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5/22/2014 Whose truth is it anyway?

by Evan Killick Anthropology of this Century


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Anthropology of this Century
Whose truth is it anyway?
Evan Killick
(http://aotcpress.com/author/evan-killick/)
Truth in motion: the recursive anthropology of Cuban divination by Martin
Holbraad
What does the fish remind you of?
Other fish.
And what do other fish remind you of?
Other fish.
Major Sanderson sat back disappointedly.
(Major Sanderson, the staff psychiatrist, talking to Yossarian in Joseph
Hellers Catch-22)
At a recent anthropology conference I spoke to a PhD student who had just returned from
fieldwork in Amazonia. As it often does among contemporary Amazonianist anthropologists, our
conversation turned to perspectivism: the radically different way in which many indigenous
Amerindians appear to view the world. The student told me that when she had started her PhD,
her initial supervisors neither of them Latin Americanists insisted that she must read the work
of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and especially his writings on perspectivism. The student then
confided to me that once she got to the field perspectival ideas just did not seem to be of any
importance in the lives of the people she was working with. Nevertheless, two years later here she
was ready to present to an audience of mostly Amazonianists a paper considering the role of smells
in perspectival terms.
I start with this anecdote not to criticise the student, whose presentation was very lucid, well-
researched and argued, nor to dismiss the importance of perspectival theories, which I have used
in my own research and will defend below. The encounter does, however, seem to encapsulate a
particular trend in some current anthropological work in which the complex ideas, practices and
social processes of everyday life are overlooked in the intellectual pursuit of radical alterity. While
I might have dismissed my fears over this students particular focus on perspectivism at this early
stage in her writing, our conversation occurred just as I had been asked to review Martin
Holbraads new book, Truth in motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. What
was striking was that the students approach appeared to parallel the ontographic methodological
instructions (p.255-6) that Holbraad lays out in the concluding chapter of his book. Truth in
motion is arguably the clearest manifesto of the recent ontological turn in British anthropology,
and that like that movement also clearly owes a great debt to the work of Viveiros de Castro. So
while I will focus on Holbraads ideas in this article, I want to embed my discussion within a wider
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consideration of this apparently new direction for anthropology and in conversation with the work
of Viveiros de Castro.
Tsinki
[1 (#truth-n-1) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-1) ]
Magnus Course has described the ontological turn as a particular commitment to recalibrate the
level at which analysis takes place (2010:248), while Morten Pedersen echoes Holbraads own
stress on ontography as a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixed theoretical framework
(Pedersen 2012). This underlines the fact that, at least from their perspective, the work of these
new ontographers is less about producing new anthropological theories than about producing a
new methodology that they feel will take them past what they see as anthropologys fundamental
inability to take the words and views of others seriously. At the heart of the movement lies a deep
scepticism about the anthropological project as it has so far been conducted, based on the
fundamental issue of representation, and the political issue of who controls that representation.
For Holbraad, this debate centres around the issue of the distinction between nature and culture,
of the ability for anyone to be able to talk of a world out there in a way that is not fundamentally
caught up in their own particular worldview.
As Holbraad puts it: How might the nonuniversality of the distinction between nature and
culture be conceptualized without recourse to that very distinction? (p.35). For him the answer is
to seek out alterity and embrace it wherever possible, if necessary by creating new concepts and
ways of thinking that allow us and them to move forward together into a new world of
understanding. As he and his co-editors put it in the introduction to the edited volume Thinking
Through Things:
An ontological turn in anthropological analysis turns on the humble admission that our
concepts (not our representations) must, by definition, be inadequate to translate different
ones. This, it is suggested, is the only way to take difference alterity seriously as the
starting point for anthropological analysis (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007:12)
The corollary of this view is Holbraads new ontographic methodology in which he explicitly
subjugates ethnography to the search for this ontological alterity, exhorting ontographers to
search for apparent logical contradictions in their ethnographic descriptions and then to produce
(infine) new concepts, new to both the anthropologists culture as well as the one under study,
that will ultimately lend logical cogency to the initial contradiction and dissolve it in a newly shared
understanding.
