This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

Criticism of post-modernizm and post-colonializm caused to question the mission of anthropology in terms of understanding different societies. Materialist, secular and anthropocentric anthropological approaches based on enlightenment and modern assumptions have faced criticism by many disciplines from philosophy and critical theory to science and quantum theory. Anthropology of religion which is a branch of cultural anthropology is also effected by changes within the broader field of anthropology. The aim of this project is to shed light on the potential of the (...) critical approach, which emerged in anthropology of religion recently and underlined the ontology, to understand religious experiences and practices of different societies. This approach is called ontological turn. In this article, first I point out the historical process in anthropology which led to the turn to ontology. Social structuralism and representationalism which played an important role for the formation of anthropology impacted significantly the ways in which anthropology understands nature and human being. According to these assumptions commonly used in anthropology, while human beings try to understand universal and static natural law principles, they create representations about nature. But, for there is only one nature, there must be only one true representation. This attempt to understand nature through representations created the base for the concepts of belief, knowledge, and mind of Edward Tylor who was the pioneer of cultural anthropology. While the mind refers to rational capacity of human being, belief is an area of irrational representations that human beings pragmatically need. Religious assumptions and practices are listed under incorrect representations. The concept of belief has been frequently used after Tylor as well to understand societies which are located outside of modernity. What ontological turn aims with criticism of conceptual framework is to prevent the domination of Western based reality. Therefore, one of the most emphasized arguments is the multiplicity of reality. This approach of ontological turn is called as taking everything serious. New definitions which are made in a way including the experiences of ethnographic objects mean taking them serious. Acceptance of the concepts by anthropologist in the ethnographic field means acceptance of difference in reality. The act of definition and conceptualizing is the act of creating different realities. In many ethnographic researches, ethnographers choses their concepts before entering to the field. This means that trying to fit differences within existing concepts and confirming the existing thoughts from different perspectives. Understanding ethnographic materials with its own terms or analyzing, explaining or interpreting ethnographic phenomenon by eliminating presumptions was always a concern for anthropology. These questions are asked so commonly that they can be seen as banal questions. The difference of ontological turn is not to ask these questions, but to ask ontological questions as an epistemological approach. The base of this ontological approach is the thought that what forms anthropologists’ perspective are not social or cultural but ontological assumptions. Thus, the question to be asked is how anthropologists’ assumptions about what the world is can be eliminated. To sum up, the idea of taking everything serious in ontological turn aims to eliminate the hierarchy between the subject and object of ethnography. Instead of seeing ethnography as an object of anthropology through modern categories, ontological turn suggests seeing ethnography as a real source to create new concepts and analytical tools. (shrink)

This article explores some implications of using a critical realist theoretical framework for the study of education, in particular the core activities of learning and teaching. Many approaches have been made to understanding learning and teaching, but they tend to fall into one of two camps. The first includes approaches known as objectivism, instructivism and behaviourism, and is interpreted here as embodying principles of empiricism. The second comprises various takes on constructivism, particularly social constructivism, and is interpreted here as embodying (...) idealism. This paper does not wholly endorse or reject either objectivism or constructivism, but draws elements from each. The key difference for educators is that the starting position is not the transmission of knowledge, as in objectivism, or the construction of knowledge by learners, as in social constructivism. Instead it foregrounds the learning environment, arising from the realist premise that the possibilities for knowledge are given in the ontology. For educators this means the learning environment is not simply the location of learning, as widely construed, but the set of conditions that enable and constrain learning. (shrink)

The ontological turn (OT) is a loose cluster of theoretical approaches within cultural anthropology that advocates a synthetic, overarching way forward for ethnographically oriented cultural anthropology. We argue that in order to contribute substantively to ethnobiology the OT needs to distance itself from a long-standing tradition of thinking within ethnography that assumes some kind of fundamental divide between the natural and the social sciences. This distancing seems especially unlikely in light of the meta-anthropological nature of the OT as (...) primarily a perspective on ethnographic methodology. Instead, we advocate for naturalistic theoretical alternatives for thinking about human sociality, where philosophical innovation develops in concert with ongoing empirical work across the biological, cognitive, and social sciences. We illustrate this perspective by drawing on two naturalistic accounts likely to prove more fruitful for ethnobiological practice, namely, trans-genera models of sociality and progenerative views of kinship. (shrink)

