The Politics of Ontology:

Anthropological Positions

Martin Holbraad

Morten Axel Pedersen

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro


Position Paper for Roundtable Discussion
112th AAA Annual Meeting
Chicago, 20-24 November 2013
Martin Holbraad
University College London
Morten Axel Pedersen
University of Copenhagen
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
At first blush ‘ontology’ and ‘politics’ make strange
bedfellows. Ontology evokes essence, while
politics, as modern, democratic, multiculturalist
citizens tend to understand it, is about debunking
essences and affirming in their stead the world-
making capacities of human collectives. Yet, this
notion of a social construction of reality itself
instantiates a particular ontology, and a powerful
one at that — and here we also mean politically
powerful. Still, as anthropologists we are attuned
to the ‘powers of the weak’ – to the many complex
connections, some of them crucially negative, be-
tween power differences (politics) and the powers
of difference (ontology).
For purposes of discussion, then, we begin with
a broad distinction between three different man-
ners in which ontology and politics are correlated
in the social sciences and cognate disciplines, each
of which is associated with particular method-
ological prescriptions, analytical injunctions and
moral visions: (i) the traditional philosophical
concept of ontology, in which ‘politics’ takes the
implicit form of an injunction to discover and dis-
seminate a single absolute truth about how things
are; (ii) the sociological critique of this and other
3
‘essentialisms’, which, in sceptically debunking
all ontological projects to reveal their insidiously
political nature, ends up affirming the critical
politics of debunking as its own version of how
things should be; and (iii) the anthropological
concept of ontology as the multiplicity of forms
of existence enacted in concrete practices, where
politics becomes the non-sceptical elicitation of
this manifold of potentials for how things could be
– what Elizabeth Povinelli (2012b), as we under-
stand her, calls ‘the otherwise’.
So how might ‘the otherwise’ be rendered
manifest ethnographically? Here, we need to
remind ourselves that ethnographic descriptions,
like all cultural translations, necessarily involve
an element of transformation or even disfigura-
tion. A given anthropological analysis, that is,
amounts to a ‘controlled equivocation’ (Viveiros de
Castro 2004) that, far from transparently map-
ping one discrete social order or cultural whole
onto another, depends on more or less deliber-
ate and reflexive ‘productive misunderstandings’
(Tsing 2005) to perform its translations and
comparisons, not just between different contexts,
realms and scales, but also within them. This, if
4 5
anything, is what distinguishes the ontological
turn from other methodological and theoretical
orientations: Not the dubious assumption that it
enables one to take people and things ‘more seri-
ously’ than others are able or willing to,1 but the
ambition and ideally the ability to pass through
what we study, rather as when an artist elicits
a new form from the affordances her material
allows her to set free, releasing shapes and forces
that offer access to what may be called the dark
side of things.
Accordingly, while the ontological turn in
anthropology has made the study of ethnographic
difference or ‘alterity’ one of its trademarks, it
is really less interested in differences between
things than within them: the politics of ontology
is the question of how persons and things could
alter from themselves (Holbraad & Pedersen
2009, Pedersen 2012b). Ontology, as far as anthro
pology in our understanding is concerned, is the
1
Although one could somewhat uncontroversially argue
that to take other ontologies seriously is precisely to
draw the political implications of how things could be
for ‘us’, given how things are for those ‘others’ who take
these other ontologies seriously as a matter of fact.
comparative, ethnographically-grounded tran-
scendental deduction of Being (the oxymoron is
deliberate) as that which differs from itself (ditto)
— being-as-other as immanent to being-as-such.
The anthropology of ontology is anthropology as
ontology; not the comparison of ontologies, but
comparison as ontology.
So this, in our understanding, is what the
ontological turn is all about: it is a technology of
description (Pedersen 2012) designed in the opti-
mist (non-sceptical) hope of making the otherwise
visible by experimenting with the conceptual
affordances (Holbraad, forthcoming) present in a
given body of ethnographic materials. We stress
that such material can be drawn from anywhere,
anytime and anyone; there is no limit to what
practices, discourses and artefacts are amenable
to ontological analysis. Indeed, articulating ‘what
could be’ in this way implies a peculiarly non- or
anti-normative stance, which has profoundly
political implications in several senses.
For a start, subjunctively to present alterna-
tives to declarations about what ‘is’ or imperatives
about what ‘should be’ is itself a political act – a
radical one, to the degree that it breaks free of
the glib relativism of merely reporting on alterna-
tive possibilities (‘worldviews’, etc.), and proceeds
boldly to lend the ‘otherwise’ full ontological
weight so as to render it viable as a real alterna-
tive. For example, the relativist reports that in
such-and-such an ethnographic context time is
‘cyclical’, with ‘the past ever returning to become
the present’. It is an evocative idea, to be sure.
But strictly speaking, it makes no sense. To be
‘past’ is precisely not ‘to return to the present’, so
a past that does so is properly speaking not a past
at all (in the same sense that a married bach-
elor is not a bachelor). By contrast, like a kind of
‘relativist-turbo’, the ontologically-inclined an-
thropologist takes this form of e(qui)vocation as a
starting-point for an ethnographically-controlled
experiment with the concept of time itself, re-con-
ceptualizing ‘past’, ‘present’, ‘being’ etc. in ways
that make ‘cyclical time’ a real form of existence.
In this subjunctive ‘could be’ experiment, the
emphasis is as much on ‘be’ as on ‘could’: “imagine
a cyclical time!”, marvels the relativist; “yes, and
here is what it could be!”, replies the ontological
anthropologist.
Furthermore, when such ‘ontographic’ (Hol-

