This book explores how one measures and analyzes human alterity and difference in an interconnected and ever-globalizing world. This book critically assesses the impact of what has often been dubbed the ontological turn within anthropology in order to provide some answers to these questions. In doing so, the book explores the turns empirical and theoretical limits, accomplishments, and potential. The book distinguishes between three central strands of the ontological turn, namely worldviews, materialities, and politics. It presents empirically rich case studies, which help to elaborate on the potentiality and challenges which the ontological turns perspectives and approaches may have to offer.
Chapter 1: Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology. Anthropological Engagements with Human and Non-Human Worlds
Part I: Worldviews
Chapter 2: Seeing, Being, and Knowing: The Relationality of Species in Chewong Animistic Ontology
Chapter 3: Alterity, Predation, and Questions of Representation: The Problem of the Kharisiri in the Andes
Chapter 4: False Prophets: Blasphemy and Ontological Contests in Indonesian Courts
Chapter 5: Chronically Unstable Ontologies: Ontological Dynamics and the Difference Within
Part II: Materialities
Chapter 6: The Hold Life Has in a Warao Village: Assembling Household and the Practicalities of Everyday Life
Chapter 7: Disrupting School Smartness: Critical Ethnography of Schooling l#*