(Book Review) Whose Truth is it Anyway?

22/01/2014 11:39Whose truth is it anyway? by Evan Killick « Anthropology of this Century

of 26http://aotcpress.com/articles/truth/

WHOSE TRUTH IS IT ANYWAY?‘What does the fish remind you of?’

‘Other fish.’

‘And what do other fish remind you of?’

‘Other fish.’

Major Sanderson sat back disappointedly.

(Major Sanderson, the staff psychiatrist, talking to Yossarian in JosephHeller’s Catch-22)

At a recent anthropology conference I spoke to a PhD student who hadjust returned from fieldwork in Amazonia. As it often does amongcontemporary Amazonianist anthropologists, our conversation turned toperspectivism: the radically different way in which many indigenousAmerindians appear to view the world. The student told me that whenshe had started her PhD, her initial supervisors – neither of them LatinAmericanists – insisted that she must read the work of Eduardo Viveirosde Castro and especially his writings on perspectivism. The student thenconfided to me that once she got to the field perspectival ideas just didnot seem to be of any importance in the lives of the people she wasworking with. Nevertheless, two years later here she was ready to presentto an audience of mostly Amazonianists a paper considering the role ofsmells in perspectival terms.

I start with this anecdote not to criticise the student, whose presentationwas very lucid, well-researched and argued, nor to dismiss the



importance of perspectival theories, which I have used in my ownresearch and will defend below. The encounter does, however, seem toencapsulate a particular trend in some current anthropological work inwhich the complex ideas, practices and social processes of everyday lifeare overlooked in the intellectual pursuit of radical alterity. While I mighthave dismissed my fears over this student’s particular focus onperspectivism at this early stage in her writing, our conversation occurredjust as I had been asked to review Martin Holbraad’s new book, Truth inmotion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. What wasstriking was that the student’s approach appeared to parallel the‘ontographic’ methodological instructions (p.255-6) that Holbraad laysout in the concluding chapter of his book. Truth in motion is arguably theclearest manifesto of the recent ‘ontological turn’ in British anthropology,and that like that movement also clearly owes a great debt to the work ofViveiros de Castro. So while I will focus on Holbraad’s ideas in thisarticle, I want to embed my discussion within a wider consideration ofthis apparently new direction for anthropology and in conversation withthe work of Viveiros de Castro.

Tsinki[1]

Magnus Course has described the ontological turn as “a particularcommitment to recalibrate the level at which analysis takes place”(2010:248), while Morten Pedersen echoes Holbraad’s own stress onontography as “a heuristic analytical device as opposed to a fixedtheoretical framework” (Pedersen 2012). This underlines the fact that, atleast from their perspective, the work of these new ‘ontographers’ is lessabout producing new anthropological theories than about producing anew methodology that they feel will take them past what they see as



anthropology’s fundamental inability to take the words and views ofothers seriously. At the heart of the movement lies a deep scepticismabout the anthropological project as it has so far been conducted, basedon the fundamental issue of representation, and the political issue of whocontrols that representation. For Holbraad, this debate centres aroundthe issue of the distinction between nature and culture, of the ability foranyone to be able to talk of a world ‘out there’ in a way that is notfundamentally caught up in their own particular worldview.

As Holbraad puts it: “How might the ‘nonuniversality’ of the distinctionbetween nature and culture be conceptualized without recourse to thatvery distinction?” (p.35). For him the answer is to seek out alterity andembrace it wherever possible, if necessary by creating new concepts andways of thinking that allow ‘us’ and ‘them’ to move forward together intoa new world of understanding. As he and his co-editors put it in theintroduction to the edited volume Thinking Through Things:

An ontological turn in anthropological analysis… turns on the humble…admission that our concepts (not our ‘representations’) must, bydefinition, be inadequate to translate different ones. This, it is suggested,is the only way to take difference – alterity – seriously as the startingpoint for anthropological analysis (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007:12)

The corollary of this view is Holbraad’s new ontographic methodology inwhich he explicitly subjugates ethnography to the search for thisontological alterity, exhorting ‘ontographers’ to search for apparent‘logical contradictions’ in their ethnographic descriptions and then toproduce (‘infine’) new concepts, new to both the anthropologist’s cultureas well as the one under study, that will ultimately lend logical cogency tothe initial contradiction and dissolve it in a newly shared understanding.



