Ontology and Wonder - An Interview With Michael Scott

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Notes a nd Que r ies in Anthropology

Savage Minds

March 19, 2014Rex

Ontology and wonder: an interview withMichael W. Scott

Thanks to the incredible incredibilicity of our intern Angela, Im happy topresent an interview I recently did with Michael W. Scott. Michael iscurrently an associate professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and hisbook, The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and aMelanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands , appeared in20 07. Michael frequently uses the concept of ontolog y in his work, so Isa t down to talk with him today about this and other a spects of hisintellectual project. Ive broken the interview down into sections, so scroll down to read Michaels thoughts on Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner,

wonder, whether reality exists, politics, and how to do fieldwork.

Inte llectual In fluences at Glasgow and Chicago

RG: Were going to talk a little bit about your work and how it relates to theongoing interest in ontology. We both know each other from theUniversity of Chicago where we were both graduate students toget her.Maybe we could get started with you telling us what were your

intellectual influences at Chicago?

MS: Marshall Sahlinss focus on the relationship among cosmology,ontology, and practice was most important for me. But my interest inthose themes goes back to when I was a masters student in Glasgow, insociology. I was taught there by Harvie Ferguson. Hes a sociologist of modernity and a really wide-ranging, synthetic academic who couldnt beeasily compartmentalized. In his book, The Science of Pleasure , he made
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connections between theology, philosophy, science, art, literature,psychoanalysis, and traced a complex history of what he called cosmosand psyche in the bourgeois worldview. He was trying to understandmodernity in terms of its cosmological coordinates and conundrums.

There was also Derek Sayer, a historical sociologist at Glasgow who hasbeen pretty influential in the development of my interest in ontology. Heintroduced me to the work of Roy Bhaskar, the philosopher of science. Inhis first book, A Realist Theory of Science , Bhaskar analyzed scientificpractice to discern what ontological assumptions underlie experimental method. What kind of a world, or what kind of an ontology, ispresupposed by scientific experiments? His answer was: its a stratified buta changing world, one with layers of ontological depth that science is

trying to mine more and more deeply. So these ideas really informed mydoctoral work and then my subsequent book, The Severed Snake .

RG: Right, and I remember in David Graebers book on value he has asection on Bhaskar as well, so it sounds like Bhaskar has had influence ina couple different places.

MS: Yes, I took that interest in Bhaskar to Chicago, and I remember

sharing it with Terry Turner, who was teaching both David and myself atthe same time.

RG: Ah, thats interesting. And of course Sayer wrote The Great Arch withPhilip Corrigan, which is sort of one of the precursors to the contemporaryethnographies of the state.

MS: Thats right. But let me just return to Sahlins for a moment. He lookedat cosmogonic myth as that which reveals the ontological assumptionswhich inform practice. But, I tried to look at everyday practice in myresearch in the way that Bhaskar looked at experimental method inscience, and I was asking: what kind of ontological assumptions arelegible in practice?

RG: Right. Yes. And so, who else? Was Valerio Valeri an influence?


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MS: Yes. He, like Harvie Ferguson, was a figure that impressed me verymuch. As you know, he was very wide-ranging in his erudition, hissynthetic thinking. He was particularly attentive to diverse models of cosmology and cosmogony and their ontological implications. Chicago isa really vibrant intellectual context, and so I also had many conversationswith fellow students such as my now-wife, Krista Ovist, who was astudent in history of religions. She introduced me to the work of hersupervisor, Bruce Lincoln, and his studies of cosmogony and its social andpractical implications, and Krista remains an important partner in dialoguefor me.

RS: When I was doing the first chapter of my book, I had to trace outcosmology, what does that term mean? We use it all the time, but where

does it really come from? And I found myself having to read a lot of Eliade.

MS: Yes, I really discovered Eliade through Valeri and conversations withKrista, and read a bit of Eliade then. Of course, I think Eliade has beenproblematized because of, well, his right-wing political commitments.

