The ‘ontological turn’ is a movement in anthropology, prominent since the 2000s, that takes other peoples’ accounts of what exists, such as animals who are persons or rivers with a will, as accounts of reality in their own right, and not as mistaken beliefs about a reality the West already knows. It draws on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and others, and is close to the ‘new animism’, though critics argue that it romanticises difference and overlooks the real, present lives of Indigenous peoples. Therapeutic Shamanism shares its refusal to treat animism as a mistaken belief, but rests on direct experience rather than on a theory of worlds.
What does ‘ontological’ mean? #
Ontology is the branch of philosophy that asks what exists and what it is to be. An ontology, in the anthropologists’ sense, is a people’s understanding of what kinds of beings there are and how they are related: whether animals have souls, whether a stone can be a person, whether the dead are still present, whether there is a firm line between nature and culture.
The older anthropology spoke instead of ‘belief’ and ‘world view’. A people might believe that the jaguar is a person, but the anthropologist knew that it was an animal. The ontological turn questions that arrangement, in which Western science holds the facts and everyone else holds beliefs. The anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell had already used the word in 1960, in the title of his essay “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View”, about the Ojibwe of Manitoba, then hunter-gatherers in transition, for whom some stones and animals were persons.
What does the ontological turn say? #
That other peoples’ worlds should be taken seriously on their own terms. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, introducing Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture, called it a “Neo-Copernican” claim, that other people’s worlds do not revolve around ours, and good anthropology revolves around theirs. The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn put it that an anthropology beyond the human is “perforce an ontological one”.1
Its best-known forms are Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism, in which animals and spirits see themselves as people and what differs between beings is the body, and Philippe Descola’s four ways of seeing the world, in which modern ‘naturalism’ is only one of four. The anthropologists Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, in The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (2017), trace its roots especially to Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Viveiros de Castro.2 Related work includes Eduardo Kohn’s study of how forests think and Bruno Latour’s questioning of the split between nature and society.
How is it related to the new animism? #
Closely. Both reject the Victorian view of the anthropologist Edward Tylor, for whom animism was a primitive and mistaken ‘belief in spiritual beings’. The new animism, set out by the scholar of religion Graham Harvey, describes animism as living in a world full of persons, only some of whom are human, and learning to relate to them respectfully. The ontological turn gave that view a theoretical setting in anthropology, in which animist peoples are not getting the world wrong but living in it differently. See What is animism? and Who is Tim Ingold?
What do critics say? #
Some anthropologists think the turn romanticises difference. The anthropologists Lucas Bessire and David Bond argue that by making the line between ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ worlds the thing that matters most, the turn may harden the most modern division of all.3 Bessire’s own fieldwork was with the Ayoreo of the Gran Chaco, traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherers who also planted small gardens, most of whom were settled by missionaries in the twentieth century. Where the turn’s models would lead one to expect a preserved non-modern world, long-term fieldwork found people living with senseless violence, environmental devastation, aid agencies and new economic policies, in a world where rupture and transformation had themselves become key values.3 Their point is that real Indigenous people live in the present, and a theory that admires their difference can look past what is happening to them. The anthropologist David Graeber made a different objection, that protecting ‘other worlds’ from doubt silences the doubters inside them; his exchange with Viveiros de Castro is in Who is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and what is perspectivism?
Supporters have answered partly by narrowing the claim. In the anthropologist Joost Fontein’s summary of where Holbraad and Pedersen arrived, the turn became “a methodological project that poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems”, rather than a claim that there are literally many worlds.4 Others, such as the anthropologists Christopher Gad, Casper Bruun Jensen and Brit Ross Winthereik, argue that whether we inhabit many worlds cannot be settled either way, and that anthropology has to learn to live with that question open.5
How does the ontological turn sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #
They meet on one point and part on another. Both refuse to treat animism as a mistaken belief. In Therapeutic Shamanism, animism is not a belief so much as an experience, the experience that everything is alive and conscious.6 And it is not only that everything is alive; for animists, everything has personhood. The same question the ontological turn debates, whether the worlds people describe are real, comes up for anyone who journeys, as the question of whether the shamanic realms are only imagination or places that exist independently of us. Shamans are clear that what they meet is as real as this world, and in some ways more real.7
The difference lies in where the answer is looked for. The ontological turn is a debate among anthropologists about how to describe other peoples’ worlds. Therapeutic Shamanism does not ask anyone to accept a theory of worlds, its own or anyone else’s. Shamanism is about direct personal experience and not an act of faith, so the question of whether shamanic reality is real or imaginary is one each person can find out for themselves, by journeying.7 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
