Paper short abstract:

In this paper I present the most salient traditions in the ontological turn (the English, the French and the North American one) highlighting differences and similarities between them. I reflect on the scope and limitations of the methodological approach that this turn proposes.

Paper long abstract:

The interest for the Self, for what exists, and for the ontological properties of the Cosmos is not a new concern in the history of Anthropology. However, only in the last two decades the discipline has undertaken an "Ontological Turn". This perspective focuses on how different societies define the entities that inhabit the world and the relationships between them. The ontological turn is built on the critiques made to what is named as the Great Division (Nature/Culture), and to Western Naturalism as Modernity's dominant ontology. The turn is also a reaction to the linguistic turn dominating during the 1980s. In this paper I present the most salient traditions in the ontological turn, the English, the French and the North American one, highlighting differences and similarities between them. I reflect on the scope and limitations of the methodological approach that this turn proposes, in order to discuss the possibilities opened by this approach in the analysis of an ethnographic situation in Argentina that I work with.

Paper short abstract:

From some concrete ethnographic examples, It will be shown how environmental conflicts in indigenous communities involving a network of complex relationships that goes beyond the control of human beings on the natural resources and also involves deities, ancestors, animals and sacred places

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests considering the cosmopolitical proposal promoted by some authors (Stengers, De La Cadena) as a possible analytical framework for the study of socio-environmental conflicts in which indigenous peoples are involved. Considering three ethnographic examples of western and northern Mexico, it shows how the territoriality of indigenous peoples should be conceived in relational terms. In the proposed examples, the elements that compose people's territory can not be thought of as mere resources but as complex nets of relationships. Some emblematic cases will show how certain environmental conflicts can not be conceived only in terms of access, use and protection of natural resources, but reveal radically different ways of thinking and living the territory.

Concrete examples of the construction of territoriality will be presentend, and it will be shown how territoriality and its practices can be used as the main sources of political resistance to the implementation of prjects that exploit natural resources and affect the territory in different ways.

It will be also described how indigenous peoples build their political demands against the state or the privat companies from the network of relationships in which they are embedded and that are formed by humans, deities, ancestors, sacred sites, but also activists, NGOs etc

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I describe the resolution of two indigenous land´s claim by the Paraguayan state with the contributions of the ontological turn to grasp what is at stake in the discussions about land.

Paper long abstract:

Sawhoyamaxa and Yakye Axa communities from the Enxet Sur Nation were the first indigenous people from Paraguay to get a positive sentence from an international court. These legal cases have some similarities. They involve the same indigenous Nation that not only live geographically close to each other and in similarly difficult conditions, but also have gone through the same long bureaucratic legal process and, as a result, ended in an expropriation law project that had to be finally approved by the congress. But in spite of the similarities, the congress had different resolutions for each community. One obtained the lands claimed, the other was offered 'alternative' lands. Going back to the analysis we made years ago with my indigenous partners and the contributions of some concepts from the ontological turn, I argue that land is an equivocation (Viveros de Castro) that enables partial connections between two worlds that are enacted as a territory multiple (Law). In this sense, what it as stake for each is 'lands' but not only. It is Sawhoyamaxa and Yakye Axa for Enxet Sur communities and national territory, property/land, for the Paraguayan state but, not only.

Paper short abstract:

Starting from the theoretical frame developed by the ontological turn, this is an ethnographic description of the hunting practices of the Cree of Eeyou Istschee, focused on the small acts of everyday life as places of ontological engagement with animals seen as sentient beings.

Paper long abstract:

The hunting practices of the people of the subarctic have regularly been stressed as a fertile example of (the new) animism from authors identified - directly or indirectly - with the "ontological turn" (Hallowell, Descola, Ingold, Willerslev, Nadasdy, Harvey, Scott). Starting from and questioning this theoretical frame, this paper is an ethnographic contribution describing the contemporary hunting practices of the Cree of Eeyou Istschee. As the so-called ontological turn invites us to, I aim in this description at avoiding essentialism and at rendering the nuance of Cree various engagements with the world - in a context marked by rapid social change and major resource exploitation. To do so, I made the epistemological choice to focus on the everyday practices rather than on the ceremonial or symbolic aspects of hunting. Emerging from this focus on the small acts and thoughts of the everyday life in the bush, a true aesthetics of hunting appears, based on the conviction that animals are sentient and intelligent being that should be treated with respect. I will also stress how these ontological considerations and practices cohabit (sometimes with difficulties) with other forms of engagements with the natural world.

Paper short abstract:

How does performance intersect with ontology? How does Grupo Sotz’il, a Kaqchikel contemporary dance group, perform ontological critique? This will trace ontology’s movements across borders and ask how this is transforming theory. Finally, how does all this respond to the the ambiguity of the future?