I should mention that Nancy Munn was also an important formative

influence for me at Chicago, particularly her emphasis on place, and thatis very apparent in my work: my focus on peoples relationship to land andprocesses of emplacement.

RG: Can you talk a little bit about her work, because I think it can bedifficult because of the language and because of the density. Whats herapproach?

MS: I think shes been fundamentally influenced by phenomenology, andis interested in the ways in which people extend themselves throughspace and time. Actually, thats how she says they create space and time through movement.

RG: When you say people extending themselves through time and space,you dont mean them getting older and fatter. How would you explain that


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to people?

MS: I think it develops a general model thats been influential inMelanesianist anthropology whereby people are conceptualized as whatMarilyn Strathern calls partible. They arent just exchanging or givingaway things that they own as alienable objects. Those objects arefundamentally part of themselves, and so when they give them away, itsalmost as if theyre extending part of themselves existentially, beyond thebounds of their own bodies. And those objects are vehicles of themselves, and can travel quite widely. And of course Nancy Munns keystudy is of the Kula exchange ring in the Trobriand Islands in Papua NewGuinea. She focuses on the ways in which the objects which areexchanged around the islands are extensions of the island in which she

did fieldwork, Gawa.

RG: Yes, thats a great explanation.

MS: If were still on my influences, heres another: Id have to say that,during our time at Chicago, the anthropology department was animportant center for the development of historical anthropology. Andhistorical research has always been a very important part of my own

work, trying to situate my interlocutors in Solomon Islands within thelongest historical context that archival documents might allow.

Studying Poly-ontology in Solomon Islands

RG: So you had a lot of ideas to work with, a really rich intellectual contextboth at Glasgow and Chicago. What did you find when you hit theSolomon Islands?

MS: I work on the ethnography of Arosi speakers on the island of Makirain the southeast Solomons. And when I was a doctoral student in the early90s, I was working predominantly with Anglican Christians. I was puzzlingover the pervasiveness of latent land disputes between matrilineally-defined claimants the Arosi are matrilineal. I was trying to understandwhy land disputes were simmering beneath the surface of everyday life,


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but were unmentionable and didnt develop into overt conflict. My hostsseemed to feel a certain anxiety or insecurity about their disposition on theland. They had a sense that their communities, and the principles onwhich their communities were based, were in a state of confusion.

Many people wanted to set things straight by asserting that theirs was therightful land-holding matrilineage, but they couldnt voice their claimsbecause that would be too divisive. But at the same time they were afraidthat someone else might make a claim that would be recognized insteadof their own. I thought the Arosi were dealing with a kind of classicparadoxical situation. On the one hand, their ideal notion of whatconstitutes customary village life required that there be a recognizedland-holding matrilineage at a given place, serving as a kind of focal point

of authority, with the chief that would defend the interests of the landholders and bring people together to construct a multilineal polity. Andthat idea needed to be clear and transparent.

Yet, on the other hand, people from different matrilineages seemed to belocked in a sort of quiet competition over that position, but they couldntvoice their competing claims openly, not without alienating others andplacing the synthetic nature of the polity in jeopardy. To do that is to be

regarded as extremely anti-social, as sort of proof that you arent actuallythe legitimate landholders after all. What landholder, they would say,would be so ungenerous and overbearing?

RG: Just to clarify, when you say the synthetic nature of the polity, youmean that in these areas there are people from many matrilineages livingin the same place, and so the residential group has got to be kepttogether even though one part of it may claim to have a greater right tothe land?

MS: Thats precisely right.

RG: How did ontology come into that?

MS: The analysis of this problem led me to scrutinize a whole range of


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topics that are familiar to Melanesianists: origins, idioms of descent andrelatedness, relations with ancestral beings, naming practices and so forth.This led me, in turn, to theorize that the ontological principles informingthe land dispute situation constitute what I call a poly-ontology, which isa way of describing a pluralism.

