Ontologia del tra. Metamorfosi e incontro per un’antropologia fenomenologica

Metamorphosis seems problematic for our occidental point of view. Becoming in general is viewed as an error or exception by our classic standpoint. In fact, it is strongly against identity and law of non-contradiction: A is fundamentally something different from B and for A it is impossible to be at the same time B. We need to think A as what-becomes-B in order to make metamorphosis possible. Anyway, how can A become B? As a matter of fact, this very claim has been historically the most common critic opposed to becoming. Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental work had tried to offer an enormous contribution to a few related problems. Redefining the subject as an event described by movement and affect can exceed the metamorphosis’ aporia. This new principle of individuation provides a new look upon arisen questions primarily because affects and movements are constant coordinates that define how metamorphosis is experienced. The paper tries to show how the betweenness (Zwischenheit; Aida; Traità) in action in the encounter with people, human beings, things, animals, plants and minerals defines the logic field of metamorphosis. This is shown in dialogue with the ontological turn in anthropology that is particularly focused on this affective and lively dimension of encounter especially among Amazonian populations. Actually this is also what happens in our – occidental and classical but live – relation with things and objects, as long as we try to think a real conceptualisation of experience.

O desamparo da ciência na transição para sociedades sustentáveis

Esse trabalho se constrói diante a conjuntura da virada ontológica das ciências humanas e ambientais. Período em que as crises da sociedade contemporânea exigem da ciência o reconhecimento da potência agentiva de humanos e não humanos na transição para sociedades sustentáveis. Assim, reconhecendo a necessidade da corporificação política para a transição, o destaque e desafio do trabalho é buscar novos caminhos para a corporificação política da ciência através do desamparo como afeto político central, aproximando o campo psicanalítico do reconhecimento das dimensões multiespécie da antropologia contemporânea. Para isso me apoio principalmente nos trabalhos de Vladimir Safatle, Sigmund Freud e Anna Tsing.Palavras-chave: Afetos. Antropoceno. Contingência. Multiespécie. Sustentabilidade. The science helplessness in sustainable societies transitionAbstractThis work is constructed in the conjuncture of the ontological turn of human and environmental sciences. A period when the crisis of contemporary society requires science to recognize the active potential of humans and non-humans in the face of the transition to sustainable societies. Thus, recognizing the need for political embodiment in the transition, the highlight, and challenge of the work is to seek new paths for the political embodiment of science through helplessness as a central political affection, bringing the psychoanalytic field closer to the recognition of the multispecies dimensions of contemporary anthropology. For that, I supported the works by Vladimir Safatle, Sigmund Freud, and Anna Tsing.Keywords: Affect. Anthropocene. Contingency. Multispecies. Sustainability.

Cunning as... a Wolf Multispecies Relations Between Humans and Wolves in Eastern Siberia

Recent anthropological reasoning fostered by the ontological turn debate, has tackled the issue of multispecies ethnography: it deals with the lives and deaths of all the creatures that for decades have stayed on the margins of anthropology. According to this approach, animals, insects, plants and other organisms have started to appear alongside humans with legibly biographical and political lives. Focused on the changing contours of the ‘nature’ wriggling within whatever ‘human nature’ might mean, multispecies ethnography recalls that “human nature is an interspecies relationship”, as Anna Tsing would put it (Tsing 1995, 94). This last statement may also refer to the connections between humans and animals. In my paper I will take into account relations and connections between wolves and humans among hunters in Sakha-Yakutia, Eastern Siberia.

