21/05/2024 08:30 - 16:30

HALL: MARIONETTE - BIBLIOTECA

Proponent: Conty A.

Chair: Conty A.

Speaker: Botz-Bornstein T., Burgio S., Conty A., Hetrick J., Hirmer M., Weir T.

With the publication of Philippe Descola's book Beyond Nature and Culture in 2005, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins celebrated what he called a "paradigm shift" in anthropology, "a new anthropological dawn" that has come to be called "the ontological turn."  By delineating the worlds of animism, totemism and analogism as valid ontological worlds and comparing them to the ontological system of Western modernity called naturalism, Descola's book showed how each world distinguishes subjects and objects in radically different ways, belying the universalisms so typical of Western naturalism.  In accepting other peoples' "ontological self-determination," philosophical anthropology can cease to function according to the "one-world world" (Law, 2015) of Western universals and accept its new mission, "that of being the theory-practice of the permanent decolonization of thought" (Viveiros de Castro, 2009: 4).  The ontological turn can thus reinvent metaphysics, a "meta or trans-metaphysics," in order to think alterity and celebrate a world of many worlds.  In seeking to adopt this paradigm shift within the academic study of religion, this panel seeks proposals that treat the other three ontological systems described by Descola, those of animism, totemism and analogism.  This panel particularly welcomes papers seeking to show how these religious systems differentiate subjects from objects, nature from culture, in ways distinct from Western modernity and its monotheistic foundations.