After the ontological turn whither radical alerity? From multiple ontologies to “ontic capaciousness”.
Date: Wednesday 21 February 2024 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Venue: ART-25WWC-C120/121
Zoom link: https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/82519073926?pwd=V3Y2M0VuVzRWL3lmTStmanR1ZVZSZz09
Speaker: Dr Chris Vasantkumar
Moderator: Christopher Houston
Discipline: Anthropology
Abstract
This talk articulates a novel framework for understanding radical alterity (i.e., otherness that is more than merely cultural) in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. In it I argue that both ontological anthropologists and important critics of their work have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice. By contrast, building on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology, I develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavour that elaborates a framework of “ontic capaciousness” centered on practice in a single, yet potentially plural world. I suggest we should attend to radical alterity as the materio-cultural precipitate of divergent modes of successful practical action that “tune” and retune human action. Framed in such a manner, I argue that the “bodies” of palpation-based traditional Chinese and dissection-based Western medicines and the “oceans” of traditional Polynesian vestibular and contemporary magnetic navigations are less different cultural representations of a single underlying Reality than they are material embodiments of divergent incommensurable actionable realities
Bio
Dr Chris Vasantkumar is a Lecturer in the Discipline of anthropology at Macquarie School of Social Sciences. His current research involve the anthropology of money, measurement and standardization as well as the anthropology of cash and cashlessness. His research project, “The Qualities of Cash:” An Ethnographic Study of the Shifting Significance of Money in an Incipiently Cashless World” explores divergent attitudes toward money amongst locals and tourists in southern African and on the Indian Subcontinent, and has been funded by a grant from the National Research Council Canada.