Common nonsense: a review of certain recent reviews of the ont...

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Anthropology of this Century

Common nonsense: a review of certain

recent reviews of the ontological turn
Morten Axel Pedersen
(http://aotcpress.com/author/mortenpedersen/)

If the success of a new theoretical approach can be measured by the intensity of the passion
and the amount of critique it generates, then surely the so-called ontological turn within
anthropology and cognate disciplines qualifies as one. As still more scholars and perhaps
especially students express sympathy with some or all of its analytical aspirations, the larger
and the louder becomes the chorus of anthropological sceptics expressing reservations about
the project and its implications. But what is this turn really about, and how fair and thus
also how damaging are the various critiques raised against it? With a view to addressing
these and related questions, my aim in this essay is to review certain recent reviews of the
ontological turn with special emphasis on whether or not this theoretical method and some of
the 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 be
relatively brief, for a lot has already been written about this question, notably by my friend and
sometimes partner in crime Martin Holbraad, partly in relation to critiques of the book
Thinking Through Things, which he co-edited with Amira Henare and Sari Wastell (and to
which I myself contributed) in 2007.
In a recent paper about the oftentimes implicit linguistic conventions underpinning
anthropological descriptions of Amerindian cosmologies, Magnus Course correctly observes
that what people have meant by ontology has been diverse and that the ontological turn
therefore comprises neither a school nor even a movement, but rather a particular
commitment 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 basis
of the Western social and intellectual project and, on the other, of exploring and describing the
terms in which non-Western understandings of the world are grounded (ibid). This
characterization seems to me basically right, for the ontological turn has always above all been
a theoretically reflexive project, which is concerned with how anthropologists might get their
ethnographic descriptions right. The ambition is to devise a new analytical method from which
classic ethnographic questions may be posed afresh. For that is what the ontological turn was
always meant to be, in my understanding: a technology of description, which allows
anthropologists 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 just
another word for culture (Venkatesan 2010) and other claims that the ontological turn is
simply an anachronistic icing on the obsolete culturalist cake, one of the most common
objections centres on the very word ontology itself. For just how many students and scholars
ask 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 its
metaphysical, essentialist, and absolutist connotations, be of any use to the anthropological
project? One of the best examples of this critique can be found in a recent essay by Paolo
Heywood (2012). Inspired by Quines (mocking) concept of bloated universes in which
existence covers everything both actual and potential (2012: 148), Heywood argues that the
ontological turn has failed to live up to its own mission of always allowing ethnographic
specificity to trump theoretical generality by operating with a tacit meta-ontology of its own. At
some point or another along the path traced by the ontological turn, Heywood asserts, we
will have to start deciding what is, and what is not. Holbraad and others use the word
ontology precisely because of the connotations of reality and being it brings with it; yet
they neglect to acknowledge that insisting on the reality of multiple worlds commits you to a
meta-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 is
one of the subtlest. For, even if one does not necessarily share Heywoods concern that there is
a difference of usage in the concept [of ontology] as it is employed by anthropologists and by
analytical philosophers (after all, why should this constitute a problem at all surely this is a
sign of growing disciplinary confidence and maturity?), Heywood is evidently touching upon a
rather delicate question, namely whether the ontological turn amounts to a big theory (or
meta-ontology, in Heywoods terms) or not? To be sure, Holbraad in particular has gone to
great lengths to stress that the ontological turn (or the recursive move, as he calls it in more
recent writings) is a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixed theoretical framework. In a
characteristically 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 ethnographic