The most important sources of contemporary American literary theory are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term 'poststructuralism' implies, nor a 'modernity' that has been superseded, as the term 'postmodernism' implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, movements that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period between the World Wars and afterward, exercising an increasingly dominant influence on French theorists after World War II, (...) from Sartre through Derrida, and subsequently on the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. This essay strives to put well-accepted facts and issues within what Wittgenstein called a 'perspicuous' perspective. Although it is common to observe that deconstruction shares with Romanticism certain very general features, the same judgment is not often applied to deconstruction's semiotic account of language as a system of arbitrary signs without positive values. The essay's claim, by contrast, is that romanticist, especially German influences, operating in complementary relation with influences from the English and French Enlightenments, provided the cultural and conceptual milieu in which literary theory's distinctively modern, characteristically ontological, and anti-metaphysical view of language developed. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the (...) arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune (...) to the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

This paper follows recent debates on the ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities to exemplify how this turn creates important openings of methodological and political potential in education. In particular, the paper makes an attempt to show two things: first, the new questions and possibilities that are opened from explicitly acknowledging the methodological and political consequences of the ontological turn in education—e.g. concerning agency, transformation, materiality and relations; and second, the importance of being (...) clear about how educators and educational researchers conceptualize ontology and engage with debates on the ontological turn in related disciplines. The paper sketches some of the methodological and political implications of the ontological turn for education, focusing in particular on the concept of learning. (shrink)

This article argues that there is a great divide between semantics and metaphysics. Much of what is called metaphysics today is still stuck in the linguistic turn. This is illustrated by showing how Fraser MacBride misunderstands David Armstrong's theory of modality.

This article argues that agent-based modeling is the methodological implication of Lawson’s championed ontological turn in economics. We single out three major properties of agent-based computational economics, namely, autonomous agents, social interactions, and the micro-macro links, which have been well accepted by the ACE community. We then argue that ACE does make a full commitment to the ontology of economics as proposed by Lawson, based on his prompted critical realism. Nevertheless, the article also points out the current limitations (...) or constraints of ACE. Efforts to overcome them are deemed to be crucial before ACE can make itself more promising to the current ontological turn in economics. (shrink)

This article has two objectives. In the first part, I present a critical overview of the extensive anthropological literature that may be deemed “phenomenological.” Following this critique, which is built up around a classification into four different varieties of phenomenological anthropology, I discuss the relationship between phenomenological anthropology and the ontological turn (OT). Contrary to received wisdom within the anthropological discipline, I suggest that OT has several things in common with the phenomenological project. For the same reason, I (...) argue, it is not accurate to posit OT and phenomenology as opposing or antagonistic projects, as they are often depicted among critics and advocates of OT alike. On the contrary, I go as far as suggesting, OT may be understood as one of the most concerted attempts anthropology has produced to realize a distinctly anthropological version of Husserl’s method of phenomenological bracketing, namely what could be called the ontological epoché. (shrink)

Rejecting the category of belief is one of the most striking and profound ideas to emerge from the ontological turn. This essay will argue that the rejection of belief is best understood as part of a broader rejection of representationalism. Representationalism regards thought, speech, and intentionality as depending primarily on the mind’s ability to manipulate beliefs, ideas, meanings, or similar contents. Some central strands of the ontological turn thus participate in the philosophical project of understanding human (...) life without appeal to such representational states. After showing how 20th century anthropology was implicated in the representationalist picture, this essay will critique some of the arguments against belief found among proponents of the ontological turn. It will then try to construct a more robust argument against the use of the category of belief in anthropology. It ends with some reflections on what it means to do anthropology without belief. (shrink)