6 7
braad 2012) experimentations are precipitated by
ethnographic exposures to people whose own lives
are, in one way or other, pitted against the reign-
ing hegemonic orders (state, empire, and market,
in their ever-volatile and violent comingling),
then the politics of ontology resonates at its core
with the politics of the peoples who occasion it. In
such a case, the politics of ontologically-inclined
anthropological analysis is not merely logically
contingent upon, but internally constituted by
and morally imbricated with, the political dynam-
ics in which the people anthropologists study are
embroiled, including the political stances those
people might themselves take, not least on the
question of what politics itself ‘could be’.
Indeed, one of the most oft-quoted (and criti-
cized) mottoes of the ontological turn in an-
thropology is the notorious “anthropology is the
science of the ontological self-determination of the
world’s peoples” and its corollary, to wit, that the
discipline’s mission is to promote the “permanent
decolonization of thought” (Viveiros de Castro
2009; for an earlier version of the argument,
see Viveiros de Castro forthcoming [2002]). In
this connection, the first (unproductive) misun-
8 9
derstanding that should be dispelled is the idea
that this is equivalent to fighting for indigenous
peoples’ rights in the face of the world powers.
One does not need much anthropology to join the
struggle against the political domination and
economic exploitation of indigenous peoples across
the world. It should be enough to be a tolerably
informed and reasonably decent person. Con-
versely, no amount of anthropological relativism
and old-hand professional scepticism can serve as
an excuse for not joining that struggle.
Secondly, the idea of an ontological self-
determination of peoples should not be confused
with supporting ethnic essentialization, Blut und
Boden primordialism and other forms of socio-
cultural realism. It means giving the ontological
back to ‘the people’, not the people back to ‘the
ontological’. The politics of ontology as self-deter-
mination of the other is the ontology of politics as
decolonization of all thought in the face of other
thought — to think of thought itself as ‘always-
already’ in relation to the thought of others.
Thirdly, the idea of self-determination of the
other means that a fundamental principle of
anthropologists’ epistemological ethics should be
‘always leave a way out for the people you are
describing’. Do not explain too much, do not try
to actualize the possibilities immanent to oth-
ers’ thought, but endeavour to sustain them as
possible indefinitely (this is what ‘permanent’
means in the phrase ‘permanent decolonization of
thought’), neither dismissing them as the fanta-
sies of others, nor by fantasizing that they may
gain the same reality for oneself. They will not.
Not ‘as such’, at least; only as-other. The self-
determination of the other is the other-determina-
tion of the self.
This brings us to a final point regarding the
political promise held by ontologically-oriented
approaches in anthropology and cognate disci-
plines. Namely, that this promise can be con-
ceived, not just in relation to the degree to which
such approaches are in affinity with (or even
actively promote) particular political objectives,
or with the abiding need for a critique of the state
and the turns of thought that underpin it, but
also in relation to their capacity to enact a form
of politics that is entailed in their very opera-
tion. Conceived of in this manner, the ontological
turn is not so much a means to externally defined
10
political ends, but a political end in its own right.
Recapitulating, to some extent, standing debates
about the political efficacies of intellectual life
(e.g. the ambivalent stance of Marxist intelli-
gentsias to Communist Parties’ calls to political
militancy in the 20th century – Adorno, Sartre,
Magritte, etc.), the question is whether ontologi-
cally-oriented analyses render political the very
form of thinking that they involve, such that
‘being political’ becomes an immanent property
of the mode of anthropological thought itself. If
so, then the politics of ontography lies not only
in the ways in which it may help promote certain
futures, but also in the way that it ‘figurates’ the
future (Krøijer forthcoming) in its very enact-
ment.
The major premise of such an argument might
border on a cogito-like apodeicticity (sensu Hus-
serl): to think is to differ. Here, a thought that
makes no difference to itself is not a thought:
thoughts take the form of motions from one ‘posi-
tion’ to another, so if no such movement takes
place, then no thought has taken place either.
Note that this is not an ontological credo (e.g.
compare with Levi Bryant’s recent (2011) ‘ontic
11
principle’, which is pretty similar, but cast in the
philosophical key of metaphysical claim-making).
Rather it is offered as a statement of the logical
