Text Exploration
In this article, Heywood attempts to describe to a non-anthropologist audience the anthropological concept of “the ontological turn.” Prior to this turn or shift in approach, anthropologists viewed people as having different perspectives on the world, but always on the same (single) world. Proponents of an ontological perspective claims that in addition to there being multiple worldviews, there are also multiple worlds. This is illustrated through an example of various Amazonian societies who feel that humans share culture and perspectives, but that is distributed across the different bodies they possess and worlds they participate in; a human with a human form sees the same items as a human in a jaguar body, but those items are then different in meaning. This raises the question for the discipline of “whether difference is to be located at the level of worldviews or not.” The ontological turn is a move from ideas and worldviews to nature and being.
Recursivity is a methodical concept related to how to describe ethnographic results in an ontological frame. The author questions, “if your interlocutor tells you that the tree she is pointing to is in fact a spirit, do you, for example, describe this as a belief?” Anthropologists are encouraged to then consider “what truth must have to mean for it to make sense” to make that statement, and to use that truth as the world of truth for that person or group. This can be pointed inwards at anthropologists themselves, and the author asserts that “this double complex nature… gives it particular power,” although it’s unclear why being more complex means something is more powerful. A large question is raised: should we let the data we gather become the conceptual scheme, or should we “impose” that conceptual scheme ourselves?
Some anthropologists argue that the abstract nature of the entire philosophical discussion is a distraction from the real work being done, while the author views it as a continuation of “a long tradition in anthropology of aiming to take difference seriously and understand it as best we can on its own terms.”