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s Century
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Anthropology of this Century
Common nonsense: a review of certain
recent reviews of the ontological turn
Morten Axel Pedersen
(http://aotcpress.com/author/morten-
pedersen/)
If the success of a new theoretical approach can be measured by the intensity of the passion and
the amount of critique it generates, then surely the so-called ontological turn within
anthropology and cognate disciplines qualifies as one. As still more scholars and perhaps especially
students express sympathy with some or all of its analytical aspirations, the larger and the louder
becomes the chorus of anthropological sceptics expressing reservations about the project and its
implications. But what is this turn really about, and how fair and thus also how damaging are
the various critiques raised against it? With a view to addressing these and related questions, my
aim in this essay is to review certain recent reviews of the ontological turn with special emphasis
on whether or not this theoretical method and some of the most common critiques of it may
themselves be said to rest on implicit meta-ontologies.
Let me begin by describing what I consider the ontological turn to be all about. I shall be relatively
brief, for a lot has already been written about this question, notably by my friend and sometimes
partner in crime Martin Holbraad, partly in relation to critiques of the book Thinking Through
Things, which he co-edited with Amira Henare and Sari Wastell (and to which I myself
contributed) in 2007.
In a recent paper about the oftentimes implicit linguistic conventions underpinning anthropological
descriptions of Amerindian cosmologies, Magnus Course correctly observes that what people have
meant by ontology has been diverse and that the ontological turn therefore comprises neither a
school nor even a movement, but rather a particular commitment to recalibrate the level at
which analysis takes place (2010: 248). Nevertheless, Course goes on to define it as the dual
movement towards, on the one hand, exploring the basis of the Western social and intellectual
project and, on the other, of exploring and describing the terms in which non-Western
understandings of the world are grounded (ibid). This characterization seems to me basically
right, for the ontological turn has always above all been a theoretically reflexive project, which is
concerned with how anthropologists might get their ethnographic descriptions right. The ambition
is to devise a new analytical method from which classic ethnographic questions may be posed
afresh. For that is what the ontological turn was always meant to be, in my understanding: a
technology of description, which allows anthropologists to make sense of their ethnographic
material in new and experimental ways.
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So, why all the fuss? Leaving aside the already hotly debated proposition that ontology is just
another word for culture (Venkatesan 2010) and other claims that the ontological turn is simply
an anachronistic icing on the obsolete culturalist cake, one of the most common objections centres
on the very word ontology itself. For just how many students and scholars ask themselves and
others with varying degrees of incredulity and shock (for a good example, see Keane 2009) can
this term, with its heavy load of philosophical baggage and its metaphysical, essentialist, and
absolutist connotations, be of any use to the anthropological project? One of the best examples of
this critique can be found in a recent essay by Paolo Heywood (2012). Inspired by Quines
(mocking) concept of bloated universes in which existence covers everything both actual and
potential (2012: 148), Heywood argues that the ontological turn has failed to live up to its own
mission of always allowing ethnographic specificity to trump theoretical generality by operating
with a tacit meta-ontology of its own. At some point or another along the path traced by the
ontological turn, Heywood asserts, we will have to start deciding what is, and what is not.
Holbraad and others use the word ontology precisely because of the connotations of reality and
being it brings with it; yet they neglect to acknowledge that insisting on the reality of multiple
worlds commits you to a meta-ontology in which such worlds exist: what Quine would call a
bloated universe (2012: 146).
Of the different critiques of the ontological turn that I have come across over the years, this is one
of the subtlest. For, even if one does not necessarily share Heywoods concern that there is a
difference of usage in the concept [of ontology] as it is employed by anthropologists and by
analytical philosophers (after all, why should this constitute a problem at all surely this is a sign
of growing disciplinary confidence and maturity?), Heywood is evidently touching upon a rather
delicate question, namely whether the ontological turn amounts to a big theory (or meta-
ontology, in Heywoods terms) or not? To be sure, Holbraad in particular has gone to great
lengths to stress that the ontological turn (or the recursive move, as he calls it in more recent
writings) is a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixed theoretical framework. In a
characteristically mind-boggling line of reasoning, he explains:
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At issue are not the categories of those we purport to describe, but rather our own when our
attempts to do so fail Rather than containing [contingency] at the level of ethnographic
description, the recursive move allows the contingency of ethnographic alterity to transmute itself
to the level of analysis [R]ecursive anthropology render[s] all analytical forms contingent
upon the vagaries of ethnographically driven aporia This, then, is also why such a recursive
argument could hardly pretend to set the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, anthropological
or otherwise [T]he recursive move is just that: a move as contingent, time-bound, and
subjunctive as any (Holbraad 2012: 263-264).
