Debate

CASPER BRUUN JENSEN

New ontologies? Reflections on some

recent ‘turns’ in STS, anthropology and
philosophy

This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS),
anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or the turn, to ontology, more than
one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping,
partly divergent, turns.

Key words   ontology, ontological turn, science and technology studies, interdisciplinarity, philosophy

Introduction

This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and
technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear
of a turn, or the turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at
stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent,
turns. Explicitly ontological approaches were developed in STS since the early 1990s
or even earlier. The sociologist of science Andrew Pickering organised a workshop on
New ontologies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign as early as 2002, fea-
turing his own work, work by the actor-­network theory inspired cognitive philosopher
Adrian Cussins, the innovative literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith, the maverick
Deleuzian Manuel de Landa, and others. To this day, Pickering is among the foremost
inspirations for ontological thinking in STS, and de Landa is an important, if somewhat
peripheral, figure within the ontological turn in philosophy. In one sense, therefore,
there is nothing very new about the discussions now taking place in several fields.
At the same time, the question of novelty relates to the content of these proposals
relative to more conventional understandings. Since different approaches define ontol-
ogy, and so also its newness vis-à-vis other positions, differently, here there are more
particular stakes.

Ontologies in STS

In philosophy, ontology conventionally deals with the ‘nature of being’, what the
world is and consists of (cf. Palecek and Risjord 2013). The Kantian revolution in
­philosophy revolved around the impossibility of knowing the world as such. Since
human understanding is mediated through categories, the question arises how those
categories structure the ability to understand the world. But the world as such remains

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out of reach. This is common sense to interpretive and critical social science. So what
provided the impetus for beginning to speak of ontologies? Moreover, why did this
happen specifically in STS?
The turn to ontology in STS was directly related to the fact that this field studies
science. The connection is that, in our times, it is precisely science that has come to
have the right to speak of what the world consists of: things like DNA and atoms. Since
STS studies how scientists come to know that the world consists of such things, it stud-
ies the making of knowledge about the ontological constitution of the modern world.
This is not how the sociology of knowledge was originally conceived. As defined
by Robert Merton (1973), this endeavour concentrated on understanding the institu-
tional structures and ideologies of science. It raised the question of why modern sci-
ence, uniquely among all human practices, had developed the capacity to be objective.
This approach created a specific division of labour between scientists and sociologists.
Whereas science uncovered the constitution of the world, sociologists would examine
the social and institutional support structure that allowed scientists to do so. However,
once the sociology of knowledge turned into social constructivist approaches to sci-
ence, this interest changed, since these new approaches insisted that all forms of knowl-
edge, scientific knowledge included, were social at their core (Bloor 1976).
According to social constructivism, scientists did not have any privileged access
to the world, because such access is in fact not within human reach. Instead, the field
of science was redefined as social, discursive and epistemological. In many ways, the
social construction of science was a fruitful research agenda that opened up new ways of
thinking about the intimate connections between science and society. However, it was
also very provocative to scientists, who did not take kindly to the idea that knowledge
about minerals, protozoa or quarks was determined by interests or social identities.
Eventually, social constructivism also came to be seen as unsatisfying within
parts of STS. Querying the conceptual basis for re-­describing science as a set of social
constructions, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (1992) identified a central problem.
Obvious in a sense, the problem was that the explanatory ground of social construc-
tivism was indeed sociological. But then, what made social scientists think that their
social explanations were somehow better grounded in reality than the natural explan­
ations of the scientists they studied? After all, if physics is a constructed and contingent
knowledge form, then surely sociology is so too. But in that case, why think that the
latter can offer a fixed and firm explanation of the former? Is there any good reason
to think social knowledge more stable than natural knowledge? Indeed, is there any
reason to think society is more stable than nature? This is where ‘ontology’ entered the
discussion in a novel manner.
Rather than studying scientific theories and concepts, laboratory studies took
an interest in the material practices of science (Latour and Woolgar 1986; Pickering
1992; Knorr Cetina 1999). Laboratories are filled with many things: chemicals, organic
­materials  and technical equipment. Scientists do not simply sit and think about the
world. They cut, blend, extract, heat and cool, and they observe and measure. If one
studies science as material practice, therefore, one encounters a mixture of all kinds of
things. Somehow a quantity called ‘knowledge’ is extracted out of this confusion.
Within this network, as Latour would call it, many different entities play different
roles. Of course people act – laboratory scientists, modellers, research assistants or cleaners
– but so do a wild profusion of nonhuman agents. Describing nonhumans like microbes
and laboratory equipment as agents, Latour and Callon emphasised that they were far from

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passive objects simply manipulated by scientists. They exploded, or were indifferent, or