Paper long abstract:

I propose to discuss the meeting between 'movement' and 'ontology' in two senses. First, how movement, specifically embodied forms of expression such as dance and performance, has intersected in various ways with the term ontology. Secondly, I will discuss how embodied movement as ontological critique is practiced and theorized in a specific 'ethnographic' context—that is to say, intellectual tradition, whether written, or not. In this case, I will pay attention to how this ontological critique is 'danced' by Grupo Sotz'il, a Kaqchikel Maya contemporary performance group from Solola, Guatemala. The proposed discussion will contribute to the tracing of ontology's movements across disciplinary and geographic borders. It will also add to the interrogation of how these oscillations are transforming theoretical understandings. Finally, I will inquire into the ways that this meeting of worlds—and ontological "stories"—respond to the problems faced by the Kaqchikel Maya nation in Guatemala and other places with similar political, social, and ecological challenges.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the indigenous concepts of dance in central Mexico before the Spanish conquest. We use the Viveiros de Castro's notion of the "controlled equivocation" to study the earliest colonial manuscripts related to pre-Columbian dance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the indigenous concepts of dance in central Mexico before the Spanish conquest.

From the Western point of view we usually look for the similarity between two things. However, way back any Europeans had settled in Ancient Mexico, the native inhabitants had their own conceptual ideas about the body and the dance. Therefore, if our logical assumptions don't resemble at all and we can't use an analogy, how can we investigate the ritual corporal behavior as it was more than 500 years ago. Before entering into any analysis of the movement in pre-Columbian Mexico, we have to find what kind of methodological tools we can use to study the earliest colonial manuscripts related to pre-Columbian dance.

There is a big gap in knowledge regarding the comparison challenges that the historians face when they investigate distant past and cultures. On the other hand, in the last few decades there has been a growing interest in that problem among anthropologists. The most interesting approach to this issue has been proposed by Viveiros de Castro's recent reflections on translation and equivocation. As reported by the Brazilian anthropologist, the misunderstandings between our culture and the native one are not a failure in comprehension, but rather recognition of the differences in our ontological backgrounds.

This paper aims to explore the changes in perspective that emerge from using Viveiros de Castro's notion of the "controlled equivocation" for the native's concept of dance in Ancient Mexico.

Paper short abstract:

The narrative ability confounds our attempts to unravel our ontological binaries. Situating this within the ‘ontological turn’ I attempt to move beyond the pitfall of the “analytic of mixture, showing that storytelling reveals a meaningful world in which we can better understand our informants.

Paper long abstract:

As the Enlightenment conception of the human as being a rational (individual) animal in exclusive possession of logos continues to unravel, we have been forced to continually move our markers of human exclusivity closer to the chest. However, there remains one human ability that has markedly resisted our attempts at resituating in a way that does not reproduce the ontological cleavages we have long laboured against. This, as Tim Ingold has termed it, "skill of skills" is the narrative ability, or put simply: storytelling. In this paper I attempt to situate this problem within recent debates in anthropology broadly falling under the heading of the 'ontological turn'. I do this in an effort to secure philosophical foundations on which we may overcome this binary affliction in the hopes of closing the host of rifts it produces, broadly between semiosis and material. In pursuing this I put forward a possible direction to go beyond what Eduardo Kohn has called the "analytic of mixture" that has plagued our posthuman responses, merely constituting a mixing of categories, and thereby an a priori acceptance of their existence. Rather, I argue, with the help of philosophers, poets, anthropologists and the wisdom of their informants alike, that story has always-already been a constitutive aspect of the world. With these grounds cleared we can return to the meaningful world, and thus better understand those with whom we work as anthropologists, and the world itself in which we are enmeshed.

Paper short abstract:

What possibilities for engaging with non-Western and non-scientific knowledge practices emerge from studying efforts to establish new forms of Western bioscientific practice?

Paper long abstract:

In both anthropology and science studies, performativist inspired meditations on natureculture(s) and/as ontolog(y/ies) have taken multiple expressions in recent years. This paper considers Karen Barad's (onto-epistemo-ethical) agential realist framework in examining the diffraction patterns made when ethnographic and bioscientific research methods move through one another. Specifically, from 2007 to 2010, I was an ethnographer of a short-lived open concept laboratory. Deemed a 'failure' under particular metrics, I want to address 'failure' as an unbecoming, a movement away from possibilities, in order to explore what it can tell 'us' about how to do human and/as natural science differently so that movement toward trading zones (Galison), broadly conceived, can be facilitated among non-scientific and non-Western knowledge practices. I argue agential realism may not specifically address other non-Western and non-scientific onto-epistemo-ethical horizons, but does provide a means for moving toward less imperial ontological encounters.

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