At its heart this call appears to offer a critique of previous anthropologistsas wilful Yossarians, seeing only similarity in everything around themand thus reducing the variation of the world to a uniform anduninteresting blankness. The alternative the ontographers offer is tobecome philosophers for others, fully elucidating and, at times,explicating apparently distinct understandings of the world. As I hopewill become clear in this discussion, there is much to admire andappreciate in both this project as well as Holbraad’s intellectuallyrigorous book. I am also generally supportive of the political perspectiveupon which I believe the ontological turn, and its precursors, to be based.My concern is that this proposed methodological emphasis on alterityand then the preoccupation with philosophically supporting theparticular ontological cases it throws up, such as perspectivism, have thedanger both of overinterpreting, or perhaps over-intellectualising,alternative views and practices while also eclipsing a fuller and widersense of the power of anthropological study itself. For me, anthropology’sstrength lies precisely in its ability to find, describe and discuss bothsimilarity and difference.

Pirarucu[2]

In an excellent early chapter, Holbraad outlines a particularunderstanding of the history of anthropological theory in terms ofchanging attitudes towards the relationship between nature and culture.Starting from a position of ‘evolutionism’ that saw ‘socioculturalvariation… as an index of underlying human nature’ and an expression ofhuman beings’ development as a species, the discipline eventuallyreplaced this with ‘diffusionism’ that decoupled culture from nature andplaced society and culture as ‘fields to be understood in terms of their



own’ (p.19-23). Here, however, while anthropologists and ‘natives’ mighthave been considered as equal in terms of their truth-claims,anthropologists, in Holbraad’s view, still tended to claim the upper handthrough arguing that “only some societies have devoted themselves todeveloping systematic methods and techniques that may ensure thattheir representations of the world are actually correct” (p.25).

For Holbraad this faith in anthropology’s own objectivity was thenreplaced by ‘social constructivism’, in which “the very idea of scientifictruth began to be considered either naïve or dogmatic” (p.27) and thediffusionists’ continued reliance on “the idea of nature that standsoutside the realms of society and culture” was taken away, replaced bythe ultimate conclusion that “if culture is natural, so to speak, thennature is cultural” (p.29). In this view it is not just that societies vary inthe manner in which they represent nature but rather that nature itself isbest understood as differing for different people. Holbraad rightly pointsout the intellectual stalemate that this brought, and with which we mostlystill seem to be living. On one side are the naturalists with their “point-blank-obvious intuition that there’s a world out there that bothconstrains and acts as a benchmark for the truth-claims we make aboutit” (p.32), on the other side are the constructivists who deny all claims toan ultimate truth.

Anthropology’s response, Holbraad suggests, has mostly been to critiquethe concepts of nature and culture themselves. From his perspective thisapproach is flawed, however, because it is still being argued from within aparticular Western discourse and therefore it ultimately still retains andrecreates the very distinction that it is trying to repudiate. ElsewhereHolbraad has gone even further to note that this idea of a single naturemeans a parallel assumption of a single humanity, reifying similarity over



difference, such that:

anthropology has built the non-possibility of the Other into its ownpremise, as the study of an inclusively construed ‘anthropos’- what theycall ‘humanity’. Once that logical move is in place then all Otherness mustappear in the form of ‘variation’ (variation on the abiding theme of‘anthropos’ of course) (Holbraad 2006)

For Holbraad then, the only way to escape this circularity, and theapparent inadequacy of our own concepts, is to see the limitations of ourown concepts and then have a willingness to invent, or to use his word‘infine’ (p.220), new concepts that will make sense of things that seemirrational from a particular perspective. Hence he does not deny thathumans can exist in a single world, it is just that that truly ontologicallyshared world does not yet exist and it is precisely anthropology’s job tohelp bring it into being.

While this may seem like a very philosophical problem and debate itsdeeper importance is made clearer if we trace the origins of thisapproach. Holbraad explicitly notes his intellectual debt to scholarsincluding Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour – scholarshe describes as sharing “a desire to think (and do) anthropology beyondrepresentation” (p.xvi). However, I think it is particularly illuminating tofocus on the influence of Viveiros de Castro, to whom the book isdedicated and to whom Holbraad’s epilogue is directly addressed. In anafter-dinner speech Viveiros de Castro gave at the ASA conference in2003, the deeper political edge of his own anthropological approach wasmade clear. In it he noted his belief, based on his experience of coming ofage during the period that included the 1968 student uprisings, inanthropology as an “insurrectionary, subversive science… the instrument



of a certain revolutionary utopia which fought for the conceptual self-determination of all the planet’s minorities” (2003). Viveiros de Castroargues that for him and others a key task of anthropologists was to“[enable] the thought of American peoples to escape the ghetto in whichit had been enclosed since the 16th century” (2003). In this context henotes that Lévi-Strauss’s ‘la pensée sauvage’ did not signify – as in theunfortunate English translation of the book title – ‘the savage mind’: “Tous it meant untamed thought, unsubdued thought, wild thought. Thoughtagainst the State, if you will” (2003).