description, the recursive move allows the contingency of ethnographic alterity to transmute
itself to the level of analysis [R]ecursive anthropology render[s] all analytical forms
contingent upon the vagaries of ethnographically driven aporia This, then, is also why such a
recursive 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, goes
Holbraads reply, the ontological turn has no covert meta-ontological ground, for its only
ground is precisely its radically contingent attitude expressed not only in its open-ended
attitude to its object of study, but also in its relative lack of commitment to the heuristic
concepts that it creates and deploys to make sense of ethnographically driven aporia. To
claim, as Heywood and several others have done, that variants of the ontological turn have
moved too far from the call to take seriously other worlds, and started positing world of their
own (2012: 144) is to fail to recognise the limited degree to which the ontological turn takes
itself seriously. Indeed, seen from its own radically contingent perspective, a future non- or
even anti-recursive turn cannot be excluded, just as they cannot yet, in their constitutive
ethnographic contingency, be conceived. What we have, in effect, is a machine for thinking in
perpetual motion an excessive motion, ever capable of setting the conditions of possibility for
its own undoing (Holbraad 2012: 264-65).
Yet, compelling as Holbraads argument is, I am not entirely sure that it lets him and other
self-proclaimed ontographers (myself included) fully off the hook. For the question is
whether the analytic ideal of a radically heuristic ethnographic theory (Da Col & Graeber
2011) is actually synthetically possible, to adopt Kants old distinction. A perfectly recursive
anthropology of the sort sketched by Holbraad above may well be logically conceivable as a
pure abstract possibility. But, to my knowledge, all of the ontographic studies published to
date have been wedded to a particular theoretical ground captured by concepts such as
relational (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 of
theoretical assumptions: a sin for which one can be charged and found guilty in the Cambridge
court. As far as I am concerned, the meta-ontological critique made by Heywood does not refer
to an ethnographic crime but an anthropological necessity of which one can, as long as one
maintains a high level of theoretical reflexivity, consider oneself proud. Indeed, as I am going
to suggest in what remains of this essay, this is the main weakness of Heywoods and other
recent critiques of the ontological turn: they are curiously blind to their own theoretical
ground. 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 on
Mongolian shamanism, Not Quite Shamans, or, put differently in keeping with Laidlaws
own jesting spirit his review of a single footnote in the books Introduction, where I
summarise my take on the term ontology. The problem, Laidlaw argues (closely echoing
Heywoods critique of Holbraad), is that my position involves a tacit oscillat[ation] between
two different uses of ontology, which are mutually incompatible. On the one hand, Laidlaw
asserts, I use this term in the same sense as he himself appears to subscribe to, namely with
reference to the study of, or reflection on, the question of what there is what are the
fundamental 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 radical
alterity of certain societies [which] consists not in them having different socially
constructed viewpoints on the same (natural) world, but in them living in actually different
worlds. 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 to
views about what exists rather than a claim about what exists, then, in the second and what
he calls original sense, people in Melanesia, the Amazon, and northern Mongolia live in
different worlds, [and] enjoy ontological auto-determination. Accordingly, Laidlaw concludes,
my concept of ontology and therefore my theoretical position more generally, delivers not new
post-plural multi-naturalism, but merely the familiar old idea that different peoples have
different theories about the world (Laidlaw 2012).
Now, I am happy to admit that my use of the term ontology oscillates between two different
and apparently contradictory meanings, namely ontology in the sense of essence (what there
is) and ontology in the sense of theory or model (of what there is). But I am less inclined to
agree that this poses any real anthropological problem; in fact, I would like to think of this
seeming slippage from essence to theory/model as one of the greatest methodological
advantages of the ontological turn. For Laidlaw, there is a qualitative difference between
refer[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 with
the 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 the
ontological turn, be that in its original form or not? And further, does not the distinction
between describing ontologies and making ontologies hinge on a tacit meta-ontology of its
own? It seems to me that Laidlaws critique of the ontological turn contains a boomerangeffect, in that the more or less implicit premises underwriting his identification of internal
contradictions in my usage of the term ontology may be turned back on Laidlaw himself to
the 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 to
as my ontological possession or challenge. He sums up my attempt to describe what a
Darhad Mongolian shamanic spirit (and a shaman) is in the following way:
Instead of being unchanging entities of which peoples diverse fleeting impressions are
imperfect representations, the unseen entities of shamanism are labile, as it were, all the way
up The confusing, fragmentary manifestations people encounter in a shamanic sance just
is what there is. On this account, genuine shamans, those who are able to some degree to pin
their spirits down and control them are, Pedersen argues, less shamanic than the not-quite
shamans 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 no
difficulty. Indeed, note that Laidlaw and I here seem to agree about how ontology might be
used in an anthropologically meaningful sense, namely as composition. But what interests me
for our present purposes is the seemingly insignificant merely in Laidlaws formulation. For
what he presents us with here, I think, is the tip of a conceptual iceberg that extends right down
to the edifice of his own meta-ontology. After all, what invisible referent could this merely
have 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 to
expose the contradictions of my argument, Laidlaw inadvertently brings to the fore some pretty
serious ontological challenges of his own.
But of course, this does not let me off the hook, either. The fact that Laidlaw performs the same
meta-ontological sleight of hand that he associates with me does not make his critique of the
ontological 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 Northern
Mongolian shamanic cosmos ? We are left with an anthropological concept of ontology that
does not confuse essence and model, or reality and its representations, but that denotes
a single yet infinitely differentiated object of ethnographic study, which spans everything both
actual and potential (Heywood in op cit). This anthropological ontology contains everything
one encounters during fieldwork spirit beliefs and doubts about these, propositions about the
nature of reality, and descriptions of such propositions, and then some for the whole point is
to never start deciding what is, and what is not (ibid). This is what the talk about multiple
worlds is all about: not the (epistemologically and politically) dubious reduction of each
culture or people to a encapsulated reality, but, on the contrary, the explosion of potential
concepts and worlds in a given ethnographic material, or combination (comparison) of such
materials. There are still too many things that do not yet exist, to paraphrase a memorable
expression by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998).
Still and here my position may be seen to differ somewhat from Holbraads although the