In other words, its an atomistic cosmos in which matrilineages areconceptualized as the bearers of independently arising and isolatedontological categories that need to be brought into productive andreproductive relations. Also, I analyzed how this poly-ontology has comeinto dialogue with Christianity, and specifically with the Anglican Christiancosmology that I found there, in mutually transforming ways.

I was also trying to make a contribution to the anthropology of Christianityby highlighting the importance of interrogating Christian ontology in a fieldcontext. In my view, the anthropology of Christianity really hasnt doneenough to explore Christian ontologies or to recognize more than onepossible Christian configuration of ontology. So, Id say that ontology is anew way of approaching traditional topics such as kinship and myth, andits revealing new things about them. Its a new way of talking about whatsinteresting about these topics.

RG: And when you say ontology, youre talking about peoples theories of the world, right? And in particular, you said something earlier, I just wantedto clarify. You talked about how theres this atomistic poly-ontology.Theres a sort of a sense that each individual lineage group is ontologicallydistinct from each other one?

MS: Thats correct. Each matrilineage has its own essential being that isfundamentally distinct from each of the other matrilineages. But I justwanted to make a note here. You said ontology was different theories of being, but in my understanding of ontology, its not simply a theory, its theassumptions that underlie both discursive practice and non-discursivepractice. So, it might be implicit assumptions rather than an explicitlyarticulated theory.


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RG: Thats an important thing to note. It means that you have to engage ina sort of a depth analysis. Its hard to say, I can see these ontological assumptions, but its tacit. Its always a little bit of a trick to get other peopleto see it.

MS: Thats right. The job of the anthropologist is to try to perform theanalysis. We begin to explicate some of those assumptions that underliewhat people say, but also really looking at what they do, quite closely.

RG: So your work sounds like its not really a call to totally redoanthropology. It sounds like its very traditionally anthropological in itsfocus on kinship, myth. Is that right?

MS: Its trying to rethink, to reconstrue, to reconceptualize, whatanthropology has always been interested in. So in a sense its dealing withtraditional issues, but in a new way.

On Wagner, Strathern, and Melanesian Sociality

RG: Your book also has a critique of the work of Roy Wagner and MarilynStrathern and their theories of kinship. It might be interesting to go over

that critique because I think when people hear the word ontology, theythink of that term as associated with people who have been educated byWagner and Strathern, not necessarily people who take issue with them.

MS: Well, I should clarify that I see my work as in dialogue with, ratherthan opposed to, the ideas of Wagner and Strathern. If Im opposed toanything its to the ways in which their models of Melanesian sociality aresometimes presupposed as a kind of orthodoxy about a monolithic

Melanesia. Heres how I would put it. It seems to me that my engagementwith Wagner and Strathern, and where I may differ from them, as it were,is shaping up into something analogous to the debates that have beengoing on in philosophy between proponents of what is usually calledrelationism, on the one hand, and those who have been developing so-called object-oriented ontology, on the other.


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When I make this comparison I dont mean to imply that Im in a debatewith Wagner and Strathern about a personal existential commitment toone or the other of these ontologies. Rather, Im simply trying to suggestthat, whereas there may be some Melanesians whose ontological assumptions are comparable in many ways to what philosophers call relational ontology, there may also be Melanesians whose assumptionsare, at least in some ways, more like those of object-oriented ontology.

Briefly put, relationists argue that there are no autonomous essences,only relations. Things are nothing but the relations that constitute themand in which they participate. Object-oriented ontologists do not deny thatall things are made up of relations and inhere in relations, but they arguethat things nevertheless entail autonomous though not eternal

essences. Objects cannot be exhausted by their relations; they entail acore proper being. In their own ways, in other words, Melanesians may bedebating the same kinds of questions that European philosophers are still splitting hairs about.

RG: When we say a relational ontology, what does that mean? I want tokeep it nice and concreteyoure making a claim that their claims aboutkinship and social structure dont apply to the Makiran case, is that right?

