The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition

Auteur

Martin Holbraad is Professor of Social Anthropology at University College London. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012), and co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorizing Artefacts Ethnographically (2007). Having studied the relationship between religious and political practices in Cuba since the late 1990s, he currently holds a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for a 5-year project titled Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics, leading a team of researchers to chart comparatively the formation of revolutionary personhood in selected countries of Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa region.

Texte du rabat

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

Résumé
A controversial new orientation that resonates with wider developments in philosophy and social theory, the ontological turn and its implications for ethnographic fieldwork and anthropological analysis are the subject of vigorous debates. Drawing together these ongoing debates, this book provides the first anthropological exposition of this topic.

Contenu

Introduction: the ontological turn in anthropology; 1. Other ontological turns; 2. Analogic anthropology: Wagner's inventions and obviations; 3. Relational ethnography: Strathern's comparisons and scales; 4. Natural relativism: Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism and multinaturalism; 5. Things as concepts; 6. After the relation; Conclusion; Bibliography.