Common nonsense_

Anthropology of this Century

Common nonsense: a review of certainrecent reviews of the ontological turnMorten Axel Pedersen(http://aotcpress.com/author/morten-pedersen/)If the success of a new theoretical approach can be measured by the intensity of the passionand the amount of critique it generates, then surely the so-called ontological turn withinanthropology and cognate disciplines qualifies as one. As still more scholars and perhapsespecially students express sympathy with some or all of its analytical aspirations, the largerand the louder becomes the chorus of anthropological sceptics expressing reservations aboutthe project and its implications. But what is this turn really about, and how fair and thusalso how damaging are the various critiques raised against it? With a view to addressingthese and related questions, my aim in this essay is to review certain recent reviews of theontological turn with special emphasis on whether or not this theoretical method and some ofthe most common critiques of it may themselves be said to rest on implicit meta-ontologies.

Let me begin by describing what I consider the ontological turn to be all about. I shall berelatively brief, for a lot has already been written about this question, notably by my friend andsometimes partner in crime Martin Holbraad, partly in relation to critiques of the bookThinking Through Things, which he co-edited with Amira Henare and Sari Wastell (and towhich I myself contributed) in 2007.

In a recent paper about the oftentimes implicit linguistic conventions underpinninganthropological descriptions of Amerindian cosmologies, Magnus Course correctly observesthat what people have meant by ontology has been diverse and that the ontological turntherefore comprises neither a school nor even a movement, but rather a particularcommitment to recalibrate the level at which analysis takes place (2010: 248). Nevertheless,Course goes on to define it as the dual movement towards, on the one hand, exploring the basisof the Western social and intellectual project and, on the other, of exploring and describing theterms in which non-Western understandings of the world are grounded (ibid). Thischaracterization seems to me basically right, for the ontological turn has always above all beena theoretically reflexive project, which is concerned with how anthropologists might get theirethnographic descriptions right. The ambition is to devise a new analytical method from whichclassic ethnographic questions may be posed afresh. For that is what the ontological turn wasalways meant to be, in my understanding: a technology of description, which allowsanthropologists to make sense of their ethnographic material in new and experimental ways.

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So, why all the fuss? Leaving aside the already hotly debated proposition that ontology is justanother word for culture (Venkatesan 2010) and other claims that the ontological turn issimply an anachronistic icing on the obsolete culturalist cake, one of the most commonobjections centres on the very word ontology itself. For just how many students and scholarsask themselves and others with varying degrees of incredulity and shock (for a good example,see Keane 2009) can this term, with its heavy load of philosophical baggage and itsmetaphysical, essentialist, and absolutist connotations, be of any use to the anthropologicalproject? One of the best examples of this critique can be found in a recent essay by PaoloHeywood (2012). Inspired by Quines (mocking) concept of bloated universes in whichexistence covers everything both actual and potential (2012: 148), Heywood argues that theontological turn has failed to live up to its own mission of always allowing ethnographicspecificity to trump theoretical generality by operating with a tacit meta-ontology of its own. Atsome point or another along the path traced by the ontological turn, Heywood asserts, wewill have to start deciding what is, and what is not. Holbraad and others use the wordontology precisely because of the connotations of reality and being it brings with it; yetthey neglect to acknowledge that insisting on the reality of multiple worlds commits you to ameta-ontology in which such worlds exist: what Quine would call a bloated universe (2012:146).

Of the different critiques of the ontological turn that I have come across over the years, this isone of the subtlest. For, even if one does not necessarily share Heywoods concern that there isa difference of usage in the concept [of ontology] as it is employed by anthropologists and byanalytical philosophers (after all, why should this constitute a problem at all surely this is asign of growing disciplinary confidence and maturity?), Heywood is evidently touching upon arather delicate question, namely whether the ontological turn amounts to a big theory (ormeta-ontology, in Heywoods terms) or not? To be sure, Holbraad in particular has gone togreat lengths to stress that the ontological turn (or the recursive move, as he calls it in morerecent writings) is a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixed theoretical framework. In acharacteristically mind-boggling line of reasoning, he explains:

At issue are not the categories of those we purport to describe, but rather our own when our


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attempts to do so fail Rather than containing [contingency] at the level of ethnographicdescription, the recursive move allows the contingency of ethnographic alterity to transmuteitself to the level of analysis [R]ecursive anthropology render[s] all analytical formscontingent upon the vagaries of ethnographically driven aporia This, then, is also why such arecursive argument could hardly pretend to set the conditions of possibility of all knowledge,anthropological or otherwise [T]he recursive move is just that: a move as contingent,time-bound, and subjunctive as any (Holbraad 2012: 263-264).

