recent writing about wonder, this discussion about wonder is about people being exposed to new ontological assumptions.

MS: I first started wondering about wonder after a stint of fieldwork in the Solomons in 2006. During this period I encountered what I call “wonder discourses,” which is to say, stories, speculations, rumors and claims about things people described as amazing, baffling, miraculous, and wonderful. The biggest of these is the idea that there’s a hidden underground realm inside the island of Makira. This is envisioned as a kind of high-tech army base-cum-metropolis that’s run by white people, chiefly Americans, in league with beings known as kakamora – these are thought of as small super-powerful autochthonous beings. It seemed to me that these wonder discourses had to do with what I would call an ontological crisis – or, the undermining of older ontological assumptions and the emergence of new possibilities for becoming. But they were also possibly techniques or methods for precipitating ontological transformation, for participating in it. The particular transformation in question seemed to involve a rupturing of the plurality of poly-ontological matrilineal categories within a new underlying insular category of Makiran being that seemed previously to been denied.

This got me thinking about wonder discourses in anthropology and academic writing more generally. And I’ve noticed and written about two things. Firstly, I’ve analyzed how many contributors to the anthropology of ontology have not only theorized indigenous ontologies as relational, but have presented them as morally preferable to the Euro-American ontology they call Cartesian dualism or Kantian dualism or representationism. And they’ve suggested that one of the key indicators of the moral advantages of relationism is its capacity for wonder, its open orientation to the unpredictable, the astonishing flow of becoming. And here I am thinking of authors such as Tim Ingold or Deborah Bird Rose or Terence Evens.

And secondly, I’ve suggested that this apparent enthusiasm for relational ontology and its orientation to wonder could be described as religious, as an expression of post-biblical religion and an appetite for re-enchantment in the so-called secular world. So in short, as on Makira, it seems to me that, within anthropology, the pursuit and production of wonder accompanies a bid for ontological transformation. In this case, from the supposed dualism of modernity toward the uptake of relationism.

RG: So the goal of anthropology is to recreate a sense of wonder and to change our worldview, not necessarily to explain what causes human behavior or to decipher or interpret cultural texts?

MS: For some people that’s correct. I detect in some of the anthropology of ontology a particular agenda that’s engaged with the problems of the world today. It’s about re-thinking anthropology as a form of ethics, or de-colonization of thought, or a morally responsible form of being in the world. It’s responding to things like environmental crisis, so it’s not simply sitting back and trying to analyze or interpret, no.

Power

RG: I’m just trying to imagine sort of an old-school Marxist looking at a book like Holbraad’s Truth in Motion, which can be very difficult to read, saying, “that’s an ethical response to climate change and political crisis?” Shouldn’t we instead be trying to affect the world by understanding how it works and then trying to change it? For a lot of American anthropology you have to be discussing politics, you have to be taking a concrete stand on particular issues. But this doesn’t seem to be doing that, so many people would be surprised that it would be called a political form of anthropology.

MS: I think that perhaps people are operating with a very narrow definition of the political. And some anthropologists who are interested in questions of being are not prejudging what politics might be. Surely there could be nothing more political than trying to think in new ways about the nature of being, and expanding the possibilities for thinking about being. That would seem to me to be a fundamentally political project.

RG: I guess maybe it would be sort of like a kind of consciousness-raising in the way that people might have talked about consciousness-raising in the 60s and 70s: widening your horizon, questioning expectations that you’ve taken for granted, maybe something like that?

MS: Yes, fundamentally questioning your assumptions about the nature of things. And also recognizing that in any attempt to change the world for the better there may be an unexamined problem of whose ontological assumptions are going to inform policy.

RG: Where do you think this literature is going, can I ask you? Where do you see this going in the future, including your work or the work you see? You’re in London, you must get a sense of what people are thinking about currently that maybe hasn’t seen print yet.

MS: It’s pretty hard for me to say in what directions some of my colleagues interested in ontology may be going at the moment. I think that the interest in ontology in this country is maturing.

Ontology really sort of began to come into its own in the United Kingdom in about 2006, 2007. And so now there’s this well-known stream of thought in this country, so it was surprising to go to the American Anthropological Association in November last year and find that so many people there were unaware of it. From the perspective of the UK, this is a debate or set of debates that have been ongoing for quite some time now. I know that some figures were sort of moving away from these kinds of issues and looking in different directions.

RG: Ah, yes, we’re behind the times.

MS: I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s just different intellectual interests, different disciplinary foci. The kinds of debates that drive anthropology in the UK are slightly different from those in the US.

Fieldwork

RG: What are some good rules for practice that you see really emerging from your approach? What do you think is valuable for people to do in the field and when they are writing up?

MS: I’ve tried to model an approach that asks questions about the ontological assumptions that are implicit in what we encounter in the field. I’d emphasize the importance of not assuming that we already know what the prevailing configuration of ontology is, especially in regions where certain theoretical models have become, well, synonymous with those areas. The idea that we have relational Melanesians or perspectival Amerindians always needs to be tested and not presumed.