It is hard to imagine a more logically compelling response to Heywoods critique. No, goes
Holbraads reply, the ontological turn has no covert meta-ontological ground, for its only ground
is precisely its radically contingent attitude expressed not only in its open-ended attitude to its
object of study, but also in its relative lack of commitment to the heuristic concepts that it creates
and deploys to make sense of ethnographically driven aporia. To claim, as Heywood and several
others have done, that variants of the ontological turn have moved too far from the call to take
seriously other worlds, and started positing world of their own (2012: 144) is to fail to recognise
the limited degree to which the ontological turn takes itself seriously. Indeed, seen from its own
radically contingent perspective, a future non- or even anti-recursive turn cannot be excluded,
just as they cannot yet, in their constitutive ethnographic contingency, be conceived. What we
have, in effect, is a machine for thinking in perpetual motion an excessive motion, ever capable of
setting the conditions of possibility for its own undoing (Holbraad 2012: 264-65).
Yet, compelling as Holbraads argument is, I am not entirely sure that it lets him and other self-
proclaimed ontographers (myself included) fully off the hook. For the question is whether the
analytic ideal of a radically heuristic ethnographic theory (Da Col & Graeber 2011) is actually
synthetically possible, to adopt Kants old distinction. A perfectly recursive anthropology of the
sort sketched by Holbraad above may well be logically conceivable as a pure abstract possibility.
But, to my knowledge, all of the ontographic studies published to date have been wedded to a
particular theoretical ground captured by concepts such as relational (Strathern 1988), fractal
(Wagner 1991), and intensive (Deleuze 1994). Certainly, some of my own work is guilty of this
if that is what it is to analyse from a set of theoretical assumptions: a sin for which one can be
charged and found guilty in the Cambridge court. As far as I am concerned, the meta-ontological
critique made by Heywood does not refer to an ethnographic crime but an anthropological
necessity of which one can, as long as one maintains a high level of theoretical reflexivity, consider
oneself proud. Indeed, as I am going to suggest in what remains of this essay, this is the main
weakness of Heywoods and other recent critiques of the ontological turn: they are curiously blind
to their own theoretical ground. For, no matter whether they want this or not, they too are meta-
ontological sinners.
Nowhere is this more clear than in James Laidlaws recent review in this journal of my book on
Mongolian shamanism, Not Quite Shamans, or, put differently in keeping with Laidlaws own
jesting spirit his review of a single footnote in the books Introduction, where I summarise my
take on the term ontology. The problem, Laidlaw argues (closely echoing Heywoods critique of
Holbraad), is that my position involves a tacit oscillat[ation] between two different uses of
ontology, which are mutually incompatible. On the one hand, Laidlaw asserts, I use this term in
the same sense as he himself appears to subscribe to, namely with reference to the study of, or
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reflection on, the question of what there is what are the fundamental entities or kinds of stuff
that exist? And, on the other hand, I also deploy ontology in what Laidlaw considers to be a more
radical and dubious sense of a purported radical alterity of certain societies [which] consists
not in them having different socially constructed viewpoints on the same (natural) world, but in
them living in actually different worlds. The differences between them and Euro-America are not
therefore epistemological (different ways of knowing the same reality) but ontological
(fundamentally different realities). This, Laidlaw maintains, is a contradiction, for if in the first
sense, ontologies refer to views about what exists rather than a claim about what exists,
then, in the second and what he calls original sense, people in Melanesia, the Amazon, and
northern Mongolia live in different worlds, [and] enjoy ontological auto-determination.
Accordingly, Laidlaw concludes, my concept of ontology and therefore my theoretical position
more generally, delivers not new post-plural multi-naturalism, but merely the familiar old idea
that different peoples have different theories about the world (Laidlaw 2012).
Now, I am happy to admit that my use of the term ontology oscillates between two different and
apparently contradictory meanings, namely ontology in the sense of essence (what there is) and
ontology in the sense of theory or model (of what there is). But I am less inclined to agree that
this poses any real anthropological problem; in fact, I would like to think of this seeming slippage
from essence to theory/model as one of the greatest methodological advantages of the ontological
turn. For Laidlaw, there is a qualitative difference between refer[ing] to views about what exists
as opposed to putting forward a claim about what exists, and it is precisely because what he
refers to as the original ontological turn is concerned with the latter project (ontology) and not
the former (epistemology) that it disqualifies itself as (good) anthropology and turns into (bad)
philosophy. However, is this a fair depiction of the ontological turn, be that in its original form or
not? And further, does not the distinction between describing ontologies and making ontologies
hinge on a tacit meta-ontology of its own? It seems to me that Laidlaws critique of the ontological
turn contains a boomerang-effect, in that the more or less implicit premises underwriting his
identification of internal contradictions in my usage of the term ontology may be turned back on
Laidlaw himself to the effect of exposing otherwise hidden theoretical grounds in his own
anthropological project.