MS: Thats right. Their basic argument, as I read them, is that Melanesiansociality presupposes relational continuity. Its a cosmos in whicheverything is fundamentally related, and the major problem for social agents within that cosmos is to create distinctions, to create or to cutrelational continuity, continuity of being.

And I find in the Solomon Islands case where I did my fieldwork, itseemed precisely the inverse of that. People needed fundamentally tocreate relations, to bring the elements of the cosmos, which wereoriginally unrelated, into relation, into productive and reproductiverelations. So thats a broad contrast that I draw in the introduction to thebook.

RG: So in the case of Makira, the question is, how are these matrilineages


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going to be able to relate to one another? We want them to relate to oneanother so we can build harmonious communities. How can they relate toeach other when theyre just fundamentally, ontologically distinct?Something like that?

MS: Thats correct.

RG: And then, in the case of Strathern and Wagner, the argument is thatpeople already think theyre related, so then they try to make themselvesdifferent what would be a good example of that, Michael? In terms of aconcrete kinship practice?

MS: Well, the ways in which Wager and Strathern and those moststrongly influenced by them depict Melanesian sociality is, I think,probably nicely captured in the work of Jadran Mimica among the Iqwayein the New Guinea highlands. Mimica presents a striking model of cosmicorigins from a primordial figure, a figure who is sort of self-contained, andis the source of all things in their universe.

RG: Thats like a mythological person, you mean.

MS: Thats right, yes. Everything in the universe is conceptualized ascoming from that one figure. And everything needs to be differentiatedout of that figure. So this process of differentiation and bifurcation is kindof the fundamental cosmogonic or cosmological process that informs all of being there.

RG: So its a different kind of cosmology or worldview. Its a different kindof ontological assumption than what you discovered in Makira.

MS: Thats correct. James Weiner has written about the Foi, also in theNew Guinea highlands. He talks about a world of immanent continuity;that the world for the Foi, in his understanding, is one is which theres afundamental relation of resemblance and that resemblance needs to bedenied. The given connections between things need to be cut for thesocial world to be developed. The moral foundation of human action is


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really to draw contrasts.

RG: I see that in the area of Papua New Guinea where I worked. You canbe a member of more than one cognatic stock there, so a lot of times atweddings by giving food to one side of the wedding youre showing thatyoure a member of the other side, since you could theoretically be both.

MS: Yes, precisely, those kinds of processes.

Does reality exist?

RG: When people hear the word ontology, they assume that peoplewho advocate an ontology-oriented approach in anthropology have aradical program to destroy the idea that there is one reality out there andthat we just have different cultural ways of understanding a single shareduniverse. Ontologists seem to claim that there are multiple universes outthere, and thats a claim a lot of people just dont understand or thinkcouldnt possibly be true. Is that a kind of claim that youre interested inmaking in your work?

MS: Well, this may seem like a fudge, but I dont think that one is best

placed to be the judge of ones own ontological presuppositions if, as Itend to think, peoples discursive and non-discursive practices index andthen transform their ontological assumptions. It seems to me that whatone does, especially in ones anthropological practice, is likely to belieones carefully crafted philosophy.

That said, were I to carefully craft my philosophy of being, Id suggest akind of realism that says there are things that actually exist a reality is

not incompatible with the possibility that everyone is in their own world. Itseems to be me that it may be the case that there are noumena in theKantian sense of things in themselves, the really real but that theseare never experienced or known directly in themselves by anythinghuman or otherwise. This would mean that everything is, in a sense,creating its own world based on its own capacities to translate informationfrom other beings and other entities into a world that it inhabits.


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But in my work, by ontology, I generally mean the assumptions about thenature of reality that shape peoples ways of doing things. Basically, Ivebeen interested in trying to discern the way ontological assumptionsinform the lives of my interlocutors in Solomon Islands.