died, or did many other things, in response to scientific set-­ups. This was an image of a
constantly changing network of relations between a multiplicity of entities. Ian Hacking
(2002) characterised it as an image of science as intervening rather than representing.
Bruno Latour (1988) and Andrew Pickering (1995) insisted on the reciprocity of
these interventions. On the one hand, microbes are certainly changed by scientists:
they are boiled, cooled, stirred and come to behave in ways they never did ‘naturally’.
Yet, on the other hand, scientists are also changed by microbes: they respond to non-
human responses by changing theories, building new equipment and conducting new
experiments. Over time, some become rich and famous, some go insane and most carry
on working out empirical and theoretical puzzles (Kuhn 1970 [1962]). Because of this
mutual entanglement, humans and nonhumans were said to be hybrid. Because of the
in principle impossibility of making sense of one without the other, they were also said
to be co-­constructed.
Finally, and crucially for the present discussion, because these processes transform
what the entities are, not just what they think (probably microbes do not think too
much), what is at issue are changes in the actual composition of the world. Thus, the
laboratory was described a site of ontological transformation. Andrew Pickering (1995,
2008) spoke of ontological change as a ‘dance of agency’, a de-­centred process, or a
flow of becoming, that constantly modifies the world.
Certainly, not all work in STS was ontological. Moreover, most of the work just
described was not described as ontological. Yet, for many years, distinctly ontological
preoccupations operated as a kind of undercurrent in STS. Both the ethnomethod­
ologist Michael Lynch and the symbolic interactionist Joan Fujimura recognised that
actor-­network theory was something more than and different from another social the-
ory. While Fujimura approvingly referred to actor-­network theory (ANT) as defining
a new ontology as early as 1991, Lynch (as cited by Latour 1999: 19) proposed, rather
more sceptically, to rename ANT as ARO – actant-­rhizome-­ontology – with reference
to the Deleuzian inspiration he discerned behind Latour’s formulations.
This body of work prepared the grounds for an ontological extension beyond sci-
ence. It enabled others to ask whether ontological transformations take place only in
laboratories. Soon it was realised that the sciences were hardly the world’s only zones
of ontological experimentation. Having already argued that his ‘mangle of practice’
provided a general theory of ontological becoming, Andrew Pickering began studying
large-­scale changes between science and industry. In the mid-­1990s, Charis Cussins’
(1998) [now Thompson] analysed infertility treatment as a process of ontological
chore­ography. In The body multiple, Annemarie Mol (2002) argued for an ontological
rethinking of the body. Rather than contrasting patients’ subjective perspectives with
their objective conditions, she examined how different material settings produced dif-
ferently real, and really different, bodies.
Meanwhile, out of an American lineage, Donna Haraway’s (1991) studies of cyborgs,
which focused on the fundamental entanglements of bodies, machines and forms of nar-
ration, could also be seen as having an ontological impetus. To be sure, Haraway did not
speak of ontologies (her analogue would be ‘material-­semiotic’), but she inspired the
ex-­physicist Karen Barad (2007) to develop an explicitly ontological approach, agential
realism, drawing on the philosophy and scientific practice of Niels Bohr.
Finally, it is worth mentioning Helen Verran, whose work provides a kind of bridge
to the ontological turn in anthropology. Originally trained as a biochemist, Verran ended

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up teaching mathematics in Nigeria. There, she came to realise that Yoruba math func-
tioned differently from how it was supposed to according to the Western ontology of
numbers. Eventually she wrote a book about these differences, and about how to allow
them to coexist as a material pedagogy (Verran 2001). Later, she would examine efforts
by Australian ecologists to collaborate with Aboriginals across ontological difference
(Verran 2002). Even though these groups were barely able to understand each other,
Verran argued, it was possible to them to come together in material-­practical micro-­
worlds that allowed temporary ontological convergence around particular projects.
In my own work, I refer to the aggregate of these positions as the study of prac­
tical ontologies (e.g. Gad et al. 2015; Jensen 2004, 2012), which means that they are
about how worlds are concretely made, conjoined or transformed by co-­evolving rela-
tions of multiple agents; people, technologies, materials, spirits, ideas, and so on.

The anthropological turn to ontology

The anthropological turn to ontology comes via a route quite different from that of
STS, though there are also significant points of convergence. The three primary inspir­
ations are Marilyn Strathern,1 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Roy Wagner, though
only Viveiros de Castro regularly uses the word ontology.2
Since the post-­colonial critiques of the 1970s and 1980s, anthropology has been
concerned with its own entanglements with colonial history. Critiques such as the ones
offered by Talal Asad (1973) made clear that Western anthropologists could not claim
an innocent position as ‘representatives of the other’. This is why Viveiros de Castro
(2004a) has referred to anthropology as the ‘most Kantian of disciplines’ – constantly
questioning its own grounds of knowledge.
The work of Roy Wagner exemplifies a quite different orientation to this prob-
lem, which can now be described as proto-­ontological. Rather than aiming for a
self-­reflexive gaze, he intensified the interest in how others make their worlds. The
invention of culture (Wagner 1975) offers the best example.
Of course anthropologists are interested in culture (or society), which forms a
kind of baseline for inquiry. Anthropologists are specialists in knowing culture, but
obviously the cultures they aim to know are different – that’s why there is an interest
in knowing them. So how does one come to know the cultures of others? First, one
conducts long-­term fieldwork and gathers a copious amount of ethnographic mater­
ials. This set of materials is then organised and analysed. Conventionally, this may lead
to diverse forms of contextualisation organised around topics such as social or political
organisation, gender roles or lived worlds.
Crucially, this is almost invariably done with reference to specific theories of cul-
ture. The problem, therefore, is that concepts, including gender, power and context,
are our own rather than those of our informants. In the effort to elucidate the cultures

1 Though Ashley Lebner (2017) argues that Strathern has developed a critique of ontology that goes
back to Kinship, law and the unexpected, Strathern’s actual comments in that book are generally
appreciative and sympathetic (e.g. Strathern 2005: 140, 141, 159).
2 Irwing Hallowell (1960) wrote on Ojibwa ontology, and others, including Evans-Pritchard (1976
[1937]) and Godfrey Lienhardt (1961), are sometimes said to be de facto ontologists (usually as part
of the argument that the ontological turn offers nothing new). However, the specific intellectual
genealogy of the ‘turn’ centres on the above-­mentioned triad.