One of the main questions that the anthropology of ontology has raised is the role of philosophy in anthropology. Philosophy can be hugely stimulating, but it’s also easy to get carried away and simply read your ethnographic material in terms of the principles of a particular philosopher. And, well, frankly, the wonder we experience when it seems that the ontological assumptions legible in some myth or indigenous practice correlate almost precisely with the ideas of a particular philosopher can be, well, too compelling. So it’s always good to remind ourselves that we are discovering a relationship of affinity, not identity.

I think we should always aspire to a kind of ethnographic particularism – this is something I took from Sahlins and Munn. Labels that we develop to describe particular configurations of ontology – like dualism, animism, relationism or even poly-ontology – can become as banal and blunt as the old chestnuts of solidarity, resistance, and power, and they don’t necessarily shed light on anything unless you can locate them in the details, unless you can show that a particular ontological configuration motivates the logic of a particular magical technique, for example, or why someone did X rather than Y in a particular situation. If there’s really one thing that I would highlight, what I tell my own students, is that it’s always a good idea to attend to what your consultants in the field find puzzling and problematic. What are they preoccupied with or struggling to understand or trying to cope with? What do they wonder about?

Recently, some anthropologists interested in ontology have been advocating that we should focus our work on what they call alterity. By this they mean that we should concentrate on what doesn’t make sense to us, which usually means other people’s “apparently irrational beliefs” – things like how can they be fundamentalist Christians or how can they say that they are red parrots? But I think we are bound to be puzzled by what puzzles the people we meet in the field, so why pre-empt their puzzlement with our own?

RG: I think that that’s good advice. I agree with that. You and I must have both gone to the same graduate school!

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.

Claiming the ground philosophy has so often staked out, and which science in its many forms also wants to try to take of late, that in itself would be enough.  I really wish the ontologists would just stop there, at the “screw you, we’ve got this” statement.  But after that it often becomes about academese, because that’s the main thing they know.  And in that particular arena, it’s like the anthropologists bring a butter knife to what’s at least a knife fight (if not a gun fight), and that butter knife doesn’t cut through much and smears everything around anyway.  Sure, a lot of rich, creamy language, but it’s the same brown as the philosophers when it comes out the other end.  At least they’ve got precision on their side.

So, what do the ontologists miss?  One, they kinda think they’re solving the nature-nurture debate, because they’re talking “ontology,” the nature of being.  But all they’re really solving is how to try to talk about the nurture side of ontology; it’s like Geertz all over again.  Oh, yes, we’re these biosocial beings, and then the systems of symbols take precedence, and the best way to understand those systems is to treat them as malleable texts.  Problem solved!

Or not.  It’s as if they equate “being” with consciousness, the same classic mistake of Western philosophy.  Try being hungry for awhile.  Or someone trying to make ends meet in coastal Mexico, tourism moving in, the old ways getting displaced, and you got two kids to feed, and you know that what the government is doing isn’t quite right, but it’s so ordered, sounds rational, and it’s bringing a lot of money, and how the heck are you supposed to wrap your head around that?

Those sorts of pragmatic questions could be of more use in anthropology.  So could an empirical philosophy that, even as it insists on materiality and trying to dissolve the nature/culture division, treats both of those as more than ideas, as more than Western traditions hampering our present understanding.

So let’s listen to some Samuel Johnson on Bishop Berkeley:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – “I refute it thus.”

It comes down to three things for me, (1) the ontological turn betrays a larger holistic anthropology, (2) the ontological turn reinforces the Ivory Tower, mistaking sophistry for relevance and doing little about present plights faced by students, adjuncts, and research participants alike; and (3) it limits our anthropological bad-assery, which should just claim “everyday philosophy” as our own.

-Anonymous.

I did read a post over on Allegra by Isaac Morrison about this whole “ontological turn” thing that makes some good points.  Here’s how it starts:

It’s taken me a while to mentally unpack my experiences from the 2013 AAA conference. The conference itself came at a strange time for me, fresh on the heels of the loss of two close family members and the acquisition of two new jobs.

I bounced from session to session, cursed the Hilton’s Wi-Fi, delivered a workshop, periodically stepped out for work-related phone calls, sat on a panel or two, and indulged in Chicago’s culinary offerings. I collected business cards and passed business cards out. I reconnected with some old acquaintances, made a few new friends, and took copious notes while trying to make sense of a sprawling and diverse agglomeration of oblique specialties and deep knowledge.

Strange oppositions were the order of the day, and the most striking of them was my experience of strolling out of a panel on the importance of public engagement only to overhear a fresh-faced PhD student chirp “Marshal Sahlins is about to beat the crap out of Bruno Latour” while scampering past me on his way to a panel on “the ontological turn”

Now, I’ve had a fondness for ontological self-indulgence since the early 1990s, but all I could think about was the room I had just left full of deer-in-headlights PhD students all wondering where and how they were going to find jobs. The older faculty members on the panel had offered little consolation – they made it clear that failure to secure a full-time academic job wasn’t really a failure anymore, since the full-time academic jobs were vanishing anyway from the US job market and worldwide.