Here the political importance of taking alternative visions of the worldseriously becomes clear: it is not a merely philosophical matter but ratheris above all a political act, countering a history of colonialism and

exploitation.[3] Against a Western intellectual imperialism that ultimatelysubordinates all others to a particular understanding of the world andunderstands and explains their actions and beliefs from that perspective,is placed an alternative intellectual future in which different perspectivesmeet and interact in relative equality. It is this view and objective that, asI understand it, underpins Viveiros de Castro’s anthropological projectand that the ontographers have sought to carry forward. The intellectualand political importance of this project is clear, particularly in theBrazilian context, or in other settings where people are still deeplyengaged in questions over the role and future of indigenous or minoritygroups within a nation state. Holbraad and the other European-basedacademics involved in the ontological turn seem even more ambitious,however, in wanting to make this approach, with its focus on the absoluteequality of ontological differences and the creation of a newly sharedfuture, apply to all anthropological endeavour, wherever it occurs. Thereason why Holbraad’s book is so interesting is precisely because it offers



an early example of putting this analytical approach at the heart of ananthropological study. In this case Holbraad’s focus is on the Afro-Cubanpractice of Ifá divination in Havana

Bacalao[4]

If this article has so far been taken up with philosophical questions anddebates then it in no small measure reflects the structure of Holbraad’sapproach, which is much more focused on his intellectual forbears andlogically constructed arguments than on ethnography per se. While thisreflects Holbraad’s emphasis on taking the intellectual basis of Ifáseriously, as I am using his monograph as the focus of this discussion –and ultimately I believe that it needs to be judged according to its relationto its ethnographic subject – I need to give a brief account of Ifádivination here.

Clients come to babalawos, the ‘priest[s] of Ifá’ (p.76), for divinations fora variety of reasons, but essentially to provide insight into their lives. Atthe centre of Ifá are the oddu, the mythical verses that are split into 256accounts that are then associated with specific divinatory configurations.At a divination the babalawo uses certain instruments to divine whichoddu are applicable to the client’s case and recites and discusses them.Divining can be done using various elements but the most formal andelaborate divination ritual, and the one that Holbraad concentrates on,involves the use of palm nuts and a divining tray. Here the tray is coveredin divining powder and after various initiatory activities the babalawocasts the nuts. He does this by holding 16 of them in his cupped handsbefore clutching as many as he can in his right hand and lifting themaway from the left hand. If none are left, or more than three, then theaction is discounted; but if either one or two nuts are left in the left hand



then an appropriate number of lines are drawn in the powder on the tray.This is then repeated seven more times until there are two columns offour marks. Each set of four binary marks gives 16 possible combinations,which when combined with the other set gives 256 overall combinations(16×16). Each combination is associated with a particular oddu which thebabalawo can then recite and interpret in terms of its relevance to theclient.

While Holbraad does eventually describe a generic divination, he is notreally interested (as he makes clear from the start) in the ethnographicspecifics of individual consultations or even the wider social setting andcontexts in which they occur. Instead Holbraad is focused on howdivination is understood from the perspective of its practitioners. Thuswhile he writes that “one may admit straight out that divinatory verdictsare open to doubt” (p.68) for him this would reflect an etic position thatfails to take at face value practitioners’ own views, the fault he finds in allprevious anthropological approaches to divination, including the work ofEvans-Pritchard and Boyer. Instead his key insight is that oracularverdicts are not just understood to be true but rather are “the kinds ofthings that could not but be true” (p.55). For practitioners – andHolbraad tends to focus on the babalawos themselves although hisoverall argument appears to include the clients as well – it is meaninglessto talk of doubt, as the truth of a divination lies at the heart of the verydefinition of what a divination is: “To doubt oracular truth is to doubtwhether it is oracular” (p.69).

This then is the key moment of alterity that Holbraad takes as being atthe heart of his task to take Ifá practitioners seriously, and it is how hedifferentiates his own work from previous anthropological approaches.As with Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad’s approach is an important antidote



to work which, as he sees sit, would seek to offer only an outsideexplanation of the practices of others. For Holbraad though, it is notenough to offer this insight and then go on to discuss its implications interms of how babalawos and consultants react to and use consultations,nor even perhaps the wider implications for other aspects of Cubanbeliefs, life and society. Instead Holbraad sees his task as delineating thedeeper philosophical principles that might underpin such a view and thencontrasting them with ‘Western’ understandings. It is this quest thatforms the heart of the book.