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of others, anthropologists thus impose on them their own categories, including that of
culture. This problem persists even in the highly reflexive Writing culture (Clifford and
Marcus 1986), where it is visible in the very title of the book.
This is where the distinctiveness of Roy Wagner’s approach made itself felt. For
what Wagner explored was how the Daribi of Papua New Guinea invent their own
version of what we call culture. In other words, he did not describe the activities of
the people he studied as a particular example – as one culture among others. Rather,
he tried to figure out what worked for the Daribi in a way analogous to how culture
works for Westerners. The resulting analyses are quite unsettling. Both the terms and
the shape of analysis are different because they are based on the concepts of people who
do not have, or live in, culture.
Marilyn Strathern’s Melanesian studies operated in a similar manner, and Wagner
and Strathern were mutual sources of inspiration. Thus, in The gender of the gift,
Strathern (1988) criticised then regnant perspectives on gender and exchange relations
in Papua New Guinea for imposing Marxist categories on people for whom they did
not make sense. To repeat the point: Marxists could speak on behalf of ‘repressed’
Melanesian women only by assuming that they were repressed in a way that corres­
ponded to their own theories. It is not, of course, that Melanesian women necessarily
had a wonderful time. Yet Strathern insisted that an identification of their problems
would have to start from within the universe of these women, not from the extant
perspective of Western social theory.
Among the Araweté in the Amazon, Viveiros de Castro drew much the same con-
clusion. Amerindians, as Viveiros de Castro (1998) argued, live within a world in which
bodies operate and relate to one another in a manner fundamentally different from
in the West. Their ontology is different, Viveiros de Castro stated; and he went on to
insist that anthropology should be a discipline in support of the right to ontological
self-­determination of the world’s peoples (2011).
The explicit argument for an ontological turn in anthropology was made in
Thinking through things (Henare et  al. 2007). The editors, Amiria Henare (now
Salmond), Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell were Cambridge students influenced by
the triad of figures mentioned above, mentored by Strathern who taught there and
Viveiros de Castro who visited. Here, we find one of the central overlaps between STS
and anthropological ontology, because Bruno Latour was an important reference point
for both of these figures.
The relation to Latour was complicated. While in some ways sympathetic,
Strathern worried about his guiding image of an extendable network. For one thing,
this image seemed distinctly Western. Since most people in the world do not view the
world as infinitely extendable and transformable, the figure of the network seemed to
exemplify a Western, colonial imagination. And, Strathern (1995) asked, what about
the many situations in which ‘cutting’ relations is far more important than prolonging
them? Moreover, Henare et  al. (2007: 7), in line with many other anthropologists,
described actor-­network theory as a meta-­theory that makes the whole world look the
same.3 It was difficult to connect this (partly projected) image of sameness with an
anthropological project in support of ontological self-­determination.
3 There is a significant tendency among anthropologists (and philosophers) to focus on Latour’s
philo­sophical writings rather than on his empirical work. This emphasis lends misleading plausi-
bility to the idea that actor-­network theory defines a general metaphysics rather than offering a
method for tracing practical ontologies.

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Other ideas, however, were more resonant. For example, the actor-­network the-
ory notion that we do not know in advance who or what the actors will be (they can
be much more than human) and what they will do, fit neatly with the effort to make
all kinds of agencies – spirits, magical powder, shamanic cloaks – active ingredients in
ethnography-­driven ontological analysis. Similar to Latour, the point was to ensure that
these strange actors would be allowed to operate on so far unknown principles. This
alignment with actor-­network theory is visible in the very title of Thinking through
things, which simultaneously invites the anthropologist to recognise how other people
think through things, and suggests that anthropology itself ought to do so.
The edition offered a provocative call for a generalised redefinition of the
anthropo­ logical enterprise, according to which ethnography would function as a
method for dealing with alterity, understood as the many sources of profound oth-
erness encountered while doing fieldwork. Alterity should not be explained away by
existing anthropo­logical categories but rather be the starting point for rethinking those
categories themselves.
Martin Holbraad outlined this programme in several articles and in his study of
Cuban Ifá divination (Holbraad 2012). What holds Holbraad’s attention is the fact that
divine pronouncements are unquestionably true, and this remains the case even if their
predictions seem obviously false. Instead of explaining this situation with reference to
Western ideas of cognition, self-­affirmation or paradox and aporia, Holbraad proposes
that this ‘alter’ concept of truth requires a reformulation of our notion of truth, which
is thus put in motion.
The emphasis on alterity follows directly from the injunction to start with indi­
genous conceptualisations. In this sense, the ontological takes the form of an extraction
of cosmologies, which long held anthropological interest, but has long been criticised
for essentialising the other.
Yet representations of alterity are hardly at issue. Marilyn Strathern wrote in the
introduction to The gender of the gift that anthropological concepts should not be
justified ‘by appealing to indigenous counterparts’, since we ‘cannot really expect
to find others solving the metaphysical problems of Western thought’ (1988: 3). As
noted, Wagner compares different analogues of culture, and Viveiros de Castro con-
stantly works with contrasts between the West and the Amerindian. In each case, we
are witness to a complex conceptual effort that bears little resemblance to the naive
extraction of indigenous knowledge. Indeed, as a more than cursory reading of the cor-
pus demonstrates, the turn to ontology names an inherently methodological and con-
ceptual operation, the outcome of which is a synthetic product (Viveiros de Castro’s
(2004b) ‘controlled equivocation’). It is therefore peculiar to observe the repeated cri-
tique of the ontological turn for instantiating a pre-­reflexive essentialism.
At this point, however, we encounter a second line of critique. After all, Viveiros
de Castros often refers to Deleuze. Yet, most Amerindians have not read French phil­
osophy. Aha, critics go, so this is not really a representation of indigenous thought!
And, as just indicated, this is indeed the case. For critics who make this observation,
however, the real problem with the ontological turn is not that it essentialises the other
but rather that it does philosophy on top of the other. Ontologists are thus guilty of
the same kind of conceptual imposition to which they claimed to respond in the first
instance (Heywood 2012; Laidlaw 2012 with reference to Pedersen 2011). Ironically,
this critique takes the same form as the one made of actor-­network theory (compare
Lenoir (1994) and Laidlaw and Heywood (2013)). While Timothy Lenoir, like Henare

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et al. (2007: 7) suggested that Latour alternatively relied on and disavowed an underly-
ing meta-­theory, Laidlaw and Heywood argued that the anthropological turn to ontol-
ogy is based on presuppositions that renders it less open to difference than advertised.
Another set of critiques centre on questions of politics. For Lucas Bessire and
David Bond (2014: 449, n4), the missing politics of the ontological turn is evinced by
the fact that it does not make use of the standard critical categories of class, gender or
race.4 This popular line generally ignores that the very impetus of the ontological turn
was to develop concepts and modes of description not limited to explaining everything
with the standard Western categories of critique.
A different kind of political critique has emerged from anthropologists that are
themselves indigenous. Depicting the ontological turn as an updated form of colonial-
ism, Zoe Todd (2016) argues that just as indigenous people are beginning to have voices
in the realm of professional anthropology, they are drowned out by ontologists who
claim to speak on their behalf.5
It is quite doubtful that the relatively few proponents of the ontological turn are
in the position of strength ascribed to them by Todd and others. Yet, given Viveiros
de Castro’s insistence that anthropology should be in support of the ontological auto-­
determination of the world’s peoples, the line of critique is potentially powerful. Even
so, it moves rather too quickly.
For one thing, there are significantly different takes on politics within the onto­
logical turn. Whereas Martin Holbraad represents the most ‘a-­political’ tendency,
Viveiros de Castro has long been involved with Amerindian struggles against the
Brazilian state. Moreover, perspectivism is obviously not his own ‘invention’, as a
comparison with the cosmological narrative of the shaman and political leader Davi
Kopenawa (2013) makes clear. Meanwhile, Marisol de la Cadena (2015) and Mario
Blaser (2010) work explicitly on political ontology, and they do take indigenous think-
ers very seriously. Though there are certainly conceptual, methodological and political
discussions to be had (e.g. Gad et al. 2015; Jensen 2012), a wholesale condemnation of
the ontological turn as a pawn of colonialism is clearly misguided.

