Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology: Anthropological Engagements with Human and Non-Human Worlds
How does one measure and analyze human alterity and difference in an interconnected and ever-globalizing world? This chapter contextualizes and critically assesses the impact of what has often been dubbed ‘the ontological turn’ within anthropology in orde
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Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology: Anthropological Engagements with Human and Non-Human Worlds Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Synnøve Bendixsen A longitudinal review of the anthropological literature will show that usage of the concept of “ontology” has increased dramatically: Drawing on Google Scholar one can see that between 1960 and 1990 there were only eight articles published which had anthropology and ontology- related words in the title, while between 1990 and 2016 the number was approximately 90. And akin to the ontological maneuver of a reversal of perspectives, our impression is that these 90 merely comprise the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In other words, anthropology has literally become awash with debates invoking ontology in a myriad ways—and, crucially, in ways that are often mutually incompatible. Opening Google Scholar’s gates of knowledge—or, more correctly, the digital sediments of research texts—will therefore lead you to “ontology” being inferred in what may seem as sprawling and ultra-diverse anthropological discourses. The notion of ontology is, of course, also integral to non-anthropological political analyses, such as in critical analyses of capitalism. For one, the French philosopher Alain Badiou refers to the “ontological virtue of capital” (quoted
B.E. Bertelsen (*) • S. Bendixsen Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 B.E. Bertelsen, S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_1
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in Pignarre and Stengers 2011, xii) while, for instance, the anonymous politically radical group The Invisible Committee in a recent book describes the totalizing ontology of a capitalist world itself where (almost) all alterworlds or outsides have receded into or been co-opted by capitalism (The Invisible Committee 2015 [2014]). Such relatively recent turns of theory and methodologies—in anthropology and beyond—are informed by disparate analyses of scholars so differing in perspective as, for instance, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, Philippe Descola, Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, Marisol de la Cadena, Bruce Kapferer, Isabelle Stengers, John Law and Michael W. Scott, to name a few. However, what is shared among all of these, we argue, is that they in profoundly varied and sometimes also conflicting ways develop forms of anthropology where, first, a notion of difference is accentuated and, second, where such difference is analytically explored and theoretically circumscribed (if not fully empirically represented) as somehow bounded, tangibly other or, also, as existing within entities. However, beyond stating a sharp rise in the usage or invocation of the term and beyond recognizing the accentuation and tentative entification inherent to usage of “ontology” as difference, how is one, possibly, to define or assess the impact and directio
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