Ontological Conflicts and The Stories of PDF

Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013 547
Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of

Peoples in Spite of Europe
Toward a Conversation on Political Ontology
by Mario Blaser
Ontological conflicts (conflicts involving different assumptions about “what exists”) are gaining unprecedented
visibility because the hegemony of modern ontological assumptions is undergoing a crisis. Such crisis provides the
context and rationale for political ontology, a “project” that, emerging from the convergence of indigenous studies,
science and technology studies (STS), posthumanism, and political ecology, tackles ontological conflicts as a polit-
icoconceptual (one word) problem. Why? First, because in order to even consider ontological conflicts as a possibility,
one must question some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the social sciences, for instance, the
assumptions that we are all modern and that the differences that exist are between cultural perspectives on one
single reality “out there.” This rules out the possibility of multiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological
conflict (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, because ontological conflicts pose the challenge of how
to account for them without reiterating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a reality “out there” being
described. To tackle this politicoconceptual problem, I discuss the notion of an all-encompassing modernity and
its effects, present the political ontology project, and offer a story of the present moment where the project makes
sense.
tory as well.” He asked, “(1) to what extent is that history

Perhaps “ethnohistory” has been so called to separate it
equally their history, and (2) is that history the only one that
from “real” history, the study of the supposedly civilized.
can be written of them?” and then moved on to argue that
Yet what is clear from the study of ethnohistory is that the
the story of world capitalism is the history of the dominant
subjects of the two kinds of history are the same. The more
world order within which diverse societies exist. But there
ethnohistory we know, the more clearly “their” history and
are also histories (some written, some yet to be written) of
“our” history emerge as the same history. (Wolf 1982:19)
the diverse traditions and practices that once shaped peo-
Empieza una nueva era impulsada por los pueblos indı́- ple’s lives and that cannot be reduced to ways of generating
genas originarios, dando luz a los tiempos de cambio, a los surplus or of conquering and ruling others. . . . Do we not
tiempos de Pachakuti, en tiempos de la culminación del therefore need to understand the traditions and practices
Quinto Sol. (A new age driven by the originary indigenous by which people’s desires were once constructed if we are
peoples is beginning, giving birth to the times of change, to recount precisely how they made (or failed to make) their
the times of Pachakuti, in times when the Fifth Sun is own history? (Asad 1987:604)
coming to an end.) (Mandato de los Pueblos y Naciones
Asad concluded the review by stating that
Indı́genas Originarios a los Estados del Mundo, Chimoré,
Cochabamba, Bolivia, October 12, 2007)1 it is when we have anthropological accounts of what those
constructions were, and how they have changed, that we
In his review of the now classic Europe and the People without may learn what the histories of peoples without Europe once
History, Talal Asad (1987:604) raised two questions to the were, and why they cannot make those histories any longer.
Wolfian assertion that “the global processes set in motion by We may then also understand better why and in what ways
European expansion constitutes their [non-Europeans] his- so many peoples are now trying to make other histories both
within and against the hegemonic powers of modern capitalism
that had their origins in Western Europe. (Asad 1987:607,
Mario Blaser is Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at emphasis added)
Memorial University of Newfoundland (Inco Innovation Centre,
Room 2003, P.O. Box 4200, 230 Elizabeth Avenue, St. John’s, NL Insightful as it is, the centrality of the emphasized portion
A1C 5S7, Canada [mblaser@mun.ca]). This paper was submitted 6
III 12, accepted 15 IX 12, and electronically published 27 VIII 13. 1. See http://alainet.org/active/20160&langpes.
䉷 2013 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2013/5405-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/672270
548 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013
of the quote seems to have been lost under the weight of the mentalists was all that was there. Ontological conflicts thus
past tense that Asad uses to refer to the histories of people involve conflicting stories about “what is there” and how they
without Europe. The Wolfian conclusion that, after the en- constitute realities in power-charged fields.
counter with Europe, there has only been one historical tra- Leach, Scoones, and Wynne (2005:5–6) argue that onto-
jectory—that of the modern capitalist world system—seems logical conflicts that challenge “modernity and its hegemonist
to have carried the day. Thus, other histories have come to scientific culture” seem to be almost definitive of our times.
have little relevance for the present; they are things of the Rather than being new, I contend, these kinds of conflicts
past. Lost has been the importance of keeping in sight that have gained unprecedented visibility and potentiality, in part
the (hi)story of the encounter with Europe is not the only because the hegemony of the story of modernity is undergoing
factor that shaped in the past, and continues to shape in the a crisis. Such crisis provides both the context and the rationale
present, the trajectories and the projects of various peoples for political ontology, a loosely connected project emerging
around the world; their own stories about such trajectories from the convergence of ideas advanced in various scholarly
and projects play a role as well. Granted, these cannot be fields (indigenous studies, science and technology studies
stories without Europe, but, I will argue, in many cases, they [STS], posthumanism, and political ecology, among others),
can be and are stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that which I seek to present here. However, in order to do this, I
are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.2 will need to follow a circuitous path, as ontological conflicts
Although I will later complicate this definition, let me for pose a politicoconceptual (one word) problem. First, in order
now say that by stories I refer to narratives that embody to even consider them as a possibility, one must question
certain ideas about the world and its dynamics. In this sense, some of the most profoundly established assumptions in the
any history is a story about the unfolding state of the world social sciences and in dominant common sense. For instance,
told from the vantage point of a particular set of ideas about the generalized assumptions that we are all modern and that
the world and its dynamics; in other words, there is no in- the cultural differences that exist are between perspectives on
trinsic difference between the terms “history” and “story,” as one single reality “out there” rule out the possibility of mul-
the former necessarily implies the latter. While this is what tiple ontologies and what is properly an ontological conflict
the counterpoint offered by the epigraphs above intends to (i.e., a conflict between different realities). Second, ontological
highlight, it would not be surprising to have analysts and conflicts pose the challenge of how to narrate them without
commentators explaining the use of the Andean concept of restating (and reenacting) the ontological assumption of a
Pachakuti and the Mesoamerican idea of the Fifth Sun in the reality out there being described. To tackle this politico-
indigenous statement as “stories” that symbolize ethnic pol- conceptual problem, I begin by addressing the effects (and
iticking, a thoroughly modern historical development. Yet Pa- the limits) of established assumptions about an all-encom-
chakuti and the Fifth Sun exceed modern categories of his- passing modernity that engulfs cultural differences. I then
toricity; they tell other stories about how the world unfolds move on to present the political ontology project and offer
in time. What is being missed and what is being produced a plausible story of the present moment in which such a
when these kinds of stories are forced to fit into a naturalized project makes sense. But before unfolding my arguments, a
(hi)story of modernity? In this article, I argue that what we clarification is in order. I build this narrative largely in ref-
miss are ontological differences, thus producing the condi- erence to indigenous peoples and Latin America because these
tions of possibility for disavowing ontological conflicts. are the topical areas I am most familiar with. In this sense,
A brief example will help me illustrate what I mean by indigenous peoples and Latin America constitute fields in
ontological conflicts. In June 2004, in the province of British which ontological conflicts have become visible as a problem-
Columbia, Canada, the Mowachat/Muchalaht First Nation atic for me rather than where the problematic is located per
botched a carefully staged and scientifically approved plan by se. In fact, I hope this article might prompt further explo-
Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans and environ- rations of the multiple fields in which ontological conflicts
mentalist groups to return a young lost orca whale, Luna, to play out in the present conjuncture.
its pack. The First Nation insisted that the orca was Tsux’iit,
the abode of the spirit of their recently deceased chief, Am-
brose Maquinna, and that his desire to stay with his people
An All-Encompassing Modernity
should be respected.3 This was not a conflict between two
different perspectives on an animal but rather a conflict over The assumption of an all-encompassing modernity has come
whether the “animal” of scientists, bureaucrats, and environ- to dominate both scholarly and political analysis to the point
that anything that might try to contest it is automatically
2. In this article, the term “Europe” operates as a metonym for mo- treated with contempt. For instance, the anonymous reviewer
dernity. of an article in which a colleague and I (Aparicio and Blaser
3. See http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2004/06/16/orca_drums040616
.html; the story of Luna received a lot of media attention, and besides
2008) referred to certain knowledge practices enacted by sec-
news and blogs, now there are two feature films about it: Spirit of the tors of indigenous movements in Latin America as “non-
Whale, which is a dramatization, and The Whale, a documentary. modern,” wrote,
Blaser Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe 549
To say that indigenous knowledge is “non-modern” or exists inception. If one were to seek a common denominator across
“outside of” modernity seems in fact to reinstate a colonial the various positions, the only one would be that the notion
legacy in which indigenous peoples are said to be backwards, of an all-encompassing modernity is somehow related to Eu-
or islands of time untouched by history (see James Fabian’s ropean expansion and its effects.4 In other words, all contem-
Time and the Other, or Wolf’s Europe and the People without porary cultures are modern because they have engaged in
History). This statement in fact flies in the face of most transformative interactions with Europe. The problem is that
anthropological research (well, almost all) that tries to com- this implies that the encounter with Europe is the single most
bat colonial representations of indigenous peoples as not important constitutive factor in the historical trajectory of
engaged in the modern world. any given culture. At best, this can be a hypothesis to be
investigated case by case, not a foregone conclusion.
Echoing our academic reviewer, the Bolivian vice president
Based on this aprioristic conclusion about the importance
and intellectual Alvaro Garcia Linera has accused some sectors
of the encounter with Europe, the claim that all contemporary
of the indigenous movement in that country of being ro-
cultures are modern is less than solid. But the problem be-
mantic because they reclaim a role for indigenous cosmologies comes compounded because, while being primarily associated
in shaping the Bolivian state. Pointing to the 500 years of with a historical event (i.e., European expansion, or more
interaction and mingling between them, he denied that such generally the formation of a world system eventually domi-
cosmologies could be radically different from, or sustain a nated by the North Atlantic nations), when the term “mod-
relation of antagonism with, the dominant modern one: “En ern” is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference
el fondo todos quieren ser modernos” (Deep inside, everyone from the present. Indeed, putting the very variable results of
wants to be modern) (Garcia Linera 2007:156–157). the encounter with Europe within the common grid of mo-
While not fully explicated by it, the idea that modernity is dernity assumes that, once affected in such a way, a culture
all-encompassing has some connections with the critiques to enters the overarching historical trajectory of modernity that
which earlier notions of culture as systemic, organic, and dominates the present time.5 Ironically, and as modernity be-
bounded were subjected from the 1970s onward. One of the comes equated with the present, radical difference is (again)
main thrusts of the critiques was that by deploying such no- mapped out against a temporal grid, for if something is said
tions of culture, anthropology removed other (non-Western) to be nonmodern, its logical location is in the past. This
peoples from history and was blind to the actual consequences betrays one of the central intents of the critiques of earlier
of its own politics of representation (see Asad 1973; Clifford notions of culture, foregrounding “coevalness as the prob-
and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Fox 1991; Hymes 1972; Wolf lematic simultaneity of different, conflicting, and contradic-
1982). Showing that so-called traditional societies have never tory forms of consciousness” (Fabian 1983:146).
been isolated, unchanging, backward, and out of history—in In short, while the critiques of “tradition” revealed the
short, that they have never been “traditional” in the terms problematic nature of “Othering,” they left unquestioned
set by the modern imagination—these critiques reshaped the whose self becomes naturalized in a strategy of “Sameing,”
notion of culture as something fuzzy, porous, dynamic, and, whereby everything contemporary in general ends up being
fundamentally, always the emergent result of a history of in- coded as modern.6 How to overcome this Sameing that trans-
teractions. Yet, the consequences of these critiques went far mutes the inherent hybridity of cultures into ethnographically
beyond a reconsideration of culture, for one of their corol- “thin” differences unified under the banner of modernity (be
laries has been that, if there are no really existing traditional this defined as the capitalist world system or otherwise)?
societies (i.e., those bounded, timeless, and unchanging so- Asad’s (1987:604–607) point that the “concept of culture is
ciocultural units imagined by our anthropological ancestors), crucial” in trying to keep in sight the relevance of differences
then we are all modern in one way or another. is apposite here. Yet, I will argue, this is not because the
However, truly accepting the proposition that any given concept of culture will allow us to retrieve differences from
culture is always the historical product of transformative in- the thinness imposed on them by an all-encompassing mo-
teractions with other cultures should raise the question as to dernity, but rather because we must attend to culture—with
why we should call the present state of diverse cultures “mod- capital C—as an ontological category that together with the
ern.” The “modernness” that underlies contemporary cultural category of nature naturalizes modernity, thus making it all-
differences would need to be proved rather than axiomatically encompassing in practice.
asserted, but, in order to do so, one would need some criteria According to McGrane (1989), the concept of culture is
of what it means to be modern. If one attends to the debates
on the meaning of modernity, this seems to be an unrealistic 4. Even claims of other modernities cannot be constructed without
expectation. There is little agreement on whether the defining Europe being a referent in one way or another (see Gyeke 1997; Takeuchi
criteria are sociological, political, or cultural; whether mo- 2005).