O b j e c t -­o r i e n t e d o n t o l o g i e s

At the fringes of mainstream philosophy, recent years have seen the emergence of yet
another ontological turn. Referred to as speculative realism and object-­oriented ontol-
ogy, these discussions have hardly overlapped with the ontological turn(s) in anthro-
pology, though they have evolved in discussion with Bruno Latour’s philosophical
(but not empirical) work.
This relation is most manifest in the prolific writings of Graham Harman (e.g.
2002), who argues that certain forms of phenomenology hold the seeds for engaging
the power of things in themselves rather than as known by people. Unsurprisingly,
his fascination with Latour therefore has to do with the shared interest in nonhuman
agency (Harman 2009). Beyond this, however, there are crucial differences.

4 David Graeber, similarly, offers a list of missing terms: ‘serf, slave, caste, race, class, patriarchy, war,
army, prison, police, government, poverty, hunger, inequality’ (2015: 32, n46).
5 Centring on an analysis of institutional colonialism, however, Todd’s own analysis is firmly based
in Western critical theory and barely touches on indigenous thought.

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The term speculative realism was coined by Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray
Brassier and Levi Bryant, as a title for a 2007 conference held at Goldsmiths College.
Since then, the term has proliferated and transformed, not least due to an intensive use
of blogs and non-peer-reviewed forms of publishing, which have facilitated speedy
dissemination of ideas though at the cost of a loss of nuance, not least with respect to
the positions speculative realists criticise.
From the start, the term speculative realism held together an extremely varied set
of ideas. Harman began from an interpretation of the maverick philosopher Alphonso
Lingis’ ‘carnal phenomenology’, Levi-­Bryant was inspired by German nature philoso­
phies and Ray Brassier promoted a nihilist reading of the enlightenment. Meanwhile,
Quentin Meillassoux (2008) examined Kant, Hume and other classic philosophers to
diagnose a problem of ‘correlation’ – the idea that people can only know the world
through their own categories.
In some sense, we find among the speculative realists an overlap with STS, since
both groups insist on the importance of moving beyond anthropocentrism. In practice,
this ‘move beyond’ takes widely varying forms. Somewhat to the side, an example is
offered by Manuel de Landa’s A thousand years of nonlinear history (1998), which
examined history from the point of view of the morphogenetic capacities of matter
and energy. Quite differently, Meillassoux argued that philosophy since Kant has ren-
dered everything human, thereby losing the ability to engage with the ‘great outdoors’.
Accordingly, he examines alternatives to ‘correlation’: ‘the idea according to which we
only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being’ (2008: 5), so that
everything becomes ‘relative to us’ (7).
Whereas de Landa finds resources in the ‘sciences of matter’, Meillassoux turns
to astrophysics, which, he argues, is capable of putting us in touch with an ‘ancestral
reality’ ‘anterior to the emergence of the human species’ (10). The existence of such
an ancestral reality is indicated by the ‘luminous emission of a star that informs us as
to the date of its formation’ (10). The existence of such emissions, Meillassoux argues,
forces a collapse upon correlational thinking, since it brings us face-­to-­face with events
that took place ‘prior to the emergence of conscious time’ (21) and therefore before
the existence of a human mind that could establish the correlation. This example, he
suggests, establishes the possibility of conceiving an outside radically detached from
both mind and culture.
Speculative audacity aside, from the point of view of STS these examples have
significant problems. De Landa begins with a very specific interpretation of Gilles
Deleuze, which authorises a history centring on emergent patterns of ‘matter’, based
on certain kinds of physics and biology. Meillassoux, similarly, begins from a strictly
philosophical consideration that leads to the prioritisation of very particular claims
from physics and mathematics. Thus, both analyses work within a conventional epis-
temological hierarchy, according to which objective science provides the foundation
for authoritative philosophy. Various scientific claims are ad-­libbed and, in de Landa’s
claim, transposed as underlying explanations of human history. Neither the social
sciences nor the humanities are anywhere in sight. Basically, we are in the realm of
scientism.
This route to ontology is particularly grating to STS scholars who study how
scientific facts are made, how they come to circulate and how they are stabilised as
facts. This empirically grounded literature has not made a dent in the interpretations
of object-­oriented ontologies and speculative realists, who generally proceed as if

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objective facts fall from the sky. By ignoring that knowledge about matter is itself
created and made to endure through material networks of science, they avoid dealing
with the troublesome fact that scientific statements, too, are correlational through and
through. Not only do these ‘correlations’ take the form of theoretical propositions
and models, they are built into the very technologies that allow scientists to detect and
measure ‘luminous emissions’ in the first place (Galison 1997).
The following quote by Isabelle Stengers could be read as a response to Meillassoux,
although it was written considerably earlier:

What other definition can we give to the reality of America, than that of hav-
ing the power to hold together a disparate multiplicity of practices, each and
every one of which bears witness, in a different mode, to the existence of what
they group together. Human practices, but also ‘biological practices’: whoever
doubts the existence of the sun would have stacked against him or her not only
the witness of astronomers and our everyday experience, but also the witness
of our retinas, invented to detect light, and the chlorophyll of plants, invented
to capture its energy. By contrast, it is perfectly possible to doubt the existence
of the ‘big bang’, for what bears witness to it are only certain indices that have
meaning only for a very particular and homogenous class of scientific specialists.
(Stengers 2000: 98)

