Criticism of post-modernizm and post-colonializm caused to question the mission of anthropology in terms of understanding different societies. Materialist, secular and anthropocentric anthropological approaches based on enlightenment and modern assumptions have faced criticism by many disciplines from philosophy and critical theory to science and quantum theory. Anthropology of religion which is a branch of cultural anthropology is also effected by changes within the broader field of anthropology. The aim of this project is to shed light on the potential of the (...) critical approach, which emerged in anthropology of religion recently and underlined the ontology, to understand religious experiences and practices of different societies. This approach is called ontological turn. In this article, first I point out the historical process in anthropology which led to the turn to ontology. Social structuralism and representationalism which played an important role for the formation of anthropology impacted significantly the ways in which anthropology understands nature and human being. According to these assumptions commonly used in anthropology, while human beings try to understand universal and static natural law principles, they create representations about nature. But, for there is only one nature, there must be only one true representation. This attempt to understand nature through representations created the base for the concepts of belief, knowledge, and mind of Edward Tylor who was the pioneer of cultural anthropology. While the mind refers to rational capacity of human being, belief is an area of irrational representations that human beings pragmatically need. Religious assumptions and practices are listed under incorrect representations. The concept of belief has been frequently used after Tylor as well to understand societies which are located outside of modernity. What ontological turn aims with criticism of conceptual framework is to prevent the domination of Western based reality. Therefore, one of the most emphasized arguments is the multiplicity of reality. This approach of ontological turn is called as taking everything serious. New definitions which are made in a way including the experiences of ethnographic objects mean taking them serious. Acceptance of the concepts by anthropologist in the ethnographic field means acceptance of difference in reality. The act of definition and conceptualizing is the act of creating different realities. In many ethnographic researches, ethnographers choses their concepts before entering to the field. This means that trying to fit differences within existing concepts and confirming the existing thoughts from different perspectives. Understanding ethnographic materials with its own terms or analyzing, explaining or interpreting ethnographic phenomenon by eliminating presumptions was always a concern for anthropology. These questions are asked so commonly that they can be seen as banal questions. The difference of ontological turn is not to ask these questions, but to ask ontological questions as an epistemological approach. The base of this ontological approach is the thought that what forms anthropologists’ perspective are not social or cultural but ontological assumptions. Thus, the question to be asked is how anthropologists’ assumptions about what the world is can be eliminated. To sum up, the idea of taking everything serious in ontological turn aims to eliminate the hierarchy between the subject and object of ethnography. Instead of seeing ethnography as an object of anthropology through modern categories, ontological turn suggests seeing ethnography as a real source to create new concepts and analytical tools. (shrink)

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like (...) for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively. (shrink)

This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of (...) terms like “systematizing” and “inter-objectivity” adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one. (shrink)

In the approach that sustains this entire essay, besides my own trajectory as a researcher, the path moves away from the orthodox tradition, the more Kantian one, incorporating in Social Theory a philosophical line for a long time forgotten, by including figures such as Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the founding father, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and many others. They would be the famous authors of vitalism, also known as philosophers (...) of life (Lebensphilosophie), philosophers of process, or philosophers of affect. What are the implications when these figures invade the field of Social Theory, which characteristics can be found and, mainly, which advantages when compared with their more orthodox side and their insistent commitment to Kantian philosophy and its transcendental by-products (power, culture, ideology, discourse, etc)? Following this and other questions, six points will be considered as representative of what we call here an Object-Oriented Social Theory (O.O.S.T.). (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’ ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, (...) its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper’s third section asserts that phenomenology’s substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes. (shrink)

The ontological turn (OT) is a loose cluster of theoretical approaches within cultural anthropology that advocates a synthetic, overarching way forward for ethnographically oriented cultural anthropology. We argue that in order to contribute substantively to ethnobiology the OT needs to distance itself from a long-standing tradition of thinking within ethnography that assumes some kind of fundamental divide between the natural and the social sciences. This distancing seems especially unlikely in light of the meta-anthropological nature of the OT as primarily a (...) perspective on ethnographic methodology. Instead, we advocate for naturalistic theoretical alternatives for thinking about human sociality, where philosophical innovation develops in concert with ongoing empirical work across the biological, cognitive, and social sciences. We illustrate this perspective by drawing on two naturalistic accounts likely to prove more fruitful for ethnobiological practice, namely, trans-genera models of sociality and progenerative views of kinship. (shrink)