Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History

Abstract

In this article, we return to a fundamental anthropological question: How can we understand apparently incommensurate perspectives on the human body? While applauding recent moves to place local people's perspectives on an ontological rather than epistemological footing, we suggest that both of these approaches fail to explain how different ontological perspectives can ever communicate with one another and how historical change takes place. To understand this, we offer a different model of multiple ontologies that also makes room for physical materials; we explore this through the ontologies of Native America and Western Europe from medieval times to the present day. [ontology, body, history]

Making Meaning Present: Semiotics and the Ontological Life of Stones in West Africa

“…It may also continue to exist as part of more semiotic presencing practices, at least minimally. It is maybe only in strict scientific presencing practices that ontonicity ceases to play a role, even though it hardly can be eradicated from the lives of even the most positivist scientists, who are likely to understand and experience their human body at least in some circumstances as the seat of the self (Harris & Robb, 2012).…”

“…This, in turn, increases the possibility of essentializing ontology at the cost of an epistemologically and methodologically shared human commonality (Vigh & Sausdal, 2014, p. 54), thereby questioning the validity of ethnographic encounters and the possibility of successfully doing anthropology: "How the proponents of the ontological turn are able to connect to incommensurable worlds, and translate them into understandable anthropological text, remains a mystery" (Vigh & Sausdal, 2014, p. 57; see also Harris & Robb, 2012;Scott, 2013).…”

“…Returning to the woman who seeks to have children, so far she sought help from a stone shrine, largely drawing on ontonic presencing practices. Should she decide to seek help through prayer at a Pentecostal church, she would be exposed to modernist Pentecostal presencing practices that stress a more symbolic and representational view of materiality and disembodied spirits, while a visit to a hospital would expose her to scientific presencing practices in which a body becomes a functional machine devoid of ontonicity (Harris & Robb, 2012). Her actions lead her to engage with people and institutions that apply different presencing practices, which she herself may slowly absorb to various degrees and then begin to draw on in different situations she encounters in her daily life, thereby altering her actions.…”

“…It advocates that different perspectives be accepted on their own terms and as a basis for theorization, an idea that goes back to Malinowski (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017, p. 6) and that has been regularly advocated, for example by Stoller: "As anthropologists we must respect the people among whom we work [… by] accepting fully beliefs and phenomena which our system of knowledge often holds preposterous" (Stoller & Olkes, 1987, p. 229). So far, however, I do not think that ontological anthropologists have sufficiently addressed the epistemological paradox (see, e.g., Harris & Robb, 2012;Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017;Vigh & Sausdal, 2014), mainly due to their seeming reluctance to tackle the limitations of semiotics as an underlying principle in the social sciences and the humanities.…”

Quantum Anthropology: Man, Cultures, and Groups in a Quantum Perspective

“…Harris and Robb, 2012). For example, Barad (2007) has questioned the ambiguity of bodily boundaries.…”