Later, Morrison asks this question: “If somebody asked you, ‘what’s the hot topic in the field of anthropology right now?’ would you be eager to tell them about the ben-wa glass bead game that is the ontological turn?'”

The rest is here.  Please feel free to make your case for or against anthropology and its ontological turn in the comments.

UPDATE 1/27/14: In the comments below, responding to a discussion about the current crisis in academic anthropology, and explaining his understanding of that crisis, Rex wrote: “These are the things that created the crisis we find ourselves in. Not ‘Writing Culture’.”  Here is my extended response to Rex:

I’d argue that the larger political economy of higher ed (and academic anthro) is just part of the issue. A big part, but still just a part. I think the current crisis is also about the kind of anthropology that has taken shape in the last few decades. It’s about what anthropologists do with their concepts, ideas, knowledge. I definitely don’t think it makes sense to blame post-modernism, or “critical theory,” or “Writing Culture” for contributing to the current fix we’re in. To me those are just sets of ideas or knowledge–they don’t “do” anything on their own. I do think, however, that it is fair to talk about the ideas and conversations we fixate upon, where those conversations actually go (via publishing, conferences, etc), how we transmit our values and ideas through training students, and, ultimately, the “anthropologists” and “anthropology” we have produced over the last three decades. I think we, as a discipline, have sort of painted ourselves into a corner–effectively removing ourselves from the public sphere. With noted exceptions. We do this–sometimes–by retreating into our own corners and closed, specialized conversations. I think this withdrawal from public engagement has seriously contributed to our current dilemma. There is a reason why so many people in the US have no clue what we do. It’s not just because they “don’t get it.”

So, overall, my skepticism about the ontology-related excitement isn’t so much about whether or not I find ontology personally useful or relevant. It’s more about whether or not the “ontological turn” fever is just another in a series of inward-looking shifts that further entrenches us in our own little worlds. Sometimes this kind of excitement about a particular body of theory–I think of “theory” as a tool for understanding the world–is akin to photographers who get all worked up about certain camera equipment, and that’s all they talk about. By and large, nobody cares about this but the photographers themselves. Granted, I love a good Leica or 4×5 view camera, but I really don’t want to sit around talking about it all day. It’s the photographs that matter. Sure, the process matters…but it’s important to balance process with practice. I think anthropologists find themselves caught in this trap a little too often. We like to talk shop, a lot.

So if ontology is the next big thing, great. Our challenge is to balance all the excited, insular shop talk with the doing anthropology thing. To me that means taking anthropology out into the world and finding ways to communicate our results, and it also means turning the anthropological eye upon the political and economic systems in which we exist on a day to day basis. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure our wider audiences could care about which tools we’re currently fixated upon. The AAA meetings are a place to have our internal conversations, but they’re also (potentially) a place for initiating deeper public engagement. I, for one, would be excited if our next “big thing” was less about our own conversations and theories, and more about what we’re actually doing with our ideas and methods. At home, and abroad.

I mentioned earlier that for many people ontology was a major theme at AAAs. Well now the good folks at Cultural Anthropology have published the papers from the Politics of Ontology Session. Short. Sweet. Ontologytastic. Most of what happens at the AAAs doesn’t live on in any meaningful way, or else is published years afterwards. It’s amazing, frankly, to see such relevant stuff from such high-calibre people get thrown up on the Intarweb.

Speaking of high-calibre, Museum Anthropology Review has published a ginormous double issue on digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge. Its an amazing collection of papers that help get the word out about the cutting edge of digital repatriation projects which are out there. Hats off to the organizers.

There are also many new less scholarly, more general-interest pieces out now. Limn, an art magazine/scholarly journal hybrid founded by our own Chris Kelty, published its fourth issue on Food Infrastructures. Yum. There is also a new issue of Anthropology of This Century out as well as a new number of Popular Anthropology.

I wish I could recommend specific articles out of all these journals, but frankly I’m swamped — and eager to hear what you all have to say. Anything in here you’re particularly keen to read? Or what would you recommend, having read some of this stuff? The Internetz wants to know.

The term was not everywhere at the AAAs, but it was used consistently, ambitiously, audaciously, and almost totally unironically to offer anthropology something that it (supposedly) hasn’t had in a long time: A massive infusion of theory that will alter our paradigm, create a shift in the field that everyone will feel and which will orient future work, and that will allow us, once again, to ask big questions. To be honest, as someone who had been following ‘ontological anthropology’ for the past couple of years, I was sort of expecting it to not get much traction in the US. But the successful branding of the term and the cultural capital attached to it may prove me wrong yet.

In fact, there were just two major events with the world ontology in the title: the “Politics of Ontology” roundtable and the blowout “The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology”. But these events were full of ‘stars’ and attracted plenty of attention.

Will this amount to anything? What is ontology anyway? Were there other themes that were more dominant in the conference? I don’t have any answers to these questions yet, but I hope to soon and will let you figure it out when I do. If you get there before me, then fire away in the comments section and we’ll see what people think.