LÉVY BRUHL AND ONTOLOGICAL DÉJÀ VU: AN APPENDIX TO VIGH AND SAUSDAL

Vigh and Sausdal have recently (2014) raised some concerns about the ontological turn or what I call ‘de Castristism’. They have written cogently about the prospects and problems of anthropological ontologies. This piece is intended as a postscript or appendix to their article. There is some irony that, at about the time that Viveiros de Castro (in his 1998 Cambridge lectures, conveniently published in the journal Hau in 2012) was developing his use of ontology within anthropology, people in informatics led by Tim Berners Lee were developing another very different use of the word, equally distant from its philosophical origins, as part of the so-called ‘semantic web’. As used in informatics, an ontology is a description of the categorical structure of a subject domain, mapping out the relationships and dependencies of its constituent parts so that indexes and searches of catalogues can produce relevant results more efficiently. As many have pointed out, this is beset with problems since only a few domains can be mapped out explicitly and unambiguously, and the existence of uncertainty, contradiction and lack of clarity is part of the social world we live in.1 Leaving that aside, let us return to the use of ontology within anthropology. What should we conclude from its growing popularity? Frequent usage (trendiness?) alone does not a useful concept make, and I for one have some deep reservations which are clearly shared by Vigh and Sausdal (2014). Keane (2013) makes some similar points, particularly in making an important distinction between weak and strong ontologies, arguing that anthropology deals with weak ontologies (accounts of the world) even when claiming they are strong ones (worlds tout court). Following the lead given by their article, I offer some reflections on the ontological turn to complement those of Vigh and Sausdal: one about Lévy-Bruhl’s idea of mentalities, the other about the comparative method and its implications