At its heart this call appears to offer a critique of previous anthropologists as wilful Yossarians,
seeing only similarity in everything around them and thus reducing the variation of the world to a
uniform and uninteresting blankness. The alternative the ontographers offer is to become
philosophers for others, fully elucidating and, at times, explicating apparently distinct
understandings of the world. As I hope will become clear in this discussion, there is much to
admire and appreciate in both this project as well as Holbraads intellectually rigorous book. I am
also generally supportive of the political perspective upon which I believe the ontological turn, and
its precursors, to be based. My concern is that this proposed methodological emphasis on alterity
and then the preoccupation with philosophically supporting the particular ontological cases it
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throws up, such as perspectivism, have the danger both of overinterpreting, or perhaps over-
intellectualising, alternative views and practices while also eclipsing a fuller and wider sense of the
power of anthropological study itself. For me, anthropologys strength lies precisely in its ability to
find, describe and discuss both similarity and difference.
Pirarucu
[2 (#truth-n-2) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-2) ]
In an excellent early chapter, Holbraad outlines a particular understanding of the history of
anthropological theory in terms of changing attitudes towards the relationship between nature and
culture. Starting from a position of evolutionism that saw sociocultural variation as an index of
underlying human nature and an expression of human beings development as a species, the
discipline eventually replaced this with diffusionism that decoupled culture from nature and
placed society and culture as fields to be understood in terms of their own (p.19-23). Here,
however, while anthropologists and natives might have been considered as equal in terms of their
truth-claims, anthropologists, in Holbraads view, still tended to claim the upper hand through
arguing that only some societies have devoted themselves to developing systematic methods and
techniques that may ensure that their representations of the world are actually correct (p.25).
For Holbraad this faith in anthropologys own objectivity was then replaced by social
constructivism, in which the very idea of scientific truth began to be considered either nave or
dogmatic (p.27) and the diffusionists continued reliance on the idea of nature that stands outside
the realms of society and culture was taken away, replaced by the ultimate conclusion that if
culture is natural, so to speak, then nature is cultural (p.29). In this view it is not just that
societies vary in the manner in which they represent nature but rather that nature itself is best
understood as differing for different people. Holbraad rightly points out the intellectual stalemate
that this brought, and with which we mostly still seem to be living. On one side are the naturalists
with their point-blank-obvious intuition that theres a world out there that both constrains and
acts as a benchmark for the truth-claims we make about it (p.32), on the other side are the
constructivists who deny all claims to an ultimate truth.
Anthropologys response, Holbraad suggests, has mostly been to critique the concepts of nature
and culture themselves. From his perspective this approach is flawed, however, because it is still
being argued from within a particular Western discourse and therefore it ultimately still retains
and recreates the very distinction that it is trying to repudiate. Elsewhere Holbraad has gone even
further to note that this idea of a single nature means a parallel assumption of a single humanity,
reifying similarity over difference, such that:
anthropology has built the non-possibility of the Other into its own premise, as the study of an
inclusively construed anthropos- what they call humanity. Once that logical move is in place
then all Otherness must appear in the form of variation (variation on the abiding theme of
anthropos of course) (Holbraad 2006)
For Holbraad then, the only way to escape this circularity, and the apparent inadequacy of our
own concepts, is to see the limitations of our own concepts and then have a willingness to invent, or
to use his word infine (p.220), new concepts that will make sense of things that seem irrational
from a particular perspective. Hence he does not deny that humans can exist in a single world, it is
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just that that truly ontologically shared world does not yet exist and it is precisely anthropologys
job to help bring it into being.
While this may seem like a very philosophical problem and debate its deeper importance is made
clearer if we trace the origins of this approach. Holbraad explicitly notes his intellectual debt to
scholars including Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour scholars he describes as
sharing a desire to think (and do) anthropology beyond representation (p.xvi). However, I think
it is particularly illuminating to focus on the influence of Viveiros de Castro, to whom the book is
dedicated and to whom Holbraads epilogue is directly addressed. In an after-dinner speech
Viveiros de Castro gave at the ASA conference in 2003, the deeper political edge of his own
anthropological approach was made clear. In it he noted his belief, based on his experience of
coming of age during the period that included the 1968 student uprisings, in anthropology as an
insurrectionary, subversive science the instrument of a certain revolutionary utopia which
fought for the conceptual self-determination of all the planets minorities (2003). Viveiros de
Castro argues that for him and others a key task of anthropologists was to [enable] the thought of
American peoples to escape the ghetto in which it had been enclosed since the 16th century
(2003). In this context he notes that Lvi-Strausss la pense sauvage did not signify as in the
unfortunate English translation of the book title the savage mind: To us it meant untamed
thought, unsubdued thought, wild thought. Thought against the State, if you will (2003).
