From ‘Other Worlds’ and ‘Multiple Ontologies’ to ‘a Methodological Project That Poses Ontological Questions to Solve Epistemological Problems’. What Happened to Thinking Through Things?

ABSTRACT

This Bookmark uses the publication of Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen's The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition in 2017 as an opportunity to re–assess what has happened to anthropology's so–called ‘ontological turn’. It asks: what happened to the core arguments first aired in Thinking Through Things (Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad & Sari Wastell. 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.), between its publication and that of The Ontological Turn a decade later? Outlining the controversies the first book provoked, it examines how some of these core arguments are clarified, refined, and modified in the more recent publication. It suggests that while anthropology has been enriched by the debates these books provoked – offering a glimpse at the subjunctive possibilities derived from taking ethnography and things (i.e. the world in all of its excessive potentialities) seriously – many will sense a loss of ambition and relevance since Thinking Through Things was published over a decade ago.

KEYWORDS:

• Ontology
• materiality
• review
• alterity
• uncertainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See for example Miller’s comment: ‘To be frank, I suspect they chickened out of any direct identification with material culture since they were scared that the term might still have a somewhat lower status than mainstream social anthropology. Something which may reflect their parochialism, since in general I don’t think this is a fear that holds much ground these days’ 7/12/06 http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-things/, accessed 8/5/19.

2 The notion of an anthropology of the subjunctive – of what ‘could be’ – has been gaining ground in various ways in anthropological debates recently, building on a diversity of works exploring uncertainty (see for example Cooper & Pratten 2015) and the excessive potentialities of materiality (see Fontein 2014; Pinney 2005). In September 2019, a panel entitled ‘Uncertainty in the Anthropocene: possibilities for a new humanism in the fourth industrial revolution’, (part of a larger international conference on the Fourth Industrial revolution hosted by the University of Johannesburg), discussed this notion in the context of an emerging critique of ‘posthumanism’ (see also Wentzer & Mattingly 2018; Ingold 2018; Mattingly 2018; Jackson 2018; Throop 2018). For another recent example, see https://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/articles/subjunctivity-narratives-evidence-and-uncertainty (accessed 19/11/19); and for older discussions of the subjunctive in anthropology see Whyte 2002 and Good and Del Vecchio Good 1994.

3 See Martin Holbraad’s response to Daniel Miller, 7 March 2007, http://www.materialworldblog.com, available here: http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-things/, accessed 8/5/19.

4 Others have used a similar kind of analogy, but I came up with this before I read these other uses (see Borofsky 1994).