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Various misunderstandings and conflicts associated with attempts to integrate Indigenous Knowledges (IK) into development and conservation agendas have been analyzed from both political economy and political ecology frameworks. With their own particular inflections, and in addition to their focus on issues of power, both frameworks tend to see what occurs in these settings as involving different epistemologies, meaning that misunderstandings and conflicts occur between different and complexly interested perspectives on, or ways of knowing, the world. Analyzing the conflicts surrounding the creation of a hunting program that enrolled the participation of the Yshiro people of Paraguay, in this article I develop a different kind of analysis, one inspired by an emerging framework that I tentatively call "political ontology." I argue that, from this perspective, these kinds of conflicts emerge as being about the continuous enactment, stabilization, and protection of different and asymmetrically connected ontologies. [

The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two ‘ontological’ projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality conceived as an always-emergent assemblage of human and non-humans and troubles the politics that such assemblages imply. The other in ethnographic theory, that foregrounds that we are not only dealing with a shifting ontology, a (re)animated world, but also with multiple ontologies, a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways. Thus, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? I advance the notion of political ontology as a possible venue to explore this question.

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The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant. Figuring the common world as its possible result, rather than as a starting point, cosmopolitics disrupts the quick recourse to ruling out concerns on the basis of their ostensible lack of reality. And yet, questions remain as to who and what can participate in the composition of the common world. Exploring these questions through ethnographical materials on a conflict around caribou in Labrador, I argue that a cosmopolitics oriented to the common world has important limitations and that another orientation might be possible as well.