Here the political importance of taking alternative visions of the world seriously becomes clear: it
is not a merely philosophical matter but rather is above all a political act, countering a history of
colonialism and exploitation.
[3 (#truth-n-3) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-3) ]
Against a Western intellectual imperialism that ultimately subordinates all others to a particular
understanding of the world and understands and explains their actions and beliefs from that
perspective, is placed an alternative intellectual future in which different perspectives meet and
interact in relative equality. It is this view and objective that, as I understand it, underpins
Viveiros de Castros anthropological project and that the ontographers have sought to carry
forward. The intellectual and political importance of this project is clear, particularly in the
Brazilian context, or in other settings where people are still deeply engaged in questions over the
role and future of indigenous or minority groups within a nation state. Holbraad and the other
European-based academics involved in the ontological turn seem even more ambitious, however,
in wanting to make this approach, with its focus on the absolute equality of ontological differences
and the creation of a newly shared future, apply to all anthropological endeavour, wherever it
occurs. The reason why Holbraads book is so interesting is precisely because it offers an early
example of putting this analytical approach at the heart of an anthropological study. In this case
Holbraads focus is on the Afro-Cuban practice of If divination in Havana
Bacalao
[4 (#truth-n-4) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-4) ]
If this article has so far been taken up with philosophical questions and debates then it in no small
measure reflects the structure of Holbraads approach, which is much more focused on his
intellectual forbears and logically constructed arguments than on ethnography per se. While this
reflects Holbraads emphasis on taking the intellectual basis of If seriously, as I am using his
monograph as the focus of this discussion and ultimately I believe that it needs to be judged
according to its relation to its ethnographic subject I need to give a brief account of If divination
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here.
Clients come to babalawos, the priest[s] of If (p.76), for divinations for a variety of reasons, but
essentially to provide insight into their lives. At the centre of If are the oddu, the mythical verses
that are split into 256 accounts that are then associated with specific divinatory configurations. At
a divination the babalawo uses certain instruments to divine which oddu are applicable to the
clients case and recites and discusses them. Divining can be done using various elements but the
most formal and elaborate divination ritual, and the one that Holbraad concentrates on, involves
the use of palm nuts and a divining tray. Here the tray is covered in divining powder and after
various initiatory activities the babalawo casts the nuts. He does this by holding 16 of them in his
cupped hands before clutching as many as he can in his right hand and lifting them away from the
left hand. If none are left, or more than three, then the action is discounted; but if either one or
two nuts are left in the left hand then an appropriate number of lines are drawn in the powder on
the tray. This is then repeated seven more times until there are two columns of four marks. Each
set of four binary marks gives 16 possible combinations, which when combined with the other set
gives 256 overall combinations (1616). Each combination is associated with a particular oddu
which the babalawo can then recite and interpret in terms of its relevance to the client.
While Holbraad does eventually describe a generic divination, he is not really interested (as he
makes clear from the start) in the ethnographic specifics of individual consultations or even the
wider social setting and contexts in which they occur. Instead Holbraad is focused on how
divination is understood from the perspective of its practitioners. Thus while he writes that one
may admit straight out that divinatory verdicts are open to doubt (p.68) for him this would
reflect an etic position that fails to take at face value practitioners own views, the fault he finds in
all previous anthropological approaches to divination, including the work of Evans-Pritchard and
Boyer. Instead his key insight is that oracular verdicts are not just understood to be true but
rather are the kinds of things that could not but be true (p.55). For practitioners and Holbraad
tends to focus on the babalawos themselves although his overall argument appears to include the
clients as well it is meaningless to talk of doubt, as the truth of a divination lies at the heart of the
very definition of what a divination is: To doubt oracular truth is to doubt whether it is oracular
(p.69).
