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 CRITICAL
ANTHROPOLOGICAL
ENGAGEMENTS IN
HUMAN ALTERITY AND
DIFFERENCE
Edited by

BJØRN ENGE BERTELSEN and

SYNNØVE BENDIXSEN

APPROACHES
TO SOCIAL
INEQUALITY AND
DIFFERENCE
Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference

Series Editor
Edvard Hviding
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Synnøve Bendixsen
University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
 The book series contributes a wealth of new perspectives aiming to
denaturalize ongoing social, economic and cultural trends such as the
processes of ‘crimigration’ and racialization, fast-growing social-economic
inequalities, depoliticization or technologization of policy, and simulta-
neously a politicization of difference. By treating naturalization simulta-
neously as a phenomenon in the world, and as a rudimentary analytical
concept for further development and theoretical diversification, we iden-
tify a shared point of departure for all volumes in this series, in a search
to analyze how difference is produced, governed and reconfigured in a
rapidly changing world. By theorizing rich, globally comparative ethno-
graphic materials on how racial/cultural/civilization differences are cur-
rently specified and naturalized, the series will throw new light on crucial
links between differences, whether biologized and culturalized, and vari-
ous forms of ‘social inequality’ that are produced in contemporary global
social and political formations.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14775
 Bjørn Enge Bertelsen • Synnøve Bendixsen
Editors

Critical
Anthropological
Engagements in
Human Alterity and
Difference
Editors
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen Synnøve Bendixsen
University of Bergen University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway Bergen, Norway

Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference

ISBN 978-3-319-40474-5    ISBN 978-3-319-40475-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956840

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
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nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
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Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgments

Both the idea for and the time and resources for this book project was
made possible by the framework of the broad, theory-driven project
“Denaturalizing difference: Challenging the production of global
social inequality” (DENAT) at the Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Bergen. Moreover, the generous funding of DENAT
made it possible to bring most of the contributors of this book together
for the seminar “Ontologizing Difference: De- and re-naturalizing
boundaries” in Bergen, January 2015. We are grateful for all com-
ments, interventions, and other contributions offered at this seminar,
including those from Tone Bringa, Vigdis Broch-Due, Annelin Eriksen,
Edvard Hviding, Christine M. Jacobsen, Ståle Knudsen, Marianne Lien,
Marit Melhuus, Knut Rio, Olaf Smedal, and Hege Toje. Our thanks
are also extended to our good colleagues at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bergen, for their engagement with issues
at the core of our discipline.
The great people at Palgrave Macmillan—and Mireille Yanow and Milana
Vernikova in particular—also deserve a special thanks for their support, pro-
fessionalism, and continued belief in this book project. We are grateful to
the anonymous reviewer who provided us with useful critique and com-
ments to push this book project forward. We would also like to thank those
that have provided feedback to various aspects of the volume, including the
Introduction to the book. Our gratitude extends, in particular, to Thomas
Hylland Eriksen, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen for their
keen, close, and critical reading of an early draft of the Introduction to this

v
vi Acknowledgments

volume, as well as to Henrik Vigh who early on engaged with the guiding
ideas of the book as well as several of the chapters.
Lastly, we would like to mention, especially, all the contributors to this
volume who have taken part in this journey with us—from initial idea to
now a book completed. Thank you!
 Contents

1 Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology:

Anthropological Engagements with Human
and Non-Human Worlds   1
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Synnøve Bendixsen

Part I Vistas  41

2 The Relationality of Species in Chewong Animistic

Ontology  43
Signe Howell

3 Alterity, Predation, and Questions of Representation:

The Problem of the Kharisiri in the Andes  65
Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard

4 False Prophets? Ontological Conflicts

and Religion-Making in an Indonesian Court  89
Kari Telle

5 Chronically Unstable Ontology: Ontological Dynamics,

Radical Alterity, and the “Otherwise Within” 113
Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme

vii
viii Contents

Part II Materialities 135

6 The Hold of Life in a Warao Village: An Assemblage

Analysis of Householding Practices 137
Christian Sørhaug

7 Disrupting Book Smartness: Critical Ethnography

and the “Ontological Turn” in Anthropology and
Educational Studies 159
Lars Gjelstad