As is clear, Stengers’ point is not to denigrate nonhuman agency. It is, rather, that nei-
ther physics nor biology holds any ultimate privilege in dictating what ontology is,
since it is a becoming that depends on a ‘disparate multiplicity of practices’.
It is worth noting that the usage of ‘reality’ or ‘ontology’ in these approaches is
almost always singular. For de Landa, ontology is a matter of unfolding morphogenetic
patterns. For Meillassoux, it seems to inhere in certain forms of mathematics. For
Karen Barad (2007), it is explicable via the theories and technical apparatus of the
physi­cist Niels Bohr. I mention Barad at this point, though she is not a speculative
realist but an ex-­physicist turned feminist STS scholar, because her Meeting the uni-
verse halfway is peppered with assertions that her (‘my’) ontology (agential realism) is
preferable to alternatives (e.g. Barad 2007: 33–6, 69, 205, 333).6 There is here a qualita-
tive difference from the concrete, empirically based elucidation and comparison of
variable ontologies that hold the interest of STS researchers and anthropologists.
In contrast to de Landa and Meillassoux, Graham Harman cannot be accused of
scientism. Superficially more aligned with STS and anthropological modes of onto­
logical thinking, Harman insists on the ‘equal’ reality of objects as diverse as sunsets,
cars and ancestor spirits. Yet, Harman expresses dissatisfaction with Latour’s insistence
on relations, which he sees as illustrative of ‘correlations’, and thus as taking us away
from the power of objects as such.
Drawing on Heidegger, Harman has repeatedly emphasised that objects have an
inexhaustible essence that is withdrawn from all relation:

The science of geology does not exhaust the being of rocks, which always have
a surplus of reality deeper than our most complete knowledge of rocks – but
our practical use of rocks at construction sites and in street brawls also does not

6 This is also the case for Andrew Pickering’s (1995) ‘mangle of practice’, which he characterises as a
‘theory of everything’. Pickering, however, tests his ‘mangle’ in relation to a wide range of empirical
materials, such as the history of cybernetics (2010).

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exhaust them … rocks themselves are not fully deployed or exhausted by any of
their actions or relations. (2013: 32)

Harman argues that process philosophers like Gilles Deleuze ‘undermine’ objects, by
which he means that they deprive them of reality by locating the ‘ultimately real’ as an
underlying flow of becoming. Reversely, he criticises relational approaches like
Latour’s for ‘overmining’ objects, which are seen as only surface effect of network
relations.7 Both fail to adequately deal with objects as ‘withdrawn’ entities.
The ambition to shed objects of correlations can be questioned in terms of its
premises and its coherence. Above, I noted that object-­oriented ontologists never
question the specific ‘correlations’ on which scientists depend when making the factual
statements that these philosophers use to critique correlation. In the case of Harman,
who relies neither on scientific claims nor on other forms of empirical evidence, the
problem is more to do with unbridled speculation.
To account for the difference between object-­oriented and STS ontologies, there is
no need to rely on a counter-­factual, since discussions are already unfolding. Themes
such as climate change and the Anthropocene are particularly important testing
grounds for object-­oriented ontology, since they clearly illustrate the power of non-
human forces. Timothy Morton (2013), for example, has vividly written about climate
as a hyperobject that ‘withdraws’ from relations. Even so, the analysis contains no
detailed investigation of any particular setting, and no examination of any group of
people, their problems, actions or thoughts. As in Harman, the image remains funda-
mentally speculative, and it is the theorist who does all the speculation.
Moreover, though it may be philosophically pertinent to identify the untouched
essence of climate change or tsunamis, it is quite hard to identify the social scientific
purchase or relevance of the effort. After all, far from being completely ‘withdrawn’,
these phenomena form a multiplicity of heterogeneous relations with the people who
are affected by them, hurt or worried, and who imagine their consequences and take
according action.
Aside from the idea that it would be possible to do anthropology by focusing exclu-
sively on what is ‘withdrawn’ from any relation, almost everything the STS scholar
or anthropologist would typically want to say concerns these relations. This irony is
exemplified by Nigel Clark’s (2011) Inhuman nature, which skewers Latour for his
residual anthropocentrism, yet eventually turns to Emmanuel Levinas’ human-­centred
and deeply relational discussion of how to respond to the ‘other’.

Interrelations and questions of novelty

The reflections above have focused on three quite different ‘turns’ to ontology, in STS,
anthropology and philosophy, each of which has a complicated history of emergence
and reception. Though none of them can be seen as strictly new, they exhibit varied
degrees of novelty and interest.
In STS, ontology long ran as an undercurrent, but the word has only recently been
subject to general scrutiny. This belated attention was due to a conference entitled ‘A
7 For a quite different interpretation of the relation between ‘underlying flow’ and ‘surface effects’,
parsed through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 20–1) ‘formula’ PLURALISM=MONISM, see Jensen
and Rödje (2010: 26).

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turn to ontology in STS?’ organised by Steve Woolgar at Oxford University in 2008,

and the subsequent publication of a 2013 special issue of Social Studies of Science (e.g.
Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). This special issue, however, offers a rather limited engage-
ment with the richer history of ontology in the field. Moreover, Michael Lynch, the
previous editor, wrote a post-­script that concluded that the ontological interest in STS
basically amounted to a return to metaphysics at the cost of empirical studies (Lynch
2013).8
As an alternative to ontology, which he relegated to an outdated location in the
metaphysical clouds, Lynch proposed an empirically focused ontography.9 In a foot-
note (2013: 459–60, n6), he mentions that he thought the term was his invention, but
found that it had already been used for the very kinds of ‘metaphysics’ which he aimed
to avoid. While no citations are given, it is striking that Martin Holbraad (2009) uses
exactly the same term, and it is tempting to think that Lynch had accidentally come
across his work. In any case, by referring to ontology as nothing but a pretentious
‘philosophy in the sky’, Lynch repeats critiques of the ontological turn in anthropol-
ogy. Finding support for their critique of the anthropological turn to ontology in
Lynch’s post-­script Lucas Bessire and David Bond (2014), as it were, close the loop.
As noted, STS’s ontological interests are not, as such, novel. Yet, contrary to
Lynch’s dismissive treatment, they have been, and remain, generative. Centrally, they
have enabled scholars to analyse the socio-­material composition and transformation
of the world beyond questions of social construction and discourse. At the same time,
ontological approaches within STS have been somewhat hampered by insufficient
attention to the role played by concepts, including those of ‘informants’, in the making
of worlds. Here is an obvious and potentially fruitful connection to anthropology,
where precisely this issue has been highlighted.
Contrary to STS, ontology in anthropology has been violently debated, especially
since 2012, where Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen
convened a well-­attended panel on the politics of ontology at the AAA conference.
In anthropology, the fronts are thus drawn up much more sharply than in STS. Many
anthropologists, particularly, but by no means exclusively North American, have been
in a great hurry to distance themselves from the turn, if not actively calling for its quick
demise. Yet ontological modes of anthropological analysis continue unabated.
Contrary to the often-­heard view that what’s good about the turn isn’t new,
while what is new isn’t good, it seems clear that this body of work is relatively novel
and important along various lines. There are clear differences, for example, between
precursors such as Lienhardt (1961) and Hallowell (1960), and the kinds of analyses
offered by latter-­day ontologists. But, again, these approaches are themselves variable.
Along one axis, Viveiros de Castro, de la Cadena and Blaser convincingly argue
that an ontological orientation brings into view forms of politics that cannot be cap-
tured by conventional anthropological concepts. Contrary to STS, which has until
recently ignored anthropology, this work is inspired by ideas like Annemarie Mol and