This then is the key moment of alterity that Holbraad takes as being at the heart of his task to
take If practitioners seriously, and it is how he differentiates his own work from previous
anthropological approaches. As with Viveiros de Castro, Holbraads approach is an important
antidote to work which, as he sees sit, would seek to offer only an outside explanation of the
practices of others. For Holbraad though, it is not enough to offer this insight and then go on to
discuss its implications in terms of how babalawos and consultants react to and use consultations,
nor even perhaps the wider implications for other aspects of Cuban beliefs, life and society. Instead
Holbraad sees his task as delineating the deeper philosophical principles that might underpin such
a view and then contrasting them with Western understandings. It is this quest that forms the
heart of the book.
In line with the ontographic methodological instructions that he lays out in his conclusion (p.255-
6), Holbraad doesnt rely so much on ethnography as the work of other anthropologists,
philosophers and other thinkers for inspiration and comparison in taking this project forward. His
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method is to consider the logic that appears to underlie both Western and If definitions of truth to
unpack why the indubitability of If divination is a problem from a Western perspective. He builds
his arguments through detailed and complex philosophical debate mostly involving critiques of
alternative interpretations. In essence, though, he traces the ultimate incompatibility in the two
systems of thought as lying in the Western ontological position that truth is a relationship
between a representation and a fact (p.74). Thus:
The practitioner of divination may insist, blue in the face, that doubtful verdicts are not
verdicts. But if verdicts are taken to be representations they must be doubtful, so the
practitioners insistence makes no sense (p.74).
Instead Holbraad shows how the concept of truth in If divination rituals cannot be understood
representationally but rather must be understood recursively by facing the fundamental alterity
in If ontology, such that truth lies only in the oddu themselves, and the diviners job is to align
the world, or at least the world of the consultant, to the truth of the Oddu. As Holbraad explains:
The key claim is that, in order to make sense of the constitutive indubitability of truth in If,
divinatory truths must be conceived as acts of definition (rather than representation) that
effectively transform the world upon which they purport to comment (p.xxiii).
He therefore proposes an understanding of If truth as motile rather than representational. A
traditional anthropological understanding might be to see the chosen oddu as representing a
particular truth that must then be interpreted in light of the clients circumstances. Instead
Holbraad argues for understanding the truth of the oddu as on a trajectory that the skilled
babalawo must then combine along with the clients own circumstances, to bring them together
into a single new trajectory.
Understood in this way, every divination cannot but be true, because every divination enacts this
transformation upon the consultant. As surely as any patient coming out of a medical surgeons
operating theatre has been physically changed, regardless of their eventual health outcome, a
consultant is now living with their oddu and their divination has thus been truthful. For Holbraad
then, this exposition has achieved his original goal of understanding If divination from the
perspective of practitioners.
Having produced this compelling account of If, however, Holbraad is not content to rest his
analysis here, returning instead to the question of anthropological methodology itself. Specifically
he argues that his notion of motility and the bringing together of two separate paths is a useful way
to think about the anthropological endeavour and specifically his new ontographic methodology.
That is, that an anthropologist, faced with an alternate view of the world, should bring her own
understandings together with that of the alternate ontology to create new concepts such that,
ideally, people from both cultures could move forward together in a newly shared understanding of
the world. So in this way Holbraad has come full circle, using the insights gleaned from using his
own ontographic method on If divination to then reinforce and further elucidate his own
methodology. If this intellectual dexterity seems a little too neat, the coincidence of the
ethnographic subject somehow reflecting and reinforcing the anthropologists own methodology,
then it points to a key criticism that can be made of Holbraads approach, as well the ontological
turn more generally.