It is hard to imagine a more logically compelling response to Heywoods critique. No, goesHolbraads reply, the ontological turn has no covert meta-ontological ground, for its onlyground is precisely its radically contingent attitude expressed not only in its open-endedattitude to its object of study, but also in its relative lack of commitment to the heuristicconcepts that it creates and deploys to make sense of ethnographically driven aporia. Toclaim, as Heywood and several others have done, that variants of the ontological turn havemoved too far from the call to take seriously other worlds, and started positing world of theirown (2012: 144) is to fail to recognise the limited degree to which the ontological turn takesitself seriously. Indeed, seen from its own radically contingent perspective, a future non- oreven anti-recursive turn cannot be excluded, just as they cannot yet, in their constitutiveethnographic contingency, be conceived. What we have, in effect, is a machine for thinking inperpetual motion an excessive motion, ever capable of setting the conditions of possibility forits own undoing (Holbraad 2012: 264-65).

Yet, compelling as Holbraads argument is, I am not entirely sure that it lets him and otherself-proclaimed ontographers (myself included) fully off the hook. For the question iswhether the analytic ideal of a radically heuristic ethnographic theory (Da Col & Graeber2011) is actually synthetically possible, to adopt Kants old distinction. A perfectly recursiveanthropology of the sort sketched by Holbraad above may well be logically conceivable as apure abstract possibility. But, to my knowledge, all of the ontographic studies published todate have been wedded to a particular theoretical ground captured by concepts such asrelational (Strathern 1988), fractal (Wagner 1991), and intensive (Deleuze 1994).Certainly, some of my own work is guilty of this if that is what it is to analyse from a set oftheoretical assumptions: a sin for which one can be charged and found guilty in the Cambridgecourt. As far as I am concerned, the meta-ontological critique made by Heywood does not referto an ethnographic crime but an anthropological necessity of which one can, as long as onemaintains a high level of theoretical reflexivity, consider oneself proud. Indeed, as I am goingto suggest in what remains of this essay, this is the main weakness of Heywoods and otherrecent critiques of the ontological turn: they are curiously blind to their own theoreticalground. For, no matter whether they want this or not, they too are meta-ontological sinners.

Nowhere is this more clear than in James Laidlaws recent review in this journal of my book onMongolian shamanism, Not Quite Shamans, or, put differently in keeping with Laidlawsown jesting spirit his review of a single footnote in the books Introduction, where Isummarise my take on the term ontology. The problem, Laidlaw argues (closely echoingHeywoods critique of Holbraad), is that my position involves a tacit oscillat[ation] betweentwo different uses of ontology, which are mutually incompatible. On the one hand, Laidlawasserts, I use this term in the same sense as he himself appears to subscribe to, namely withreference to the study of, or reflection on, the question of what there is what are thefundamental entities or kinds of stuff that exist? And, on the other hand, I also deploy ontology


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in what Laidlaw considers to be a more radical and dubious sense of a purported radicalalterity of certain societies [which] consists not in them having different sociallyconstructed viewpoints on the same (natural) world, but in them living in actually differentworlds. The differences between them and Euro-America are not therefore epistemological(different ways of knowing the same reality) but ontological (fundamentally different realities).This, Laidlaw maintains, is a contradiction, for if in the first sense, ontologies refer toviews about what exists rather than a claim about what exists, then, in the second and whathe calls original sense, people in Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia live indifferent worlds, [and] enjoy ontological auto-determination. Accordingly, Laidlaw concludes,my concept of ontology and therefore my theoretical position more generally, delivers not newpost-plural multi-naturalism, but merely the familiar old idea that different peoples havedifferent theories about the world (Laidlaw 2012).