8 Bessire and Bond tendentiously refer to Lynch’s (2013) post-­script as general proof that ‘scholars
working in STS have greeted the claims by ontologists to novelty with a similar skepticism’ (2014:
451, n12). This is curious, not least since Lynch’s critique was directed only at the STS version with
which they in fact express sympathy (2014: 445, 451, n15).
9 Ironically, ontography would thus closely resemble the actual meaning given to practical ontol­
ogies, except for a limiting commitment to the vocabulary of mundane practice and locally, situated
action.

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John Law’s ontological politics and the notion of cosmopolitics developed by the
philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Along another axis, Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de
Castro insist that anthropology’s vocabularies are in need of an overhaul based on
different ways of imagining the interplay of concepts and ethnography. As exemplified
by Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism, Holbraad’s truth in motion or
Atsuro Morita’s (2014) ethnographic machine, this work has certainly also been gener-
ative.10 Even so, it is also the case, as critics insist, that the relation between the philo-
sophical and the ethnographic remains equivocal in some cases. Furthermore, the
ontologists are not making life easier by the occasional deployment of terms like ‘rad-
ical essentialism’, which misleadingly suggests that ontologies are indeed akin to static
objects. Though not usually described as such, multispecies ethnography (e.g. Kirksey
2014; Swanson 2017), which inspired by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing cross-­
fertilises STS and anthropology, can also be seen as an ontological strand. In all likeli-
hood there are further parallel or intertwined developments of which I am not aware.
Finally, it would also be remiss to ignore the magisterial ontological typology of
Philippe Descola (e.g. 2013), which is generally seen as a sober anthropological enter-
prise, though with a penchant for abstraction and a certain rigidity. In some sense, his
systematic efforts can be likened to the efforts of philosophers to specify ontology in
general, rather than to reinvent it as a tool with which to generate new ethnograph­
ically informed concepts.
The difference between the sobriety of Descola’s typology and the provocations
of Viveiros de Castro is neatly captured in Bruno Latour’s (2009) comparison, which
asked whether ‘perspectivism’ should be seen as ‘type or bomb’. For Descola, perspec-
tivism is one type of cosmology among others, and it is the role of the anthropologist
to describe and categorise such types. For Viveiros de Castro, quite differently, per-
spectivism is a ‘bomb’ because it demands a radical rethinking of the anthropological
enterprise. Not surprisingly, the latter argument has proven far more controversial. In
Latour’s balanced review of the two positions, he nevertheless came out in favour of
the bomb.
Doing so, Latour not only aligned his work with the anthropological version of
ontology, but also, inadvertently, signalled his distance from object-­oriented ontol-
ogy and speculative realism. Despite internal variations, this ‘tradition’ basically aims
to philosophically specify the ‘right’ ontology. The difference from multinaturalism
is manifest because one obviously cannot be simultaneously committed to multiple
natures that have different forms – to be specified through empirical work – and to the
notion of a general ontology, specifiable through philosophical analysis, or via particu­
lar scientific concepts.
As I have suggested, the emphasis on objects ‘withdrawn’ from all relations
combined with the ‘one ontology’ commitment makes speculative realism, and its
variants and offshoots, practically unworkable for ontologists working in the STS
and anthropological traditions. Thus, it is hardly surprising that speculative realism
and object-­oriented ontology has been most welcomed in areas within the human-
ities with a primary commitment to theory, such as certain forms of media and

10 On the basis of Strathern’s preface to a comment for a Hau forum on the Japanese turn to ontology
(Strathern 2012: 402), Lebner (2017) discusses what she sees as Strathern’s ‘unconscious critique’ of
ontology in general. Exemplifying the reduction of plural ontological approaches to a single entity,
she has nothing to say about the texts that occasioned Strathern’s comment (Jensen and Morita 2012;
Ishii 2012; Kasuga and Jensen 2012; also Morita 2016).

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art studies. Whether they will succeed in making inroads into more conventional
philosophical departments remains to be seen, but there are reasons to be sceptical
(Zahavi 2016).
I end these reflections by returning to the case of Bruno Latour, since he is the only
figure that plays a role in relation to all three ontological ‘turns’. At the same time, his
changing orientation to the ontological is instructive because it illuminates some of
the tensions that lie at the heart of discussions in both STS and anthropology. Whereas
Latour’s early work (e.g. Latour 1988) was resolutely on the side of ‘irreduction’, and
although he came out on the side of Viveiros de Castro’s ontological pluralism, the
voluminous An inquiry into modes of existence (Latour 2013) basically specifies a com-
prehensive ontological system. Certainly, there are multiple modes, and they are meant
to be able to account for all possible variations. Yet, at the end of the day, this is dis-
cernibly Latour’s ontology.
As Latour (2013) increasingly redefines himself as a philosopher, he is thus also
exhibiting a growing penchant for the very kind of meta-­theory that critics claim to
have always characterised his work. The discrepancy between the early and late Latour,
in other words, brings us face-to-face once again with the fraught question of whether
particular philosophical or conceptual dispositions open up to otherness or whether
they necessarily shut out certain kinds of difference.
There is probably no final resting place for this discussion. Yet, if concepts, prac-
tices and things are seen as equally empirical and as equally conceptual, the con-
ventional distinction between desk and field, the philosophic and the ethnographic
loosens and opens up (Jensen 2014). Unavoidably, the writing of ethnography entails
a rearrangement of elements from many sources, which not conforming to either
‘theory’ or ‘data’ always has an experimental and performative dimension. In that
sense, anthropological texts, too, are ontological.