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Piraa
Michael Scott in discussing the ontological turn has cited Alfred Korzybskis famous saying:
Mistake the map for the territory mistake a philosophical system for the world and the map
will overdetermine the inquiry (Kyriakides 2012:415). In this view the philosophical ideas
become an end in themselves, not linked to raising further ethnographic questions or elucidating
other social and cultural phenomenon but rather held up as precious jewels to be admired in
isolation. Certainly when Holbraad links his ontographic conclusions back to his own methodology
one feels that he has made a philosophical step too far. Yet even before this there is a question of
whether it is his own intellectual pursuit that is guiding his analysis rather than any real interest in
the practices of If divinations and their participants. In the first instance this is emphasised by
Holbraads reluctance to bring to life the voices of babalawos and their clients which means that
the ideas that he presents as being at the heart of If come much more in his own voice than that
of his informants. This leaves him open to the criticism that he is ventriloquising the voices of his
informants to fit his own theoretical preoccupations (see Ramos 2012:490). Beyond this, however,
Holbraads methodology and writing can be more broadly accused of both essentialising and
exoticising If ontology. In the first place by distilling one particular aspect of it, making the search
for and understanding of its point of ultimate alterity so precious that nothing else matters. In the
second place by reifying and fixing this understanding in place as if it is stable and shared
uniformly. And finally by emphasising the radical alterity of the concept, such that it can only
apparently be understood by others through the creation of new and newly-shared concepts.
Reflecting the long gestation of the book itself, Holbraad is aware of various forms of this critique
but interestingly he chooses to defend himself by further emphasising the detachment of his
methodology. He notes that there is a basic misapprehension involved in this line of complaint,
namely the assumption that recursive analyses are even in the business of providing accurate
representations of the people studied (p.249). He argues against holistic approaches that might
wish for a fuller picture of If practices arguing that such an approach loses something of the
essence of If divination in the continued search for similarity. He also notes: So, as in divinatory
infinition, truth in our analytical infinitions becomes a matter of internal cogency rather than
external match (p.254). I am not, however, convinced by this argument, and its related
assumption that Holbraad, or anyone emphasising his ontographic or philosophical approach, has
definitively distilled and understood what is going on.
Interestingly, much of the limited ethnography that Holbraad does provide is concerned with
practitioners and their clients doubts about If. Holbraad includes this precisely to bolster his
claim that ultimately divinations are indubitable but the reader is left with questions of how far
this ontological position would hold and also of a reality in which people seem much more willing to
live with ambiguity than Holbraads statements would suggest. For example, Holbraad describes a
woman who was told that her problems stemmed from needing her mothers forgiveness. The
woman rejected this divination, noting that Ive spent the past hour talking and crying with my
mum, trying to work out what Ive done to her. I asked her for her forgiveness but she didnt give
it because I havent done anything! (p.204). Holbraad notes that a few weeks later the girl
decided that the divination was wrong because those gentlemen werent babalawos, leading
Holbraad to conclude that her belief in the power of divination remains intact (p.212). If the
divination wasnt true then it wasnt a divination.
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Holbraad supports this interpretation by arguing:
To interpret her criticism as a breach with the logic of divination as such would be equivalent
to doubting whether, say, love thy neighbor is an inherent principle of Christian practice on
the grounds that many Christians are less than loving to their neighbors (p.212-3).
This seems a particularly telling comparison in the sense that the Christian creed is based on
specific scriptural passages (Matthew 22:39 & Mark 12:29) and is therefore indisputably part of
Christian beliefs regardless of the actions of Christian people.
[5 (#truth-n-5)
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While Holbraad may be intent on giving equal
weight to If notions, the fact remains that its central creeds do not exist in a generally accepted,
textual form. As such, and particularly in relation to his assertion of the indubitability of If
divination, there may be a fluidity at the heart of the system itself, let alone in the minds of its
adherents and practitioners that Holbraads interpretation fails to capture.
Thus, while in Holbraads description there is a clear all or nothing choice between accepting the
truth of divination or not believing in it at all, one is left wondering how this process developed
and wondering about the many people caught in that liminal stage between absolute belief and
none at all. As with the unnamed woman above, but also in the life histories of Holbraads central
figures of Javier and Javielito, people are clearly not acting at all times as if divinations are
indubitable. Rather, as I have found in my own engagement with Amerindians perspectival ideas,
it seems likely that many of the people he interacted with live in a much greyer area in which they
are willing not only to doubt but also to explicitly hold both belief and non-belief in their minds at
the same time. This points to a number of aspects of such beliefs, first their ability to change and to
differ between individuals, or in the same individual over time, and also the deeper question, that
strikes at the heart of Holbraads project, of whether a single, internally logical system of thought
actually exists in these cases. There is thus a fear that in producing a clear, logical argument about
the nature of If divination Holbraad has produced a thing that, much as it can be philosophically
defended, really exists for no one except himself.