Now, I am happy to admit that my use of the term ontology oscillates between two differentand apparently contradictory meanings, namely ontology in the sense of essence (what thereis) and ontology in the sense of theory or model (of what there is). But I am less inclined toagree that this poses any real anthropological problem; in fact, I would like to think of thisseeming slippage from essence to theory/model as one of the greatest methodologicaladvantages of the ontological turn. For Laidlaw, there is a qualitative difference betweenrefer[ing] to views about what exists as opposed to putting forward a claim about what exists,and it is precisely because what he refers to as the original ontological turn is concerned withthe latter project (ontology) and not the former (epistemology) that it disqualifies itself as(good) anthropology and turns into (bad) philosophy. However, is this a fair depiction of theontological turn, be that in its original form or not? And further, does not the distinctionbetween describing ontologies and making ontologies hinge on a tacit meta-ontology of itsown? It seems to me that Laidlaws critique of the ontological turn contains a boomerang-effect, in that the more or less implicit premises underwriting his identification of internalcontradictions in my usage of the term ontology may be turned back on Laidlaw himself tothe effect of exposing otherwise hidden theoretical grounds in his own anthropological project.

To flesh out this point, it is instructive to look at a concrete example of what Laidlaw refers toas my ontological possession or challenge. He sums up my attempt to describe what aDarhad Mongolian shamanic spirit (and a shaman) is in the following way:

Instead of being unchanging entities of which peoples diverse fleeting impressions areimperfect representations, the unseen entities of shamanism are labile, as it were, all the wayup The confusing, fragmentary manifestations people encounter in a shamanic sance justis what there is. On this account, genuine shamans, those who are able to some degree to pintheir spirits down and control them are, Pedersen argues, less shamanic than the not-quiteshamans whose unpredictable behaviour more fully manifests the fluid ontology of spirits:ontology here meaning merely composition (Laidlaw 2012).

This is a stellar gloss of one of the central arguments of my book, with which I have nodifficulty. Indeed, note that Laidlaw and I here seem to agree about how ontology might beused in an anthropologically meaningful sense, namely as composition. But what interests mefor our present purposes is the seemingly insignificant merely in Laidlaws formulation. Forwhat he presents us with here, I think, is the tip of a conceptual iceberg that extends right downto the edifice of his own meta-ontology. After all, what invisible referent could this merelyhave other than the essentialist notion of the really real with which Laidlaw (unjustifiably, in


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my view) accuses the ontological turn of operating? It would appear that, in his eagerness toexpose the contradictions of my argument, Laidlaw inadvertently brings to the fore some prettyserious ontological challenges of his own.

But of course, this does not let me off the hook, either. The fact that Laidlaw performs the samemeta-ontological sleight of hand that he associates with me does not make his critique of theontological turn less pertinent. But then again, perhaps it does in one way. For what happens,we may ask, the moment we omit the word merely from Laidlaws depiction of the NorthernMongolian shamanic cosmos ? We are left with an anthropological concept of ontology thatdoes not confuse essence and model, or reality and its representations, but that denotesa single yet infinitely differentiated object of ethnographic study, which spans everything bothactual and potential (Heywood in op cit). This anthropological ontology contains everythingone encounters during fieldwork spirit beliefs and doubts about these, propositions about thenature of reality, and descriptions of such propositions, and then some for the whole point isto never start deciding what is, and what is not (ibid). This is what the talk about multipleworlds is all about: not the (epistemologically and politically) dubious reduction of eachculture or people to a encapsulated reality, but, on the contrary, the explosion of potentialconcepts and worlds in a given ethnographic material, or combination (comparison) of suchmaterials. There are still too many things that do not yet exist, to paraphrase a memorableexpression by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998).