8 Beyond Cultural Relativism? Tim Ingold’s “Ontology

of Dwelling” Revisited 181
Are John Knudsen

Part III Politics 203

9 Ontological Turns Within the Visual Arts: Ontic

Violence and the Politics of Anticipation 205
Martin Thomassen

10 Alter-Politics Reconsidered: From Different Worlds to

Osmotic Worlding 229
Kathinka Frøystad

11 “It Seems Like a Lie”: The Everyday Politics of World-

Making in Contemporary Peru 253
Astrid B. Stensrud
 Contents  ix

12 Reading Holbraad: Truth and Doubt in the Context

of Ontological Inquiry 273
Eldar Bråten

Postscript: Taking the Ontological Turn Personally295

Adam Reed

Index305
 List of Contributors

Synnøve Bendixsen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of

Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, with a Ph.D. from École des
hautes études en sciences and Humboldt University. Her research interests
include irregular migration, refugees, Islam and Muslims in Europe, polit-
ical mobilization, borders, and religiosity. She has written a number of
articles and book chapters, and one monograph: The Religious Identity of
Young Muslim Women in Berlin (2013). Bendixsen is the co-editor of the
Nordic Journal of Migration Research.
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is an associate professor at the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has researched issues such
as state formation, cosmology, violence, colonialism, egalitarianism, and
rural–urban connections in Mozambique since 1998. Bertelsen has
authored the monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Sociality
and Power in Mozambique (2016), as well as co-edited Crisis of the State:
War and Social Upheaval (with Bruce Kapferer, 2009), Navigating
Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania,
ca. 1850 to 1950 (with Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland, 2015), and Violent
Reverberations: Global Modalities of Trauma (with Vigdis Broch-Due,
2016).
Eldar Bråten is an associate professor at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bergen. His research has focused on a range
of topics emerging from fieldwork in Central Java, Indonesia: Islamization,
concepts of self and person, cultural heritage, entrepreneurship, and state
decentralization. During the last few years, Bråten has also ­carried out

xi
xii List of Contributors

research on historical transformations of social inequality in Norwegian

rural communities. Among his publications is the edited volume Embedded
Entrepreneurship: Market, Culture and Micro-Business in Insular Southeast
Asia (2013).
Kathinka Frøystad is Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the
University of Oslo, with a disciplinary specialization in social anthropol-
ogy. Her previous works include Blended Boundaries: Caste, Class and
Shifting Faces of Hinduness in a North Indian City (2005) as well as vari-
ous articles on political and ritual dimensions of religious diversity and
change in India.
Lars Gjelstad is an associate professor and head of studies at the
Department of Vocational Teacher Education at Oslo and Akershus
University College of Applied Sciences. He conducted 20 months of field
research on youth, education, and cultural complexity in Java, Indonesia.
As a postdoctoral student at the University of Bergen, he shifted his
research field to youth and vocational education in Norway.
Signe Howell is a professor emeritus at the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Oslo. She obtained her D.Phil. at the
University of Oxford in 1981 with a thesis entitled Chewong Modes of
Thought. It was based on 18 months fieldwork with the Chewong, a
small hunting–gathering and shifting cultivating group who lived in the
tropical rainforest of the Malaysian Peninsula. Chewong adhered to an
animistic ontological understanding. Subsequently, she has undertaken
fieldwork in eastern Indonesia. Howell has written extensively on issues
related to cosmology, religion, personhood, ritual, and kinship which
have been published. The following are a few publications of relevance
for this volume: Society and Cosmos; Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia
(1984); Knowledge, causality and morality in a “luckless” society (2012);
Seeing and knowing: Metamorphosis and the fragility of species (2016); For
the sake of Our Future: Sacrificing in Eastern Indonesia (1996); Battle of
cosmologies: The Catholic Church, adat, and “inculturation” among
Northern Lio, Indonesia (in press).
Are John Knudsen is a senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.
Knudsen specializes on peacebuilding, micro-conflict, and forced migra-
tion in the Middle East. He is the author of Violence and Belonging: Land
Love and Lethal Conflict in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan
(2009) and co-editor of three books: Palestinian Refugees: Identity, Space
 List of Contributors  xiii