Holbraad might counter that my critique undermines alternative ontologies, apparently deeming
them less rational than our own and therefore precisely undermining the ontographic imperative
to take them seriously. I would counter this by arguing symmetrically (Latour 1993:92) that I
also dont entirely recognise the Western ontology against which Holbraad contrasts If. As with
his ventriloquism for If one can argue that Holbraad has set up a particularly reified and clearly
defined notion of Western truth that is equally unrepresentative (pun intended). In the first place
there is a question of who we are in this equation, particularly in a contemporary reality in which
anthropologists, not to mention Westerners, have a variety of personal, cultural and ontological
backgrounds.
[6 (#truth-n-6) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-6) ]
Moreover, as
Venkatesan has written:
Ontologies, theories of being and reality, have histories (and genealogies). They are also not
necessarily transcontextually stable. Who among us has not shouted at a car or a printer for
deliberately breaking down when one is racing to make a deadline? (Venkatesan 2010:154)
The question then becomes whether the philosophers version of our rationality has ever had
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much relation to non-philosophers thought processes. Thus, it is not that in rejecting Holbraads
ontology of If that I am taking it less seriously than Western thought. Rather I follow Richard
Handlers insistence that: Others are no less capable of rationality and no more prone to
rationalization (however we may define those two terms) than we are (Handler 2004:489).
Here it might be argued that Holbraad just has divergent aims from an anthropological approach
that focuses on everyday interactions and accurate representations of the people studied
(p.249). Elsewhere he has emphasised the philosophical and intellectual basis of his quest:
If culture, at whatever level of abstraction is a set of representations produced by the people
we study, then it quite properly is said to belong to them: Nuer culture, Western culture,
etc. Not so for ontology, which is just a set of assumptions postulated by the anthropologist
for analytical purposes (Holbraad 2010:185 my emphasis).
The deeper issue here is that in choosing this methodology for considering other people, Holbraad
fundamentally undermines the political act that lies at the very foundation of the ontological turn.
That is, Holbraad can be seen as enacting a similar form of intellectual imperialism against which
Viveiros de Castro railed in his original championing of the savage mind (2003). By all means let
us have philosophers debate all manner of possible ontologies, but we cannot let them claim to be
the only ones who have truly elucidated what is going on.
The ontological turns critique of previous anthropological approaches was that in its assumption of
shared humanity it had built the non-possibility of the Other into its own premise (Holbraad
2006, see above). Arguably it seems that Holbraads strict methodology, with its intensive focus
on alterity, is potentially just as destructive to the anthropological endeavour.
[7 (#truth-n-7)
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In stressing alterity, Holbraad creates purified
versions of the Other that end up bearing little relation to peoples lives and deny their ability to
interact with others, as they have and do on a regular basis, prior to any ontographic intervention.
As such the ontographer seems to start speaking for the people being studied and denying their
own agency in their inhabited world. As with his creation of a particular notion of If divination,
Holbraad reifies alterity to the point that he seems to forget that his informants are interacting
with each other, and him, on an everyday basis (cf. Carrithers 2010:186). This is not to say that
Holbraads approach is without merit, it is only that, to my mind, his obsession with alterity drives
him to act as imperiously as those against whom Viveiros de Castro originally pitted the
anthropological method.
In contrast to Holbraads approach, I would also note that Viveiros de Castro while recognising the
artifice of his own model has also produced something of unquestionable use for helping to further
elucidate previously misunderstood instances and interactions. The most obvious example, used
repeatedly not only by Viveiros de Castro (1998a:475, 1998b & 2004) but also by Latour, is to
reread the example taken from Lvi-Strauss of Amerindians drowning Europeans to discover
whether their corpses were subject to putrefaction (1973:384, quoted in Viveiros de Castro
1998a:475). Viveiros de Castro uses the insights of perspectivism to turn Lvi-Strauss
observation that the proof that they were true humans is that they considered that they alone
were the true humans on its head:
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Now everything has changed. The savages are no longer ethnocentric but rather
cosmocentric; instead of having to prove that they are humans because they distinguish
themselves from animals, we now have to recognize how inhuman we are for opposing
humans to animals in a way they never did (Viveiros de Castro, 1998:475).
