Today:
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Bringing this here, from a conversation started in the Theory Thursday thread:
/u/yodatsracist wrote:
what's the ontological turn? If you can, try to explain without using the word ontological. Keep in mind, I'm skeptical of the previous turns, like the cultural turn and the linguistic turn. I'm a straight and narrow kind of fellow.
So, the linguistic turn happened, and now many agree that everything is relative to your cultural experience (bye bye functionalism, behavioral ecology, etc). But not in a static, norms and values sort of way, where people can only understand things they have words for, or can't escape the discourse in which they are trapped. Instead, cultural values are seen as products of human agency interacting with social structures - ie Bourdieu's habitus, or Giddens' structuration theory. These social structures and human choices happen in the material world, and the material world also shapes and influences them - so we get excited about materiality, and start talking about how material objects have agency, too. Actor Network Theory made a big deal about how agency is actually a product of different kinds of agents coming together in large networks of action - Sailing a boat requires a sailor, the wind, water currents, fuel networks, agriculture or fishing nets... As a result, a 2007 (I think) issue of World Archaeology publishes a bunch of articles calling for a more 'symetrical' archaeology, by which it means an archaeology that doesn't assume humans cause everything a priori. Wd should, instead, recognize that action and culture is produced by people, animals, things coming together in these collaborative networks.
The ontological turn is responding to this.
Like most turns, it's a big umbrella, but the key idea is that, while we've talked a lot about the relativity of cultural experience, the importance of not privileging human action over other kinds of action, and the role of things like the material world in shaping human society, we still talk about all this as though humans are different and special, as though culture is different from nature, and as though the idea that the material world can have agency is a thought experiment or concession rather than a basic starting assumption for some cultures (like certain Amerindian animists). We talk a good talk about these things, but deep down, use language and methods that normalize a western, scientific experience - a western theory and experience of being (ontology).
But many non western and premodern societies don't share our experience of the world. Australian aboriginal groups experience the landscape as alive in a way that defies scientific categories and logic, but which is clearly real and effective when experienced by anthropologists who study with them. Some people experience the 'natural world' as cultural - animals are humans with different bodies. Others believe that transformations between the human and animal world are possible. But these beliefs aren't just ideas - they're foundational for the logoc these people use to go about their daily lives, and people who have these beliefs do experience the world around them differently, because they're more than ideas - they're ways we live in, experience, and interpret the world around us. They have consequences for the people from whose lives they emerge. So when we talk about how animists believe that natural things are actually cultural, we're stuck with a translation problem in that describing them as having a different belief about nature implies that nature is the real reality, and the animist experience is a less real alternative, and that implicit assumption makes it hard to take the logics and experiences of non western and pre modern societies as seriously as we should (see Alberti 2011 for a great discussion of why this is essential if we want to do decent anthropology - and I eould argue, also history).
All this, for me, is a way of getting at early medieval attitudes toward iron. Early medieval people believed iron was a living thing, almost more animal than mineral, and this belief emerged from their experiences of working with it. It wasn't just their way of explaining things they didn't understand (the unpredictable and changeable behaviors of complex chemistry) by attributing qialities of life to their material. Rather, the experience of iron as alive was deeply rooted in the blacksmith's experiences, and the belief that iron was alive that these experiences taught him influenced the kinds of technological solutions he attempted to overcome what we would instead tackle as materials science problems. We have different ontologies - that is, different real, lived experiences of the nature of reality, and these experiences are rooted in real, not imagined, engagement with the material world and have significant influence on how we live our lives, and need to be considered to make sense of premodern experience of the magerial world, technology, and magic.
Good overview of the current discussion:
Why we have to take animism seriously, and not just treat it as a curiosity (when we study animist cultures) - perhaps one of the most useful articles, for me at least:
A practical approach that you can actually use to do things (my favorite and most used text on this list):
Some of the more helpful (for me at least) articles about using ontology to do archaeology:
HOLBRAAD, M. 2009. Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: An afterword on the ontography of things, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 19, part 3, 431-441
HOLBRAAD, M. 2011. Can the thing speak? Open Anthropology Cooperative Press, Working papers series, 7, available at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http:/openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf (accessed 31 March 2015)
HOLBRAAD, M., M.A. PEDERSEN and E. VIVEIROS DE CASTRO. 2014. The Politics of Ontology: Anthropological Positions, Cultural Anthropology Online, available at: http://culanth.org/fieldsights/462-the-politics-of-ontology-anthropological-positions (accessed 31 March 2015)
Anything by Viveiros de Castro
Chris Gosden has recently been writing good papers on this as well
I passed my oral with distinction! I'm officially ABD!
There has been a bitter struggle over the order of the second and third chapters in my dissertation; here it is played out in the footnotes of the fourth.
Hey guys. Generally just a lurker but I've tried to contribute a little here and there to the standards of the sub.
Just wanted to say I really appreciate the effort you put into keeping this sub is such remarkable shape. If not for the efforts of you great mods, we wouldn't be so lucky to have all of the great contributors we have.
Thanks!
While reading miles and miles of text about the Habsburgs is great, I do like a bit of variety in life, so I've decided to start looking into the Northern Wars. Finding good material has been a bit tricky, but Peter Frost appears to be a prominent author in the area, so I have two questions for anyone with an interest in the period.
Here is Reeves' journal article on the gold mask of Tut which he believes was meant for Nefratiti for those that are interested in such things.
Thinking about submitting an article to Cambridge University's Greece & Rome. does anyone have experience submitting to this journal and have any tips or recommendations?
Hi! Once more, I'm advertising /r/JewishHistory, and, uh, nothing new apart from that. Reading a rather depressing Swedish classic novel. Waiting for Chanukah, then Christmas, then my birthday! Panicking about secret Santa gifts too. Ugh.
I've posted this in a couple other places, but I thought askhistorians might be interested as well. Here's an update on how my dissertation is going! :D
Wondering could anyone point me towards books about the Thurn und Taxis family and their postal service?
I've finally made the decision to apply for a PhD in history after a few years away from academia. Fingers crossed I get funding sorted! :)
How do I phrase this...
Besides the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, are there any true non-sequiturs in history? All of the millennia-long power struggles in the Andes and in Mexico were effectively put to rest between 1492 and 1532 by a group of people who were not at all part of the pre-existing politics before they showed up. Are there examples of this happening in Old World history? The Mongol conquests come to mind, but they themselves fit into the local politics of the spice route and Persia's position as an intermediary between East and West. Were the Indian kingdoms at all involved with the Achaemenids, before Alexander swept through?
Sorry if this is a nonsensical jumble.
Submitted my first application to a real conference the other day, to the Society for East Asian Anthropology American Anthropological Association's Hong Kong Conference 2016: East Asia and Tomorrow's Anthropology. Joined some group that's going to look at Russia's increasing interest in China, and who needed another and were asking online. While I am not in any way familiar with China in the least, I wrote up a quick brief about the KHL, the Russian hockey league, and how they are starting to look east, rather than west (into Europe), and how that shows Russian soft power expanding. It really is just a reverse of a couple papers I wrote for classes last year about KHL expansion into Europe, and would simply be reoriented to the east. A little surprised the group liked the idea, and we find out in January if the conference accepts us. Would be nice, as its being hosted in late June and I've never been to Hong Kong.
