12. The Ontological Turn: Perspectivism and the Dividual

Welcome to Section 12 of Culture, Body, and Mind. This as an upper-level cultural anthropology course concerning the Anthropology of Body and Mind.

Revision

In Sections 4-6, we considered concepts such as corporeality, personhood, embodiment, and subjectivity in relation to phenomenology.

The Ontological Turn

 In the 1990s, some anthropologists pushed these ideas further. To understand other cultures, anthropologists began to write positively about ontology, perspectivism, relatedness, sentience and the dividual. These ideas began to coalesce into what is often called the Ontological Turn in anthropology.

Self and Individual (Helliwell)

You might recall in Section 2 we questioned whether the notion of "individual" was an adequate concept to describe the self. You might also recall we read in Section 6 about Helliwell's experience of living in a longhouse; how Helliwell reacted the light and sound created by the flimsy 'walls' that connected everyone living in their section of the longhouse. We can see these two things--a critique of the notion of "individual" as well as a phenomenological methodology--coming together in Helliwell's article. Here she observse that the Gerai don't really have an idea of a private self:

a rather different conception of the area [inside the longhouse] than can be accounted for in terms of “private“ households. This is because while yeg diret might superficially translate as “pertaining to the self,” the notion of diret (“self “) does not, in fact, easily accord with Western conceptions of a distinct, bounded ego or subject. Thus, while the term's use often appears parallel to that of the English “self,“ it  extends far beyond this to denote also what English would translate as “we“ or “us”: any group of people which includes the speaker and which is engaged in some shared enterprise is referred to as diret. Like “we“ or “us“ in English, direct has no specific, the limited preference; exactly who is denoted by varies from context to context. Describing [the inside of the longhouse] as an area “pertaining to diret,“ then designates it as pertaining to the English the “us“ as much as it does to the English “self”.

To recap, Helliwell uses a phenomenological methodology (paying careful attention to the experience of light and sound). This leads Helliwell to question of the self as individual (as well as notions of private and public) to explain her experience.

Private Individuals (Habermas)

Highlighting the cultural specificity of the idea of "individual" and how this related to the constructs of private and public is Habermas. This famous a Marxist theorist, describes the emergence of the ideal of the individual and the notions of private and public in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Habermas is neither an anthropologist nor a phenomenologist. But it is informative to see how he points to a similar critique of self as a private individual.

At one point, Habermas quotes Trevelyan, a writer from the 1800s. Trevelyan was disgusted by the new bourgeois homes ("modern private dwellings") with their rooms for individuals: 

What Trevelyan was longed for was the old aristocratic mansions of grandeur which had no 'private' bedrooms! It seems that bedrooms were for displaying grandeur.

Sadly for Trevelyan, this new bourgeois ideal of private individuals living in a family home took off. It has become the dominant model for city and suburban living in the Western world. What was then the "new family life" has now become standard. It's how I was raised.

Can you imagine trying to get by without a clear notion of public and private? Habermas argues that prior to the modern era, no idea of public and private existed. It only emerged and only in Europe as the result of a set of specific factors.

Nowadays, the experience of having private rooms probably assists in socializing young people into being individuals. But this was not the case in pre-Modern Europe, nor is the case among Gerai, where the private individual does not exist. 

In a sense, the dividual is a radically different idea of 'self' compared to the individual. The autonomous, self-driven 'thing' I associate with 'me' as an individual is a historical product of modernity.

Multiple Person or Dividual (Strathern)

So what is another model of self? Since the 1980s anthropologists have been developing the concept of the dividual. Perhaps the most famous exponent is Marilyn Strathern, who did fieldwork on Mt Hagen in Papua New Guinea. 

Strathern argues that for the people of Mt Hagen there is no unitary self as individual. Rather there is a multiple self a dividual.  Put simply, you are someone's child, someone else's partner (spouse, girlfriend etc.), someone's parent (if you have a child), someone's grandchild, someone's worker (if you have a boss) etc. But that is all you are. You cannot separate a sense of self aside from your position as you are related to others.

It follows that those 'others' your boss, grandparent etc. are not individuals either, but only constituted by their relationship to you and the people in their lives. As a result, there are no individuals only what Strathern calls "dividuals". This has profound implications for social life, as Strathern shows in her Critique of the Gift.  I try to shed some light on this in a summary of a small part of Strathern's magnum opus. But actually, Strathern does not single out this concept in a handy quotable section, so to explain I turn Smith:

...the individual is considered to be an indivisible self or person. That is, it refers to something like the essential core, or spirit of a singular human being, which, as a whole, defines that self in its particularity. To change, remove or otherwise alter any part of that whole would fundamentally alter the ‘self’; she ⁄ he would then be, effectively, a different person. By contrast, the dividual is considered to be divisible, comprising a complex of separable—interrelated but essentially independent—dimensions or aspects. The individual is thus monadic, while the dividual is fractal; the individual is atomistic, while the dividual is always socially embedded; the individual is an autonomous social actor, the author of his or her own actions, while the dividual is a heteronomous actor performing a culturally written script; the individual is a free-agent, while the dividual is determined by cultural structures; the individual is egocentric, and the dividual is sociocentric....Ram explains that the dividual has been portrayed as ‘someone with permeable boundaries that allow transactions with substances of native soil’ (1994: 145) as well as with others in the community ⁄society.