In line with the ‘ontographic’ methodological instructions that he lays outin his conclusion (p.255-6), Holbraad doesn’t rely so much onethnography as the work of other anthropologists, philosophers andother thinkers for inspiration and comparison in taking this projectforward. His method is to consider the logic that appears to underlie bothWestern and Ifá definitions of truth to unpack why the indubitability ofIfá divination is a problem from a Western perspective. He builds hisarguments through detailed and complex philosophical debate mostlyinvolving critiques of alternative interpretations. In essence, though, hetraces the ultimate incompatibility in the two systems of thought as lyingin the Western ontological position that truth is “a relationship between arepresentation and a fact” (p.74). Thus:

The practitioner of divination may insist, blue in the face, that doubtfulverdicts are not verdicts. But if verdicts are taken to be representationsthey must be doubtful, so the practitioner’s insistence makes no sense(p.74).

Instead Holbraad shows how the concept of truth in Ifá divination ritualscannot be understood representationally but rather must be understood



recursively by facing the fundamental alterity in Ifá ontology, such that‘truth’ lies only in the oddu themselves, and the diviner’s job is to alignthe world, or at least the world of the consultant, to the ‘truth’ of theOddu. As Holbraad explains:

The key claim is that, in order to make sense of the constitutiveindubitability of truth in Ifá, divinatory truths must be conceived as actsof definition (rather than representation) that effectively transform theworld upon which they purport to comment (p.xxiii).

He therefore proposes an understanding of Ifá truth as ‘motile’ ratherthan representational. A traditional anthropological understanding mightbe to see the chosen oddu as representing a particular ‘truth’ that mustthen be interpreted in light of the client’s circumstances. InsteadHolbraad argues for understanding the ‘truth’ of the oddu as on atrajectory that the skilled babalawo must then combine along with theclient’s own circumstances, to bring them together into a single newtrajectory.

Understood in this way, every divination cannot but be true, becauseevery divination enacts this transformation upon the consultant. Assurely as any patient coming out of a medical surgeon’s operating theatrehas been physically changed, regardless of their eventual health outcome,a consultant is now living with their oddu and their divination has thusbeen truthful. For Holbraad then, this exposition has achieved hisoriginal goal of understanding Ifá divination from the perspective ofpractitioners.

Having produced this compelling account of Ifá, however, Holbraad isnot content to rest his analysis here, returning instead to the question of



anthropological methodology itself. Specifically he argues that his notionof motility and the bringing together of two separate paths is a useful wayto think about the anthropological endeavour and specifically his new‘ontographic methodology’. That is, that an anthropologist, faced with analternate view of the world, should bring her own understandingstogether with that of the alternate ontology to create new concepts suchthat, ideally, people from both cultures could move forward together in anewly shared understanding of the world. So in this way Holbraad hascome full circle, using the insights gleaned from using his ownontographic method on Ifá divination to then reinforce and furtherelucidate his own methodology. If this intellectual dexterity seems a littletoo neat, the coincidence of the ethnographic subject somehow reflectingand reinforcing the anthropologist’s own methodology, then it points to akey criticism that can be made of Holbraad’s approach, as well theontological turn more generally.

Piraña

Michael Scott in discussing the ontological turn has cited AlfredKorzybski’s famous saying: “Mistake the map for the territory – mistake aphilosophical system for the world – and the map will overdetermine theinquiry” (Kyriakides 2012:415). In this view the philosophical ideasbecome an end in themselves, not linked to raising further ethnographicquestions or elucidating other social and cultural phenomenon but ratherheld up as precious jewels to be admired in isolation. Certainly whenHolbraad links his ontographic conclusions back to his own methodologyone feels that he has made a philosophical step too far. Yet even beforethis there is a question of whether it is his own intellectual pursuit that isguiding his analysis rather than any real interest in the practices of Ifádivinations and their participants. In the first instance this is emphasised



by Holbraad’s reluctance to bring to life the voices of babalawos and theirclients which means that the ideas that he presents as being at the heartof Ifá come much more in his own voice than that of his informants. Thisleaves him open to the criticism that he is ‘ventriloquising’ the voices ofhis informants to fit his own theoretical preoccupations (see Ramos2012:490). Beyond this, however, Holbraad’s methodology and writingcan be more broadly accused of both essentialising and exoticising Ifáontology. In the first place by distilling one particular aspect of it, makingthe search for and understanding of its point of ultimate alterity soprecious that nothing else matters. In the second place by reifying andfixing this understanding in place as if it is stable and shared uniformly.And finally by emphasising the radical alterity of the concept, such that itcan only apparently be understood by others through the creation of newand newly-shared concepts.