Still and here my position may be seen to differ somewhat from Holbraads although theontological turn offers an unusually open-ended and creative technology of ethnographicdescription, it does, nevertheless, rest on a certain set of theoretical premises, which may ormay not (depending on how strictly one defines this term) be deemed meta-ontological.Methodological monism, we might call this heuristic anthropological ontology: the strategicbracketing of any assumption on behalf of the ethnographer and the people studied thatthe object of anthropological analysis is comprised by separate, bounded and extensive units.The ontological turn amounts to a sustained theoretical experiment, which involves a strategicdecision to treat all ethnographic realities as if they were relationally composed, and, inkeeping with its recursive ambitions, seeks to conduct this experiment in a manner that isequally intensive itself. This is why the ontological turn contains within its conceptualmake-up the means for its own undoing: it is nothing more, and nothing less, than a particularmode of anthropological play designed with the all too serious aim of posing ethnographicquestions anew, which already appear to have been answered by existing approaches. To claim,as Laidlaw for instance does in his review of my book (Pedersen 2012), that I overlook whatappears to be the most obvious interpretation in my analysis of a Mongolian huntersuncertainty about the spirits not as doubt about their existence but as doubt about theirwhereabouts at a particular time and place is therefore not entirely off the mark. But the pointis that this least obvious interpretation (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009) is done entirelydeliberately and with a very particular purpose, namely, in the case at hand, to account forpeoples apparently irrational beliefs and their distancing towards such beliefs in a new andethnographically more satisfactory way.

For the same reason, the ontological turn does not, as I would like to see it, automatically meantaking people, animals, artefacts, or whatever more seriously than other anthropologists do,as if there were a vantage-point imbued with the authority to pass such normative judgements.But it does involve adopting a certain, and theoretically highly self-reflexive, stance towards


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what ethnographic data might be, what concepts they might evince, as well as what such dataand their conceptual yield might do to common senses of what reality is. It is, above all, thistheoretical reflexivity which Holbraad and I try to take seriously, and for which we may justlybe criticized, albeit not, I think, necessarily for the reasons laid out by Heywood, Laidlaw, andothers.

The ontological turn, then, does indeed involve a concept of a bloated universe, but this doesnot mean that it celebrates itself as the holy grail of anthropological theory. Rather, itrepresents a certain (and thus unavoidably fading) moment in the recent history of thediscipline, where a vaguely defined cohort of mostly Cambridge-associated scholars found itexciting to experiment with the nature of ethnographic description and anthropologicaltheorizing in a certain way. Certainly, no one is pretending that the ontological turn isparticularly new anymore, let alone that it will last forever. Indeed, the time may well havecome to put the ontological turn to rest, or at least to transform it beyond recognition bydistorting its core assumptions from within. So, by all means, let us all look for ways topuncture the inflated ontological balloon, insofar as it is fair to say that such a thing everexisted beyond the artificial confines of the monster created by its critics to shoot it down.

Still, there are different ways of deflating the ontological bubble. Some of these critiques maybe deemed more productive than others in that they seek to push forward the limits ofanthropological theory and the riddles that good ethnography poses, as opposed to trying todefend an imagined status quo or, even, reverting to ossified positions. As I have suggestedelsewhere (2012), such a productive unsettling of the ontological turn (and of relationalanthropology more generally) would seem necessarily to entail a further radicalization ordistortion of its intensive ground to the point where it ceases being relational anymore.Possibly, this differs from Holbraads attempt to construct a machine for thinking in perpetualmotion (cf. op. cit), for whereas he takes alterity to constitute an ethnographic fact that onlya recursive anthropology can take fully seriously, I wonder whether the notion of ethnographicalterity itself might not be inseparable from the very relational anthropology that we mightnow imagine leaving behind. Be that as it may, whether a creative destruction or distortion ofthe ontological turn can occur from within its own recursive logic (as Holbraad seems tosuggest) or as I rather tend to think not, is, in the larger scheme of things, beside the point.What matters is the commitment to an anthropological vision, which insists that a viableanswer can only be found through still more ethnographic explorations and experimentations.To be sure, it is hard to imagine Laidlaw or any other critic of the ontological turn disagreeingwith this (again: show me an anthropologist who does not aspire to take his ethnographyseriously!) But I do think that he and other default sceptics may be criticized for a certain lackof reflexivity about their own theoretical grounds. After all, scepticism along with its favouriterhetorical trope, sarcasm rests on a certain ontology, too.