Art and Influence, Presence and Navigation in Southern African Forager Landscapes

With earlier origins and a rebirth in the late 1990s, the New Animisms and the precipitate ‘ontological turn’ have now been in full swing since the mid-2000s. They make a valuable contribution to the interpretation of the rock arts of numerous societies, particularly in their finding that in animist societies, there is little distinction between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, the sacred and the profane. In the process, a problem of perspective arises: the perspectives of such societies, and the analogical sources that illuminate them, diverge in more foundational terms from Western perspectives than is often accounted for. This is why archaeologists of religion need to be anthropologists of the wider world, to recognise where animistic and shamanistic ontologies are represented, and perhaps where there is reason to look closely at how religious systems are used to imply Cartesian separations of nature and culture, religious and mundane, human/person and animal/non-person, and where these dichotomies may obscure other forms of being-in-the-world. Inspired by Bird-David, Descola, Hallowell, Ingold, Vieiros de Castro, and Willerslev, and acting through the lens of navigation in a populated, enculturated, and multinatural world, this contribution locates southern African shamanic expressions of rock art within broader contexts of shamanisms that are animist.

Modernistskiy ekfrasis v esse Mariny Tsvetayevoy „Natal'ya Goncharova. Zhizn' i tvorchestvo”

This article examines Marina Tsvetaeva’s modernist perception of the personality and paintings of the greatest representative of the Russian avant-garde of the 20th century in the essay “Natalia Goncharova. Life and Work” (“Наталья Гончарова. Жизнь и творчество”, 1929). Goncharova’s paintings that Tsvetaeva describes in her essay are indicated. The principles of modernist poetics and ekphrasis are revealed (lyrical subjectivism, ontology, consonance, anagrammatic disclosure of the inner form of a word, mythologization, reader co-creation, dialogism). The similarity between Tsvetaeva’s understanding of painting and poetry is compared to the ontological understanding of art by Martin Heidegger. This can be explained by the tradition of ontological poetry (Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke), which is important for both. The ontology of Goncharova’s painting is also considered in the context of the ontology of animals in Russian philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century (Vasily Rozanov) and in the Tahitian Painting of Paul Gauguin. Special attention is paid to ekphrastic poetics (style, tropes, consonance), with the help of which Tsvetaeva authentically transfers the ontologism of Goncharov’s painting in its stylistic diversity (cubism, neo-primitivism, rayonism) to the verbal level. Tsvetaeva and Goncharova in the respective Russian and European context (Gauguin, Rozanov, Heidegger, Rilke) appear as exponents of the ontological turn in the culture of the first half of the 20th century.

Posthumanistic trends in foreign science vs culturology?

The purpose of the article is to attract the attention of culturоlogists and cultural anthropologists to the possibility of reception of the problems and research lens of non-anthropocentric anthropology. In the last third of the ХХ – and early ХХІ centuries foreign non-anthropocentric anthropology has been in an active stage of conceptualization and institutionalization. And now its influence is continuing to grow. The article reveals the essence of such academic trends as anthropology without anthropocentrism, ontological turn in line with perspectivism, trans- аnd posthumanistic tendencies in the humanities, material turn, bio/animal turn, and others. The methodology within the framework of culturology and cultural studies is based on the conceptual foundations of non-anthropocentric anthropology, methods of empirical (observation, comparison), and theoretical research (abstraction, analysis, synthesis, induction, and deduction), etc. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in the fact that in the Ukrainian humanities, in particular in culturology and cultural studies, an analytical review of the genesis and essence of such a research approach as non-apocentric anthropology is carried out for the first time. As far as we know, the question of the need for the reception of the research optics of neo-centric anthropology by culturology is also raised for the first time. The article contains conceptual author’s tables also. Conclusions. The author believes that the reception of research on non-anthropocentric anthropology, the development of an appropriate conceptual apparatus, and revision of some key concepts of culturology in the light of modern scientific knowledge in a timely and promising area of research in culturology and cultural studies.

Testing the Ethos of Tolerance: Chin’s Interpretation of Rorty’s Political Theory

In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin puts Richard Rorty’s pragmatism in dialogue with a range of contemporary political theorists, particularly focusing on how his notion of cultural politics can speak to the ontological turn in political theory. This article focuses on Chin’s claim that Rorty’s cultural politics provides an ethos of inclusive and tolerant political engagement. After exploring the basis for Chin’s interpretation, it identifies three tensions in this ethos, in relation to character of its demandingness, the fissure between ethnocentric and egalitarian engagement, and the relationship of this ethos to the virtues and procedures of democratic citizenship.