Reflecting the long gestation of the book itself, Holbraad is aware ofvarious forms of this critique but interestingly he chooses to defendhimself by further emphasising the detachment of his methodology. Henotes that there is a basic “misapprehension involved in this line ofcomplaint, namely the assumption that recursive analyses are even in thebusiness of providing accurate representations of the people studied”(p.249). He argues against holistic approaches that might wish for a fullerpicture of Ifá practices arguing that such an approach loses something ofthe essence of Ifá divination in the continued search for similarity. Healso notes: “So, as in divinatory infinition, truth in our analyticalinfinitions becomes a matter of internal cogency rather than externalmatch” (p.254). I am not, however, convinced by this argument, and itsrelated assumption that Holbraad, or anyone emphasising his‘ontographic’ or philosophical approach, has definitively distilled and



understood what is going on.

Interestingly, much of the limited ethnography that Holbraad doesprovide is concerned with practitioners’ and their clients doubts aboutIfá. Holbraad includes this precisely to bolster his claim that ultimatelydivinations are indubitable but the reader is left with questions of how farthis ontological position would hold and also of a reality in which peopleseem much more willing to live with ambiguity than Holbraad’sstatements would suggest. For example, Holbraad describes a womanwho was told that her problems stemmed from needing her mother’sforgiveness. The woman rejected this divination, noting that “I’ve spentthe past hour talking and crying with my mum, trying to work out whatI’ve done to her. I asked her for her forgiveness but she didn’t give itbecause I haven’t done anything!” (p.204). Holbraad notes that a fewweeks later the girl decided that the divination was wrong because “thosegentlemen weren’t babalawos”, leading Holbraad to conclude that herbelief in the power of divination remains intact (p.212). If the divinationwasn’t true then it wasn’t a divination.

Holbraad supports this interpretation by arguing:

To interpret her criticism as a breach with the logic of divination as suchwould be equivalent to doubting whether, say, ‘love thy neighbor’ is aninherent principle of Christian practice on the grounds that manyChristians… are less than loving to their neighbors (p.212-3).

This seems a particularly telling comparison in the sense that theChristian creed is based on specific scriptural passages (Matthew 22:39 &Mark 12:29) and is therefore indisputably part of Christian ‘beliefs’

regardless of the actions of Christian people.[5] While Holbraad may be



intent on giving equal weight to Ifá notions, the fact remains that itscentral creeds do not exist in a generally accepted, textual form. As such,and particularly in relation to his assertion of the indubitability of Ifádivination, there may be a fluidity at the heart of the system itself, letalone in the minds of its adherents and practitioners that Holbraad’sinterpretation fails to capture.

Thus, while in Holbraad’s description there is a clear all or nothing choicebetween accepting the ‘truth’ of divination or not believing in it at all, oneis left wondering how this process developed and wondering about themany people caught in that liminal stage between absolute belief andnone at all. As with the unnamed woman above, but also in the lifehistories of Holbraad’s central figures of Javier and Javielito, people areclearly not acting at all times as if divinations are indubitable. Rather, as Ihave found in my own engagement with Amerindians’ perspectival ideas,it seems likely that many of the people he interacted with live in a muchgreyer area in which they are willing not only to doubt but also toexplicitly hold both belief and non-belief in their minds at the same time.This points to a number of aspects of such beliefs, first their ability tochange and to differ between individuals, or in the same individual overtime, and also the deeper question, that strikes at the heart of Holbraad’sproject, of whether a single, internally logical system of thought actuallyexists in these cases. There is thus a fear that in producing a clear, logicalargument about the ‘nature’ of Ifá divination Holbraad has produced athing that, much as it can be philosophically defended, really exists for noone except himself.

Holbraad might counter that my critique undermines alternativeontologies, apparently deeming them ‘less rational’ than our own andtherefore precisely undermining the ontographic imperative to ‘take them



seriously’. I would counter this by arguing ‘symmetrically’ (Latour1993:92) that I also don’t entirely recognise the ‘Western’ ontologyagainst which Holbraad contrasts Ifá. As with his ventriloquism for Ifáone can argue that Holbraad has set up a particularly reified and clearlydefined notion of Western truth that is equally unrepresentative (punintended). In the first place there is a question of who ‘we’ are in thisequation, particularly in a contemporary reality in which anthropologists,not to mention ‘Westerners’, have a variety of personal, cultural and

ontological backgrounds.[6] Moreover, as Venkatesan has written:

Ontologies, theories of being and reality, have histories (andgenealogies). They are also not necessarily transcontextually stable. Whoamong us has not shouted at a car or a printer for ‘deliberately’ breakingdown when one is racing to make a deadline? (Venkatesan 2010:154)

The question then becomes whether the philosophers’ version of ‘our’rationality has ever had much relation to non-philosophers’ thoughtprocesses. Thus, it is not that in rejecting Holbraad’s ontology of Ifá that Iam taking it less seriously than ‘Western’ thought. Rather I followRichard Handler’s insistence that: “Others are no less capable ofrationality and no more prone to rationalization (however we may definethose two terms) than we are” (Handler 2004:489).