In his classic essay, Common sense as a cultural system (1975), Clifford Geertz writes:

There are a number of reasons why treating common sense as a relatively organized body ofconsidered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, shouldlead on to some useful conclusions; but perhaps the most important is that it is an inherentcharacteristic of common sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets areimmediate deliverances of experience not deliberated reflections upon it Common sense isnot what the mind spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions concludes [N]o religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more


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general. Its tonalities are different, and so are the arguments to which it appeals, but itpretends to reach past illusion to truth, to, as we say, things as they are (1975: 7, 16-17)

This, it seems to me, is a rather precise depiction of the more or less consciousmeta-ontological ground inhabited by Laidlaw, Heywood, and, coming to think of it, whatseems to be most other recent critiques of the ontological turn (see e.g. Geismar 2011):common sense, in its various guises. Or, could we say, provocatively, common nonsense, as away of conveying what in my own (and it would appear also Geertzs) opinion represents thebasic flaw of this approach, namely its striking unwillingness to reflect on its own theoreticalpresuppositions. Common nonsense, that is to say, as a term for denoting the all too commonanthropological problem of not recognising the intrinsic and inescapable theoretical ground ofall ethnographic description and anthropological analysis, including and perhaps especiallyso those descriptions and analyses that claim to not be overly theoretical or, worse, to notbe theoretical at all, as if theory was the name of a spirit that could be exorcized by denyingits presence and not talking about it. And, not for the first time, we can thank an oldanthropological master like Geertz for reminding us that common (non)sense, along with othermeta-ontologies in our discipline, is associated with certain particular stylistic features, themarks of attitude that give it its peculiar stamp (1975: 17). For is that not how the otherwisetacit ontology of anthropological skepticism shows its face: through a telling air ofof-courseness, a sense of it figures [that] is cast over some selected, underscored things(1975: 18)?

It should be amply clear by now that, from the perspective of the critiques of the ontologicalturn, the question (indeed, the mere mention) of the word ontology is better left to thephilosophers to deal with (as if philosophers were especially well equipped to address bigquestions about the reality of things, leaving the smaller question of how different people seeand know these things to anthropologists and other mortals). But, as I have tried to show, thisis, for a number of reasons, an untenable position. The time has come to challenge thecommonsensical sceptics to stand up and make explicit their own theoretical ground.

REFERENCES

Course, Magnus. 2010. Of Words and Fog. Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology.Anthropological Theory 10(3): 247263.

Da Col, Giovanni & David Graeber. 2011. Foreword: The return of ethnographic theory. HAU:Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): vixxxv.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone.

Geismar, Haidy. 2011. Material Culture Studies and other Ways to Theorize Objects: A Primerto a Regional Debate. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53(1): 210218.

Geertz, Clifford. 1975. Common Sense as a Cultural System. The Antioch Review 33 (1), pp.5-26.

Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. 2007. Thinking Through Things.Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.

Heywood, Paolo. 2012. Anthropology and What There Is: Reflections on Ontology.


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Cambridge Anthropology 30 (1): 143-151.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination.Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Planet M : The intense abstraction ofMarilyn Strathern. Anthropological Theory 9 (4): 371-394.

Keane, Webb. 2009. On Multiple Ontologies and the Temporality of Things. Material Worldblog, 7 July 2009. URL: http://www.materialworldblog.com/2009/07/on-multiple-ontologies-and-the-temporality-of-things/. (http://www.materialworldblog.com/2009/07/on-multiple-ontologies-and-the-temporality-of-things/.) Accessed 15 Sept. 2012.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. Ontologically Challenged. Anthropology of This Century, vol. 4,London, May 2012. URL: http://aotcpress.com/articles/ontologically-challenged/.(http://aotcpress.com/articles/ontologically-challenged/.)

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives inNorthern Mongolia. Cornell University Press.

Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For the Motion.Critique of Anthropology 32 (1): 59-65.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Venkatesan, Soumhya et al. 2010. Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabledat the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University ofManchester. Critique of Anthropology 30 (2) pp 152-200.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1998a. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (3): 469-88.

Wagner, Roy. 1991. The Fractal Person. In Big Men and Great Men. Personifications of powerin Melanisia. M. Godelier & M. Strathern (eds.), pp.159-173. Cambridge University Press.

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Common nonsense_