You can read the rest of Smith's great overview of the ontological turn here. But now let's look at one application of this dividual concept.

Relatedness & Dividual (Bird David)

Remember when we were looking at Hallowell's research on the Ojibwa? I mentioned that, instead of dismissing the perspectives of other cultures, anthropologists say "Let's say they've got it right. What would that mean?" This is the starting point for the next piece of research we consider; Bird-David on the Nakaya.

Nayaka women

Bird-David expands on Tylor's idea of Animism, Hallowell's research, and Strathern's "dividual". She does this by referring to the Nayaka, a forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer people in Southern India (and by a liberal use of italics):

I derive from Strathern's “dividual“ (a person constitutive of relationships) the verb “to dividuate," which is crucial to my analysis. When I individuate a human being I am conscious of her “in herself“ (as a single separate entity); when I dividuate her I am conscious of how she relates with me. This is not to say that I am conscious of the relationship with her “in itself,“ as a thing. Rather, I am conscious of the relatedness with my interlocutor as I engage with her, attentive to what she does in relation to what I do, to show how she talks and listens to me as I talk and listen to her to what happened simultaneously and mutually to me, to her, to us.… As I understand it, this common experience of sharing space, things, and actions contextualised Nayaka’s knowledge of each other: they dividuated each other. They gradually got to know not how each talked but how each talked with fellows, not how each worked, but how each worked with fellows, not how each shared but how each shared with fellows etc. They got to know not other Nayaka in themselves but  Nayaka as they interrelated with each other....

This document is a selection from her "'Animism' Revisited" essay. For conceptualizing this, make sure you don't get interactionism (the problem of how matter interacts with thought created by Descartes' dualism) and relatedness (how self or person identity is created by relating to other persons, both human and non-human.

Dividuals and non-human others

Because dividuals that they not only relate to other humans but also to non-humans. In this tradition, anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose described her anthropological research method (or practice) as "multispecies ethnography". She uses the word Aboriginal-English word "Country", which means the landscape, the animals, plants and humans in it, the spirits of the ancestors, and so on. She finds these things all interrelated and helping each other by helping themselves.