5. Birth (2008:3) calls this the trap of homochronism “which subsumes
dernity is singular or plural; whether it is essentially a Eu- the Other into academic discourses of history.”
ropean phenomenon that was later globalized and “indigen- 6. I borrow the wonderful term “Sameing” from Lesley Green (see
ized”; or whether it was a global phenomenon from its Green and Green 2010).
merely the most recent way in which the West conceived and difference between what is Culture and what is nature: a
explained otherness. The successive movements in the un- distinction that other cultures do not have.
derstanding of the non-European Other from being poten- Summing up, then, culture contributes to naturalize the
tially devilish to lacking reason, then to represent backward very ontological assumptions that allow modernity to produce
races and to finally being simply a human bearing a different an “autocentric picture of itself as the expression of universal
yet equally valid culture, marks at each stage an adjustment certainty” (Mitchell 2000:xi; see also Carrithers et al. 2010)
of otherness against a new horizon of intelligibility (Chris- Through culture, we end up with a de facto all-encompassing
tianity; the Enlightenment and reason; time and evolution; modernity, this time not by aprioristically assuming the rel-
and human exceptionalism or humanism). McGrane argues ative relevance of the encounter with Europe but by assuming
that the epistemological relativism and pluralistic sensibility that one of its categories can account for the differences in
associated with the concept of culture, far from being eman- the stories that exist about how things work, including the
cipatory, brings about a new form of establishing the privileges effects of transformative interactions between different on-
and hierarchy of those using it. For our culture tologies. Resituating culture as a category with which a par-
knows that it is one-among-many, knows that it is relative, ticular world is being made constitutes a first step toward
and further, it values this knowledge (this knowledge is one refusing to be captured by modernity and an attempt to re-
of its basic values), i.e., it locates its own superiority (knowl- cuperate radical differences as something other than tradition.
edge) in this knowledge of its relativity, as it likewise locates
inferiority (ignorance) in ignorance of this relativity. Our Refusing Capture: Political Ontology
knowledge lies in the fact that we recognize . . . our relativity:
In the context of a debate (Carrithers et al. 2010) that carried
our relativity and their relativity, whereas their ignorance
the suggestive title of “Ontology Is Just Another Word for
lies now in their cultural absolutism. (McGrane 1989:120)
Culture,” Matt Candea has argued that, in anthropology, the
As Scott (2003:103–104) puts it in commenting on turn to ontology “comes from the suspicion that cultural
McGrane’s work, the possibility of seeing all difference as difference is not different enough, or alternatively that cultural
relative depends on an omniscient vantage from which all difference has been reduced by cultural critics to a mere effect
difference is visible to a detached perspective that is not rel- of political instrumentality. By contrast, ontology is an at-
ative. The coordinates of such an omniscient epistemological tempt to take others and their real difference seriously” (Car-
vantage point that distinguishes the culture that uses the con- rithers et al. 2010:175). Another participant in the debate,
cept of culture to conceive otherness emerges from what La- Martin Holbraad, nails down what it means to take others
tour (1993) calls the modern great divide between nature and and their real difference seriously: to entertain the idea that
culture: “the concepts we have at our disposal may be inadequate even
We [moderns] are the only ones who differentiate absolutely to describe our data properly, let alone to ‘explain’ or ‘inter-
between Nature and Culture whereas in our eyes all the pret’ it. Our task then must be to locate the inadequacies of
others—whether they are Chinese or Amerindians, Azande our concepts in order to come up with better ones” (Car-
or Barouya—cannot really separate what is knowledge from rithers et al. 2010:180). I want to dwell for a moment on the
what is society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes ideas of the inadequacy of concepts and of coming up with
from Nature as it is from what their cultures require. (Latour better ones.
1993:99) Culture is an inadequate concept for dealing with difference
not only because it is thin but also because it takes for granted
The point I want to stress here is that when the concept its own ontological status. In effect, while debates over the
of culture becomes the dominant diacritical for human dif- concept of culture as a means to think about differences
ferences, it comes along with the ontological armature in among human groups have been almost canonical in an-
which it makes sense. As an ontological category, “Culture” thropology since the mid-1980s, questions about the univer-
is related to but also different from “culture” as the concept sality of the ontological armature composed by culture and
through which the otherness of humans is conceived. As an nature have remained somehow off center stage until very
ontological category, Culture works in tandem with nature to recently. Yet these kinds of questions have been posed in
set (among other things) the very basis of what moderns ethnographies that foregrounded the ontological assumptions
understand by knowledge, that is, a relation of equivalence implicit in the practices of indigenous interlocutors, and
between a cultural representation and a natural and auton- which thereby denaturalized those of the ethnographers (see
omous reality “out there.” And here we come full circle back Descola 1996, 2005; Ingold 2000; Strathern 1992a, 1999; Viv-
to McGrane and Scott: the culture that uses culture to un- eiros de Castro 1996, 1998). Yet, unfortunately, scholars con-
derstand difference has a privileged status because it knows, cerned with the interactions generated by the formation of a
and it does so because it has a privileged access to reality, one European-dominated world system tended to consider these
that is not clouded by culture (with lowercase c), and this works as having little actual relevance—this when not con-
access is premised precisely on recognizing the ontological sidering those works misguided in seeking to foreground dif-
ferences without giving a privileged attention to that partic- limits of our own conceptual repertoire. . . . The anthro-
ular (hi)story of “transformative interactions” that, as I have pological task, then, is not to account for why ethnographic
argued before, assumes that everyone has come now into the data are as they are, but rather to understand what they
fold of modernity and its categories (see Starn 2011). I say are—instead of explanation or interpretation, what is called
unfortunately because the ethnographic sensibilities displayed for is conceptualization. . . . Rather than using our own
in those works are crucial in addressing ongoing transfor- analytical concepts to make sense of a given ethnography
mative interactions between different ontologies without be- (explanation, interpretation), we use the ethnography to
ing prey to the capture of an all-encompassing modernity. rethink our analytical concepts. (Holbraad, quoted in Car-
And this is precisely because these works highlight how peo- rithers et al. 2010:184)
ples distribute what exists and conceive their constitutive re-
So here is ontology as a heuristic device, a tool to rethink
lations in different ways; or, posed otherwise, that modernity
our analytical concepts. However, what is not self-evident is
is one way of making worlds among others and therefore that
why rethinking our analytical concepts is something that
the concepts generated within it (including that of culture)
can only go so far.7 should be pursued. For many espousing the ontological ap-
As a first approximation, the ontological approach at the proach, it goes without saying that doing otherwise betrays
very least raises a caution flag as to the adequacy of our the existing multiplicity of worlds or realities. Holbraad (Car-
established concepts. However, as Candea (Carrithers et al. rithers et al. 2010:183) poses the point thus: “The alternative
2010) warns, the move from culture to ontology does not [to assuming that differences are differences in the way people
cancel some vexing questions that trailed behind the former represent the world] must be to reckon with the possibility
concept: namely, what is the nature of the distinction that that alterity is a function of the existence of different worlds
the terms seek to highlight, and what do we mean when we per se.” But this seems to lead us back to ontology as a
speak of different ontologies? Is the term purported to be statement of facts. The heuristic device then begins to trail
merely heuristic or is it a description of a state of fact? These very close to relativism and its self-defeating paradox: if taking
questions are crucial and admittedly difficult to tackle, pre- different worlds seriously means that they cannot be wrong,
cisely because the problem with ontology is that heuristics what do we do when facing the world that claims that the
and statements of facts constantly slip into each other. world is only one and what we have are multiple represen-
Many of the ethnographies mentioned above introduce ca- tations of it? In another contribution (Alberti et al. 2011:902),
veats as to the heuristic character of the arguments they con- Holbraad seems to steer away from presenting the “ontolog-
tain regarding the indigenous ontologies under considerations ical claim” in such strong terms and further emphasizes its
(and their contrasts with the Western/modern one), yet some- heuristic nature: the turn to ontology is meant to address “the
times it is difficult to shed the impression that one is being analytical problem of how to make sense of things that seem
presented with the description of an actually existing ontology to lack one.” Apparently this move circumvents the problem
“out there.” If we take the ontological approach as simply associated with making foundational claims, but actually just
stating that there are a variety of describable ontologies out postpones it. As Holbraad points out, anthropologists have
there, we end up very much in the same place as where we long been in the business of making sense of things that lack
started with culture, that is, sneaking up the modernist on- one (It is their culture!); hence, the question is under what
tological assumption that there is a world out there, in this premises making sense of things that seem to lack one emerge
case a world made of ontologies rather than cultures. In con- as a renewed legitimate analytical problem. In other words, the
traposition to this, Holbraad (Carrithers et al. 2010:185) pro- question of why the ontological approach might be better is
poses to take ontology as being “just a set of assumptions always waiting at the end of the road, and answering this ques-
postulated by the anthropologist for analytical purposes.” As tion seems to unavoidably require some sort of foundational
a heuristic device, ontology works with the contradictions claim after all. And then we are back where we started.
between a set of initial assumptions and some body of material Are we in a dead end? Not necessarily, if we consider an-
that appears to contradict it. other possible take on ontology, one in which the heuristic
So what makes the ontological approach to alterity not only device contributes to enact the “fact,” or put otherwise, one
pretty different from the culturalist one, but also rather that allows us to articulate a foundationless foundational
better, is that it gets us out of the absurd position of thinking claim. In this version, ontology is a way of worlding, a form
that what makes ethnographic subjects most interesting is of enacting a reality. It is critical to stress, however, that the
that they get stuff wrong. Rather, on this account, the fact understanding of reality being postulated here is one that,
that the people we study may say or do things that to us building on some versions of STS, bypasses the nature/culture
appear as wrong just indicates that we have reached the (or subject/object; material/ideational) divide to arrive at a
material-semiotic formulation (see Haraway 2008; Latour
7. Hence, the term “nonmodern” that I have used before was meant
1999; Law 2004; Mol 1999). What does this mean? (a) That
as a placeholder, a carving out of space from the tenet that modernity we avoid the assumption that reality is “out there” and that
is all that exists. “in here” (the mind), we have more or less accurate cultural
representations of it; and (b) that reality is always in the For them, it goes without saying that they are treating with
making through the dynamic relations of hybrid assemblages a single entity/disease. Moreover, the assumption of singu-
that only after the fact are purified by moderns as pertaining larity is crucial to the very practices through which they per-
to either nature or culture. One way to grasp what is at stake form atherosclerosis. This enacted assumption can be storied
is starting from the idea that humans are involved in the thus: there is an objective reality out there (the disease ath-
enactment of realities but not under conditions of their own erosclerosis), and there are (more or less accurate) subjective
choosing. They have to grapple with an environment whose or disciplinary perspectives on it. This is the succinct version
features have been more or less sedimented and crystallized of the modern “myth” telling us what kinds of things (e.g.,
through previous actions. But, crucially, the agents of those subjects and objects) and relations (e.g., of perspective) make
actions are not humans per se, but heterogeneous assemblages up this particular world. Of course, the connections can be
that we (moderns) conceptually purify and enact as humans narrated in the reverse order, and we can move from one of
and nonhumans—along with an associated asymmetrical dis- the various storied versions of the modern myth to its en-
tribution of agency (see Law 2004).8 actment in practice. This is the road taken many times by
If the ethnographies that foreground the diversity of ways ethnographers when showing how myths are enacted in the
of conceiving what exists and its relations give substance to practices and embedded in the institutions of the peoples they
the notion of multiple ontologies, understanding ontology as work with.