Here it might be argued that Holbraad just has divergent aims from ananthropological approach that focuses on everyday interactions and“accurate representations of the people studied” (p.249). Elsewhere hehas emphasised the philosophical and intellectual basis of his quest:

If culture, at whatever level of abstraction… is a set of representationsproduced by the people we study, then it quite properly is said to ‘belong’



to them: ‘Nuer’ culture, ‘Western’ culture, etc. Not so for ontology, whichis just a set of assumptions postulated by the anthropologist foranalytical purposes (Holbraad 2010:185 my emphasis).

The deeper issue here is that in choosing this methodology forconsidering other people, Holbraad fundamentally undermines thepolitical act that lies at the very foundation of the ontological turn. Thatis, Holbraad can be seen as enacting a similar form of intellectualimperialism against which Viveiros de Castro railed in his originalchampioning of ‘the savage mind’ (2003). By all means let us havephilosophers debate all manner of possible ontologies, but we cannot letthem claim to be the only ones who have ‘truly’ elucidated what is goingon.

The ontological turn’s critique of previous anthropological approacheswas that in its assumption of shared humanity it had built ‘the non-possibility of the Other into its own premise’ (Holbraad 2006, see above).Arguably it seems that Holbraad’s strict methodology, with its intensivefocus on alterity, is potentially just as destructive to the anthropological

endeavour.[7] In stressing alterity, Holbraad creates purified versions of‘the Other’ that end up bearing little relation to people’s lives and denytheir ability to interact with others, as they have and do on a regularbasis, prior to any ontographic intervention. As such the ontographerseems to start speaking for the people being studied and denying theirown agency in their inhabited world. As with his creation of a particularnotion of Ifá divination, Holbraad reifies alterity to the point that heseems to forget that his informants are interacting with each other, andhim, on an everyday basis (cf. Carrithers 2010:186). This is not to say thatHolbraad’s approach is without merit, it is only that, to my mind, his



obsession with alterity drives him to act as imperiously as those againstwhom Viveiros de Castro originally pitted the anthropological method.

In contrast to Holbraad’s approach, I would also note that Viveiros deCastro while recognising the artifice of his own model has also producedsomething of unquestionable use for helping to further elucidatepreviously misunderstood instances and interactions. The most obviousexample, used repeatedly not only by Viveiros de Castro (1998a:475,1998b & 2004) but also by Latour, is to reread the example taken fromLévi-Strauss of Amerindians drowning Europeans to discover whethertheir corpses were subject to putrefaction (1973:384, quoted in Viveirosde Castro 1998a:475). Viveiros de Castro uses the insights ofperspectivism to turn Lévi-Strauss’ observation that “the proof that theywere true humans is that they considered that they alone were the truehumans” on its head:

Now everything has changed. The savages are no longer ethnocentric butrather cosmocentric; instead of having to prove that they are humansbecause they distinguish themselves from animals, we now have torecognize how inhuman we are for opposing humans to animals in a waythey never did (Viveiros de Castro, 1998:475).

As Latour has shown, the potential power of this insight is great and, aswith the wider aims of the ontological turn, can be used to undermineand divert particular Western intellectual traditions and assumptions(Latour 1993, 2002, 2004 & 2009). Thus while the pursuit ofperspectivism may have gone too far in certain cases (Ramos 2012:482)its underlying importance is retained. While it might be argued thatHolbraad’s work could lead to similarly wide insights, the fact is that,discounting the self-serving discussion of his own methodology,



Holbraad has not yet used his apparent insight into the indubitability ofIfá divination to tell us anything else about Cuban life, the history of Ifáor anything wider about social, political, intellectual or culturalinteractions.

To my mind the remedy for these apparent weaknesses in Holbraad’sapproach is found precisely in the central tenet of anthropology whichHolbraad seems so keen to downplay, namely ethnography. MichaelCarrithers noted something similar in his contribution to the 2008 GDATdebate:

One of the features of anthropology as a discipline is precisely that it isn’tphilosophy, but that the union card is ethnography, and the union card ofethnography is actually going and encountering people… This means, Ithink, that it’s radically empiricist in a way that it’s hard for philosophy ofany kind really to wrap its head around what that empiricism would orcould actually be, in the terms in which anthropologists actually practiceit (Carrithers 2010:196).