Gustav Bergmann was, arguably, one of the greatestontologists of the twentieth century. In 2006 and 2007, after aperiod of relative neglect, international conferences devoted solelyto Bergmanns work were held at the University of Iowa in the USA,Universit de Provence in France, and Universit degli Studi diRoma Tre in Italy. The fifteen papers collected in this volume werepresented at the third of these conferences, in Rome, and are here dividedinto three sections: "Categories of a realistic ontology," "World,mind, and relations," and "Metaphysics (...) of space and time". (shrink)

The ontological turn in anthropological methodology, at least in its conceptualization-oriented formulation, aims to turn away from the concepts and objects found within one’s own social setting in order to turn to indigenous conceptualization processes and take a look at “the things themselves.” This article aims to unpack what such constant reconceptualization amounts to, arguing that when modified to meet certain objections, the ontological turn could provide important ingredients for an alternative version of interpretive (...) social science—one that wishes to understand social phenomena as human kinds in the vein of Ian Hacking, Sally Haslanger and Ron Mallon. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 4, August 2020, Page 3-8.

I agree with Paul Lewis that mathematics has a valuable but not all-encompassing role in economics, that event regularities must be supplemented with a persuasive narrative, and that inferences can inform our understanding of economic behavior. However, Lewis's full-throated defense of critical realism does little to allay my original concerns. It is absurd to maintain, as critical realists do, that mainstream economics has nothing valuable to offer heterodox economists, as their critique of the quantity theory of money tries to demonstrate. (...) More crucially, critical realists—unlike Austrian economists—neglect to provide an epistemological explanation of economic actors’ perceptions, which is necessary if we are to bridge critical realism's own division of the social world into the “actual,” “empirical,” and “non-actual real.”. (shrink)

I agree with Paul Lewis that mathematics has a valuable but not all-encompassing role in economics, that event regularities must be supplemented with a persuasive narrative, and that inferences can inform our understanding of economic behavior. However, Lewis's full-throated defense of critical realism does little to allay my original concerns. It is absurd to maintain, as critical realists do, that mainstream economics has nothing valuable to offer heterodox economists, as their critique of the quantity theory of money tries to demonstrate. (...) More crucially, critical realists—unlike Austrian economists—neglect to provide an epistemological explanation of economic actors’ perceptions, which is necessary if we are to bridge critical realism's own division of the social world into the “actual,” “empirical,” and “non-actual real.”. (shrink)

: The paper explores the meaning and fate of the category of critique within the so-called “ontological” or “speculative turn”. First, the article addresses the question of knowing what could give consistency to the very concept of a contemporary ontological turn, in order to present, in a second moment, the tension that, since Kant, constitutes the relationship between critique and ontology. Finally, the paper explores - particularly in the work of Quentin Meillassoux - the possibility of (...) a new ontology that claims to be both non-dogmatic and immune to the neutralization of ontology carried out by critique. Resumo: O objetivo do artigo é escrutinar o sentido geral e o destino da categoria de crítica, no interior do pensamento ontológico contemporâneo, particularmente no quadro da assim chamada “virada ontológica” ou “giro especulativo”. Considerando que essas vertentes de pensamento pretendem reabilitar a ontologia em um ambiente filosófico não dogmático, pergunta-se: em que se converte a crítica, em seu interior? Para tal, o artigo aborda primeiramente a questão de saber o que poderia dar consistência ao conceito de uma tal virada ontológica ora em curso, para então apresentar a relação tensa que vigora desde Kant entre crítica e ontologia. Por fim, investiga-se, a partir sobretudo da obra de Quentin Meillassoux, a possibilidade de se fundar uma ontologia que se queira simultaneamente não dogmática e imune à neutralização da ontologia efetivada pela crítica. (shrink)

