The ontological turn in anthropology has triggered harsh criticism on political and epistemic grounds in recent years, channeling the disciplinary orthodoxy encapsulated in the Barbados Declaration and Writing Culture. Drawing from ethnographic material on ontologically based preferences between ancestral health‐seeking practices and state health care on Shuar territory in southeastern Ecuador, I point out that the appreciation and articulation of ontological alterity is central to certain contemporary indigenous political struggles for state interculturality, before discussing the value of interviewing and research across multiple sites within any given indigenous territory so as to develop a degree of scope that complements participant observation by contextualizing representations of ancestral ontologies. [Shuar, Amazonia, intercultural state, interculturality, ontological anthropology, perspectivism, politics of representation]

No abstract

Dynamics of economic and spatial rationalization are widely acknowledged characteristics of industrial–capitalist society, but the way in which these dynamics might shape the incorporation of so-called natural spaces into regimes of regulation and valuation is still being conceptualized in political ecology. Extending on the work of theorists who have documented and theorized the extension of neoliberal governance regimes over nature, this article argues that even the knowledge of nature produced in industrial–capitalist society is circumscribed by the biases inherent in its socio-cultural heritage. The argument, which can be described as a political epistemology of nature, is advanced by reference to medical science and industrial pharmacy, which has sought to understand and apprehend the value of nature via pharmaceutical bioprospecting research on medicinal plants. An analysis of one such project, pursued in the indigenous Aguaruna territory of the Peruvian Amazon, illustrates that the same processes of economic and spatial rationalization characteristic of industrial–capitalist society can be seen to recur in its production of knowledge about nature. Pharmaceutical bioprospecting evidences the extension of the rationalization of society and space to the molecular and genetic level, such that medicine becomes the microcosm to the macrocosm of industrial–capitalist society. The article goes on to compare the pharmaceutical industry’s epistemology of nature with non-profit research on indigenous people’s medicinal plants, and finally with the epistemology of nature evidenced in ancestral health-seeking practices of the Shuar, an indigenous Amazonian group bordering the Aguaruna. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork, a comparative analysis of these distinct epistemologies of nature is developed that illustrates a spectrum of constraints upon the agency of nature, each of which to differing extents pre-forms nature’s modes of action, at the same time as that action can never be fully determined by those constraints.

The project of ontological anthropology expounded by Philippe Descola has unexplored merits for a critical and secular anthropology of Christian conversion in indigenous societies. Drawing on Shuar descriptions of their healing practice in a context of medical pluralism in southeast Ecuador, this article argues that for animist peoples, Protestant Evangelicalism constitutes a step toward philosophical materialism or ‘naturalism’. While Shuar healing reserves a central place for hallucinogenic plant-induced visions for personal empowerment and shamanic healing, Shuar Evangelicals express a preference for engaging only the material qualities of medicinal plants. This is not, however, the consequence of adopting a disenchanted material cosmology but of a submissive mode of relating to the immaterial aspects of reality normally engaged in ancestral Shuar ontology. The article thereby extends the ontological turn’s emphasis on what is known to a consideration of modes of relation to ontological content.

is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow based in the Institute for Global Health at UCL. Jennie has carried out extensive research in Mexico and the UK on reproductive and maternal health and has worked for the past 10 years with indigenous Wixárika communities. She is also co-director of the UCL Centre for Gender and Global Health and teaches and writes about the political economy of gender and health.Sahra Gibbon is associate professor in the Medical Anthropology Department at UCL. She has carried out research in the UK, Cuba and Brazil examining developments in genomics, public health, activism, gender and identity. Her recent publications include (as co-editor) The Routledge Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society (2018) and she is editor, with Jennie Gamlin, of the UCL Press book series Embodying Inequalities.