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Browsing Faculty by Author "Bessire, Lucas"

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    Ontological Anthropology and the Deferral of Critique
    (Wiley, 2014-08) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    What does ontological anthropology promise, what does it presume, and how does it contribute to the formatting of life in our present? Drawing from our respective fieldwork on how Indigenous alterity is coenvisioned and how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized, we develop an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology. This essay, then, provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity. In it, we examine the methodological and conceptual investments of ontological anthropology. The figure of the ontological as commonly invoked, we argue, often narrows the areas of legitimate concern and widens the scope of acceptable disregard within social research. We chart how this paradigm’s analytical focus on the future redefines the coordinates of the political as well as anthropology’s relation to critique. Finally, we formulate three conceptual theses that encapsulate our criticism and open this discussion to further debate.
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    The Ontological Spin
    (American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2014-02-28) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    In the second Commentary essay, Lucas Bessire and David Bond respond to the Theorizing the Contemporary series, “The Politics of Ontology,” edited by Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen.
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    Ontology: A Difficult Keyword
    (Wiley, 2014-09-25) Bond, David; Bessire, Lucas
    Ontology is hard to ignore in contemporary anthropology. From conference abstracts to journal word clouds and job descriptions, ontology is fast becoming a new keyword in marquee debates as well as in the unfolding identity and direction of the discipline. Yet, as even the most sophisticated participants and observers soon realize, the word itself is elusive and polysemous. It holds in unresolved tension diverse semantic genealogies, opposed spatiotemporal scales, and various materialist registers. This animating tension couples profound insights with lively disagreements. At the very least, perhaps we can all agree: Ontology is an instrumentally difficult word.