form of thinking – a phenomenology in Simon
Critchley’s sense (2012: 55) that is, moreover, apo-
deictic insofar as it instantiates itself in its own
utterance. The minor premise, then, would be the
(more moot) idea that to differ is itself a politi-
cal act. This would require us to accept that such
non-controversially ‘political’ notions as power,
domination, or authority are relative stances to-
wards the possibility of difference and its control:
to put it very directly (crudely, to be sure): domi-
nation is a matter of holding the capacity to differ
under control – to place limits upon alterity and
therefore, ipso facto (viz. by internal implication
from the to-think-is-to-differ premise above) upon
thought also.
If these two premises are accepted, then a
certain kind of politics becomes immanent to the
ontological turn. For if it is correct to say that the
ontological turn ‘turns’, precisely, on transmuting
ethnographic exposures recursively into forms of
conceptual creativity and experimentation, then
ontologically inflected anthropology is abidingly
12
oriented towards the production of difference,
or ‘alterity’, as such. Regardless (at this level of
analysis) of the political goals to which it may
lend itself, anthropology is ontologically political
inasmuch as its operation presupposes, and is an
attempt experimentally to ‘do’, difference as such.
This is an anthropology that is constitutively anti-
authoritarian, making it its business to gener-
ate alternative vantages from which established
forms of thinking are put under relentless pres-
sure by alterity itself, and perhaps changed. One
could even call this intellectual endeavour revo-
lutionary, if by that we mean a revolution that is
‘permanent’ in the sense we proposed above: the
politics of indefinitely sustaining the possible, the
‘could be’.
13
Roundtable Abstract
Much energy has been devoted over the last
decade or so to the so-called ontological turn in
the social sciences, and in anthropology in par-
ticular. A number of statements, critiques, and
discussions of this position are now available
(e.g. Viveiros de Castro 2002; Henare et al 2007;
Pedersen 2011; Holbraad 2012; Candea & Alcay-
na-Stevens 2012; Palecek & Risjord 2013), and
its implications for anthropological research are
being concertedly explored and debated more and
more passionately (e.g. Venkatesan et al 2009;
Alberti et al 2011; Viveiros de Castro 2011; Ramos
2012; Ishii 2012; Strathern 2012; Laidlaw 2012;
Pedersen 2012a). This roundtable sets out to
explore the theoretical positions and methodologi-
cal projects pursued under the banner of ontology,
focusing particularly on the political implications
of the ‘turn’, including its potential pitfalls. Why
have social scientists turned to the concept of
ontology in the ways that they have, and why is
the move as controversial as it is proving itself to
be, at least among anthropologists? What explicit
and implicit political projects does the turn to
ontology (as well as various critiques of it) evince?
14
Does the ontological turn open up new forms of
cultural critique and progressive politics, or does
it represent a ‘closet-culturalist’ and potentially
dangerous rehearsal of past essentialisms? What,
in short, does the ethnographic commitment to
ontology ‘do’ – for our engagements and collabora-
tions with the people with whom we work, and for
anthropology’s role within the global intellectual
and political landscape at large?
This roundtable discussion brings together
scholars whose work has a stake in the debate
about ontology in anthropology, taking its poli-
tics in a variety of directions. Viveiros de Castro
(2009, forthcoming) and Hage (2012) have sought
most explicitly to connect these concerns with
an on-going project of decolonizing anthropologi-
cal thinking, while Blaser (2013) and Holbraad
(2013) have recently sought in different ways to
formulate ‘political ontology’ as an anthropologi-
cal concern, drawing also on Povinelli’s (2012a)
analyses of the politics of alterity in late liberal-
ism. Candea (2011) and Pedersen (2011) have
addressed the possibilities and the limitations,
not only of the turn to ontology, but also of the
broader anthropological penchant to see politics
15
as an omnipresent phenomenon. In doing so, all
have shared an interest in the diverse ways in
which ontological issues inflect political lives – a
question that has been explored ethnographically
also by Crook (2007), Kohn (2013), Scott (2007)
and, on a cross-cultural scale, Descola (2013).
Bruun Jensen (2010), Mol (2003) and Verran
(2001), have explored the purchase of ontology
at the interface of anthropology and Science and
Technology Studies, a field in which the possibil-
ity and promise of ontological politics have been
developed in great depth, while Alberti and his as-
sociates (Alberti & Marshall 2009) have pioneered
ontological approaches in archaeological research.
16
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