A temple by night

By the 1990s most North American cultural anthropologists had long since put Richard Dawkins on their blacklist. By relativist logic he just doesn't get it: every natural fact is a fact only as reckoned within a given cultural frame, a "lifeworld." The cultural subdiscipline set about to uphold its stature within the increasingly science-oriented spectrum of academe by positioning itself as the champion of critical science studies, of "engaged scholarship" with humanitarian or political commitments, and of diversity in the face of globalization. The ontological turn is thus a circling-back to earlier commitments of cultural anthropology, namely the effort to recognize "Other" human constructions of life as importantly, deeply different. Ontology's traditional issues nag at cross-cultural thinking more than ever. Freed from the obligation to find equations between things implicit in cultures and "natural" things, ontological-minded ethnographers became especially good at capturing cultural notions that seem vague, elusive, or illogical to the outsider

Ancient history · Art · Temple · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History

• Worlds Otherwise

  Benjamin Alberti, Severin Fowle et al.•Current Anthropology•2011

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