Anthropology and the Return of Purity. Ontology and Other Ambushes
In the early 1960s I switched gradually from history to anthropology. At the time this was an audacious move since the prevailing mood in anthropology was still a-historical (or even anti-historical). Leading anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Evans-Pritchard had already published on anthropology and...
Spremljeno u:
| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/passesfuturs, |
|---|---|
| Glavni autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
| Izdano: |
Passés futurs
2025
|
| Teme: | |
| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | In the early 1960s I switched gradually from history to anthropology. At the time this was an audacious move since the prevailing mood in anthropology was still a-historical (or even anti-historical). Leading anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Evans-Pritchard had already published on anthropology and history (resp. 1958 and 1961) but this still remained lip service. My new colleagues explained to me that anthropologists studied “social change” and that this was very different from history with its particularizing tendencies. I was especially struck by their penchant for recovering some sort of purity. The ideal of the “primitive isolate” might have been superseded by then but a nostalgia for the “pre-contact” situation remained.I was quite happy that this changed towards the end of the 1960s. Anthropology was supposed to be in “crisis” and this meant that anthropologists began to take history seriously. There was increasing concern about the success (also outside academia) of an ahistorical idea of “culture” as radically different, and a growing interest in cultural hybridization as a creative process. However, there are now signs that this glasnost was a short intermezzo. Since 2000, the sudden emergence of “ontology” as the new buzzword in the discipline seems to signal a “return” of purity. This “ontological turn” was marked by rich and sophisticated theorizing. In this paper I want instead to follow its practical effects in ethnography using my confrontations with the notion as examples. Leading protagonists (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, Morton Pedersen) have forged a special “anthropological notion” of ontology. But it remains to be seen how to avoid, especially in transcultural research, ontology’s heavy substantial charge bringing back an essentialist notion of culture. This is a serious problem in a time when growing polarization seems to encourage a general obsession with binary oppositions, boundary-making, and dreams of purity. As an antidote, anthropology might rather need concepts emphasizing hybridization and ambiguity (cf. Achille Mbembe and Francis Nyamnjoh on African personhood as “incomplete” and boundaries as “porous”; or Birgit Meyer on the “interstice” as an “in-between”). |
|---|