This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization as a core concern for anthropological thinking: anthropology as the activity of transfiguring the contingency of ethnographic materials in the formal language of conceptual relations and distinctions. Focusing on works by Mauss and Evans-Pritchard, as well as my own research, the article articulates the morphological character of such a project. While akin also to philosophy, such attention to the “shapes” of conceptual relations is analogous to the practice of art in (...) its concern for the expressive potentials of these acts of conceptual transfiguration. (shrink)

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

How might the anthropological study of cosmologies – the ways in which the horizons of human worlds are imagined and engaged – illuminate understandings of the contemporary world? This book addresses this question by bringing together anthropologists whose research is informed by a concern with cosmological dimensions of social life in different ethnographic settings. Its overall aim is to reaffirm the value of the cosmological frame as a continuing source of analytical insight. Attending to the novel cosmological formations that emerge (...) in such fields as modern markets, political landscapes, digital media and popular cinema, the book's key task is to explore how modern circumstances are constituted within the variable imagination of worlds and their horizons. It will be of interest to all students and researchers in anthropology, as well as scholars in fields as diverse as film studies, cultural studies, comparative religion, science and technology studies, and broader social theory. (shrink)

This response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” presents some thoughts on how the debates about “relativism” upon which Smith comments could be refigured in the light of this symposium's theme of “comparative relativism.” If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a “comparative” relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its “position” within the kinds of debates in which Smith's paper, by way of commentary, (...) also participates? In particular, if part of Smith's aim is to defuse some of the unfair thoughts that have fueled the antirelativist industry in academia, then how might one think of the character of such “anti-anti-“moves themselves? What manner of academic debate does a properly relative notion of relativity allow for? The response herein to these questions takes off from the obvious thought that, properly squared, relativism cannot be understood as a “position”—one that should or could be “defended,” albeit in the Geertzian “anti-anti-“mode that Smith's article seems sometimes to adopt. Rather, it would imply a somewhat different way out of the tribal deadlocks that Smith so elegantly helps put to rest (relativists vs. positivists, etc.); namely, a manner of debate in which a generalized relativity of thinking, including the relativity of that thought itself, would make a merit of academic opposition at all levels. This piece suggests, in other words, a manner of debating in which the “anti-” would be both proffered and received as a manner of compliment rather than attack. (shrink)