The ontological turn or ontologically-oriented approach accentuates the key importance of intercultural variability in ontologies. Different ontologies produce different ways of experiencing the world, and therefore, participation in alternative realities is very desirable in anthropological and ethnological investigation. Just the participation in alternative realities itself enables researchers to experience alterity and ontoconceptual differences. The present study aims to demonstrate the power of ritual in alteration, and to show how co-experiencing rituals serves to uncover ontological categories and relations. (...) We argue that the experience of alterity in everyday activities is of a different quality than the experience of alterity when participating in rituals. Transcendent reality is accessible during rituals. It serves as source of potentialities. These potentialities are actualized in ritual and entangled with people's everyday existence. Furthermore, we argue that participating in ritual enables the researcher to step into the alterity of alterity, and to get nearer to the origins of ontologies. Ritual participation also invokes the extension of consciousness and provides a collectively shared cognition, opening up the ontological dimension and enabling access to existential experiences and concepts. In these settings, relations between people and the world can be recognized and investigated. (shrink)

According to some authors, Latour’s attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a “normative turn”—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT’s view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on (...) the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour’s conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour’s overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a “political” but an “ontological” turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become (...) a true alternative to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections. (shrink)

Discourses on the “event” today mark a profound opportunity for philosophic thought to change direction in its focus, particularly for those interested in the prospect of rehabilitating the communist hypothesis. Of the thinkers that have come to write on this topic Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have emerged as leading the way. Their joint proposal aims to subvert the need for epistemological reflection by (re)turning to a totally new sense of ontology, one that results in a new account of revolutionary, (...) or “evental,” political action. Yet while animated by a joint aim, both thinkers propose utterly distinct paths to their conclusion: Žižek proposes a "finite" account of evental change, Badiou an "infinite" account. The aim of the present essay is thus to evaluate these competing claims, and it is argued that while Žižek's work is laudable in many respects, it nevertheless fails to grasp the full scope of Badiou's critique of finitude. Žižek's proposed revival of Post-Kantian Idealism, then, is exposed as highly problematic, so that the only reasonable path for philosophic thought is to follow Badiou's turn to infinite thought in some way. (shrink)

In this paper I briefly describe Hochberg's role in helping bringing about the ontological turn through his critique of Quine's ostrich nominalism and his arguments in favour of truth-making. I compare Hochberg and Armstrong's fact-centred metaphysics, where the former was an influence for the latter, before charting some of Hochberg's contributions to the history of philosophy.

In the current world of education, politics and public opinion, musical experience is increasingly threatened. It is designated ever more as an expendable luxury. This kind of general trend has hardly left the thinking in the field of music and music education untouched. Inspiration comes from the technical rationality of our time. This rationality affects an oblivion of ontology. In this article we discuss this trend related to Martin Heidegger’s thinking concerning the human existence in the world, artworks and notions (...) like “being” (Sein) and “oblivion-of-being” (Seinsvergessenheit). We think that it is possible to see this “oblivion-of-being” in relation to the trend in cultural and educational politics as well as in music educational thinking to focus on the instrumental usefulness of learning music. (shrink)

Abstract:According to some authors, Latour's attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a "normative turn"—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT's view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on (...) the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour's conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour's overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a "political" but an "ontological" turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. (shrink)

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar (...) as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between public involvement and everyday material practices. While the latter are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of `being intimate in public' to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement. (shrink)

The discipline of economics can benefit from a more explicit, systematic, and sustained concern with ontology; that is, with the philosophical analysis of the nature of the social world. Contrary to the argument advanced in these pages by Gerry Steele , critical-realist ontological analysis encourages fruitful economic research in a number of ways: by helping to identify research methods suitable for analyzing economic issues; by promoting the development of key substantive economic concepts; and by helping to reveal and resolve (...) inconsistencies in existing research. (shrink)

In the current world of education, politics and public opinion, musical experience is increasingly threatened. It is designated ever more as an expendable luxury. This kind of general trend has hardly left the thinking in the field of music and music education untouched. Inspiration comes from the technical rationality of our time. This rationality affects an oblivion of ontology. In this article we discuss this trend related to Martin Heidegger’s thinking concerning the human existence in the world, artworks and notions (...) like “being” (Sein) and “oblivion-of-being” (Seinsvergessenheit). We think that it is possible to see this “oblivion-of-being” in relation to the trend in cultural and educational politics as well as in music educational thinking to focus on the instrumental usefulness of learning music. (shrink)