The power of ethnography is seen in responses to perspectivism where, incontrast to Holbraad’s purely intellectual pursuit, it is ethnography thathas shown how and why Amerindian thought is much more complex thanthe basic philosophical inversions that lie at the heart of Viveiros de

Castro’s work (Turner 2009, Course 2010).[8] While these differencesmight be taken as grist for the ontographic mill, the reality is that theontographic process of purification that Holbraad appears to exemplify islikely only to take us further away from the complexity of reality. Thus,while philosophers may be able to sit around and consider the possibilityof these alternatives, it tends to be ethnography, the actual words, actionsand ideas of other people that generates alternative versions that are



much more complex and novel than anything ‘we’ can dream up. To mymind, Holbraad’s method does not allow us to break free of our ownconceptions and thus ‘really’ understand ‘the other’. Instead his methodis likely to produce new intellectual rails along which suchunderstandings are going to be judged.

Holbraad, in the conclusion to the book, contrasts the ‘strength’ ofWestern intellectual arguments with ‘oracular’ divinations noting that itwas the lack of the former in the latter that so worried earlieranthropologists. It was this that led him to seek out a deeperunderstanding of divinations to show why such argumentation was notneeded. Yet, ironically it is precisely his own search for a ‘strong’intellectual underpinning of divination that in his writings seems to robdivination of its own complexity and underlying self. Thus, while the‘strength’ and ingenuity of Holbraad’s own arguments are to beapplauded the real lacuna in his work is the lack of ethnography thatwould allow the reader to judge his pronouncements more fully as well assee how these apparently different notions of truth play out in theeveryday world and may have wider implications. In a country (i.e. Cuba)synonymous in the international arena with politics, revolution andalternative socio-economic activities it would not seem out of place towonder whether Holbraad’s insights might relate to things of widerimport than his own philosophical musings.

Bufeo[9]

Any discussion touching on the relationship between philosophy andanthropology would be incomplete without reference to Ingold’s well-known dictum: “Anthropology is philosophy with the people in” (Ingold1992: 695-6). Viveiros de Castro used it in his 2003 speech to the ASA



emphasising the importance of ‘native thought’ in the philosophicalproject: “If real philosophy abounds in imaginary savages, thegeophilosophy implied by anthropology strives to articulate an imaginaryphilosophy with the help of real savages” (Viveiros de Castro 2003). ForIngold the key advantage of anthropology over philosophy was preciselyto lessen the ‘exclusivity’ of such intellectual pursuit by enlisting ‘the helpof ordinary people’ (Ingold 1992: 695-6). In taking this notion of ‘nativephilosophy’ forward in his work, however, Viveiros de Castro steadilydetaches anthropological thought from any ethnographic reality. He endsup arguing for “an anthropological theory of conceptual imagination”that creates “those intellectual objects and relations which furnish theindefinitely many possible worlds of which humans are capable”(Viveiros de Castro 2003).

It is this call that I believe Holbraad and, to various degrees, his fellowanthropologists within the ‘ontological turn’ have followed in theirsubsequent work. In its inherent critique of prior intellectual endeavourthat might be deemed not to have taken the thoughts and ideas of others‘seriously’ enough, this approach is important. Yet Holbraad alsoexplicitly takes this intellectual trajectory full circle saying “What is atstake are the ideas, not the people who might ‘hold’ them. So if…anthropology is philosophy with people in it, I’d say [Ingold] is right, butonly without the people” (Holbraad 2010:185).

And in taking the people out Holbraad loses his possible interlocutorswho might limit his reification and exoticisation of their concepts beyondany emic recognition. Moreover, his approach, rather than bringingequality to cross-cultural intellectual debate by emphasising the need tobring a particular philosophical depth to apparently alien concepts,reinforces a very particular intellectual approach to the world. Logically,



if we have removed the people from anthropology then all that is left isphilosophy. The philosopher may worry that anthropologists see onlyundifferentiated fish populating an uninteresting world but just becausewe use a category to make comparisons does not mean that we are blindto the intricacies and possible separations and contradictions within it.

“So long, and thanks for all the fish”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Liana Chua, Magnus Course, Amit Desai, Peter Gow and JonMitchell for their astute comments and suggestions. Any opinions anderrors remain entirely my own.

REFERENCES

Carrithers, Michael, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, Martin Holbraad andSoumhya Venkatesan. 2010. Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture:Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group for Debates inAnthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique ofAnthropology 2010 30(2):152-200.

Course, Magnus. 2010. Of words and fog: Linguistic relativity andAmerindian ontology. Anthropological Theory. 10:247-263.

Course, Magnus. 2013. The Fifth of Five Worlds. Anthropology of thisCentury. Issue 6, Jan 2013.