and Place in the Levant (2010); Lebanon: After the Cedar Revolution
(2012); and Popular Protest in the New Middle East: Islamism and Post-­
Islamist Politics (2014).
Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard is an associate professor at the Department of
Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. Ødegaard is author of the
monograph Mobility, Markets and Indigenous Socialities: Contemporary
Migration in the Peruvian Andes (2010), and has contributed with a chap-
ter in the recently published book Contested Powers: The Politics of Energy
and Development in Latin America, edited by J.A. McNeish,
A. Borchgrevink, and O. Logan (2015). Ødegaard’s work has been pub-
lished in journals such as Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
Ethnos, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Journal of Ethnobiology and
Ethnomedicine, Forum for Development Studies, and Journal of Development
Studies (forthcoming), among others. Her research interests include ques-
tions of indigeneities, landscape, and cosmology in the Andes, as well as
questions related to urbanization, space, neoliberalism, labor, illicit econo-
mies, gender, energy politics, and state.
Adam Reed is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University
of St. Andrews. His research includes fieldwork conducted in Papua New
Guinea and the UK, and ranges between legal anthropology, anthropol-
ogy of ethics, anthropology of the city, and anthropology and literature.
Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme is an associate professor at the Department
of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He has conducted two years
of fieldwork in Ifugao, the Philippines, with both practitioners of tradi-
tional animistic religion and in Pentecostal congregations. He has a par-
ticular interest in the human–animal–spirit relational complex and written
extensively on these matters which have been published. His works
include the monograph Pigs and Persons in the Philippines: Human-­
Animal Entanglements in Ifugao Rituals (2014) and articles like
“Actualizing spirits: Ifugao animism as onto-praxis” in Animism in
Southeast Asia (2016) and “A dispositional account of causality: From
herbal insecticides to anthropological theories on emergence and becom-
ing” (Anthropological Theory 2014). Remme has also co-edited the forth-
coming volume Human Nature and Social Life: Perspectives on Extended
Socialities (Cambridge University Press).
xiv List of Contributors

Christian Sørhaug is an associate professor of Social Science at Department

of Health and Social Research at Østfold University College. He holds a
Ph.D. (2012) in social change among the Warao in Venezuela. His current
research concerns indigenous identity and change, elderly care, urban
minorities, cultural heritage, migration, and household studies. The ethno-
graphic fields are situated in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Romania, and Norway.
The theoretical concerns revolve around Science and Technology Studies
(STS)/Actor-Network Theory (ANT), materiality, political ecology, and
performativity.
Astrid B. Stensrud holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the
University of Oslo. She has a postdoctoral position at the Department of
Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, as part of the project
“Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalization”. Having done ethno-
graphic research in the Peruvian Andes since 2001, her current research
interests include environment–human relations, climate change, water
management, globalization, state practices, ontologies, and the political.
The Ph.D. dissertation focused on entrepreneurial activities and animistic
practices in a working class neighborhood in Cusco, Peru. Stensrud’s cur-
rent postdoctoral project examines responses to climate change and water
politics in the Majes-Colca watershed in Arequipa, Peru.
Kari Telle is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at the Chr.
Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway. Her research in Indonesia focuses
on the anthropology of religion, with particular focus on Hindu and
Muslim relations, secularism and religious minorities, militias and vernac-
ular security, place, and landscape. She is co-editor of a special issue on
Performing the State (2016) on religious militias in Southeast Asia, and
co-edited the volume Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and
the Post-Nation State (2010).
Martin Thomassen is an associate professor of Social Anthropology at
the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim,
Norway. His contribution as a lecturer has first and foremost revolved
around globalization, postcolonialism, and political ecology. He has done
fieldwork among peasants in the Kenyan highlands and northern Norway.
His added educational training in intellectual history from Clark University
in Massachusetts and later University of Oslo has of late developed into a
keen interest in the anthropology of art seen within a “global ­conversational”
perspective developed at the department in Trondheim by his colleague
Tord Larsen.
 CHAPTER 1