To flesh out this point, it is instructive to look at a concrete example of what Laidlaw refers to as
my ontological possession or challenge. He sums up my attempt to describe what a Darhad
Mongolian shamanic spirit (and a shaman) is in the following way:
Instead of being unchanging entities of which peoples diverse fleeting impressions are imperfect
representations, the unseen entities of shamanism are labile, as it were, all the way up The
confusing, fragmentary manifestations people encounter in a shamanic sance just is what there is.
On this account, genuine shamans, those who are able to some degree to pin their spirits down
and control them are, Pedersen argues, less shamanic than the not-quite shamans whose
unpredictable behaviour more fully manifests the fluid ontology of spirits: ontology here
meaning merely composition (Laidlaw 2012).
This is a stellar gloss of one of the central arguments of my book, with which I have no difficulty.
Indeed, note that Laidlaw and I here seem to agree about how ontology might be used in an
anthropologically meaningful sense, namely as composition. But what interests me for our
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present purposes is the seemingly insignificant merely in Laidlaws formulation. For what he
presents us with here, I think, is the tip of a conceptual iceberg that extends right down to the
edifice of his own meta-ontology. After all, what invisible referent could this merely have other
than the essentialist notion of the really real with which Laidlaw (unjustifiably, in my view)
accuses the ontological turn of operating? It would appear that, in his eagerness to expose the
contradictions of my argument, Laidlaw inadvertently brings to the fore some pretty serious
ontological challenges of his own.
But of course, this does not let me off the hook, either. The fact that Laidlaw performs the same
meta-ontological sleight of hand that he associates with me does not make his critique of the
ontological turn less pertinent. But then again, perhaps it does in one way. For what happens, we
may ask, the moment we omit the word merely from Laidlaws depiction of the Northern
Mongolian shamanic cosmos ? We are left with an anthropological concept of ontology that does not
confuse essence and model, or reality and its representations, but that denotes a single yet
infinitely differentiated object of ethnographic study, which spans everything both actual and
potential (Heywood in op cit). This anthropological ontology contains everything one encounters
during fieldwork spirit beliefs and doubts about these, propositions about the nature of reality,
and descriptions of such propositions, and then some for the whole point is to never start
deciding what is, and what is not (ibid). This is what the talk about multiple worlds is all about:
not the (epistemologically and politically) dubious reduction of each culture or people to a
encapsulated reality, but, on the contrary, the explosion of potential concepts and worlds in a
given ethnographic material, or combination (comparison) of such materials. There are still too
many things that do not yet exist, to paraphrase a memorable expression by Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro (1998).
Still and here my position may be seen to differ somewhat from Holbraads although the
ontological turn offers an unusually open-ended and creative technology of ethnographic
description, it does, nevertheless, rest on a certain set of theoretical premises, which may or may
not (depending on how strictly one defines this term) be deemed meta-ontological. Methodological
monism, we might call this heuristic anthropological ontology: the strategic bracketing of any
assumption on behalf of the ethnographer and the people studied that the object of
anthropological analysis is comprised by separate, bounded and extensive units. The ontological
turn amounts to a sustained theoretical experiment, which involves a strategic decision to treat all
ethnographic realities as if they were relationally composed, and, in keeping with its recursive
ambitions, seeks to conduct this experiment in a manner that is equally intensive itself. This is
why the ontological turn contains within its conceptual make-up the means for its own undoing: it
is nothing more, and nothing less, than a particular mode of anthropological play designed with the
all too serious aim of posing ethnographic questions anew, which already appear to have been
answered by existing approaches. To claim, as Laidlaw for instance does in his review of my book
(Pedersen 2012), that I overlook what appears to be the most obvious interpretation in my
analysis of a Mongolian hunters uncertainty about the spirits not as doubt about their existence
but as doubt about their whereabouts at a particular time and place is therefore not entirely off
the mark. But the point is that this least obvious interpretation (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009)
is done entirely deliberately and with a very particular purpose, namely, in the case at hand, to
account for peoples apparently irrational beliefs and their distancing towards such beliefs in a
new and ethnographically more satisfactory way.
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For the same reason, the ontological turn does not, as I would like to see it, automatically mean
taking people, animals, artefacts, or whatever more seriously than other anthropologists do, as if
there were a vantage-point imbued with the authority to pass such normative judgements. But it
does involve adopting a certain, and theoretically highly self-reflexive, stance towards what
ethnographic data might be, what concepts they might evince, as well as what such data and their
conceptual yield might do to common senses of what reality is. It is, above all, this theoretical
reflexivity which Holbraad and I try to take seriously, and for which we may justly be criticized,
albeit not, I think, necessarily for the reasons laid out by Heywood, Laidlaw, and others.
