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A readers guide to the ontological turn Part1

2014-01-15 09:00:37

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Editors note: In the wake of the discussion about the ontological turn atthis years American Anthropological Association conference, we askedseveral scholars, which texts or resources would you recommend to astudent or colleague interested in the uses of ontology as an analyticalcategory in recent work in anthropology and science and technologystudies? This was the reading list we received from Judith Farquhar, MaxPalevsky Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Answersfrom a number of other scholars will appear as separate posts in theseries.

In providing a reading list, I had lots of good ontological resources athand, having just taught a seminar called Ontological Politics. This listis pared down from the syllabus; and the syllabus itself was just a subsetof the many useful philosophical, historical, and ethnographic readingsthat I had been devouring during the previous year, when I was on leave.

I really like all these pieces, though I dont actually follow all of them. This is a good thing, because the field if it can be called that tends togo in circles, with all the usual suspects citing all the usual suspects. Inthe end, as we worked our way through the course, I found theethnographic work more exciting than most of the more theoreticallyinclined writing. At the other end of the spectrum, I feel quite transformedby having read Heideggers The Thing but Im not sure why!

Philosophical and methodological works in anthropology andbeyond:

Philippe Descola, 2013, The Ecology of Others, Chicago: Prickly ParadigmPress.

William Connolly, 2005, Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press. (Ch. 3,Pluralism and the Universe [on William James], pp. 68-92.)

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Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2004, Perspectival Anthropology and theMethod of Controlled Equivocation, Tipiti 2 (1): 3-22.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, 2012, Immanence and Fear: Stranger eventsand subjects in Amazonia, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1):27-43.

Marisol de la Cadena, 2010, Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes:Conceptual reflections beyond politics, Cultural Anthropology 25 (2):334-370.

Bruno Latour, 2004, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From mattersof fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225-248.

A dialogue from Common Knowledge 2004 (3): Ulrich Beck: The Truth ofOthers: A Cosmopolitan Approach (pp. 430-449) and Bruno Latour:Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Termsof Ulrich Beck (pp. 450-462).

Graham Harman, 2009, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour andMetaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press. (OA)

Isabelle Stengers, 2005, The Cosmopolitical Proposal, in Bruno Latour &Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 994-1003.

Martin Heidegger, 1971, The Thing, in Poetry, Language, Thought (Tr.Albert Hofstadter). New York: Harper & Row, pp. 163-180

Graham Harman, 2010, Technology, Objects and Things in Heidegger,Cambridge Journal of Economics 34: 17-25.

Jane Bennett and William Connolly, 2012, The Crumpled Handkerchief,in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Time and History in Deleuze and Serres.London & New York: Continuum, pp. 153-171.

Tim Ingold, 2004, A Circumpolar Nights Dream, in John Clammer et al.,eds., Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 25-57.

Annemarie Mol, 1999, Ontological Politics: A Word and SomeQuestions, in John Law, and J. Hassard, ed., Actor Network Theory andAfter. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74-89.

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http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol2/iss1/1/http://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/tipiti/vol2/iss1/1/http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/13http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/13http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x/abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x/abstracthttp://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/165http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/165http://genestocellsonline.org/content/10/3/430.full.pdfhttp://genestocellsonline.org/content/10/3/430.full.pdfhttp://genestocellsonline.org/content/10/3/450.full.pdfhttp://genestocellsonline.org/content/10/3/450.full.pdfhttp://re-press.org/books/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/http://re-press.org/books/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/http://mnissen.psy.ku.dk/Undervisning/Stengers05.pdfhttp://xx7777777xx.com/files/thething.pdfhttp://www.henigman.com/webquest/images/Harman.pdfhttp://books.google.com/books?id=za2lYK6ZUMcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Bernd+Herzogenrath%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OVfUUqCxL4jtqwGM5oCABg&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YFDLD3Qh668C&oi=fnd&pg=PA25&dq=%E2%80%9CA+Circumpolar+Night%E2%80%99s+Dream,%E2%80%9D+&ots=VjUL80rleu&sig=wLXKVoa7CjbFVFTyrkoZny9dCak#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CA%20Circumpolar%20Night%E2%80%99s%20Dream%2C%E2%80%9D&f=falsehttp://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631211942.htmlhttp://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0631211942.html

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Terrific ethnographic studies very concerned with ontologies:

Mario Blaser, 2010, Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Eduardo Kohn, 2013, How Forests Think: Toward an anthropology beyondthe human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Helen Verran, 2011, On Assemblage: Indigenous Knowledge and DigitalMedia (2003-2006) and HMS Investigator (1800-1805). In Tony Bennet &Chris Healey, eds., Assembling Culture. London & New York: Routledge,pp. 163-176.

Morten Pedersen, 2011, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit worlds and PoliticalLives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

John Law & Marianne Lien, 2013, Slippery: Field Notes in EmpiricalOntology, Social Studies of Science 43 (3): 363-378.

Stacey A. Langwick, 2011, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: TheMatter of Maladies in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and SocialSciences at the University of Chicago. Her research concerns traditionalmedicine, popular culture, and everyday life in contemporary China. She isthe author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of ChineseMedicine (Westview 1996), Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-SocialistChina (Duke 2002), and Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life inContemporary Beijing (Zone 2012) (with Qicheng Zhang), and editor (withMargaret Lock) of Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology ofMaterial Life (Duke 2007).

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