performance or enactment brings to the fore the notion of Storied performativity underscores the connection between
ontological multiplicity, which can be related but is not the stories and practices (which in turn stresses the extent to
same as the former. Annemarie Mol’s (2002) work with ath- which the terms ontologies, worlds/worlding, and stories are
erosclerosis is a good example of what ontological multiplicity synonyms). But the most important point that can be drawn
entails. She has shown how, in a Dutch hospital, atheroscle- from the concept is something numerous indigenous philos-
rosis emerges as a different entity depending on the practice ophers and intellectuals have insisted on (see Archibald 2008;
under consideration. Under the microscope and manipula- Burkhart 2001; Cajete 2000; Wilson 2008): stories are not
tions of the pathologist, it emerges as a narrowing of the only or not mainly denotative (referring to something “out
artery. According to the records and interpretations of the there”), nor are they fallacious renderings of real practices.
clinician, it emerges as the patient’s expressed pain. In turn, Rather, they partake in the performance of that which they
in the graph of the radiologist, it emerges as differential blood narrate. One implication of this is that the stories being told
pressure in a limb. In each case, there is a different enactment cannot be fully grasped without reference to their world-
making effects, for different stories imply different worldings;
of atherosclerosis, a multiplicity that does not always add up
they do not “float” over some ultimate (real) world. The
as pieces in a puzzle. Sometimes there is pain but not nar-
corollary is that, indeed, some ethnographic subjects (or sto-
rowing of arteries, or there is differential blood pressure in a
ries/worldings/ontologies) can be wrong, not in the sense of
limb without pain, and so on. This multiplicity is, at least
a lack of coincidence with an external or ultimate reality, but
temporarily, rendered singular through a series of conceptual
in the sense that they perform wrong: they are/enact worlds
and politico-managerial procedures, through which some ver-
in which or with which we do not want to live.
sions of atherosclerosis are discarded or made to fit uneasily
Multiple ontologies, ontological multiplicity, and storied
with each other. But the key point is that in practice, ath-
performativity constitute the resources with which what I call
erosclerosis (or reality) is multiple because there are multiple
political ontology tries to perform the pluriverse. The term
practices. This is ontological multiplicity. Now, let me re-
political ontology is meant to simultaneously imply a certain
introduce the notion of multiple ontologies with a twist that,
political sensibility, a problem space, and a modality of anal-
for lack of a better term, I call storied performativity.9
ysis or critique. The political sensibility can be described as
Enactments or practices are storied, and stories are them-
a commitment to the pluriverse—the partially connected
selves enacted. Let’s take Mol’s case again. As I pointed out, (Strathern 2004) unfolding of worlds—in the face of the im-
she convincingly argues that atherosclerosis is multiple in poverishment implied by universalism. Of course, the plu-
practice, but what interests me here is how the radiologist, riverse is a heuristic proposition, a foundationless founda-
the clinician, and pathologist might conceive atherosclerosis.10 tional claim, which in the context of the previous discussion,
means that it is an experiment on bringing itself into being.
8. These heterogenous assemblages may have different relational con-
figurations; thus, while the modern may have human and nonhumans, The problem space can then be characterized as the dynamics
others may have other kinds of entities. through which different ways of worlding sustain themselves
9. Here we come to a full disclosure of the meaning of the term “story” even as they interact, interfere, and mingle with each other.
that I promised in the introduction. Finally, and in contrast with other modalities of critique or
10. Perhaps not the particular health practitioners that worked with
analysis, political ontology is not concerned with a supposedly
Mol, who, for this same reason, might now have different stories to tell
about atherosclerosis. Of course, this in itself would go a long way to external and independent reality (to be uncovered or depicted
show the ways in which “the ontological approach” may intervene in accurately); rather, it is concerned with reality making, in-
reality making, but this is not the point I want to stress now. cluding its own participation in reality making. In short, po-
litical ontology is concerned with telling stories that open up dle-class white women involved in Wicca. Likewise, neither
a space for, and enact, the pluriverse. Before moving forward indigenous identity automatically translates into an other-
to tell one of these stories—one constructed as context and than-modern ontology, nor does indigenous involvement
rationale for the project—I will first address equivocations make a conflict an ontological one. As indicated in the in-
about political ontology that, paraphrasing some critical introduction, if the notion of multiple ontologies appears closely
terlocutors, I will call “homogenizing,” “exoticizing,” and “old associated with indigenous peoples in this article, it is due to
wine in a new bottle.”11 my professional trajectory and experience rather than to an
The “homogenizing equivocation” would assume that po- implicit claim that there is an inherent association between
litical ontology postulates as homogeneous the multiple ex- them.
periences of indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and of the For some interlocutors, talking of worlds may recall ex-
modern West, on the other. What we must bear in mind here oticizing fictions about native life as somehow existing in a
is that one of political ontology’s concerns is how to operate time-space continuum outside our own. Granted, the term
in a terrain dominated by conceptions of an all-encompassing might not be the best, but it should not be the grounds for
modernity. As discussed in the previous section, one of the an equivocation that misses the centrality that performance
ways of doing this is by shrinking modernity to make it some- and enactment have in political ontology’s definition of on-
thing more specific and contrastable, thus liberating the con- tologies/worlds. “Shrinking” modernity to one particular way
ceptual-ontological space for something else to exist.12 Yet of worlding, and thus regaining a space for the positivity of
shrinking modernity to allow for contrast with other ways or other worldings, does not mean that we must fall back into
worlding does not mean that political ontology is blind to notions of discrete and clearly bounded entities that interact
variations and/or dissent within modernity; it is just that for with each other. Rather, in talking about particular worldings
the specific purpose of highlighting the existence of something or ontologies, the image I would like to convey is of enact-
other than modernity, such variations are not analytically rel- ments complexly entangled in non-Euclidian fashion; they
evant. It is in the specificity of the ethnographic case (and the might take place in the same spatiotemporal location but not
intended intervention) where the relevance of variations within always interfere with each other.13 This is a pluriverse con-
modernity (or any other way of worlding) can be brought to stituted by intra-acting (Barad 2007) worldings that share
the fore. partial connections (Strathern 2004). Thus, while these world-
Still, someone may ask, are you not homogenizing when ings are coemergent, they do not share an overarching prin-
you say that all Westerners operate according to the nature/ ciple that would make their entanglement a universe. Rather,
culture divide? Or that indigenous peoples live in a different their partial connections often constitute the sites in which
ontology? Here the cart is put in front of the horse. It is it is possible to discern how what is brought into existence
assumed that political ontology attributes a given ontology or by a certain worlding might interfere and conflict with what
set of practices to a given group—Westerners, indigenous is brought into existence by another.
peoples, or what have you. In fact, political ontology is con- The “old wine in a new bottle” equivocation is a version
cerned with practices, performances, and enactments and not of the seeming contradiction in the use of the term ontology
with specific groups. One can speak of a given worlding or as heuristic device and statement of fact that I discussed be-
ontology as long as one can trace its enactment. Moreover, fore, and it would say something like this:
practices do not need to be entirely self-coherent and con- Fine, your worlds are constituted through diverse enact-
sistent, although one may find more or less coherence and ments and they are not isolated but mutually entangled, yet
consistency in some situations than in others. Yet, the lack of at the bottom, it seems that you are just changing one term
coherence or consistency neither implies that all worldings (ontology) for another (culture), you are still capturing dif-
are modern, nor that the term modern cannot be used to label ference from your own “perspective” (call it ontological
and single out a particular way of worlding. In short, the rather than cultural as you may wish). Indeed, the passage
attribution of modernness would go hand in hand with spe- from Scott about culture quoted above can be perfectly
cific practices and not with a specific group. For instance, I applied to your “ontology.” In saying that “in reality” what
would feel unwarranted to call modern the practices of mid- we have is a diversity of worlds/ontologies rather than cul-
tures, you situate yourself in an “omniscient epistemological
11. An article by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) brought to my vantage point from which (and of course in relation to
attention the appropriateness of the term “equivocation” for the kind of
which) all difference is simultaneously available to a de-
problems I am tackling here. In effect, equivocation is not a misunder-
standing about some “thing,” but a failure to understand that at stake tached, surveying gaze which itself is not relative.” What is
in a disagreement are different “things.” I will return to this concept new in all this?
later.
12. In this sense, the project of “eventualizing” modernity (i.e., at- The key to the equivocation here is in the reference to “re-
tending to the actual practices that are articulated around the appellative
“modern”) proposed by Eduardo Restrepo (2011) appears as a potential 13. For this understanding, I variously build on Haraway (1997), La-
complement to political ontology. tour (2005), Law (2004), Law and Mol (2002), and Strathern (1996).
ality.” As Mol (1999:77) says, “talking about reality as multiple

depends [not on the metaphors] of perspective and construc-
tion, but rather those of intervention and performance. This
suggests a reality that is done and enacted rather than ob-
served.” This reinforces the point raised before that political
ontology’s concern is with efficacy rather than accuracy. And
efficacy is tied to plausibility, which is just another way of
referring to the actual environment that has been brought
into being from the infinite possibilities of the pluriverse.
Political ontology does its work at the interstice between the
possible and the plausible that the foundationless founda-
tional claim of a pluriverse opens. And thus, the claim of the
pluriverse (or multiple ontologies) is not concerned with pre-
senting itself as a more “accurate” picture of how things are
“in reality” (a sort of meta-ontology); it is concerned with
the possibilities that this claim may open to address emergent
(and urgent) intellectual/political problems. Central among
these problems is the extent to which those of us (persons
Figure 1. The modern myth.
and institutions) who have been shaped by an ontology that
postulates/performs a “one-world world” are ill prepared to
grapple with its increasing implausibility.14 story was conceived as a description of the path that every-
body would eventually follow, now it is conceived as a fait
Why Political Ontology: A (Plausible) Story of accompli; modernity is “the present” and thus, as Giddens
the Present? (1990) says, from now on is modernity all the way down.