Casper Bruun Jensen

Department of Anthropology, School of Human Sciences
Osaka University
Yamada-oka 1-2, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
cbruunjensen@gmail.com

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Commentaries

ANDREA BALLESTERO

Lineages and discomforting relatives

I want to begin this commentary where the essay that inspired it ends, with the obser-
vation that ‘anthropological texts, too, are ontological’. Thus, I ask what ontology is
Jensen’s essay enacting? What kind of ‘intervention’, rather than mere description, is
it making?
Jensen’s essay enacts a genealogical world by attending to how the centripetal force
of ontology, as an analytic, has guided citational practices, invitations to conferences,
intellectual friendships and also relations of mutual responsibility. He curates three lin-
eages, three sets of intellectual kin relations – science and technology studies (STS),
anthropology and philosophy – each with a distinct tone. We first learn about STSers
through a soft linear frame – a trajectory that begins with the sociology of knowledge,
moves to constructivism and reaches something of a Latourian pinnacle. Even with
loops and oblique diversions that challenge the linearity of time, the tone of historical
phases seeps through the organisation of this family. In the case of anthropology, we
find relatives in conflict, a lineage challenged from within. Jensen has little patience here,
undisciplined relatives turned critics are presented as missing the point, not understand-
ing. And finally, the philosophical kin is something of a nuclear family that, as Jensen
rightly notes, despite offering seductive rhetorical moves has not inspired robust and
systematic experimentation in the other two intellectual groups in his account.
As anthropologists know, the way people present kin relations is a telling exercise.
We also know that opening one’s family to others is a brave move. Jensen has opened
his perspective on intimate and distant intellectual kin to us. He allows us to see how
he crafts a genealogical history from the inside out, this is a most welcome gift. If I
were to comment on the three genealogies at once, I would do it borrowing Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s (2000) concepts of history. To gloss Chakrabarty, history 1 is a domin­ant
history, a narrative sustained by multiple structures of power and difference. This is a
history that cannot be rejected, even if one so desires, because it is already part of one’s
inheritance. But history 1 is also silently populated by unauthorised events and actors

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that it cannot embrace. History 1 is made possible by its repressed Others, by what
Chakrabarty calls history 2. This alternative history is based on analytic parameters
that challenge the solidity of history 1 and its privileged position. History 2 accounts
for that which history 1 is unequipped to address.
Jensen’s crafting of what we might call a history 1 of Ontological Turns allows
us to pose another question. What would the history 2 of said turns look like? What
unauthorised spirits, border crossers and tricksters have made history 1 possible but
are not included in its official account? If one were to pay attention to what looks like
the margins from the viewpoint of history 1, what discomforting relatives would we
have to invite to this genealogical party?

Andrea Ballestero
Department of Anthropology
Rice University
Houston, TX 77005-1892
USA
aballes@rice.edu

Reference
Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.

MARISOL DE LA CADENA

Response to new ontologies

A meeting of amoderns, my recent ethnography works with indigenous Andean

world-­making practices and STS scholarship; the latter, I agree with Jensen, prepared
the grounds for what he calls ‘an ontological extension beyond science’, and in my case
into emergent considerations about the impossible presence of other-­than-­humans
disrupting modern politics in defence of territories and against neo-­liberal corporate
mining in Peru. As Jensen says, this work should assuage worries about the a-­political
and ahistorical drive of ethnographic uses of ontology as analytical tool: I use it to
think both earth-­beings and, in close relation, the ontological limits of modern politics
as concept-­practice. (This heeds Jensen’s proposal to consider concepts empirically,
i.e. as practices.)
The above offered conditions made my ethnographic opening to ontology spe-
cific. For example, unlike the Cambridge/Thinking Through Things group, I could
not think earth-­beings as things. In fact, earth-­beings would even disrupt Latour’s
‘parliament of things’ which undoes the political exclusion of nature/things that
the Modern Constitution requires, yet thereafter, requires that participants gather
concern (and thus recognition) as things and humans. Unable (or unwilling) to meet
such a requirement, other-­than-­human entities (not-­things?) would not be allowed
in this refurbished constitution. They may be also ungraspable to object-­oriented
ontological philosophers and to speculative efforts if they are of the realist sort!

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Other-­than-­humans (or not-­things?) and the practices through which they are,
as such, may escape the empirical. Figuring them requires ethnographic concepts-­
methods that both signal the entity/practice and allow for its escape. Here, while fol-
lowing Jensen’s practical ontologies, I also want to urge him to slow down ‘practical
ontologies’ and observe a phrase he uses as an ‘etcetera’ and that may do conceptual-­
political work. The phrase is ‘what have you’ (original italics); Jensen uses it in ending
his explanation of ‘practical ontologies’ as world-­making relations among multiple
agents (my rephrasing). If taken as more than an additive, what have you may usher
conceptual-­methodological openings for emergences that escape the empirical and
may be not-­knowable through modern translation practices. ‘Practical ontologies’
would be thus an analytical tool to signal that (notwithstanding the modern limits of
the verifiable) ‘what have you’ is, and you may be unable to ‘fill in the blank’. Rather
than a relativistic end of the story, this may be a contentious opening to a different
one.
A final comment to add to Jensen’s rendition: not surprisingly, the routes to the
‘ontological turn’ in the anthropology of the Cambridge/TTT group, and of Mario
Blaser and myself (as Latin American anthropologists) were different. Our route
started with political events and scholarship via Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and
John Law. In my case, earth-­beings approximated me to Viveiros de Castro’s ‘equivoca-
tion’, Wagner’s ‘fractal persons’ and Mol’s ‘enactment’. Through them (and Haraway’s
‘cyborg’) I arrived at my key analytics: ‘partial connections’. Apparently, heteroge-
neous ethnographic ontological paths lead to Strathern, or start with her inspiration;
while this does not make her an adherent, pace Lebner’s recent argument, it does make
her a contributor to it!