As Latour has shown, the potential power of this insight is great and, as with the wider aims of the
ontological turn, can be used to undermine and divert particular Western intellectual traditions
and assumptions (Latour 1993, 2002, 2004 & 2009). Thus while the pursuit of perspectivism may
have gone too far in certain cases (Ramos 2012:482) its underlying importance is retained. While it
might be argued that Holbraads work could lead to similarly wide insights, the fact is that,
discounting the self-serving discussion of his own methodology, Holbraad has not yet used his
apparent insight into the indubitability of If divination to tell us anything else about Cuban life,
the history of If or anything wider about social, political, intellectual or cultural interactions.
To my mind the remedy for these apparent weaknesses in Holbraads approach is found precisely
in the central tenet of anthropology which Holbraad seems so keen to downplay, namely
ethnography. Michael Carrithers noted something similar in his contribution to the 2008 GDAT
debate:
One of the features of anthropology as a discipline is precisely that it isnt philosophy, but that
the union card is ethnography, and the union card of ethnography is actually going and
encountering people This means, I think, that its radically empiricist in a way that its hard
for philosophy of any kind really to wrap its head around what that empiricism would or could
actually be, in the terms in which anthropologists actually practice it (Carrithers 2010:196).
The power of ethnography is seen in responses to perspectivism where, in contrast to Holbraads
purely intellectual pursuit, it is ethnography that has shown how and why Amerindian thought is
much more complex than the basic philosophical inversions that lie at the heart of Viveiros de
Castros work (Turner 2009, Course 2010).
[8 (#truth-n-8)
(http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-8) ]
While these differences might be taken as grist
for the ontographic mill, the reality is that the ontographic process of purification that Holbraad
appears to exemplify is likely only to take us further away from the complexity of reality. Thus,
while philosophers may be able to sit around and consider the possibility of these alternatives, it
tends to be ethnography, the actual words, actions and ideas of other people that generates
alternative versions that are much more complex and novel than anything we can dream up. To
my mind, Holbraads method does not allow us to break free of our own conceptions and thus
really understand the other. Instead his method is likely to produce new intellectual rails along
which such understandings are going to be judged.
Holbraad, in the conclusion to the book, contrasts the strength of Western intellectual arguments
with oracular divinations noting that it was the lack of the former in the latter that so worried
earlier anthropologists. It was this that led him to seek out a deeper understanding of divinations
to show why such argumentation was not needed. Yet, ironically it is precisely his own search for a
strong intellectual underpinning of divination that in his writings seems to rob divination of its
own complexity and underlying self. Thus, while the strength and ingenuity of Holbraads own
arguments are to be applauded the real lacuna in his work is the lack of ethnography that would
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allow the reader to judge his pronouncements more fully as well as see how these apparently
different notions of truth play out in the everyday world and may have wider implications. In a
country (i.e. Cuba) synonymous in the international arena with politics, revolution and alternative
socio-economic activities it would not seem out of place to wonder whether Holbraads insights
might relate to things of wider import than his own philosophical musings.
Bufeo
[9 (#truth-n-9) (http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/#truth-n-9) ]
Any discussion touching on the relationship between philosophy and anthropology would be
incomplete without reference to Ingolds well-known dictum: Anthropology is philosophy with the
people in (Ingold 1992: 695-6). Viveiros de Castro used it in his 2003 speech to the ASA
emphasising the importance of native thought in the philosophical project: If real philosophy
abounds in imaginary savages, the geophilosophy implied by anthropology strives to articulate an
imaginary philosophy with the help of real savages (Viveiros de Castro 2003). For Ingold the key
advantage of anthropology over philosophy was precisely to lessen the exclusivity of such
intellectual pursuit by enlisting the help of ordinary people (Ingold 1992: 695-6). In taking this
notion of native philosophy forward in his work, however, Viveiros de Castro steadily detaches
anthropological thought from any ethnographic reality. He ends up arguing for an anthropological
theory of conceptual imagination that creates those intellectual objects and relations which
furnish the indefinitely many possible worlds of which humans are capable (Viveiros de Castro
2003).
