Chronically unstable ontology: Ontological dynamics, radical alterity, and the "otherwise within"

Abstract

I will open this chapter with closures and close it with what I hope will become an opening. The closures I think of here are two. One is created by the alleged comparative dead end created by the ontological turn’s focus on radical alterity (Vigh and Sausdal 2014, 57). The other is generated by the tendency of criticizers of the ontological turn to close off alternative ways of thinking about ontology and radical alterity, alternatives, that is, to the approaches of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (e.g. 1998, 2004, 2013) and Martin Holbraad (e.g. 2009, 2012). I think that in order to open the ontological turn’s potential for rethinking the questions of the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of anthropology, as Bertelsen and Bendixsen phrase it in the introduction to this volume, we need to open up both of these closures. We need to open anthropology to thinking otherwise about ontology, alterity, and difference. This final version of this chapter has been published in Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. © 2016 Palgrave Macmillan