Notice that I speak of an arrangement of the three elements:
In the introduction, I advanced the argument that ontological it is not the nature/culture divide, a hierarchical understand-
conflicts are becoming more visible in part because the he- ing of the differences between (modern) self and (nonmod-
gemony of the story of modernity (or the modern ontology) ern) others, or linear time per se that makes the story of
is in crisis.15 After having prepared the terrain, I can now modernity specific; what constitutes the specificity of mo-
substantiate my point. In figure 1, we have a sketch showing dernity in a context of multiple ontologies/stories is the par-
how the modern story hinges upon a specific arrangement of ticular way in which these elements are storied/enacted as
three elements: an ontologically stark distinction between na- being related to each other. The arguments of the Latin Amer-
ture and culture, a dominant tendency to conceive difference ican research program on modernity/coloniality and de-
(including the difference between nature and culture) in hi- colonial thought (MCD) are useful to explicate the point.17
erarchical terms, and a linear conception of time. The domain MCD foregrounds that the modern ontological armature de-
of culture has been further subdivided into several “cultures” scribed above emerged progressively in a series of specific
as the key diacritic to establish differences among humans. locations in western Europe along with the unfolding of the
The place of “modern culture” in relation to its others (nature colonial experience and needs inaugurated by the Spanish
and other cultures) is more or less explicitly linked to a hi- conquest of the New World (see Dussel 1995; Mignolo 2000).
erarchical system mapped out against the background of lin- Thus, the two great divides (nature/culture and modern/non-
ear time. In effect, between the sixteenth and eighteenth cen- modern) and its correlated temporal matrix are not just his-
turies, the two great divides (between nature and culture and torically coemergent, they are cosustaining. The implication
between moderns and nonmoderns) were increasingly un- being that performing a modern world in which this arrange-
derstood by moderns in terms of a story that makes modernity ment of threads constitutes the ontological bedrock neces-
not only different but also the spearhead of the evolving his- sarily involves keeping at bay the threat posed to it by the
tory of humanity.16 And while in the past, this progressive radically different ways of worldings with which it is never-
theless entangled. And this has been done, first by denying
14. Law (2011) uses the term “one-world world” for the way of world-
ing that proposes that reality is one, that ontology cannot but be in these other worldings any veracity and, later on, even real
singular. existence, to the point that true conflicts (i.e., where parties
15. Helen Verran’s (2002) work has provided much inspiration to
conceive and plot my arguments as a story. 17. Under this research program, a heterogeneous groups of scholars
16. The arrow of time was mainly understood as a progression, al- located in both Latin America and the United States have been discussing
though it could be understood as a sort of regression too, as the Romantics since the 1990s the constitutive relations between modernity and colo-
did. Not surprising, then, that any contestation to dominant notions of niality, on the one hand, and between these and nonmodern societies,
progress are still labeled romantic and often equated to a desire for the on the other hand (for a more detailed discussion of this research pro-
past (see Hindess 2007). gram, see Escobar 2007a; Mignolo 2007).
recognize each other as adversaries) have been turned into the multicultural “cunning of recognition” (Povinelli 2002),
anomalies (i.e., where one of the parties has been simply coercion has never disappeared regardless of how persuasive
rendered a deviation from the norm embodied by the other; the scape to the future may have appeared to many; rather,
see Latour 2002). it has been crucial in containing radical difference to then
As long as the horizon of alterity in the encounter with submit it to the domain of governmentality (Ghosh 2006).
the New World was Christianity, the radical Otherness of the In effect, even within a paradigm claiming that different cul-
natives’ worlding was recognized as potentially threatening tures are equally valid perspectives on the world, the use of
and the site of an open antagonism (i.e., the Indians were coercion continues to be seen as legitimate when Others cross
minions to the devil either willingly or because they had fallen the limits of what is commonly perceived as reasonable and
prey to his lies), but as reason displaced faith in the consti- conceivable. This is exceedingly obvious when indigenous
tution of the modern regime of truth, this antagonism was peoples try to defend their worlds in the face of development
progressively muted: Indians were just ignorant, they were at or conservation projects that, promoted from either right or
an earlier stage of evolution, or, as of late, they just had left political stances, assume that those complex assemblages
another culture (which, critically, lacked the concept of cul- of relations are cultures and nature, that is, things or resources
ture; de la Cadena 2010). In its latest modality, modernity that exist for the greater good of humans.
exorcises the threatening difference of other worldings by As Marisol de la Cadena (2010) has argued, in the modern
taming them and allowing them to exist just as cultural per- division of representational work, only universal science can
spectives on a singular reality. In other words, all the different represent (speak for) nature, while politicians represent (speak
ontologies described by ethnographers are shrunk and made for) their human constituencies. Thus, the only “legitimate”
to fit into one of the little squares labeled “Other culture” in way in which peoples can defend their different worlds
figure 1. (which, of course, include more than humans) is by way of
What I am “storying” here is the enactment of a modern converting them into “cultures” that can be mobilized by
world that actively produces other ontologies or worlds as “ethnic politicians.” However, claims for the respect of cul-
absences (see Santos 2004). Yet, it is my contention that mo- tural differences can only go so far before the reality sanc-
dernity has been able to make this absenting story plausible tioned by universal science is brought up as the limit beyond
as long as it has maintained hegemony. I follow Guha (1997: which cultural demands become unreasonable and therefore
23) in using the term hegemony to refer to “a condition of deserving of the disciplinary force of coercion to keep them
Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of D, in check (see Povinelli 2001).20 But here is where the crisis
Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion (C).” In this sense, a key of hegemony mentioned at the beginning of the section enters
element in building and maintaining the hegemony of mo- the scene, for it is becoming more difficult to cloak the use
dernity has been the spectacular feats afforded by the exper- of disciplinary force as a reasonable response to defend the
imental sciences since the sixteenth century onward. First, modern story.
they contributed plausibility to the emergent story of mo- The symptoms and sources of the crisis are numerous, but
dernity as a progressive movement marked by the increasing they converge in challenging the arrangement of the three key
mastery of nature, and second, they became the anchor for elements that shape the modern story: the internal great divide
a regime of knowledge that we may call “universal science” (nature/culture), the external great divide (modern/nonmod-
that claimed to be able to get to the Truth while disqualifying ern), and linear progressive time. Developments in science
all other ways of knowing as beliefs.18 This regime of knowl- and technology, from research on animal behavior that has
edge in turn became ingrained into a modern governmentality shaken ideas of human exceptionalism to the imbroglios of
where a concern with shaping life progressively displaced a techno-nature where nature and culture are impossible to
focus on the “right to kill” (Foucault 1991), contributing thus keep apart, have made the internal divide harder to sustain
to give shape to a societal project that can be described as an (see Haraway 2008; Latour 2004). More important for our
“escape to the future.” By this I mean to signal the attitude story, universal science has begun to lose its capacity to com-
and assumption that, with the guarantee of science, a sort of mand consent in the face of the consequences (particularly
paradise waits at the “end of the road” and that the human
and nonhuman sacrifices of the present are somehow insig- 20. The examples are myriad, but the cases of Ecuador, Bolivia, and
Peru during 2009 and 2010 are particularly telling in that governments
nificant from the perspective of those who can anticipate such
from both the right and the left, and even one presided over by an
paradise.19 However, from the “extirpation of idolatries” to indigenous person (Evo Morales, in Bolivia), reacted with the same ar-
gument to indigenous demands. In effect, confronted with grassroots
18. By universal science, I refer to an assemblage of knowledge prac- indigenous movements that claimed that decisions on whether mining
tices that, associating themselves but distorting the very specific nature and resource extraction in their territories should be left in their hands,
of the truths produced by the experimental sciences, claimed to know governments responded by claiming that the demands were irrational,
reality “as it is” (see Latour 2004; Stengers 2000b). infantile, and conspired against the greater good of the nation (see http:
19. In her recent book, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) provides a very //inside.org.au/garcia-peru, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4
detailed account of how different modulations of tense such as this give -148063-2010-06-22.html, and http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/
shape to late liberalism. elmundo/4-148319-2010-06-26.html.
environmental) of the “escape to the future” premised on the gued that in spite of its cunning, and as long as neoliberal
certainty of the knowledge built on the nature/culture divide principles were critically scrutinized, the spaces opened by
(see Beck 1992; Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005). The chal- multiculturalism could be fruitfully occupied to “fight the
lenge to this divide has opened the door to the consideration good fight,” that is, to fight about what was politically possible.
of other ontologies as plausible and viable alternatives to the But, politically possible in regard to what? The article was
modern one (see Escobar 2010; Law 2004; Latour 2010; Serres clear as to the core “thing” at stake: control over resources.
2008; Stengers 201321). In this sense, what Escobar (2007b) Fast-forward to the mid-2000s and one can see that mul-
calls the “ontological turn” (i.e., the increasing attention to ticulturalism was not enough to police the political. In places
issues of ontology) in social theory is not an intellectual fad like Bolivia and Ecuador, years of neoliberal reforms were
but a symptom of the crisis. rolled back by popular uprisings in which indigenous move-
But, again, it must be stressed that the challenge is not only ments played key roles. But, in the wake of the mobilizations,
to the nature/culture divide. The “everyday forms of exis- the redefinition of “what is politically possible” went well
tence” and the struggles to maintain other worldings have beyond what many analysts would have expected. In effect,
also been eroding the mechanisms through which modernity it seems that indio permitido had been the beachhead not only
forecloses the plausibility of other ontologies, centrally among for the dysfunctional Indian that will fight for resources but
those mechanisms, the turning of difference into a hierarchy also for the indio aborrecido (abhorred Indian), the one that
(see Blaser 2010; Fox Tree 2010).22 The challenge to the ex- to the surprise of everyone and the discomfort of many would
ternal great divide has been gaining momentum (albeit un- challenge the very idea that what is at stake in politics are
evenly), in part along with the articulation of the international simply resources. For example, in Ecuador and Bolivia, in-
indigenous movement. The symptom is the emergence of digenous movements pushed for the recognition of pacha-
multiculturalism, which, as Povinelli (2011) points out, has mama (translated with much loss as mother nature) as a
been late liberalism’s response to anticolonial and new social subject with rights in the new constitutions that emerged from
movements’ challenging of liberal forms of government. Of the struggles that pushed back neoliberal agendas. As de la
course, as a governmental response, multiculturalism seeks to Cadena (2010) points out, this is a major event, for it goes
contain that challenge within the sphere of policy so that
beyond challenging neoliberal constitutions: it disrupts the
politics remain unchanged. But to what extent is multicul-
modern constitution in several fronts. For instance, the move-
turalism successful at keeping challenges from transforming
ments challenged the modern constitution’s division of labor
politics? And exactly what is the politics being protected?23 A
between politics and science: who might be pachamama’s
widely cited article by Charles Hale, “Rethinking Indigenous
spokesperson, a universal science that does not even recognize
Politics in the Era of ‘Indio Permitido’” (2004) provides an
it exists? Or are they yatiris, pacos (shamans), which, according
anchor to grapple with these questions.
to the modern constitution, can speak for culture (politics)
Indio permitido (allowed Indian) was the image used to
but not for nature? Also, the recognition of pachamama comes
refer to the difference allowed by multiculturalism, which was
associated with notions such as sumak kawsay or suma qam-
implemented in Latin America through the 1990s along with
aña (good living) that are advanced as alternative horizons
other neoliberal reforms. The thrust of Hale’s argument was
for societal projects to those offered by development and
a concern with the capacity of multiculturalism to put limits
progress (and their embedded premise of an escape to the
on what was politically possible through granting spaces for
future).24
“cultural” difference of a limited character. Indio permitido
was the embodiment of this constrained Other, which was in As pointed out before, the potency and visibility of the
turn held in contrast with another Other: the undeserving, challenge to the external great divide is complexly uneven.
dysfunctional Indian that protested and would not conform Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that challenges to the
to the delimited space offered by multiculturalism. Hale ar- story of modernity are mutually reinforcing and intimately
connected (albeit not through simple causality). Even where
the grip of cunning recognition is stronger, a loosening of the
21. The lecture is available at http://sawyerseminar.ucdavis.edu
/resources. nature/culture divide and a general devaluation on the pur-
22. In a playful counterpoint with James Scott’s “everyday forms of chase power of the modern myth create opportunities to vi-
resistance,” Erich Fox Tree (2010) has coined the phrase “everyday forms sualize ontological conflicts across the board. This is especially
of existence” to refer to those everyday practices that through persevering the case where peoples struggle to sustain their worldings and
in their difference, and without being intended as resistance, defy mod-
ernizing processes.
life projects (Blaser 2004; Escobar 2008) in the face of more
23. One of the anonymous reviewers suggested that a question that or less coercively imposed notions of progress and modern-
arises from here is what might count as political, ontologically speaking.