It is this call that I believe Holbraad and, to various degrees, his fellow anthropologists within the
ontological turn have followed in their subsequent work. In its inherent critique of prior
intellectual endeavour that might be deemed not to have taken the thoughts and ideas of others
seriously enough, this approach is important. Yet Holbraad also explicitly takes this intellectual
trajectory full circle saying What is at stake are the ideas, not the people who might hold them.
So if anthropology is philosophy with people in it, Id say [Ingold] is right, but only without the
people (Holbraad 2010:185).
And in taking the people out Holbraad loses his possible interlocutors who might limit his
reification and exoticisation of their concepts beyond any emic recognition. Moreover, his
approach, rather than bringing equality to cross-cultural intellectual debate by emphasising the
need to bring a particular philosophical depth to apparently alien concepts, reinforces a very
particular intellectual approach to the world. Logically, if we have removed the people from
anthropology then all that is left is philosophy. The philosopher may worry that anthropologists
see only undifferentiated fish populating an uninteresting world but just because we use a category
to make comparisons does not mean that we are blind to the intricacies and possible separations
and contradictions within it.
So long, and thanks for all the fish

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Liana Chua, Magnus Course, Amit Desai, Peter Gow and Jon Mitchell for their astute
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comments and suggestions. Any opinions and errors remain entirely my own.
REFERENCES
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Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology
2010 30(2):152-200.
Course, Magnus. 2010. Of words and fog: Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology.
Anthropological Theory. 10:247-263.
Course, Magnus. 2013. The Fifth of Five Worlds. Anthropology of this Century. Issue 6, Jan 2013.
Gledhill, John. 2010. The discussion, in Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture : Motion
Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of
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494.
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artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge. Pp.1-31.
Holbraad, Martin. 2006. Response to Daniel Millers review of Thinking Through Things on the
Material World Blog (http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-
things/ (http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-things/) )
Holbraad, Martin. 2010. Against the Motion, in in Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture :
Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory,
University of Manchester. Critique of Anthropology 2010 30(2):152-200.
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ingold, Tim. 1992. Editorial. Man. 27(4):693-696.
Kyriakides, Theodoros. 2012. Nondualism is philosophy, not ethnography A review of the 2011
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[1]
The Amazonian electric eel, Electrophorus electrus. (#to-truth-n-1)
[2]
Arapaima gigus, a gigantic Amazonian fish that must breathe surface air in order
to survive. (#to-truth-n-2)
[3]
For Viveiros de Castro, as for many other anthropologists, this engagment with
the political goes beyond their academic work to encompass public engagement and
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activism for and with indigenous peoples. (#to-truth-n-3)
[4]
Cod, most commonly used to refer to the dried and salted form that is a staple
part of the diet of many Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities that circle
the Atlantic Ocean. (#to-truth-n-4)
[5]
I would go further to argue that the Biblical Canon often has little relation to the
actual worldviews and actions of individuals who would call themselves Christian.
(#to-truth-n-5)
[6]
I thank Liana Chua for her discussion on this issue. (#to-truth-n-6)
[7]
I should note here that Holbraad pushes back against this point by arguing that
recursive analysis proceeds, not by seeking to verify some first principle of alterity,
but rather by submitting the prior supposition of similarity to systematic testing so
as to determine the exact degree to which it may or may not be carried (p.249). His
argument being that he accepts the existence of similarity but weeds through it to get
at the point of alterity that he finds the most interesting. In practice this means that
even if he intellectually acknowledges the existence of similarity his work leaves no
real space for it. (#to-truth-n-7)
[8]
In referring to Turners critique it is important to note that in the foundational
(English) text for perspectivism Viveiros de Castro makes the clear observation that
This inversion, perhaps too symmetrical to be more than speculative (1998a:470).
(#to-truth-n-8)
[9]
Used in Peru to refer to the Amazonian, pink, river dolphin. (#to-truth-n-9)
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