The ontological turn, then, does indeed involve a concept of a bloated universe, but this does not
mean that it celebrates itself as the holy grail of anthropological theory. Rather, it represents a
certain (and thus unavoidably fading) moment in the recent history of the discipline, where a
vaguely defined cohort of mostly Cambridge-associated scholars found it exciting to experiment
with the nature of ethnographic description and anthropological theorizing in a certain way.
Certainly, no one is pretending that the ontological turn is particularly new anymore, let alone that
it will last forever. Indeed, the time may well have come to put the ontological turn to rest, or at
least to transform it beyond recognition by distorting its core assumptions from within. So, by all
means, let us all look for ways to puncture the inflated ontological balloon, insofar as it is fair to say
that such a thing ever existed beyond the artificial confines of the monster created by its critics to
shoot it down.
Still, there are different ways of deflating the ontological bubble. Some of these critiques may be
deemed more productive than others in that they seek to push forward the limits of
anthropological theory and the riddles that good ethnography poses, as opposed to trying to
defend an imagined status quo or, even, reverting to ossified positions. As I have suggested
elsewhere (2012), such a productive unsettling of the ontological turn (and of relational
anthropology more generally) would seem necessarily to entail a further radicalization or
distortion of its intensive ground to the point where it ceases being relational anymore.
Possibly, this differs from Holbraads attempt to construct a machine for thinking in perpetual
motion (cf. op. cit), for whereas he takes alterity to constitute an ethnographic fact that only a
recursive anthropology can take fully seriously, I wonder whether the notion of ethnographic
alterity itself might not be inseparable from the very relational anthropology that we might now
imagine leaving behind. Be that as it may, whether a creative destruction or distortion of the
ontological turn can occur from within its own recursive logic (as Holbraad seems to suggest) or
as I rather tend to think not, is, in the larger scheme of things, beside the point. What matters is
the commitment to an anthropological vision, which insists that a viable answer can only be found
through still more ethnographic explorations and experimentations. To be sure, it is hard to
imagine Laidlaw or any other critic of the ontological turn disagreeing with this (again: show me an
anthropologist who does not aspire to take his ethnography seriously!) But I do think that he and
other default sceptics may be criticized for a certain lack of reflexivity about their own
theoretical grounds. After all, scepticism along with its favourite rhetorical trope, sarcasm
rests on a certain ontology, too.
In his classic essay, Common sense as a cultural system (1975), Clifford Geertz writes:
There are a number of reasons why treating common sense as a relatively organized body of
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considered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, should lead
on to some useful conclusions; but perhaps the most important is that it is an inherent
characteristic of common sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are
immediate deliverances of experience not deliberated reflections upon it Common sense is not
what the mind spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions
concludes [N]o religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more
general. Its tonalities are different, and so are the arguments to which it appeals, but it pretends
to reach past illusion to truth, to, as we say, things as they are (1975: 7, 16-17)
This, it seems to me, is a rather precise depiction of the more or less conscious meta-ontological
ground inhabited by Laidlaw, Heywood, and, coming to think of it, what seems to be most other
recent critiques of the ontological turn (see e.g. Geismar 2011): common sense, in its various
guises. Or, could we say, provocatively, common nonsense, as a way of conveying what in my own
(and it would appear also Geertzs) opinion represents the basic flaw of this approach, namely its
striking unwillingness to reflect on its own theoretical presuppositions. Common nonsense, that is
to say, as a term for denoting the all too common anthropological problem of not recognising the
intrinsic and inescapable theoretical ground of all ethnographic description and anthropological
analysis, including and perhaps especially so those descriptions and analyses that claim to not
be overly theoretical or, worse, to not be theoretical at all, as if theory was the name of a
spirit that could be exorcized by denying its presence and not talking about it. And, not for the first
time, we can thank an old anthropological master like Geertz for reminding us that common
(non)sense, along with other meta-ontologies in our discipline, is associated with certain particular
stylistic features, the marks of attitude that give it its peculiar stamp (1975: 17). For is that not
how the otherwise tacit ontology of anthropological skepticism shows its face: through a telling air
of of-courseness, a sense of it figures [that] is cast over some selected, underscored things
(1975: 18)?
It should be amply clear by now that, from the perspective of the critiques of the ontological turn,
the question (indeed, the mere mention) of the word ontology is better left to the philosophers to
deal with (as if philosophers were especially well equipped to address big questions about the
reality of things, leaving the smaller question of how different people see and know these things
to anthropologists and other mortals). But, as I have tried to show, this is, for a number of reasons,
an untenable position. The time has come to challenge the commonsensical sceptics to stand up
and make explicit their own theoretical ground.
REFERENCES
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