Dreams and reality in the tubuan and the corporation

Abstract

Beginning with a dream encounter with the tubuan, an ancestral spirit in Papua New Guinea, this article questions conventional anthropological framings that posit a sharp distinction between Western humanist ontologies and non-Western or indigenous ontologies. The article argues that non-human entities essential for human existence come in and out of being across stereotypical cultural divides and that the creation and acknowledgment of non-human agents is as essential for capitalist modernity as it is for any other form of human existence. Non-human “Objects” as diverse as tubuans and corporations are essential for the construction of human subjectivity as much as they are its outcome. The perspectival construction of such different kinds of object is a process by which humans continuously refashion themselves into different kinds of Subjects.