The discipline of economics can benefit from a more explicit, systematic, and sustained concern with ontology; that is, with the philosophical analysis of the nature of the social world. Contrary to the argument advanced in these pages by Gerry Steele (2005), critical-realist ontological analysis encourages fruitful economic research in a number of ways: by helping to identify research methods suitable for analyzing economic issues; by promoting the development of key substantive economic concepts; and by helping to reveal and resolve (...) inconsistencies in existing research. (shrink)

Political theorists have developed and refined the concept of culture through much critical discussion with anthropology. This article will deepen this engagement by claiming that political theory...

In this article, we explore the possibilities that works of art might possess for looking in original and unforeseen ways into something that, at first sight, has little to do with arts and artistic practice. To be more precise, we present here three artistic representations, taken from various times and style periods, that depict a well-known figure in art history: angels. A detailed description and analysis of these images give us the opportunity to figure out something about another figure, which (...) is fascinating to us as philosophers of education: the teacher. Our basic intuition is that the way in which three important artists—Albrecht Dürer, William Hogarth, and Paul Klee—have tried to capture and trace out... (shrink)

Chisholm's theory of agent causation is criticised. An alternative theory of agent causation is proposed.

Recent developments in themethodology of economics have drawn uponpragmatist and realist philosophies of socialscience. These recent developments areoutlined. It is argued that a specific variantof realist philosophy known as critical realismcan provide the basis for a prescriptiveeconomic methodology that is not susceptible topragmatist criticisms.

Twentieth-century anthropology has been operating with the assumption of one nature and many cultures, one reality experienced and lived in many different ways. Its primary job, therefore, has been to render the otherness of the other understandable, to demonstrate that although different it is also the same; in short, to show that although other, others are people like us. The latest theoretical paradigm, known as the ‘ontological turn’, appears to reverse this assumption and to posit many natures and (...) one culture. Whether it does in fact reverse it and constitutes a meta-ontology, as critics have pointed out, or it is only a heuristic, methodological device, as some of the proponents of the ‘turn’ have recently argued, the contention of my article is the same: first, this move – the ontological – is made in the hope of doing a better job in redeeming otherness than earlier anthropological paradigms; second, it fails as they did – in the same way and for the same reasons. (shrink)

The period between the late 1910s and early 1920s saw the emergence of onto-epistemological philosophical projects in Russia that was determined by criticism and attempts to overcome the domination of epistemology in philosophy which was the result of the intensive development of Neo-Kantianism and the influence of Husserl’s phenomenology. Attempts to turn towards ontology were made both by Russian religious philosophers and by Russian Neo-Kantians. I look at the little-studied philosophical projects of the Russian Neo-Kantians Lev Salagov and Nikolai (...) Boldyrev. Their philosophical concepts share the tendency to transpose epistemological problems to ontology, and to identify and bring closer together epistemology and ontology. Russian philosophers ontologise the theory of cognition through the analysis of subjectivity, the complete elimination of psychological motives and the separation of transcendentalism from transcendentism. These principles enable Salagov to ground a three-part structure of cognition and to assert that the main task of genuine epistemology is exclusively the study of the cognitive relationship, committing to consciousness. They enable Boldyrev, proceeding from the separation of reflection and sensibility, to build a doctrine on the self-unfolding of being. Similar tendencies — a turn towards ontology — were observed in the same period in West European philosophy, including German Neo-Kantianism. However, the concepts of Russian Neo-Kantians, which imply a new orientation towards ontology, are fairly independent, and not only on account of the original interpretation of Kantian critical philosophy and Neo-Kantian epistemology, but also on account of internal discussion with the Russian philosophers belonging to other movements. The analysis of the onto-epistemological projects of Russian Neo-Kantians makes important additions to the picture of the reception of Neo-Kantianism in Russia. (shrink)