Wonder

RG: Could we turn to some of your more recent writing about wonder,this discussion about wonder is about people being exposed to newontological assumptions.

MS: I first started wondering about wonder after a stint of fieldwork in theSolomons in 2006. During this period I encountered what I call wonderdiscourses, which is to say, stories, speculations, rumors and claims aboutthings people described as amazing, baffling, miraculous, and wonderful.The biggest of these is the idea that theres a hidden underground realminside the island of Makira. This is envisioned as a kind of high-tech armybase-cum-metropolis thats run by white people, chiefly Americans, inleague with beings known as kakamora these are thought of as small super-powerful autochthonous beings. It seemed to me that thesewonder discourses had to do with what I would call an ontological crisis

or, the undermining of older ontological assumptions and the emergenceof new possibilities for becoming. But they were also possibly techniquesor methods for precipitating ontological transformation, for participating init. The particular transformation in question seemed to involve a rupturingof the plurality of poly-ontological matrilineal categories within a newunderlying insular category of Makiran being that seemed previously tobeen denied.

This got me thinking about wonder discourses in anthropology andacademic writing more generally. And Ive noticed and written about twothings. Firstly, Ive analyzed how many contributors to the anthropology of ontology have not only theorized indigenous ontologies as relational, buthave presented them as morally preferable to the Euro-Americanontology they call Cartesian dualism or Kantian dualism orrepresentationism. And theyve suggested that one of the key indicators


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of the moral advantages of relationism is its capacity for wonder, its openorientation to the unpredictable, the astonishing flow of becoming. Andhere I am thinking of authors such as Tim Ingold or Deborah Bird Rose orTerence Evens.

And secondly, Ive suggested that this apparent enthusiasm for relational ontology and its orientation to wonder could be described as religious, asan expression of post-biblical religion and an appetite for re-enchantmentin the so-called secular world. So in short, as on Makira, it seems to methat, within anthropology, the pursuit and production of wonderaccompanies a bid for ontological transformation. In this case, from thesupposed dualism of modernity toward the uptake of relationism.

RG: So the goal of anthropology is to recreate a sense of wonder and tochange our worldview, not necessarily to explain what causes humanbehavior or to decipher or interpret cultural texts?

MS: For some people thats correct. I detect in some of the anthropologyof ontology a particular agenda thats engaged with the problems of theworld today. Its about re-thinking anthropology as a form of ethics, or de-colonization of thought, or a morally responsible form of being in the

world. Its responding to things like environmental crisis, so its not simplysitting back and trying to analyze or interpret, no.

Power

RG: Im just trying to imagine sort of an old-school Marxist looking at abook like Holbraads Truth in Motion, which can be very difficult to read,saying, thats an ethical response to climate change and political crisis?

Shouldnt we instead be trying to affect the world by understanding how itworks and then trying to change it? For a lot of American anthropologyyou have to be discussing politics, you have to be taking a concrete standon particular issues. But this doesnt seem to be doing that, so manypeople would be surprised that it would be called a political form of anthropology.


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MS: I think that perhaps people are operating with a very narrow definitionof the political. And some anthropologists who are interested in questionsof being are not prejudging what politics might be. Surely there could benothing more political than trying to think in new ways about the nature of being, and expanding the possibilities for thinking about being. That wouldseem to me to be a fundamentally political project.

RG: I guess maybe it would be sort of like a kind of consciousness-raisingin the way that people might have talked about consciousness-raising inthe 60s and 70s: widening your horizon, questioning expectations thatyouve taken for granted, maybe something like that?

MS: Yes, fundamentally questioning your assumptions about the nature of things. And also recognizing that in any attempt to change the world forthe better there may be an unexamined problem of whose ontological assumptions are going to inform policy.

RG: Where do you think this literature is going, can I ask you? Where doyou see this going in the future, including your work or the work you see?Youre in London, you must get a sense of what people are thinking aboutcurrently that maybe hasnt seen print yet.