In other words, what would be the implications of ontological pluralism 24. The notion of good living (buen vivir in Spanish) has become the
for this question. I agree this is a crucial point, but a solid engagement site of a very vibrant debate where indigenous, environmental, and post-
with it is beyond the aim of this article, which is precisely to stir con- developmentalist intellectuals are contributing (see Gudynas 2011a,
versations around these kinds of questions. But see Candea (2011) for 2011b; Walsh 2010; Yampara 2001; see also the 2010 special issue of Alai:
an excellent argument that starts to explore this point. http://www.alainet.org/publica/alai452w.pdf.
ization. To the extent that these conflictive encounters pro- to foreground the extent to which the term points toward a
liferate (see Leach, Scoones, and Wynne 2005; Mander and profound challenge to modernity and its ontological as-
Tauli-Corpuz 2006), the modern story becomes increasingly sumptions (see Burman 2011; Fernandez-Osco 2006).26 The
located in a position of “dominance without hegemony” difference is significant, as it signals a struggle to define the
(Guha 1997). This does not mean that modernity has lost limits of the political. An acrimonious discussion that flared
dominance but that in sustaining it, the balance between co- up over the Internet prompted by an article by Pablo Ste-
ercion and persuasion is shifting. Forty years ago, opposing fanoni, the director of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Di-
mining, oil extraction, or the increase of agricultural lands plomatique, makes the stakes more evident. The article re-
for environmental reasons or because indigenous ways of life ported on the World People’s Conference on Climate Change
would be profoundly disrupted would have been seen as sheer and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
irrationality by most citizens in a Latin American country; in April 2010 and called for by Bolivian President Evo Morales
not so now. The promise of modernization no longer appears in the wake of the disastrous United Nations climate change
as persuasive (which does not mean totally unpersuasive ei- conference in Copenhagen. Stefanoni wrote that the confer-
ther), and thus a space gets opened to perform other stories ence in Cochabamba
and other propositions about how different worldings might revealed something of relevance to the future: The process
relate. of change [in Bolivia] is too important to be left in the
hands of the pachamámicos. The affectation of ancestral
Conclusions: Missing the Pachakuti authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tour-
ists in search of Latin America’s “familiar exoticism” and
In 1991, Orin Starn wrote a biting indictment of anthropol-
even more so Bolivia’s . . . but it does not seem capable of
ogists working in Peru who failed to see in the 1970s the
contributing anything significant in terms of building a new
signs of the Shinning Path insurgency that were gathering in
front of their noses. In his reading, the failure stemmed from State, instituting a new model of development, discussing
a narrow focus on adaptation, ritual, and cosmology, as well a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and
as on a regional version of Orientalist othering, Andeanism. mass participation. . . . So, instead of discussing how to
His characterization of anthropological practices in Peru sum- combine developmental expectations with an intelligent
marized many of the misgivings with former notions of cul- eco-environmentalism, the pachamámico discourse offers us
tural difference as bounded, timeless, homeostatic, and un- a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enig-
changing islands of history and made a forceful argument for matic tone, and a naı̈ve reading of the crisis of capitalism
the urgency of situating ethnographies of indigenous realities and western civilization. In Europe there is much greater
within the flow of a modern “history of continuous and mul- awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic
tilayered connections” built through a common “political products) than there is in our country, where in many ways
economy and the more subtle channels of representation and everything remains to be done, and an informed and tech-
self-imagination” (Starn 1991:85–86). But if, in the 1970s, the nically solid environmentalism seems much more effective
problem was anthropological blindness to the political econ- than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed
omy that prompted the insurgency of the Shining Path, at First Nations’ philosophy, often an excuse of some urban in-
the turn of the millennium, the problem is misrecognizing tellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the
the pachakuti that is taking place in the Andes and beyond.25 country.27 (Emphasis added)
The term pachakuti is a composite of the quechua words Diatribes like this are not isolated; rather, they are quite
pacha (world, time and space, or state of being) and kuti common in Bolivia and beyond when anything unfitting to
(change, turn, or something that comes back on itself) (Steele modernist parameters of reasonability surfaces as something
and Allen 2004:226) and thus makes reference to a veritable with more pretensions than simply being folklore for tourist
turnaround. Interestingly, the effects of the powerful indig- consumption. Whether in incendiary op-ed commentaries or
enous mobilization that have been taking place in the Andean in more subtle scholarly analyses, the rationale of the dis-
countries since the mid-1990s have been increasingly referred qualification seems to follow the same pattern:
to as a pachakuti, with several movements and organizations (1) Premise: “cultural” differences are folkloric and super-
adopting the word in their names. For some, the term seems ficial because we all now live in the modern world (a product
to be simply a synonym of social revolution, while others try of five centuries of global intermingling and transformative
25. Mark Goodale (2006:636) has made a slightly similar argument, 26. Mignolo and Schiwy (2003:9) point out that, not surprisingly, “the
pointing out the extent to which Starn’s call for a focus on political situation created by the arrival of the Spaniards was referred to as pa-
economy ended up being “overemphasized at the expense of just the chakuti.” Millones (2007) in turn points out that pachakuti does not refer
type of ‘Andean’ discursivity that [he] believed had been inappropriately to a return to a pre-Hispanic state of the world, but to the creation of
romanticized.” The consequence, according to Goodale, is that analysts a new one.
will misread the current revolution in which the constitution of an in- 27. Some of the articles that composed the debate, including the one
digenous cosmopolitanism is central. cited here, are available online at http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?pp1228.
interactions) and therefore, at the bottom, the world is the iticians find few avenues to contribute to sustaining or pro-
same for everyone. tecting their worlds other than through the use of (“our”)
(2) Demonstration: show me a claim of radical difference widely available categories and symbols of alterity (or Same-
and I will show you an indigenous intellectual who uses coming)—such as that of the ecologically noble savage, the original
puters and the Internet to invent a tradition for the con- communist, or the original entrepreneur—which, with all the
sumption of guilt-ridden, exoticism-seeking white people. perils that the move entails, are palatable to different audi-
(3) Consequence: radically different worlds are not real, ences and circumstantial allies.28 Further remarks are not nec-
claims of radical difference are empty posturing, and therefore essary to bring home the point that, with regard to ontological
they have nothing to say in any serious conversation about differences, the current relations of force make equivocations
how to deal with real and urgent problems. All that needs to even more pervasive, almost endemic. In this sense, we cannot
be attended to is captured by political economy and ethnic
assume that self-representations through established catego-
politicking (with the ammunition of culture). In other words,
ries exhaust the radical differences that may or may not be
“our” established categories reflect current processes and
at stake. In fact, those self-representations tell us more about
problems (including the “affectations of ancestral authentic-
the status of the hegemony of the categories being used, and
ity”) well enough to handle them.
the asymmetrical relations between worlds, than about the
The assumption that “our” established categories are
enough is perhaps the most insidious way in which claims of existence of those radical differences. Thus, when “a cataract
an all-encompassing modernity do Sameing while seeking to of words” in an indigenous language starts to appear on the
articulate a passionate, yet sober, commitment to differences public political stage, it might be an indication that the corset
without inequalities. As pointed out by Elizabeth Povinellli that dominant categories impose upon radical differences
in an article that I consider to be a precursor of political might be exploding at the seams.
ontology concerns, although “political economy is understood Worlding is a contested, arduous, and not entirely coherent
as a framework for analyzing unequal relations and access to process and never takes place in a vacuum without connec-
cultural and material resources and power,” important questions to other ways of worlding. Yet the connections do not
tions remain: cancel their radical differences. Radically different worlds are
Is there an internal limit to political-economic approaches being enacted in front of our noses, even if they now involve
to the cultural construction of economics? If culture is a computers and the Internet, along with older (which does
lens through which the local group mediates the practices not mean unchanging) other nonhumans! And while they
and policies of the larger system . . . then what of the lens might be taking place in front of our noses, these enactments
of the larger system and its practices of knowing? . . . In are not spectacles geared to achieve the ulterior purposes that
any case, how are these beliefs and practices in conflict with our categories allow us to imagine (control of resources, po-
[indigenous] ways of knowing the human-environmental litical positioning, and so on). They are doing worlds them-
nexus? And how are the cultural assumptions underlying selves.
political economy linked to dominant institutions of power? Discussions about the proper protocols to engage powerful
Is this cultural underpinning reinscribing dominant power nonhumans in changing circumstances, inquiries into the col-
over local minority communities even as the researcher is lective memory to repair and/or recreate practices wounded
trying to empower local sociocultural practices . . . ? (Pov- by colonial policies, and efforts to relearn or create languages
inelli 1995:506) and concepts that can better express and materialize visions
Nadasdy (2007:37) provides some answers to these ques- of what a decolonized life means are taking place along with
tions when he argues that, to the extent that our theories deny other everyday forms of existence away from an audience that
the ontological assumptions on which other peoples base their
conceptions of the world, we provide “a powerful justification
for the dismissal of certain beliefs and practices as just cultural
constructions (which, although perhaps relevant in the realm 28. The “ecologically noble savage” and the “original communist” are
of cultural politics, cannot provide the factual basis for de- well-known and widely debated labels of alterity (see Harkin and Lewis
velopment or resource management).” One could add, fol- 2007; Krech 1999; Lee 1990; Wilmsen 2009); a little less known is the
original entrepreneur label, most visibly promoted by neoliberal intel-
lowing de la Cadena (2010), that from a modern perspective, lectual and pundit Hernando de Soto and his Institute for Liberty and
these ontological assumptions cannot provide a basis for “se- Democracy (see http://www.ild.org.pe). For all their differences, all these
rious politics” either. In part due to this, argues Poirier (2008: symbols tend to play the same role in the modern political terrain: being
83), many indigenous peoples “conceal those aspects that are incarnated by those supposedly closest to “natural man,” they lend an
considered, from the point of view of modernist (and Car- aura of naturalness to the positions and arguments associated with them.
Yet as Nasdasdy (2005) cogently argued in the case of the ecologically
tesian) ontology and epistemology, as a radical alterity, those noble savage, none of these labels capture what is at stake in many
that are not considered seriously and at face value, and just indigenous understandings of nonhumans, and, I will add, well-being or
as mere beliefs.” Most often, I suspect, many indigenous pol- justice, for that matter.
could be moved by the appeal of the exotic.29 And in many for such an attempt, but we cannot even begin to tell such a
cases, these processes bring to the fore radical differences. story well without engaging the stories of others seriously.
Sometimes these differences are voiced by indigenous (among
others) spokespersons who alternatively might be either de-
rided as spurious or embraced as authentic, depending on
whether the alterity displayed can be made to fit existing and Acknowledgments
interested preconceptions. In turn, nonindigenous commen-
This piece has been on the make for almost 5 years, and the
tators or analysts who take these claims seriously, and want
debts accrued are plenty. First and foremost, I must state up-
to slow down thinking to hear what is being said and what
front that the idea of political ontology has been taking shape
would be the consequences before embracing or rejecting
more directly through collective thinking with Marisol de la
them, are automatically sniggered at.30 Naive, exoticist, and
Cadena and Arturo Escobar. As part of this collaboration, we
essentialist when not patronizing are some of the epithets
organized two seminars. One of them (Politica Mas alla de
proffered. Of course, if the project of a political ontology can
la “Politica”), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, took
take flight and grow, it will have to deactivate this automatic
place in July of 2009 in Santandercito (Colombia); the other
response. I hope to have made some strides on that direction,
(Pluriverse and the Social Sciences), funded by the Social
at least with respect to the accusations of naı̈veté, exoticism,
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, took
and essentialism. But I want to raise a final point about the
place in September 2010 in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The
patronizing accusation.
participants in both seminars were enormously generous in
Political ontology is intended neither as a pedagogic project
engaging with some of the ideas presented here; in particular,
to illuminate a reality that deficient theorizing cannot grasp,
I want to thank Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Janet Conway, Harvey
nor as a proselytizing project to show the virtues of other,
Feit, Larry Grossberg, Eduardo Gudynas, Alex Khasnabish,
nonmodern blueprints for a good life. Such reading would
John Law, Brian Noble, Isabelle Stengers, Eduardo Restrepo,
confuse an attempt to carve out a space to listen carefully to
Dianne Rocheleau, Axel Rojas, and Elena Yehia. I am also
what other worldings propose with an attempt to rescue and
thankful to Michael Asch, Damian Castro, Alberto Corsin
promote those worldings as if we knew what they are about.31
Jimenez, Lesley Green, Martin Holbraad, Justin Kenrick, Josh
Political ontology is closer to hard-nosed pragmatism than
Lepawsky, Charles Mather, Annemarie Mol, Claire Poirier,
to liberal desire to understand everyone; the pax moderna no
Sylvie Poirier, Colin Scott, Helen Verran, and Eduardo Viv-
longer holds (if it ever truly did), and dominance without
eiros de Castro for insightful conversations on various aspects
hegemony is a costly proposition when ontological differences
of the arguments presented here.
