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This article proposes an approach to non-hegemonic ontologies with the purpose of contributing to the configuration of theoretical places from which conceptions of body, language, and territory are enriched. We make a tour of three notions (naane, kirigai, jabuaienán) coming from different native languages of the Andean-Amazonian indigenous world: the Magütá (Tikuna), minika (Varante dialectal of Uitoto), and Camënts á languages. This approach uses the mechanism of literary transduction, where research converges from the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of Ontography deployed by OOO, clarified and expanded in this essay, produces a highly productive framework for analyzing Salvador Dalí’s ontological project between 1928 and 1935. Through the careful analysis of paintings and original texts from this period, we establish the antecedents for Dalí’s theorization of Surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art, which we collectively refer to as ‘Ontographic art,’ drawing parallels with the tenets of Graham Harman’s and Ian Bogost’s object-oriented philosophical programmes. We respond to the question raised by Roger Rothman concerning Object-Oriented Idealism in Dalí’s work by showing pivotal changes to Dalí’s ontological outlook, from Idealism to Realism, across the aforementioned period, positing the Ontographic intentionality of Dalí’s ontological project in Surrealist art.

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In April 1859, U.S. Army assistant surgeon Charles W. Brewer was dispatched to a remote mountain valley in the Utah Territory with orders to oversee the burial of 120 massacre victims. The scattered bones of overland immigrants who had been murdered by Mormon militiamen were gathered and interred in a series of mass graves. Though Brewer reported that his work was complete, he carried away from the site two skulls and "long tresses of dark and blonde hair of some of the tender victims" (Robinson 1884). One of the crania was recently identified in the collections of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, historically known as the Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C. The analysis of "Specimen 2032" is presented here, along with the history of movements and encounters that brought it to this place. Rather than focus solely on the object's authenticity or its linkages to the massacre site, we examine it within multiple assemblages—lively gatherings of materials, agents, and practices. In moving through these assemblages, the so-called specimen, we argue, is ontologically modified and transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network advocates considering forms in terms of their affordances, "the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs" (6). This depends, however, on the reliable identification of forms in a particular text, activity, ormaterial; and the critical response to John Henry Days gives us evidence that, while we can analyze forms the novel deploys and contains, it remains a challenge to identify the novel's form as a whole. In a different vein, Heather Love'swork ondescription is explicitly concernedwith "forms of analysis," but not with the analysis of formper se. The present examination of JohnHenry Days attempts to bridge such valuable conversations about form and description. This article argues that as John Henry Days grapples with describing forms that constantly remake themselves, it takes a position akin to science and technology studies scholar Michael Lynch's theoretical agnosticism with respect to capital-O Ontology. Refusing anything like a full-blowntheory of form, John HenryDays both practices and advocates provisional taxonomy--touching and moving on--as a way of knowing its ever-changingmaterial. This article's analysis of the describer's nightmare is thus a case study for Lynch's claim that "particular descriptions--including descriptions of ontologies--can make sense, apparently even to others who do not share our grand theories". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mélanges francophones is the property of Galati University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, one that takes seriously the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place. Taking this fact seriously, the article argues, requires us to think about the material world not in terms of ‘objects’, but ecologically, that is, in terms of the processes and conditions under which certain ‘things’ come to be differentiated and identified as particular kinds of ‘objects’ endowed with particular forms of meaning, value and power. The article demonstrates the purchase of this ecological approach through the example of the Mona Lisa. It does so by exploring the rather extraordinary processes of containment and maintenance that are required to keep the Mona Lisa legible as an art object over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a co-laborative laboratory ethnography in a molecular biology laboratory conducting research on environmental epigenetics. It focuses on a single study concerned with the material implications of social differentiation. The analysis briefly raises biopolitical concerns. Its main concern lies with an understanding of the human body as local in its working infrastructure or “inner laboratory”, an understanding that emerges from the co-laborative inquiry between biologists and anthropologist. This co-laborative mode of inquiry raises productive tensions within biology as to the universal or local nature of human nature and within anthropology as to the status of human biology within social theory. The paper cannot resolve this tension. Rather it explores it as an epistemic object in the context of interdisciplinarity, ontography and co-laboration. In concluding, it specifies co-laboration as temporary, non-teleological joint epistemic work aimed at producing new kinds of reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article makes a case for an engagement with language ontologies. Rather than asking what we know about language, theorising with ontologies prompts us to engage with what language is – or, might be. This focus has potential to broaden our work from examining different perspectives on, or ideological approaches to, a single assumed phenomenon (Language), to potentially seeing multiple, different phenomena. To develop our argument theoretically, we draw primarily on research stemming from the ontological turn in anthropology (Blaser, 2009, 2013; Holbraad, 2009; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Viveiros de Castro, 2013 among others), as well as linguistic anthropology (Chernela, 2018; Seargeant, 2010). We dialogue across fields and disciplines—with philosophy, science and technology studies (Latour, 1993; Law, 2015), decolonial studies (Escobar, 2016) and language studies (García and Li, 2014; Li, 2018; Makoni and Pennycook, 2006; Pennycook, 2017, among others)—to situate language ontologies as worlded through linguistic practices. To contextualise the discussion, the paper explores three ontologies of language: language as object, language as practice, and language as assemblage. • Across many domains, language is performed as object in ways which are so naturalised that they are unquestioned. • Applying the equivalent of a one-world world model in language studies is problematic. • Ontology as heuristic and as worlding enables us to discuss language practices. • Language as object, language as practice, and language as assemblage comprise three distinct ontologies of language. • Language may be considered a heterogeneous range of ontological practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]