MS: Its pretty hard for me to say in what directions some of mycolleagues interested in ontology may be going at the moment. I thinkthat the interest in ontology in this country is maturing.

Ontology really sort of began to come into its own in the United Kingdomin about 2006, 2007. And so now theres this well-known stream of thought in this country, so it was surprising to go to the American

Anthropological Association in November last year and find that so manypeople there were unaware of it. From the perspective of the UK, this is adebate or set of debates that have been ongoing for quite some timenow. I know that some figures were sort of moving away from thesekinds of issues and looking in different directions.

RG: Ah, yes, were behind the times.


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MS: I dont think thats true. I think its just different intellectual interests,different disciplinary foci. The kinds of debates that drive anthropology inthe UK are slightly different from those in the US.

Fieldwork

RG: What are some good rules for practice that you see really emergingfrom your approach? What do you think is valuable for people to do in thefield and when they are writing up?

MS: Ive tried to model an approach that asks questions about theontological assumptions that are implicit in what we encounter in the field.Id emphasize the importance of not assuming that we already know whatthe prevailing configuration of ontology is, especially in regions wherecertain theoretical models have become, well, synonymous with thoseareas. The idea that we have relational Melanesians or perspectival Amerindians always needs to be tested and not presumed.

One of the main questions that the anthropology of ontology has raised isthe role of philosophy in anthropology. Philosophy can be hugelystimulating, but its also easy to get carried away and simply read your

ethnographic material in terms of the principles of a particularphilosopher. And, well, frankly, the wonder we experience when it seemsthat the ontological assumptions legible in some myth or indigenouspractice correlate almost precisely with the ideas of a particularphilosopher can be, well, too compelling. So its always good to remindourselves that we are discovering a relationship of affinity, not identity.

I think we should always aspire to a kind of ethnographic particularism

this is something I took from Sahlins and Munn. Labels that we develop todescribe particular configurations of ontology like dualism, animism,relationism or even poly-ontology can become as banal and blunt asthe old chestnuts of solidarity, resistance, and power, and they dontnecessarily shed light on anything unless you can locate them in thedetails, unless you can show that a particular ontological configurationmotivates the logic of a particular magical technique, for example, or why


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Blog postinterview , Michael W. Scott , ontology , Solomon Islands , University of Chicago

someone did X rather than Y in a particular situation. If theres really onething that I would highlight, what I tell my own students, is that its always agood idea to attend to what your consultants in the field find puzzling andproblematic. What are they preoccupied with or struggling to understandor trying to cope with? What do they wonder about?

Recently, some anthropologists interested in ontology have beenadvocating that we should focus our work on what they call alterity. Bythis they mean that we should concentrate on what doesnt make senseto us, which usually means other peoples apparently irrational beliefs things like how can they be fundamentalist Christians or how can they saythat they are red parrots? But I think we are bound to be puzzled by whatpuzzles the people we meet in the field, so why pre-empt their

puzzlement with our own?

RG: I think that thats good advice. I agree with that. You and I must haveboth gone to the same graduate school!

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Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at theUniversity of Hawaii at M noa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine

has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact himat [email protected]

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A. J. West(@AlWest13

)

Id suggest a kind of realism that says there arethings that actually exist a reality is notincompatible with the possibility that everyone isin their own world.

Its totally incompatible if you mean those words as otherpeople do.

It seems to be me that it may be the case thatthere are noumena in the Kantian sense of

things in themselves, the really real but thatthese are never experienced or known directly inthemselves by anything human or otherwise. Thiswould mean that everything is, in a sense,creating its own world based on its own capacitiesto translate information from other beings andother entities into a world that it inhabits.

So if humans only indirectly know the real world throughsense data, that gives them sufficient freedom to createtheir own worlds? Hmmm, no. Theyre not creating theirown worlds, theyre just interpreting their sense data aboutthe one world around them, which isnt the same thing.They arent at liberty to live without regard to the world as itactually is. People inhabit one world, and we all live there.We just think about it differently.