Recalibrating Alterity, Difference, Ontology:

Anthropological Engagements with Human
and Non-Human Worlds

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Synnøve Bendixsen

A longitudinal review of the anthropological literature will show that

usage of the concept of “ontology” has increased dramatically: Drawing
on Google Scholar one can see that between 1960 and 1990 there were
only eight articles published which had anthropology and ontology-­
related words in the title, while between 1990 and 2016 the number was
approximately 90. And akin to the ontological maneuver of a reversal of
perspectives, our impression is that these 90 merely comprise the tip of
the proverbial iceberg. In other words, anthropology has literally become
awash with debates invoking ontology in a myriad ways—and, crucially,
in ways that are often mutually incompatible. Opening Google Scholar’s
gates of knowledge—or, more correctly, the digital sediments of research
texts—will therefore lead you to “ontology” being inferred in what may
seem as sprawling and ultra-diverse anthropological discourses.
The notion of ontology is, of course, also integral to non-­anthropological
political analyses, such as in critical analyses of capitalism. For one, the French
philosopher Alain Badiou refers to the “ontological virtue of capital” (quoted

B.E. Bertelsen (*) • S. Bendixsen

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
e-mail: Bjorn.Bertelsen@uib.no

© The Author(s) 2016 1

B.E. Bertelsen, S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical Anthropological
Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_1
2 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

in Pignarre and Stengers 2011, xii) while, for instance, the anonymous
politically radical group The Invisible Committee in a recent book describes
the totalizing ontology of a capitalist world itself where (almost) all alterworlds
or outsides have receded into or been co-opted by capitalism (The Invisible
Committee 2015 [2014]). Such relatively recent turns of theory and meth-
odologies—in anthropology and beyond—are informed by disparate analy-
ses of scholars so differing in perspective as, for instance, Marilyn Strathern,
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad,
Philippe Descola, Martin Holbraad, Morten Axel Pedersen, Marisol de la
Cadena, Bruce Kapferer, Isabelle Stengers, John Law and Michael W. Scott,
to name a few. However, what is shared among all of these, we argue, is that
they in profoundly varied and sometimes also conflicting ways develop forms
of anthropology where, first, a notion of difference is accentuated and, sec-
ond, where such difference is analytically explored and theoretically circum-
scribed (if not fully empirically represented) as somehow bounded, tangibly
other or, also, as existing within entities.
However, beyond stating a sharp rise in the usage or invocation of the
term and beyond recognizing the accentuation and tentative entification
inherent to usage of “ontology” as difference, how is one, possibly, to
define or assess the impact and direction of the so-called ontological turn—
a term first coined by the anthropologists Henare et al. (2007, 7–10)?1
When seeking to respond to such a question, one needs first to note that for
anthropology the notion of “ontology” was, at least initially, seen to belong
to the domain of particularly phenomenological, ritual or philosophical
anthropological analyses. These analyses regularly drew on perspectives
from philosophers like Alfred Schutz, Paul Ricoeur, Martin Heidegger and
Edmund Husserl and generally deployed insights from the discipline of phi-
losophy’s much-longer engagement with the term. However, from such
a position of relative stability as to the meaning of the term “ontology”,
the notion has now become disciplinarily dislodged and infuses a range of
anthropological debates concerning, for instance, the nature of perspec-
tive, representation and truth, the intricacies of material and human agen-
cies, and the emergence and possibility of alter-­politics. How can we make
anthropological sense of such diverse debates and fields—all of which are
often defined as or ascribed to the so-called “ontological turn” (hereafter
unbracketed)? In light of the fact that anthropologists arguably always have
studied other people’s worlds, does the series of new engagements with
“ontology” even qualify as “a turn”, in the sense of a reorientation or novel
direction? Or may it, simply, be seen as a re-­run, a return to and rehashing
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 3