become politically active. And here I have in mind not only
the activation of indigenous and other land-based worldings
but also that of worldings in which it is unacceptable that
God play no role in politics, worldings where the killing of
animals in the pursuit of human purposes is infinitely more Comments
complicated than usually assumed, in short, the varied ways
in which other ontologies than the modern one are staking Claudia Briones
a claim to exist and, in some cases, occupy the dominant role Instituto de Investigaciones en Diversidad Cultural y Procesos de
that modernity has played so far. In this context, carving out Cambio (IIDyPCa), Universidad Nacional de Rı́o Negro-CONI-
CET, B. Mitre 630 5º Piso, (8400) San Carlos de Bariloche—Rı́o
a space to listen is also carving out a space to tell another Negro, Argentina (cbriones@unrn.edu.ar). 19 III 13
story to (and about) ourselves, to engage in other kinds of
worlding that might be more conducive to a coexistence based It has to be celebrated that anthropologists keep debating
on recognizing conflicts rather than brushing them off as better ways of approaching concepts such as “radical differ-
irrelevant or nonexistent. Certainly there are no guarantees ence” and “otherness.” These debates have been part of the
anthropological tool kit from the very beginning, always with
29. A volume edited by the Bolivian Periodico Pukara is telling in this momentous consequences. Challenges include both how far
regard. The volume collected the presentations of several key figures and we are prepared to go, and the intended and unintended
intellectuals of the Bolivian indigenous movement, some of whom fo-
effects of our updated approaches.
cused on retrieving the meaning and scope of Aymara concepts as crucial
to understanding where the movement is and what it needs to do. The Insofar as I also work with indigenous peoples, their prac-
volume is available online: http://periodicopukara.com/archivos/historia tices, and conflictive realities, I share many of Blaser’s dis-
-coyuntura-y-descolonizacion.pdf. contents and reservations. I also find extremely relevant the
30. I take the idea of slowdown thinking from Isabelle Stengers’s three theoretical moves that he proposes: (a) tackling different
(2005) “cosmopolitical proposal.”
ways of worlding not as mere contents/assumptions, but as
31. By listening carefully, I mean something closer to what Viveiros
de Castro (2004) calls translation as controlled equivocation than to the a practice; (b) making a clear distinction between practices
expectation of finding in my world a representation that will be the perfect of worlding and practices of belonging (culture and identity?);
equivalent of what those other worlds propose. (c) reframing Fabian’s “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 1983:
146), as to question “the claim that all contemporary cultures research focus is “the effects of transformative interactions
are modern” just because they are contemporaneous. between different ontologies” or, rather, the effects of trans-
Building upon these convergences, I prefer to raise some formative interactions between ontological differences?
questions instead of commenting on the paper, in the hope 4. Ontologies/epistemologies. Can the discussion of episte-
that they will invite Mario to develop his arguments further. mological relativism solve all the epistemological issues in-
1. Morphological issues. According to Blaser, “when the term volved? Is the awareness of the ways in which “peoples dis-
‘modern’ is used as an adjective, it evacuates radical difference tribute what exists and conceive their constitutive relations”
from the present.” Now then, what are the effects of using (ontology) divorced from acknowledging the means by which
ontology/ontological both as an adjective and as a noun? Does they acquire and approve such conceptualizations (episte-
the act of naming his heuristic project in the singular (Political mology)? Assuming the modernness of the ontological/epis-
Ontology) end up neutralizing ontological multiplicities? If temological divide, how should we think of the relationships
this name is adopted to emphasize the existence of ontological between both entities/realities? Can we grasp ontological dif-
conflicts, what is the space left to analyze ontological as- ferences by using our modern epistemology or must we also
sumptions of our interlocutors that are neither enacted nor consider epistemological differences? Moreover, if we do not
disputed in public arenas? take also into account epistemological differences, how could
In the article, Blaser speaks of “(modern) self and (non- we guarantee that controlled equivocations do not end up
modern) others,” “nonmodern blueprints for a good life,” establishing an epistemological vantage point to measure up
“nonmodern societies,” as if the labeling modern/nonmodern ontological differences as epistemological relativism does?
could be applied both to the self (identities) and to designs. Because it is very hard for me to abandon the anthropo-
What are the effects of this use upon the analytical distinction logical wisdom of taking “others and their real difference
between practices of worlding and practices of belonging, seriously,” as well as the disciplinary advice to be cautious
between culture and identity? Or which are the foreseen re- regarding the intended and unintended pragmatic conse-
lationships between worlding and belonging? quences of anthropological discourses on cultural difference,
Once stories and storied performativity become key con- I look forward to reading Blaser’s reply. If the idea of radical
cepts to perform realities and gain access to ontological dif- difference had not been used so extensively to justify op-
ferences (or differences we choose to consider ontological), pression within the modern world system (in spite of repeated
what is the role played by extradiscursive practices in the anthropological efforts to redefine the concept), I would also
Political Ontology project? accept Stengers’s invitation to “relearn to laugh” (2000a) and
2. Radical difference as a matter of fact. What are the effects wonder what it would mean in this case? Perhaps it would
of putting more emphasis on the domineering effects of the imply a daring “what if.” What if the idea of radical difference
politics of Otherness than on discourses about cultural dif- belonged to the realm of pragmatics instead of semantics?
ferences? Are not the ideas of radical difference and of oth- What if we approached radical difference not as the unques-
erness part of the same Janus-faced reality created by modern tioned standpoint for symbolizing gaps of meaning but as a
ontology in order to leave unmarked and universalize its own disputed index, used in multifarious ways, in order to pre-
practices and belongings? If “the ‘modernness’ that underlies suppose, create, and rank such gaps? Could this stance pave
contemporary cultural differences would need to be proved a better way to perform controlled equivocations?
rather than axiomatically asserted” and, to do so, “one would
need some criteria of what it means to be modern,” what
about the predicated nonmodernness of certain contemporary
cultural differences? Do they also need to be proved against
some criteria of what it means to be nonmodern? What are Anders Burman
these criteria then? How to discriminate between cultural dif- Human Ecology Division, Department of Human Geography,
Lund University, Sölvegatan 10, S-22362 Lund, Sweden
ferences and ontological differences and to discriminate any (anders.burman@hek.lu.se). 22 II 13
cultural difference from radical difference? Or is any difference
radical? Mario Blaser provides us with an inspiring theoretical account
3. Semantics and pragmatics. Even if the attention paid to and justification of “the ontological turn” in anthropology
practice in the paper seems to indicate otherwise, the noun and the study of indigenous societies. The task he sets for
“radical difference” seems to be related to the realm of se- himself is indeed critical. He explores how to take radical
mantics more than to that of pragmatics. A propos the tension differences seriously without indulging in essentialist exoti-
between semantic and pragmatic approaches, then, how cism. This is a task I also have attempted (e.g., Burman 2012),
should we conceive “the inherent hybridity of cultures”? As though not in such a theoretically initiated way as Blaser.
a collection of juxtaposed stories that constitute sometimes More urgently still, by framing his discussion as one of “po-
modern, sometimes nonmodern realities? Or as stories that litical ontology,” Blaser attends to ontological differences
constitute realities with modern and nonmodern features at without losing sight of social struggle and political power.
the same time? What difference does it make to state that the Current political dynamics in Latin America, as discussed by
Blaser, manifest that any definite distinction between material/ be so. However, the current political context in Bolivia shows
political and cognitive/symbolic conflicts is based on a false that indigenous concepts such as suma qamaña, pachakuti,
dichotomy. Ontological and epistemological aspects of human and pachamama are easily assimilated into dominant political
existence are at the center of struggles over resources and discourse and thereby defanged and commodified on the po-
power since these are simultaneously struggles over meaning, litical market. This makes me question the profoundness of
struggles over reality, over “what there is.” the “crisis of modernity” that Blaser identifies. If by crisis we
By questioning our routine usage of the concept “culture,” mean the socio-environmental consequences of modernity,
Blaser looks for ways of escaping the constraints of anthro- then yes—we are certainly experiencing a crisis. Likewise, if
pological theory that supposedly prevent us from seeing be- by crisis we mean that other worlds are making themselves
yond the notion of the world as constituted by one real reality heard, even in spaces of parliamentary power, then yes—
out there, and innumerous cultural interpretations and rep- modernity would seem to be under attack. However, if by
resentations of it. This line of critique is, of course, not novel crisis we mean a weakening of the hegemonic forces of mo-
in anthropology. Viveiros de Castro (1998) and others have dernity, then I believe the idea of a crisis is inflated. Modernity
already questioned the universality of the notion of “one na- selectively assimilates and disarms elements of alterity while
ture—many cultures.” Moreover, by a phenomenological at- simultaneously striving to produce ontological absence where
tention to practice, Ingold (2000) has directed our attention ontological difference is detected, that is, denying the reality
away from thinking of culture as mental representations of of any other reality than the one stipulated by modernity.
the material world and toward a comprehension of lifeworlds Consequently, there is a critical role to play for Blaser’s in-
as emerging in people’s practical engagement with and within spired thinking on radical differences in questioning this
the world. A core success of Blaser’s article stems from the dominance. I remain convinced, however, that for a project
way he builds upon ideas such as these in order to reveal of political ontology to take flight, there is a need for an-
their political dimensions and implications. choring this thinking more explicitly and deeply in specific
In many regards, Blaser’s text could be situated within the contexts and practices, also when engaging in theoretical de-
coloniality/modernity literature, as articulated in different bate. I look forward to following this process.
ways by Dussel, Quijano, Mignolo, Lugones, Grosfoguel, and
others. Blaser questions the idea of an all-embracing moder-
nity and argues, in line with Mignolo (2005:36), that the
conceptual straitjacket of modernity makes the world appear
to us according to what modern categories of thought allow Arturo Escobar
us to perceive. In this line of thought, epistemological queries Department of Anthropology, CB 3115, University of North Caro-
lina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, U.S.A. (aescobar@
are dealt with under the label “coloniality of knowledge,” email.unc.edu). 25 II 13
existential dimensions are handled under the label “coloniality
of being,” and asymmetric power relations are scrutinized Mario Blaser’s article, and his work to date, constitutes a
under the label “coloniality of power.” What Blaser is artic- major theoretical effort with important ethnographic and po-
ulating in an inspiring way in this article could be labeled the litical implications; political and ethnographic inspiration are
“coloniality of reality.” in fact central to Blaser’s compelling proposal for what he
The coloniality/modernity literature has its undeniable calls political ontology, a field that in 2009 he defined as
strength and critical verve but also its weak points. The latter having two dimensions: “On the one hand, it refers to the
are found, I would argue, in some of Mignolo’s otherwise power-laden negotiations involved in bringing into being the
thought-provoking writings (e.g., Mignolo 2000, 2005): a lack entities that make up a particular world or ontology. On the
of attention to people’s everyday concerns and practices, other hand, it refers to a field of study that focuses on these
sweeping generalizations about “indigenous knowledge,” and negotiations but also on the conflicts that ensue as different
disembedded references to a selection of indigenous concepts. worlds or ontologies strive to sustain their own existence as
Blaser does not indulge in these errors. However, his theo- they interact and mingle with each other” (Blaser 2009:11).
retical arguments would have been even more powerful if This political ontology framework links conversations in crit-
rooted more deeply in specific ethnographic contexts and ical theory (particularly in indigenous studies and STS) with
practices and not, as currently is the case, in more elusive momentous developments in socio-natural life (chiefly, Latin
discussions about indigenous peoples and a few passing ex- American indigenous uprisings and struggles). In a welcome
amples from Bolivia. It would have shown to the reader that reversal of the excessively theory-driven postconstructivist
things are not only theoretically intricate but also socially and scholarship, in Blaser’s work, the tacking back and forth be-
politically complex “on the ground.” Blaser argues, for in- tween theory and social life finds its raison d’être in the latter.
stance, that when indigenous discourse “starts to appear on This is of utmost importance since, as Blaser mentions, critical
the public political stage, it might be an indication that the social theory comes short in furnishing the categories with
corset that dominant categories impose upon radical differ- which we might visualize those practices that most radically
ences might be exploding at the seams.” It might very well challenge dominant conceptions of the world. Given its re-
liance on the modern episteme, and despite more decided modernist truth arrangements, or whether the concept could
attempts at moving away from the episteme over the past not be retrieved for strategic usage. That said, in my view,
decade, critical social theory today is insufficient to ask the the article’s main contribution is to make us newly aware of
questions, let alone venture the answers, that could illuminate the fact that much of what goes on in the world today can
effective paths toward the planet’s ontological reconstitution. be described as an ontological war on relational worlds and
As Blaser suggests, we are likely to find clues to such paths that, conversely, the struggles by those worlds to persevere
in the worlds made visible by indigenous struggles, but only and sustain the pluriverse are signs of the unraveling of the
if we are willing to deepen our epistemic-ontological “de- alleged all-encompassing modernity. This is a hopeful and
classing,” so to speak, and newly approach radical alterity empowering imagining of how things are and might get to
from the perspective of the ontological conflicts and stories be.
of peoples “in spite of Europe.”