    The mutual entanglement of benefits is well exemplified in the context of Aboriginal burning. My main example here comes from my research in the northern floodplains... On a humanly pragmatic level, 'firestick farming' involves getting rid of long grass and grass seeds which impede travel. It means being able to see the animal tracks, and thus to hunt better. It means being able to see snakes and snake tracks so as to avoid them....
At the same time, burning benefits other animals: new growth is up to five times richer in nutrients than old growth...and many creatures thrive in the aftermath of fire. The benefit to others is also good for hunters. To quote April Bright, whose home country is in the floodplains not far from Darwin:
        'Burn grass time' gives us good hunting. It brings animals such
         as wallabies, kangaroos and turkeys on the new fresh feed of
         green grasses and plants. But it does not only provide for us
        but also for animals, birds, reptiles and insects. After
        the 'burn' you will see hundreds of white cockatoos digging for
        grass roots. It's quite funny because they are no longer snow
        white but have blackened heads, and undercarriages black from
        the soot. The birds fly to the smoke to snatch up insects.
        Wallabies, kangaroos, bandicoots, birds, rats, mice, reptiles
        and insects all access these areas for food. If it wasn't burnt
        they would not be able to penetrate the dense and long spear grass
        and other grasses for these sources of food.
 Burning the country helps animals and people thrive; the benefit is mutual. The evidence is widespread that Indigenous people's burning was carried out in the patchy patterns that sustain biodiversity...Some landscape ecologists claim that the biodiversity of the Australian continent was the outcome of Indigenous people's fire regimes.
     The further point is that fire, too, is set within the communicative matrix. April Bright stated:
         The country tells you when and where to burn. To carry out this
         task you must know your country. You wouldn't, you just would
         not attempt to burn someone else's country. One of the reasons for
         burning is saving country. If we don't burn our country every year,
         we are not looking after our country.
Country tells you: the proposition prioritises country's communication, and positions human responsibility as knowledgeable action in response to country. Human action is thus both directive and responsive. It is directive in almost every foraging context: how and where to pick conkerberries, how and where to dig for crocodile eggs, and hundreds of other actions that depend on human knowledge, tradition, skill and ingenuity. It is also responsive. One of the ways that country tells April Bright that it is time to start burning, for example, is with the flowering of the 'silky oak' (Grevillea pteridi/blia). Living things communicate by their sounds, their smells, their annoying actions, as with March flies, or their brightness and beauty, as with the bright orange silky oak flowers shimmering in fresh sunshine. Within the communicative matrix of country, people respond to the patterns of connection and benefit, nurturing their own lives and the lives of others.
     The Indigenous philosophical ecology discussed here works with multiple, recursive connections. I see four major areas for dialogue concerning the human situation in relation to the living world. The first is that in this Indigenous system, subjectivity in the form of sentience and agency is not solely a human prerogative but is located throughout other species and perhaps throughout country itself. Subject-subject encounter is an ecological process that undermines the whole basis of hegemonic anthropocentrism, defined as the centring of the human within a dualistic system that hyperseparates humans from nature.
    A second area for dialogue is that life processes, although they rely on humans, do not prioritise human needs and desires. The instrumentalism that pervades much of traditional Western concepts of resources is defined provocatively by Plumwood as the viewpoint 'that all other species are available for unrestricted human use'. Such a view is clearly connected with hegemonic anthropocentrism, and denies reciprocal responsibilities among species. In contrast, within the entanglements of benefit I have analysed, humans are one species among many others, both giving and receiving benefit.
     A third area, touched on only briefly in this paper, is kinship with nature. The consubstantial kindreds known as totemic groups include both human and non-human kin. These groups ensure that non-humans and humans are part of the same moral domain.
    A fourth area is that the ecological system is not activated solely by human agency, but rather calls humans into relationship and into activity. A great deal of the literature on human ecological activities in contemporary Western practice--primarily resource use and resource management--assumes the priority of human knowledge and human intentional action. My work with Aboriginal people indicates an alternative. Rather than humans deciding autonomously to act in the world, humans are called into action by the world. The result is that country, or nature, far from being an object to be acted upon, is a self-organising system that brings people and other living things into being, into action, into sentience itself. The connections between and among living things are the basis for how ecosystems are understood to work, and thus constitute Law in the metaphysical sense of the given conditions of the created world.
     I should like to give the last words here to my teacher Daly Pulkara: 'We been listen to [your] story. You, you whitefella, [you] can listen to story too'. The story he wanted us to listen to is clear but not simple: 'I tell you, nothing can forget about that Law'.  (Rose, D 2005, 'An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human', The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 294-305.)

So what does Bird Rose mean when she writes, "Subject-subject encounter is an ecological process that undermines the whole basis of hegemonic anthropocentrism, defined as the centring of the human within a dualistic system that hyperseparates humans from nature"?

All these terms might sound a bit over-the-top, but if you read the rest of her article, you'll see that Bird Rose, to her credit, writes more clearly than most who could be situated in the Ontological Turn. In fact, in an effort to avoid jargon, she forgoes using a couple of concepts that actually might be useful for students. One is "perspectivism". This is a commitment to looking at the world from the perspective non-human others or persons. So if we establish that Country or a Bear might be a non-human other, how does the world look to them? That's the question that perspectivism seeks to answer. The other is sentience. You might recall from Section 3, sentience is the ability to perceive, feel, and experience the world. According to Descartes, only humans, thinking things, have sentience. For Bird Rose animals, even Country, have sentience.

Perspectivism  (Viveiros de Castro)

To oversimplify, perspectivism is the anthropological concept which holds that anthropologists need to understand how, for example, dogs and cats view humans, not just humans view dogs and cats. Perspectivism is a concept that urges us to consider how non-human other perceive the world in different cultures.It rejects the method of just looking at human perspectives as anthropocentric.  Perspectivism also denies the usefulness of distinguishing nature from culture.

According to perspectivism:

 “non-humans see things [the same way] as ‘people’ [see things]. But the things that they see are different: what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar, what to the souls of the dead is a rotting corpse, to us is soaking manioc [cassava soaked to make beer?]” (478) .

The perspective is embodied. The perspective of the world we humans and animals have is not a representation produced by mind or spirit. Rather, perspectivism is a point of view produced/located in the body.   The soul in all bodies, whether cats, humans, monkeys sees the same things but sees them differently because their bodies are different to ours.