Gledhill, John. 2010. The discussion, in Ontology Is Just Another Wordfor Culture : Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group forDebates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique ofAnthropology 2010 30(2):152-200.



Handler, Richard. 2004. Afterword: Mysteries of Culture. AmericanAnthropologist. 106(3):488–494.

Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad & Sair Wastell. 2007. Introduction:thinking through things. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad & Sair Wastell(eds.). Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically.London: Routledge. Pp.1-31.

Holbraad, Martin. 2006. Response to Daniel Miller’s review of ThinkingThrough Things on the Material World Blog(http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-things/)

Holbraad, Martin. 2010. Against the Motion, in in Ontology Is JustAnother Word for Culture : Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of theGroup for Debates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester.Critique of Anthropology 2010 30(2):152-200.

Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropologyof Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ingold, Tim. 1992. Editorial. Man. 27(4):693-696.

Kyriakides, Theodoros. 2012. “Nondualism is philosophy, notethnography” A review of the 2011 GDAT debate. HAU: Journal ofEthnographic Theory 2(1):413-419.

Latour, Bruno. (trans. Catherine Porter). 1993. We Have Never BeenModern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno. (trans. Charlotte Bigg). 2002. War of the Worlds: Whatabout Peace?. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

http://www.materialworldblog.com/2006/12/thinking-through-things/



Latour, Bruno. 2004. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Commentson the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck. Common Knowledge. 10(3):450-462.

Latour, Bruno. 2009. Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’? AnthropologicalTheory 25(2):1–2

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. Race et Histoire. In AnthropologieStructurale Deux. Paris: Plon.

Pedersen, Morten A. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds andPolitical Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca NY: Cornell UniversityPress.

Pedersen, Morten A. 2012. Common Nonsense: A review of certain recentreviews of ‘the’ ontological turn. Anthropology of This Century. 5.

Ramos, Alcida R. 2012. The Politics of Perspectivism. Annual Review ofAnthropology. 41:481-94.

Turner, Terence. 2009. The Crisis of Late Structuralism. Perspectivismand Animism: Rethinking Culture, Nature, Bodiliness, and Spirit. Tipití.7/1:3-42.

Venkatesan, Soumhya. 2010. Introduction. in Ontology Is Just AnotherWord for Culture: Motion Tabled at the 2008 Meeting of the Group forDebates in Anthropological Theory, University of Manchester. Critique ofAnthropology 2010 30(2):152-200.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998a. Cosmological Deixis and AmerindianPerspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–88.



Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998b. Les pronoms cosmologiques et leperspectivisme amérindien. Eric Alliez (ed.). Gille Deleuze: Une viephilosophique. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. Pp.429–62.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. AND. Manchester: ManchesterPapers in Social Anthropology.(http://nansi.abaetenet.net/abaetextos/anthropology-and-science-e-viveiros-de-castro)

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Exchanging Perspectives: TheTransformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.Common Knowledge 10(3): 463–84.

Willerslav, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, andPersonhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.

1. The Amazonian electric eel, Electrophorus electrus. ↩2. Arapaima gigus, a gigantic Amazonian fish that must breathe

surface air in order to survive. ↩3. For Viveiros de Castro, as for many other anthropologists, this

engagment with the political goes beyond their academic work toencompass public engagement and activism for and with indigenouspeoples. ↩

4. Cod, most commonly used to refer to the dried and salted form thatis a staple part of the diet of many Spanish and Portuguese speakingcommunities that circle the Atlantic Ocean. ↩

5. I would go further to argue that the Biblical Canon often has littlerelation to the actual worldviews and actions of individuals whowould call themselves ‘Christian’. ↩

http://nansi.abaetenet.net/abaetextos/anthropology-and-science-e-viveiros-de-castro



6. I thank Liana Chua for her discussion on this issue. ↩7. I should note here that Holbraad pushes back against this point by

arguing that “recursive analysis proceeds, not by seeking to verifysome first principle of alterity, but rather by submitting the priorsupposition of similarity to systematic testing so as to determine theexact degree to which it may or may not be carried” (p.249). Hisargument being that he accepts the existence of similarity but weedsthrough it to get at the point of alterity that he finds the mostinteresting. In practice this means that even if he intellectuallyacknowledges the existence of similarity his work leaves no realspace for it. ↩

8. In referring to Turner’s critique it is important to note that in thefoundational (English) text for perspectivism Viveiros de Castromakes the clear observation that “This inversion, perhaps toosymmetrical to be more than speculative” (1998a:470). ↩

9. Used in Peru to refer to the Amazonian, pink, river dolphin. ↩

(Book Review) Whose Truth is it Anyway?

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