Metaphysical fascination in the ontological turn of cultural anthropology

Abstract

Ontological questions are becoming increasingly frequent in contemporary cultural anthropology. Under the slogan "taking the other seriously", we no longer speak of cultures as representations of the same world, but of ontologically distinct worlds. The anthropologists of this ontological turn try to overthrow representational assumptions of cultural anthropology, considered as tacit metaphysics. In this methodological movement, ontology has left the philosophical realm to be considered a field of ethnographic comparison. In this article I present the internal contradiction of this movement, pointing out that the ontological turn of contemporary anthropology is not only a methodological contribution but a regime of thought that does not abandon the old dream of a non-representational metaphysics.