For Blaser, critical theory is still trapped with the narrative
of modernity, thus missing important dimensions of alterity.
This fustigation is particularly telling for anthropology, the
field of radical alterity par excellence. As others have argued, Lesley Green
anthropology continues to contribute to the domestication of School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguis-
tics, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701,
alterity. Why he believes this to be the case, however, con- Cape Town, South Africa (lesley.green@uct.ac.za). 4 III 13
stitutes a novel contribution. The reason lies in a “politico-
conceptual problem” that makes it impossible to take seri- In gathering together relatively disparate strands of anthro-
ously expressions of radical alterity and entertain the idea of pology over the past few decades—indigenous activism, sci-
multiple ontologies, or worlds beyond modernity. Some of ence and technology studies, the critiques of the idea of cul-
the main reasons for this inability are well known by now ture and modernist thought—Blaser offers a succinct
(thanks to STS’s deconstruction of the nature/culture divide statement of what a decolonial anthropology might look like.
and the notions of partial connections and ontological mul- Read in the context of South Africa, the argument speaks
tiplicity); others are newer, and newly insightful (e.g., Law’s to ongoing debate in public life and the humanities on the
critique of the “One-World” ontology, Povinelli’s analysis of difficulties of finding agreement about the place of science in
the deadly and meteoric spread of “the liberal diaspora” with a postcolonial democracy. The history of the critical human-
globalization, and the Latin American decolonial critiques). ities in the South Africa of the 1990s was that of destabilizing
Blaser’s additional contribution refers perhaps more to the certainties over apartheid’s imagined culturalist collectivities:
implications of the continued naturalization of modernity— culture, race, tribe, ethnicity, tradition among them, yet the
social theory’s inability to see that which refuses epistemic same argument has been able to offer very little to a parlia-
and ontological capture, caused by the lingering assumption ment that has, at times, been determined to contest the he-
of an all-encompassing modernity. gemony of science, or “the western version of nature” (which
A number of contributions in the present article enrich the has never itself been singular) in the name of either culture
notion of political ontology, already outlined in Blaser’s su- or political economy. For this reason, the turn to an anthro-
perb, albeit theoretically challenging, monograph (2010); pology that engages questions about both nature and culture
these include the notions of “worlds,” “ways of worlding,” is valuable.
and, particularly, the “pluriverse”: the most sophisticated ren- The question is whether the theoretical, conceptual, and
dition to date, in this reviewer’s opinion, of how multiple political project that is proposed here is broad enough to
worlds interact, mingle, and at times coemerge, without being frame an agenda for decolonial research. It is, as Blaser notes,
reducible to one another; the preemptive maneuver against very easy to put the old wine of culture into a new wine bottle
the chronic realism prevalent in the academy (of course, Left of ontology, and while I value deeply the performative em-
included) that invariably labels as romantic, localizing, or phasis that Blaser offers in his attention to storying, enacting,
essentializing any attempt at positing alterity “in spite of Eu- and worlding, the very word “ontology” has difficulty holding
rope” and modernity; the appeal to enaction (recalling Ma- the emphasis on emergence, precisely because it proposes to
turana and Varela’s oeuvre, which, in my view, provides el- make of these worldings, and so on, things. For Afro-Marti-
egant solutions to some of the aporias of Western social niquan postcolonial thinker Aimee Césaire, “thingification”—
theory, still to be taken seriously); the notion of the “foun- in the sense of objectification—is the core of the colonial project
dationless foundational claim” (which might nevertheless risk (Césaire 1972). Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language
becoming another version of antifoundationalism, but which that is attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging.
could be seen as in kinship with the masterful foundationless, While the notion of the “politicoconceptual” implies the
world-creating fictions by Borges or Calvino); and the nu- enacted emergence of “things” (or matters of concern, in the
anced critique of the concept of culture, although in this sense used by Bruno Latour), its frame of reference remains
regard I am left with the question of whether all notions of a matter of mind, culture, and ideology. Where, in this view,
culture are so inevitably tainted by their imputed reliance on are different relationships to materiality? Modernity is not
only a set of ideas, but a way of relating to material realities detractors, joining in what is beginning to look like a slinging
and technological affordances, which in turn are transfor- match of competitive exasperation, Blaser’s piece is devoted
mative of those realities and the relationships they imply. The mainly to sifting through and consolidating some of the lines
humble refrigerator changes the relationship that a hunter has of thinking this theoretical move has engendered. In this con-
with prey, and with neighbors, and with the economy, and nection, and for obvious reasons, I find particularly helpful
space and time, and indeed personhood too. Knowledge, in the way in which Blaser contrasts his core suggestion that
other words, is constantly emerging and transforming in re- political ontologies be conceived as “storied performances”
lation to material relations, which offer different reasons to that provide their own “foundationless foundation” with my
know. own contention that the turn to ontology in anthropology is
This recognition prompts a second set of questions: Does best understood as a heuristic one. The contrast speaks di-
the concept ontology itself not imply a version of the idea of rectly to what I think Blaser takes the political stakes of the
presence that is written into modernist thought? Does the ontological turn to be, as well as what I, as a fellow onto-
worlding implied in the word allow sufficient space for shades traveler, think may be wrong with Blaser’s line of argument.
and spectres—Derrida’s “hauntology”—the presences to If I understand him correctly, the reason for which Blaser
which, or to whom, the language of “being” is inhospitable?32 insists on the “foundationless” character of ontologies is iden-
How might different registers of affects and sensibilities find tical to the reason for which I have argued that they are best
a place at the table of knowledge? Does the word “ontology” conceived as heuristic devices that pertain, not to the nature
itself not occlude—or at least prejudge—different ways of of existence in the world (or worlds) at large,33 but rather to
combining the arts of the sensory? It would be an unusual the economy of anthropological argument itself. Both sug-
court of law in which a midwife defending her reading of a gestions are meant to respond to the same basic problem,
birthing belly with her hands finds herself on equal footing namely, that if anthropology stands or falls by its capacity to
with an obstetrician who can produce several meters of lines register difference in its own terms, then it must find a way
printed by a fetal heart-rate monitor, yet both rely on that to stop delimiting the scope of difference by deciding in ad-
elusive sensory combination called “clinical skill.” Certainly, vance what it must look like. Thus, I think Blaser and I can
valorization of some senses more than others is central to the
agree that what is wrong with concepts such as “culture” or
modernist project, and different attunements to bodily per-
“society” (and I would add “network,” “being-in-the-world,”
ceptual skills generate different resources for knowing.
and possibly even “relation” to the list) is that their capacity
There are roughly a dozen usages of the term “knowledge”
to register alterity is hampered by founding this capacity in
in the paper, and their relative lack of theorization (e.g., by
a prior story about how alterity may or may not behave as a
comparison to the work put into the notion “culture”) is a
feature of the world(s). By contrast, conceiving of alterity in
clue to where the conversation might yet proceed. In “The
ontological terms (i.e., as a matter of what things, including
Five Senses,” philosopher of science Michel Serres (2009) de-
alterity itself, may be) is a way of giving it free rein to be as
scribes three tongues of knowing: the tongue of reasonable
different as it wants. Unlike saying that differences are social
and rational speech, which speaks to a disaggregative analytic
or cultural, saying that they are ontological leaves constitu-
of the world; the tongue of taste, attuned to the compositional
tively open the question of what they might be, allowing logical
arts that do not yield to the logic of disaggregative abstrac-
space for it to be answered differently in any given instance.
tion—the bouquet of a wine; the alloys of metallurgy; and
What is ontology is itself an ontological question—a virtuous
the tongue of desire, ecstasy and passion. Serres’s critique is
that the idea of “knowledge” defaults to the first. The im- circularity that keeps anthropological horizons open, and, by
plication: an anthropology of ways of knowing could yet that virtue, makes anthropology irreducibly political too, ren-
stretch its tent. dering it inherently antithetical to forms of domination that
rely on delimiting the coordinates within which differences
may operate (the old point about hegemony).
I have no space here to explain why I think that it is so
important to be clear on the heuristic status of this argument
Martin Holbraad (Holbraad 2012:237–265; Pedersen 2012; cf. Holbraad, forth-
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 coming). Suffice it to say that such a tack seeks to bear out
Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom
(m.holbraad@ucl.ac.uk). 11 III 13
the key idea that the problem of difference is a function, not
of some prior theory of what may or may not count as dif-
Mario Blaser’s argument for political ontology is perhaps an ference in the world(s), but rather of the peculiar properties
augur that debates about the so-called ontological turn in
anthropology may be at the point of reaching maturity. Rather 33. Along with others, I have in past writings made the mistake of
than merely defending the turn to ontology against its many associating the notion of ontological difference with the image of multiple
worlds (e.g., Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007)—a highly misleading
reification of an essentially analytical procedure, which I have since come
32. I am grateful to Artwell Nhemachena for this insight. to regret immensely.
of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, namely, that reg- of years—and claim a lineage for this political theory with
istering difference in its own terms (i.e., as difference proper) its particular set of analytic categories—that goes back to
is what is at issue in it (Viveiros de Castro 2002). ancient Greece. The assumption that goes with this claimed
It is just on this point that I am in doubt about Blaser’s lineage is universality.
position: notwithstanding the caveats about their enacted and Not so argues Blaser. The politics that creates critical skep-
performative character, which do lend political ontologies a ticism is not enough; not even half the story. It ignores all
highly fluid and provisional nature, I fail to see how this is those extant “stories in spite of Europe, that is, stories that
not ultimately yet another argument that operates by ground- are not easily brought into the fold of modern categories.”
ing the possibility of difference in a prior story of how the We need to find a way to recognize and negotiate the ontics
world(s) must work, namely, in this case, the world(s) as a and ontological politics of Politics and devise ways to make
terrain in which ontological differences are ever-emerging, that recognition an integral part of our ordinary, serious pol-
fluid, and tentative. Sure, as Blaser emphasizes, the merit of itics. One would assume, and by publishing this manifesto in
this way of parsing difference is that, in instantiating (enact- Current Anthropology Blaser does indeed seem to, that an-
ing, performing) the very understanding of ontology it pro- thropology and anthropologists might contribute to, or even
poses, this argument must itself be fluid and tentative. Nev- initiate, such an undertaking. In supporting and encouraging
ertheless, at least for the time being and for as long as it lasts, that, here I point to a resource.
the argument seems to cut against itself. How is the possibility Bruno Latour has been making thought experiments
of different differences (again, differences proper) not can- around modern politics for many years. Leaving the empir-
celed by Blaser’s prior story of what differences must look icism of early actor-network theory behind, he has for some
like—that is, the image of ever-emergent “worldings,” enacted time been urging a new constitution, and he has begun to
and performed fluidly, tentatively, and so on? The fact that imagine its politics. Now, I am not at all convinced about
in many of its elements the story itself is not altogether un- new constitutions—or much impressed by manifestos for that
familiar (those truly in search of ontological difference are matter—but Latour’s insights on politics are a useful begin-
probably unlikely to find it among such modish concepts as ning. Political enunciation remains an enigma in modernity,
emergence, performance, fluidity, and so on) may lend some Latour claims. It cannot gain traction in a truth regime dom-
weight to this worry about the capacity of Blaser’s political inated by science’s representationism. Recognizing that we
ontologies truly to differ. have a lot of learning to do about politics, Latour wants to
explain the truth regime of the new constitution’s politics
clearly from the outset, two aspects in particular. First, in the
truth regime of the new constitution’s politics, there is no
Helen Verran separation of nature and its representation. Second, the enun-
The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, Yellow Build- ciation of this politics has “a double click communication”
ing 1, Level 2, Ellengowan Drive, Casuarina, Northern Territory at its core: the “political circle . . . which is [a]bout trans-
0909, Australia (hrv@unimelb.edu.au). 8 III 13 forming the several into one . . . and subsequently, through a
process of retransformation, of the one into several” (Latour
2003:149).