ontological turn offers an unusually open-ended and creative technology of ethnographic
description, it does, nevertheless, rest on a certain set of theoretical premises, which may or
may not (depending on how strictly one defines this term) be deemed meta-ontological.
Methodological monism, we might call this heuristic anthropological ontology: the strategic
bracketing of any assumption on behalf of the ethnographer and the people studied that
the object of anthropological analysis is comprised by separate, bounded and extensive units.
The ontological turn amounts to a sustained theoretical experiment, which involves a strategic
decision to treat all ethnographic realities as if they were relationally composed, and, in
keeping with its recursive ambitions, seeks to conduct this experiment in a manner that is
equally intensive itself. This is why the ontological turn contains within its conceptual
make-up the means for its own undoing: it is nothing more, and nothing less, than a particular
mode of anthropological play designed with the all too serious aim of posing ethnographic
questions 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 what
appears to be the most obvious interpretation in my analysis of a Mongolian hunters
uncertainty about the spirits not as doubt about their existence but as doubt about their
whereabouts at a particular time and place is therefore not entirely off the mark. But the point
is that this least obvious interpretation (see Holbraad & Pedersen 2009) is done entirely
deliberately and with a very particular purpose, namely, in the case at hand, to account for
peoples apparently irrational beliefs and their distancing towards such beliefs in a new and
ethnographically more satisfactory way.
For the same reason, the ontological turn does not, as I would like to see it, automatically mean
taking 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 data
and their conceptual yield might do to common senses of what reality is. It is, above all, this
theoretical reflexivity which Holbraad and I try to take seriously, and for which we may justly
be criticized, albeit not, I think, necessarily for the reasons laid out by Heywood, Laidlaw, and
others.
The ontological turn, then, does indeed involve a concept of a bloated universe, but this does
not mean that it celebrates itself as the holy grail of anthropological theory. Rather, it
represents a certain (and thus unavoidably fading) moment in the recent history of the
discipline, where a vaguely defined cohort of mostly Cambridge-associated scholars found it
exciting to experiment with the nature of ethnographic description and anthropological
theorizing in a certain way. Certainly, no one is pretending that the ontological turn is
particularly new anymore, let alone that it will last forever. Indeed, the time may well have
come to put the ontological turn to rest, or at least to transform it beyond recognition by
distorting its core assumptions from within. So, by all means, let us all look for ways to
puncture the inflated ontological balloon, insofar as it is fair to say that such a thing ever
existed 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 may
be deemed more productive than others in that they seek to push forward the limits of
anthropological theory and the riddles that good ethnography poses, as opposed to trying to
defend an imagined status quo or, even, reverting to ossified positions. As I have suggested
elsewhere (2012), such a productive unsettling of the ontological turn (and of relational
anthropology more generally) would seem necessarily to entail a further radicalization or
distortion 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 perpetual
motion (cf. op. cit), for whereas he takes alterity to constitute an ethnographic fact that only
a recursive anthropology can take fully seriously, I wonder whether the notion of ethnographic
alterity itself might not be inseparable from the very relational anthropology that we might
now imagine leaving behind. Be that as it may, whether a creative destruction or distortion of
the ontological turn can occur from within its own recursive logic (as Holbraad seems to
suggest) 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 viable
answer 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 disagreeing
with this (again: show me an anthropologist who does not aspire to take his ethnography
seriously!) But I do think that he and other default sceptics may be criticized for a certain lack
of reflexivity about their own theoretical grounds. After all, scepticism along with its favourite
rhetorical 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 of
considered thought, rather than just what anyone clothed and in his right mind knows, should
lead on to some useful conclusions; but perhaps the most important is that it is an inherent
characteristic of common sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are
immediate deliverances of experience not deliberated reflections upon it Common sense is
not 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 it
pretends 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 conscious
meta-ontological ground inhabited by Laidlaw, Heywood, and, coming to think of it, what
seems 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 a
way of conveying what in my own (and it would appear also Geertzs) opinion represents the
basic flaw of this approach, namely its striking unwillingness to reflect on its own theoretical
presuppositions. Common nonsense, that is to say, as a term for denoting the all too common
anthropological problem of not recognising the intrinsic and inescapable theoretical ground of
all ethnographic description and anthropological analysis, including and perhaps especially
so those descriptions and analyses that claim to not be overly theoretical or, worse, to not
be theoretical at all, as if theory was the name of a spirit that could be exorcized by denying
its presence and not talking about it. And, not for the first time, we can thank an old
anthropological master like Geertz for reminding us that common (non)sense, along with other
meta-ontologies in our discipline, is associated with certain particular stylistic features, the
marks of attitude that give it its peculiar stamp (1975: 17). For is that not how the otherwise
tacit ontology of anthropological skepticism shows its face: through a telling air of
of-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 ontological
turn, the question (indeed, the mere mention) of the word ontology is better left to the
philosophers to deal with (as if philosophers were especially well equipped to address big
questions about the reality of things, leaving the smaller question of how different people see
and know these things to anthropologists and other mortals). But, as I have tried to show, this
is, for a number of reasons, an untenable position. The time has come to challenge the
commonsensical sceptics to stand up and make explicit their own theoretical ground.
REFERENCES
Course, Magnus. 2010. Of Words and Fog. Linguistic relativity and Amerindian ontology.
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Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Athlone.
Geismar, Haidy. 2011. Material Culture Studies and other Ways to Theorize Objects: A Primer
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Henare, Amira, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. 2007. Thinking Through Things.
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Cambridge Anthropology 30 (1): 143-151.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination.
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Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in
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Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2012. The Task of Anthropology is to Invent Relations: For the Motion.
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Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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