The ontological turn revisited: Theoretical decline. Why cannot ontologists fulfil their promise?

Holbraad and Pedersen have revisited the ontological turn, suggesting that it is strictly concerned with methodology only. Holbraad goes even further, accepting an aesthetic criterion for ethnography only. This is a sign of theoretical decline. In my paper, I claim that ontologists’ tendency to overestimate the significance of ethnographic experience causes theoretical confusion. I claim that neo-pragmatic analysis can eliminate this confusion. I also argue that there is only one remaining issue from the ontological turn that is not entirely lost. A careful evaluation of all folk categories, with all its possible consequences, can boost the robustness of all competitive theories, Cognitive Evolutionary Science included.

Shedding Our Substantial Baggage: Towards a Process-Ontological Turn in Cognitive Science

In the fallout of the replication crisis, several authors have pointed to an underlying "theory crisis" in the cognitive sciences, which are argued to lack a core set of shared principles, assumptions, and methodologies. In this essay, I contend that one major barrier to an integrated field stems from a widespread, often implicit ontological commitment among scientists to substance ontology: the metaphysical view that reality is composed of one or more fundamental, static, independent entities. I argue that this metaphysical assumption contributes to the impression that alternative theoretical decompositions of systems are logically incompatible. I consider cognitive, cultural, and historical reasons for the little-challenged dominance of substance thinking in scientific thought, but suggest that the philosophical foundations are shaky. As such, the field may benefit from engaging more deeply with alternative metaphysical traditions that can be grouped as "process ontologies": the family of views that tend to deny the idea of a fundamental level, take existence to be inherently relational, and emphasize that nature is inherently dynamic. I offer a brief survey of Western philosophical traditions that speak to one or more aspects of process thought, but shine a spotlight in particular on useful concepts from Buddhist and Daoist philosophical traditions. I consider three necessary aspects of all living systems that cannot be accounted for within substance ontology, but can by process: (1) fuzzy boundaries, (2) causal loops, and (3) change. I conclude by suggesting that process ontology may help the field of cognitive science progress by dissolving ill-founded debates regarding the fundamental level of analysis, opening a path for a rigorous meta-theory of cognition.

The philosophical foundations of anthropological concept of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

The article discusses the contribution of the Brazilian anthropologist E. Castro to the formation of the post-structuralist method in anthropology. The analysis of the key notions of E. Castro’s concept (perspectivism, multinaturalism, equivocation) is proposed, according to which the subjectivity of a human is not unique and is one of the positions within the framework of the universal perspectivist structure of the world. The analysis of the sources and ethnographic data with which E. Castro worked is carried out, and the reaction of the academic community to his research, methods and intellectual moves for the transformation of the anthropological discipline itself is considered. By means of a critical approach to E. Castro's program and the analysis of its reception by his anthropological colleagues, it is revealed that the ontological turn in anthropology in E. Castro’s understanding is an attempt at a theoretical inversion, in which the premise of the unity of nature, which is technically a conceptually indefinite remainder of the ethnological classification, is replaced by the postulation of a fundamental plurality of conditionally independent agents (in the manner of G. Leibniz’s monadology). Ontology is understood here as a kind of hierarchical predicate through which the Amerindian societies are denied the subjectivity of their ways of creating a picture of the world and at the same time the epistemological basis of the dominance of Western modernity is laid. As a result of generalizing the data, the author gives a critical position in relation to the key notions and methods of E. Castro. The author comes to the conclusion that projects for expanding the non-trivial use of E. Castro’s tools also inherit its conceptual features, the ambiguous nature of which is revealed in the text of the article: the costs of “ontologizing” of anthropology, the utopian nature of ideas about access to pre-colonial thought and an even more universalist regime of dominance of modern epistemology.