An Ontological Politics of Politics?
Now, to me this describes beautifully the truth regime of
Could there be an ontological politics of Politics—the sort of the “capital P Politics” we already have—the one Blaser wants
Politics associated with government and the state? Serious to reform. But, crucially, Latour has missed one really core
politics about, say, whose land gets dug up for iron ore mines, element in his description, an element that I first learned to
and who gets the profits, and which whales where get slaugh- see under the tutelage of my Yolngu Aboriginal Australian
tered, about which PPPs (public-private partnerships) are instructors. The “political circle” is not a circle. Rather, it is
contracted, and under what terms? These are topics we often a figure eight. (My Yolngu teachers have much more useful
think of as politics over economic decisions—political econ- names for this important figure, as you would expect.) And
omy. The question helps us see “a politicoconceptual prob- the process of the crossover, the process by which “several is
lem,” suggests Mario Blaser. What this “capital P” Politics is turned into one . . . is turned into several,” is a form of
has been defined by a modern humanism, at home solely in ontological eversion. A holographic moment lies at the core
categories deriving from the metaphysical commitments of of the truth regime of politics. Interestingly, and confirming
European traditions of thought. The notion of ontological the view that anthropologists have something important to
politics is nonsense according to this comfortable and com- offer here, Strathern explains how she learned to use a very
forting modern state of being. Of course, ruling out a politics similar figuration under instruction from her Melanesian in-
around ontics—around what there is—does not mean that terlocutors in Mt. Hagen (Strathern 1992b:245).
modern politics are tame, not at all. Skeptics, insisting that So what might anthropologists contribute to ontics and
categories are historically, socially, and/or culturally generated, ontological politics? First of all, they might contribute by
have ensured a lively critical humanist politics for hundreds collectively imagining and storying it in some detail. Words
lined up as stories are the means here, for stories can even to each of the many questions Briones poses; I think, however,
evade the ontics and ontological politics that necessarily come that the readers can figure some of them out by keeping in
along with words themselves. But I do not have space for mind the remarks I just made above. Thus, I will concentrate
stories, and here’s the rub—in serious politics too, the space on questions whose answers might be harder to figure out. I
for stories is highly constrained. Stories bring in difference will start with a clarification: in political ontology, “radical
that works unpredictably, as, “several turns into one . . . turns difference” does not name a specified content; one could not
into several,” they exaggerate contingency in moments of tell in advance what is a “radical difference” other than it is
eversion. a relation in which the terms cannot be reduced to each other
without doing violence. It is precisely such reductionist moves
that political ontology seeks to address, and casting the project
in the singular responds to this intention, for it indicates the
situatedness (Haraway 1991) of the project. The proposal of
Reply the pluriverse as articulated by political ontology is self-ad-
visedly a particular one; it does not pretend to include in its
“Finding a grammar for emergence, in a language that is formulation all ontological multiplicities, thereby reducing
attuned to objects or subjects, is indeed challenging.” This them to its own terms.
phrase from Lesley Green’s commentary captures an impor- Speaking of ontological differences in contrast to cultural
tant aspect of what political ontology is up against, and I am differences points to an analytical and pragmatic decision
enormously grateful to the commentators for their insightful about how to address difference, not to kinds of differences.
prodding to further refine the language of this project. In this Yet, the language of culture to refer to the differences that
line, it might be useful to begin by clarifying the strategy/ political ontology seeks to treat as ontological is evidently
concern that led me to use some terms in certain ways and dominant. It is not only analysts, but also the subjects of
to shape the text in its present form. those analyses, who render ways of worlding into culture and
Although I agree with Martin Holbraad that the “ontolog- mobilize it in practices of belonging (identity). Yet, we must
ical turn” might be reaching maturity, it is also the case that not lose sight of the fact that both the rendering of difference
many colleagues in the discipline are skeptical if not worried as culture and the practices of belonging that require culture
about the implications of the proposal because, to paraphrase respond to the dominance of a particular way of worlding,
Claudia Briones, the othering associated to the idea of “radical which I call here modern. Thus, to some extent, these practices
difference” has often justified oppression within the modern of belonging contribute to the worlding of modernity. I say
world system. The text was thus conceived as an invitation, “to some extent” because this is not a perfect cybernetic loop.
which included those skeptical and worried colleagues, to (a) As I pointed out when discussing Hale’s indio permitido, the
think about the equally dangerous Sameing that goes under mobilization of culture in practices of belonging has in some
the banner of an all-encompassing modernity and (b) con- cases helped to create conditions in which the irreducibility
sider a proposal that might circumvent both Othering and of radical differences are harder to be ignored. This speaks
Sameing by tackling the differences apprehended as culture to Escobar’s question about the strategic use of culture. Either
in terms of ontologies. But in order for this to work, I imag- strategically or not, I think culture can and will continue to
ined, the argument would have to progressively move from be used; the trick is not to lose sight of its role in the worlding
the more familiar language of hybrid cultures (with its con- of modernity and consequently the need to “infiltrate” the
comitant “thingification”) to the language of political ontol- term so that it can do other kinds of work.
ogy, which while still in the making is decidedly on the side Trying to get it to do work that it does not do now is at
of practices, emergences, and pragmatism. It is in this context the center of my laboring the term ontology. Let as it is,
that much of the slippage between words used alternatively ontology can do all sort of things that are antithetical to the
as nouns, verbs, and adjectives must be understood. I intended project presented here. The implication is that, through the
that by the end of the paper the reader would understand “attention paid to practice” (Briones), my attempts to infil-
that, for example, nouns have been reworked to imply some- trate the term with “performative emphasis” (Green) or “en-
thing other than “things” and that, in the same way, stories acted and performative character” (Holbraad) are not sec-
imply more than discursive practices. The limited success to ondary aspects or caveats in my argument. If that labor is
achieve this, as evidenced in some of Briones’s and Green’s minimized or disregarded, the whole point is missed and we
commentaries and questions, underscores the challenge of end up discussing points in which there is no disagreement.
finding a proper language to express the project. While rec- Something of the sort I feel with some of Green’s remarks,
ognizing this, it is also important to make a clear distinction and in particular with regard to modernity not being just a
between what may be my failure to articulate a clear language set of ideas but also “a way of relating to material realities
and the project’s grounding on the pragmatist figuration of and technological affordances.” My invocation of an STS-
an emergent ontology that I call pluriverse. inspired material-semiotic formulation of reality to refurbish
It will not be possible in this short reply to provide answers the meaning of ontology not only underscores this point but
also questions the very distinction between ideal and material “playing” the discipline as the registering of difference in its
realities. By the same token, ontology refurbished as perfor- own terms: it makes it “inherently antithetical to forms of
mance or worlding disavows the classical distinction between domination that rely on delimiting the coordinates within
ontology and epistemology, itself premised on a particular which differences may operate.” Here, the pursuit of heuristic
ontology that proposes ways of knowing as something that purity starts to run into trouble, for such a statement im-
can be variously related to, and yet distinguishable from, the mediately raises the question, why would it be important to
world. In this context, it is not clear to me what an “anthro- be antithetical to these forms of domination?
pology of ways of knowing” could be if not also an anthro- In order to grasp the full consequence of the question, let
pology of ways of worlding, which will always imply fraught us first remind ourselves that delimiting the coordinates
coworldings. within which difference may operate is not universally as-
In principle, political ontology could be seen as an an- sumed to be equal to domination. In fact, in the form of
thropology of fraught coworldings, but this anthropology fig- worlding I have called modernity, such limits constitute the
ures itself in active contraposition to the “coloniality of re- very possibility for political society. And thus, many if not
ality,” to use Burman’s neat label. Thus, I cannot but agree most anthropologies are “played” informed by this assump-
with this commentator that the full force of the project will tion. These anthropologies would likely define their purpose
come from anchoring it in specific contexts and practices, for as something closer to discovering similarities beneath dif-
not withstanding its universalist claims, the worlding of mo- ferences than to registering difference in their own terms. The
dernity succeeds or fails in specific places, and so it is with point is this: when confronted with such anthropologies
the pluriverse. Thus, when I speak of crisis of hegemony of (themselves a particular way of worlding), the value assumed
modernity, I am not invoking a teleology, as if assuming that in being antithetical to delimiting the coordinates in which
what is an ongoing and open-ended process has already played difference can operate is far from obvious. Such value can
out; rather, the point is to signal the conjunctures in which only be attributed in relation to some story of how the
a space opens up for the pluriverse to become plausible where world(s) must work. In short, and even if never fully artic-
before it was not. Whether and how these spaces remain open, ulated, in his pursuit for heuristic purity, Holbraad ends up
expand, proliferate, or get closured again varies from one smuggling this kind of story as if it were a tacit agreement
circumstance to the next and is and will remain uncertain. that requires no further discussion. This to me conspires
As Escobar points out, the fate of the conjunctures I am against any possibility of keeping the anthropological horizon
invoking here constitutes the raison d’être of political ontol- open, and more so when at issue is not just registering dif-
ogy, and it is perhaps here where we can grasp the differences ference in its own terms but figuring out how anthropological
between the performative and purely heuristic versions of practice can partake in the fraught coworlding I call the plu-
ontology. The raison d’être for Holdbraad’s heuristic hinges riverse. As Helen Verran tells us, in that holographic moment
on a foundational claim of what anthropology is about; this that the figure eight traces, when the “several turns into one
avowedly circumscribed “world” is concerned with registering . . . turns into several,” stories exaggerate contingency. Stories
difference in its own terms. I will leave for others the op- told in some detail open themselves to such contingency; they
portunity to discuss the point of a project to register difference provide anchor points to grapple and twist them so that they
in its own terms. For the sake of the argument, let us assume can become something else at the moment of eversion. Here
that a project to register difference in its own terms is relatively is why, again, it is crucial to understand that the enacted and
unproblematic—although, in its strict sense, it appears as an performative character of my story of how the world(s) must
oxymoron (i.e., would that not imply the end of the difference work is not a caveat but constitutive. The challenge of keeping
as it stood before the registering of it?) and concentrates on the horizon open for difference cannot be met by denying
the antropology-world that Holbraad has defined. Once “reg- that our practices tell stories about the world but rather by
istering difference in its own terms” has been postulated as finding the way to tell stories that perform a world with such
what this world is about, the ontological approach as heuristic openness.
is not only better, it is the only one that makes sense and —Mario Blaser
very much like as in the holographic moment Helen Verran
evokes through the figure eight, the heuristic indeed ends up
worlding anthropology as the register of difference in its own
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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Number 5, October 2013 547

Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of

tory as well.” He asked, “(1) to what extent is that history

ality.” As Mol (1999:77) says, “talking about reality as multiple

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