Another example of perspectivism is this anthropological account of Yukaghir hunter in Siberia. The hunter adopts the form of a mouse:

The moose-hide coat, worn with its hair outward, the headgear with its characteristic protruding ears, and the skis covered underneath with a moose’s smooth leg-skin so as to sound like the animal when it moves in the snow—all make the hunter a moose. And yet the lower part of his face below the hat, with its human eyes, nose, and mouth, along with the loaded rifle in his hands, make him a man. Thus it is not that he has stopped being human. Rather, he is not a moose, and yet he is also not not a moose…. A female moose appears from among the bushes with a young calf. At first the animals freeze in their tracks, the mother lifting and lowering her huge head in bewilderment, seemingly unable to solve the puzzle in front of her. But as the hunter moves closer, she is captured by his mimetic performance, suspending her disbelief, and begins to walk slowly toward him with the large-legged calf tottering behind her. At that point the hunter lifts his rifle, and in quick succession shoots both dead.

Can you see how the anthropologist attends to the mouse experience of the situation? That is an example of perspectivism. You can read the rest of the article here.

The Ontological Turn

These new ideas--non-human persons, perspectivism, the dividual, personhood, relatedness--have culminated in a movement in anthropology called "The Ontological Turn".

As you'll recall from Section 3, "ontology" means the study of what kinds of things exist. So in Descartes' ontology, there are two kinds of things: thinking things and non-thinking things. But, if you have got one thing from studying this course so far, you'll realize that this distinction might not apply in other cultures.

Other societies cannot be understood using nature-culture; universal-particular etc. ontologies. It implies that animal (or human) clothing hides a common spiritual essence. Put another way, we spirits adopt human or animal forms; this must be the starting point of a new anthropology.

 The most famous exponent of the ontological turn is Viveiros de Castro. I have summarised his work which bears the rather overwhelming title "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism".

The Upshot

In the last two decades, some anthropologists have come think that in ALL cultures people are both dividual and individual. For instance, my experiences of becoming a school student, a high-school student, becoming a boyfriend, joining a football team, getting married becoming a father, coaching baseball etc. were all life-changing and all involved new roles and new relationships for me. That is the dividual aspect of my self in a Western context, some anthropologists would argue. Conversely, some would argue that in Aboriginal Australian, Nayaka, Mt Hagen societies, people also act as individual in some situations. 

New Zealand declares river a person

For instance, recently the New Zealand government declared the nation's 3rd largest river to be a person. One press report indicates that the legislation recognized what the Indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori, had always known; about the river:  “I am the river and the river is me.” 

French thinker Bruno Latour argues in his We have never been modern that Western cultures have maintained a nonmodern culture; that the subject-object distinction is a kind of false imposition. If you think about the way we might love our pet or our car (giving it a name, mourning its loss after a crash); our favorite sports stadium;  we also treat what Descartes would call 'objects' as if they have subjecthood as if they are what Hallowell calls "non-human others".

So maybe after all this prolonged attempt to understand other cultures, we get back to understanding ourselves and our own culture better. If this is the case, then the anthropological project (of understanding all of humanity in its diversity and its similarity) has been furthered by the investigations into phenomenology and ontology. 

Critiques of the Ontological Turn

For some anthropologists, the ontological turn is a return to the exoticism of past anthropology . This critique is proffered for example by Gupta in the Anthropology@Deakin podcast:

With the so-called ontological turn...there has been a return to a kind of exoticism in the discipline...kinds of subjects...[like ] famers close to urban areas practicing agriculture. Those kinds of subjects are totally absent in the whole ontological literature because I think they would be very difficult to explain. To me that shows that there is a kind of a return to the exotic. You know the whole enterprise of journals like Hau and so forth is about that (Anthropology@Deakin, @  19:32).

Thus like all new movements and trends, the Ontological Turn has its adherents as well as its haters. Speaking personally, some anthropologists I speak to informally seem to think this Ontological Turn excessively exotic and romantic and overlooks political and economic realities.  I'll leave you to make up your own mind (assuming we have separate minds and that we as individuals can make them up!).  

Summary

We have travelled a long way over a difficult conceptual landscape. To aid us in our explorations over this wide thought-territory we could have used more concepts. Alternatively, we might have completed our travels with less. In any case, the important concepts we used to guide our journey included corporeality, dividual, ontology, other-than-human, personhood, perspectivism, relatedness, sentience. 

The main point is that the philosophical tradition of phenomenology was taken up by anthropologists. It lead anthropologists in a direction I don't think I could have predicted, namely that carefully attending to our own experience of other cultures will open us up to their own experience of the world. Phenomenological anthropologists questioned notions of self. This questioning led in two directions. Anthropologists questioned whether:

1. The self was a private individual. In other words, in some cultures a person is a dividual not a dividual. 
2. Things we had previously thought of as non-humans might also have personhood or selfhood. In other words, in some cultures a person is an animal, or a rock, or even the landscape and its animals in general.

In the next section, we take the idea of embodiment and see how anthropologists took it in yet another direction.