Marisol de la Cadena
Department of Anthropology
University of California at Davis
Davis, CA 95616
USA
mdelac@ucdavis.edu

MICHAEL FISCH

Short commentary on Casper Jensen’s ‘New ontologies’

Jensen’s work brings methodological clarity to the ontological turn through a

­genealogy that tracks its reiterations across STS, Anthropology and Philosophy. In
so doing, Jensen parses a considerable amount of theoretical literature. What emerges
is precisely what is alluded to in the title: an understanding of the ontological turn
as a methodological orientation marked by a plurality of intellectual concerns and
approaches rather than a single, didactic framework of analysis. There is no codified
and formal theory of ontology, Jensen stresses, but rather a concern with materially
driven empirical analyses informed by field-­specific problematics. In other words, just
as an ontological thinking emphasises the manner in which different material settings
produce heterogeneous realities, an ontological orientation itself is deeply inflected by

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the specific conceptual infrastructure of whatever field is deploying it. In STS, Jensen
shows, an ontological approach emerges in response to the theoretical and ­empirical
impasses that develop with the realisation of the social construction of scientific
knowledge. In Anthropology, it provides a response to concerns over the discipline’s
colonial roots and its representational conundrums. Finally, in Philosophy, an onto-
logical approach arises in an attempt to treat the material world in its own terms. While
providing an excellent distillation of the field-­specific investments in ontology, the
strength of Jensen’s argument lies in its countering of a number of reductive critiques
that have been levelled against an ontological approach in recent years. His argument
is particularly important for Anthropology, which in contrast to STS has seen deep
and bitter debates regarding the value and legitimacy of ontological thinking. Against
claims made by some anthropologists that an ontological approach promotes a lack
of critical reflection and disregard for politics, Jensen points to its capacity to invoke
political concerns outside the confines of conventional anthropological concepts and
its ability for cultivating attention to something beyond language and discursive con-
struction. Moreover, Jensen makes clear the way in which an ontological approach not
only complements but also refines a traditional ethnographic method by encouraging
the ethnographer to think theoretically with the material and immaterial milieu they
encounter in the field rather than apply theory. While Jensen is critical of attempts
to undercut the ontological turn in Anthropology, he reserves his own critique for
philosophers who have been quick to invoke theoretical physics to ground ontological
claims without tending to questions regarding the social construction of science.

Michael Fisch
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL 60637
USA
mfisch@uchicago.edu

MIHO ISHII

New ontologies and persistent questions

In an earlier paper, Casper Jensen addressed recent arguments concerning ontology

in anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), and noting that the onto-
logical turn (OT) in anthropology has been based on discourse, proposed practical
ontology as a more appropriate approach (Gad et al. 2015). Now, however, contrasting
ontological studies in STS and anthropology with speculative realism (SR), he seems
to portray the OT favourably, which raises the question of whether there is a better
way to analyse these theoretical trends, perhaps by re-­examining the OT in reference
to STS and SR.
For those supporting the OT, the concept of ontology is inseparable from dif-
ference and alterity. These concepts denote the ontological difference of the lived
world itself, not differences in worldviews. The OT’s alterity and difference indicate
alterity to modern rationality and difference from modern Euro-American ontology,

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respectively (see Henare et al. 2007: 8–12). The OT tends to overlook ambiguities in
people’s realities by regarding only part of their discourses for their unique ontology
and disregarding internal differences (Graeber 2015). Gad et al. (2015) suggest that
STS methodology helps by attending to the complicated interactions among humans
and nonhumans in concrete situations, without presuming particular ontologies. This
allows investigation of the multiple practices of various actors as ever-­changing modes
of being irreducible to an ontological world contrasted to the Euro-­American one.
Another point to consider is how being and existence are presented in the OT.
Proponents of the OT describe the ontological world in which nonhuman beings such
as spirits and deities can exist as they are, by taking things in the field seriously. Here,
things are not merely physical manifestations, but also concepts (Henare et al. 2007:
13). By reiterating such assertions, proponents of the OT take everything in the field
into the sphere of beings, which are real to the extent that they are considered to really
exist for the people, while remaining virtual and indefinite for ‘us’ (see Viveiros de
Castro 2011).
The centrality of being/existence in the OT must be reconsidered when we turn
to the fundamental contingency and inscrutability of the state of being in a particular
time and space, not only for ‘us’, but also for people in the field. In a sense, ontological
self-­determination is a promise that can never be fulfilled. Here, nonhuman agency –
deities, spirits, etc. – should be considered not as an indication of different ontologies,
which people could find to exist, but as what people can never grasp but can still be
affected by. The ideas of SR, which problematise correlationism and emphasise the
inexhaustibleness of objects, may illuminate the contingent effects of that which does
not necessarily exist for humans – even though, as Jensen concedes, this approach risks
excessive speculation.

Miho Ishii
Institute for Research in Humanities
Kyoto University
Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyoku
Kyoto 6068501, Japan
mishii@zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp

References
Gad, C., C. B. Jensen and B. R. Winthereik 2015. ‘Practical ontology: worlds in STS and anthropology’,
NatureCulture 3: 67–86.
Graeber, D. 2015. ‘Radical alterity is just another way of saying “reality”: a reply to Eduardo Viveiros
de Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5: 1–41.
Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell 2007. Introduction: Thinking through things, in A. Henare,
M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds.), Thinking through things: theorising artefacts ethnographically,
1–31. New York: Routledge.
Viveiros de Castro, E. 2011. ‘Zeno and the art of anthropology: of lies, beliefs, paradoxes, and other
truths’, Common Knowledge 17: 128–45.

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De nouvelles ontologies ? Réflexions sur des

« virages » récents dans l’anthropologie, la
philosophie et les STS
Cet article examine l’émergence récente d’approches ontologiques dans l’anthropologie, la
philosophie et les études scientifiques et technologiques (STS). On entend souvent parler d’un
virage vers l’ontologie ou du tournant ontologique, mais l’enjeu concerne plus d’une tendance
intellectuelle. En réalité, nous sommes en présence d’un ensemble de multiples virages tantôt se
chevauchant, tantôt divergeant …

Mots-clés    ontologie, tournant ontologique, études scientifiques et technologiques,

interdisciplinarité, philosophie

© 2017 European Association of Social Anthropologists.