Ontology and indigeneity: On the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2014, Pages 49-58

  Blaser, Mario ^a  

^a MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND   (Canada)

Author keywords

assemblages; heterogeneity; indigeneity; ontologies; political ontology

Indexed keywords

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE; POLITICS; THEORETICAL STUDY;

EID: 84891550976     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474012462534     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Arturo Escobar, 'The "Ontological Turn" in Social Theory: A Commentary on "Human Geography without Scale" by Sallie Marston, John Paul Jones II and Keith Woodward', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(1), 2007, pp. 106-11.
2. B. Braun, 'Environmental Issues: Inventive Life', Progress in Human Geography, 32(5), 2008, pp. 667-79.
3. Castree and Nash for instance remind us that what they call posthuman geographies are informed by 'long-standing interests in the complex relationalities and generative capacity of the categories "humans" and "nature",' in Noel Castree and Catherine Nash, 'Posthuman Geographies', Social & Cultural Geography, 7(4), 2006, p. 503.
4. Sarah Whatmore, 'Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-than-Human World', Cultural geographies, 13(4), 2006, pp. 600-9.
5. Whatmore, 'Materialist Returns'
6. Braun, 'Inventive Life'.
7. Whatmore, 'Materialist Returns', p. 603.
8. Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, 'The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction', in Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore (eds), Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. ix-xi.
9. See Braun, 'Inventive Life'.
10. See Jane Bennett, 'Thing-Power', in Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, pp. 35-62.
11. N. Bingham, 'Bees, Butterflies and Bacteria: Biotechnology and the Politics of Nonhuman Friendship', Environment and Planning A, 38, 2006, pp. 483-98.
12. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter.
13. Castree and Nash, 'Posthuman'.
14. A. Donaldson, 'Biosecurity After the Event: Risk Politics and Animal Disease', Environment & Planning A, 40(7), 2008, pp. 1552-67.
15. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
16. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
17. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
18. Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter.
19. Isabelle Stengers, 'Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora's Box?', in Braun and Whatmore, Political Matter, p. 4.
20. J. Sundberg, 'Diabolic Caminos in the Desert & Cat Fights on the Río: A Post-Humanist Political Ecology of Boundary Enforcement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101, 2011, pp. 318-36, p. 321.
21. Marisol de la Cadena, 'Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond Politics', Cultural Anthropology, 25(2), 2010, pp. 334-70.
22. For a variety of takes that nevertheless underscore the use of ontology in relation to Indigenous alterity see Ruth Panelli, 'Social Geographies: Encounters with Indigenous and More-than-White/Anglo Geographies', Progress in Human Geography, 32(6), 2008, pp. 801-11.
23. Richard Howitt and Sandra Suchet-Pearson, 'Rethinking the Building Blocks: Ontological Pluralism and the Idea of "Management"', Geografiska Annaler, 88(3), 2006, pp. 323-35.
24. Jay Johnson and Brian Murton, 'Re-placing Native Science: Indigenous Voices in Contemporary Constructions of Nature', Geographical Research, 45(2), 2007, pp. 121-9.
25. Richard Howitt, 'Scale and the Other: Levinas and Geography', Geoforum, 33(3), 2002 pp. 299-313.
26. Renee Louis, 'Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin: Using Indigenous Methodologies in Geographic Research', Geographical Research, 45(2), 2007, pp. 130-9.
27. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996).
28. N. Bird-David, 'Feeding Nayak Children and English Readers: A Bifocal Ethnography of Parental Feeding in "The Giving Environment"', Anthropological Quarterly, 81(3), 2008, pp. 523-50.
29. Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, 'Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism', The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4(3), 1998, pp. 469-88;
30. John Scott and Gordon Marshall, 'Ontology', in A Dictionary of Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). This seems to be the dominant understanding of ontology in GIS parlance, where the thrust is to render in visual form the 'conceptual maps' according to which Indigenous peoples understand the entities that make up their territories.
31. See David M. Mark and Andrew G. Turk, 'Landscape Categories in Yindjibarndi: Ontology, Environment, and Language', Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 25, 2003, pp. 28-45.
32. Joel Wainwright, for example, refuses ethnography on these grounds in his Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
33. Orin Starn, 'Here Come The Anthros (Again): The Strange Marriage of Anthropology and Native America', Cultural Anthropology, 26(2), 2011, pp. 192-3.
34. For one of the original sources of this kind of critique see C. Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313.
35. See da Col and Graeber, 'Foreword: The Return of Ethnographic Theory', Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(1), 2011, pp. vi-xxxv.
36. Naomi Schor, 'This Essentialism Which is Not One', differences, 2, 1989, pp. 38-58.
37. Catherine Nash, 'Cultural Geography: Postcolonial Cultural Geographies', Progress in Human Geography, 26(2), 2002, p. 222.
38. Again, to use the Andean example, the mobilization of pachamama would raise questions not only about homogenizing categories such as West, Indigenous, and the like but also about the applicability and scope of categories such as ethnic politicking, capitalist expansion and environmental crises. The point is not that these categories might be wrong but rather that they do not exhaust what might be there; that is, they do not exhaust the ontological question. In this sense, (reinvigorated) ethnographic theory resonates more with the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality and Decolonial thinking (MCD) paradigm than with the postcolonial theory that emerged from the French and British colonial experience. In contrast to the latter, which takes aim at Enlightenment ideals as central to understanding the entrapments generated by colonialism, the former foregrounds how the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese colonial encounters were formative of the very configuration of ontological assumptions that will be expressed in the Cartesian cogito. Thus, MCD opens the door for a critique of the very ontological categories of modernity as being inherently connected to coloniality. For an overview of the MCD paradigm, see Arturo Escobar, 'Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program', Cultural Studies, 21(12-13), 2007, pp. 179-210.
39. Nalini Persram, 'Spatial and Temporal Dislocations of Theory, Subjectivity, and Post()Reason in the Geocolonial Politics of Subaltern Studies', Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies, 11(1), 2011, pp. 9-23.
40. M. Carrithers, M. Candea, K. Sykes, S. Venkatesan and M. Holbraad, 'Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester', Critique of Anthropology, 30(2), 2010, pp. 152-200.
41. Carrithers et al., 'Ontology is Just Another Word', p. 175.
42. See Mario Blaser, 'Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without "Cultures"?', Cultural Studies, 23, 2009, pp. 873-96.
43. Holbraad in Carrithers et al., 'Ontology is Just Another Word'.
44. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
45. Holbraad in Carrithers et al., 'Ontology is Just Another Word'.
46. Holbraad poses the point thus: 'The alternative [to assuming that differences are differences in the way people represent the world] must be to reckon with the possibility that alterity is a function of the existence of different worlds per se', Holbraad in Carrithers et al., 'Ontology is Just Another Word', p. 183.
47. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
48. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, MD: Duke University Press, 2002).
49. Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, CA: Clear Light Publishers, 2000).
50. Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2008).
51. Jo-Ann Archibald, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
52. Brian Burkhart, 'What Coyote and Whales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology', in Anne Waters (ed.), American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 15-33.
53. Bingham, 'Bees', p. 495.
54. Bruno Latour, 'From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik-An Introduction to Making Things Public', in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public-Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 96.
55. Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).