March 20, 2014 at 4:19 am

John

Fascinating stuff. One question, though. Could we hear a bitmore about, how this poly-ontology has come into dialoguewith Christianity, and specifically with the Anglican Christian

March 21, 2014 at 6:56 pm
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McCreery cosmology that I found there, in mutually transformingways. I know it is perfectly silly of me to be sitting hereimagining Miss Marple in the Solomon Islands; but thethought of church fetes as occasions for ritual exchangestickles my fancy and leads to serious questions about howthe local ontology fits with the one described in the Book of Common Prayer.

Michael W.Scott

Thanks to A.J. and John for their interest and responses.

Ill respond to A.J. first: I think youre right that in thesedebates much depends on what one means by terms suchas real, world, and create. When I entertain the possibilitythat all entities (including those often marked as inanimate)may be creating their own worlds, I dont mean that they aredoing so to suit themselves as free agents. If thats what itmeans to create, then perhaps nothing but a transcendentgod can create, either ex nihilo or by spontaneousemanation. My threshold for what it means to create ismuch lower than that. It seems to me that, even when wetry to replicate something exactly whether its someoneelses ideas or something more tangible we are alwayscreating something new, and I tend to agree with those whoargue that that something new has its own ontology. This isnot to deny that there are real things out there; it is rather to

try on a conceptual (if not practical) agnosticism about whatthose real things are in themselves and whether or not theyhang together as a super-entity even if there is noconsciousness that can perceive them as such.

This is in response to John: The Arosi speakers with whomIve been working on the island of Makira are a bit like MissMarple in the Solomon Islands in that theres more to them

March 25, 2014 at 4:09 am
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than meets the eye. In many ways, Arosi look like regularhigh church Anglicans (complete with incense, copes, andmitres when the bishops visit), but they entertain ideas thatmight surprise Anglicans elsewhere.

For example: traditional Arosi accounts of origins tell howseveral different kinds of pre-human beings arose onMakira and eventually produced humans by entering intorelations that prefigured the normal Arosi pattern of matrilineal exogamy. For this reason, I describe Arosiassumptions about human ontology as poly-ontological, i.e.they posit a plurality of independently arising ontological categories. In contrast, the biblical account of human origins

to which most Arosi attend tells how human beings arosefrom the bifurcation of one being, Adam. For this reason,biblical assumptions about humanity can be described asmono-ontological, i.e. they posit an underlying continuity rather than a discontinuity of being among all people. ForArosi, this inevitably incestuous ontology implies a staticcondition of non-differentiation that is inimical to theformation of a generative cosmos.

As I discuss in an article (in Ethnos 70:1, 2005), I know anArosi Anglican priest who has sought creatively to reconcilethese two visions of human origins. He suggests that, in thebeginning, God created, not one set of primordial parents,but four essentially different types of beings the bao, kuru,kakamora, and the masi (four kinds of primordial beingsknown from ancestral traditions). In this way, he adaptsGenesis to meet the Arosi demand for multiple unrelatedcategories of being that intermarry to generate truly newforms: matrilineally differentiated humans beings.

But, this is just one way in which Arosi clergy and laypeoplealike innovate distinctive ways of being Anglican. Noteveryone in Arosi would accept this priests version of


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Be that as it may, your analysis has me wondering aboutclassical examples of syncretism, very common, forexample, in ancient Rome. Because, I suspect, of themonotheistic bent of medieval and modern interpreters inEurope, these are always presented as examples of assimilation, with various pagan cults and rituals added toand subordinated or absorbed by Christianity, Islam,Buddhism, etc. I wonder to what extent your poly-ontological perspective might hold in places like Mexico,where elements of traditional cosmologies and Catholicismare blended.

AndrewBolger

What a great discussion, proper anthropology

March 26, 2014 at 4:11 am
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Ontology and Wonder - An Interview With Michael Scott

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