of previous positions in anthropology and related disciplines? And, more

crucially, what is at stake in these debates in relation, particularly, to notions
of alterity and difference—notions of anthropological pre-eminence habitu-
ally articulated analytically and conceptually as “culture”, “epistemology”
and “cosmology”?
While such questions are engaged in various ways by all contributors to
this book, this Introduction will elaborate on these issues through an exami-
nation of contributions to the ontological turn in terms of its promises,
premises and politics. Specifically homing in on the posture and construc-
tion of alterity and difference in this regard, we seek also to elaborate briefly
on the three strands of the ontological turn that we have identified as central
and which organizes the book—vistas, materialities and politics—followed
by a short discussion of the main critical contentions concerning the onto-
logical turn, before providing a short overview of the book’s chapters.

Knowing the World: What and How

On one level, one may argue that the ontological turn goes for the prover-
bial disciplinary throat through attacking the stuff anthropological theory
is made of, namely the inseparable questions of “What can I know about
the world?” and “How can I know the world?” Framed this way, it thereby
melds methodological anthropological procedures with theoretical and
analytical implications. One position sometimes expounded here is to take
informants’ world—in its ontological sense—seriously in their own right,
for instance, through deploying indigenous conceptualizations in order to
obviate ethnocentric impositions. Such an ambition is, for instance, clearly
stated in the introduction of Thinking Through Things, where Henare
et al. (2007, 16) advocate for a “methodology that allows for concept
production that makes worlds”. They further hold that a methodologi-
cal move to “make worlds” (in the plural) is made feasible by abolishing
the distinction between concepts and things. A similar deep-seated auto-­
critique of anthropological concept-making and unease with the nature
of representation informs also anthropologist Martin Holbraad’s Truth
in Motion (2012), which as a methodological and theoretical experiment
seeks to re-center anthropological concept creation through engaging and
re-deploying recursively informants’ perceptions and methods of truth-­
making practices (see also Bråten, chapter 12). A comparable sense of
a “world-making” disciplinary engagement—but one informed by the
world—is found in the French philosopher, anthropologist and ­sociologist
4 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

of science Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (2013

[2012]). Latour’s project here, it appears, is to open up the world
through eradicating it of subject–object distinctions and nature–culture
divisions seen to hamper our appreciation of the interconnected charac-
ter of the planet or Gaia, as he terms it—only infrequently (e.g., Latour
2015) acknowledging his debt to James Lovelock (2000 [1979]). Latour
argues that we need analytically “to try to benefit from the plurality of the
ontologies that we have just released from the crushing division between
Object and Subject” (Latour 2013 [2012], 182).
Several aspects of importance to anthropological practice are revealed by
these three snippets and by way of opening up the questions of the “what”
and “how” of anthropology. We will mention only a few more here.
For one, the ontological turn directs itself against the persistent root
assumption in sciences of the unity of nature, and the common distinction
between nature and culture, for example, which is approached as the prob-
lematic outcome of a Western dualist ontology which, in turn, is also inherent
to capitalism (see, e.g., Tsing 2015). Generally, it is held that dualist assump-
tions have come to underlie much of how the West pursues scientific reason-
ing and research through, for instance, the division between the natural and
the social. In this sense radicalizing anthropology’s long-standing critique of
a Cartesian dualism (see, e.g., Strathern 1980) as well as exercising a variety
of the discipline’s much-lauded project of so-called cultural critique (see, e.g.,
Marcus and Fischer 1986), many approaches within the ontological turn aims
to end this dichotomy’s hold on anthropological thought.
Second, it is also an approach where a rethinking of the discipline’s
methodological approach and apparatus is particularly significant. Put
differently, it challenges the general anthropological pattern of reason-
ing concerning the relationship between data and analysis by reversing
the sequence, arguing that ethnography should transform the concepts
used (Laidlaw and Heywood 2013).2 And because any anthropological
­undertaking, theoretical as well as methodological, necessarily is compara-
tive, the starting point for exploring and later analytically defining signifi-
cant and localizable patterns, structures, values, processes and practices will,
by default, relate to some notion of alterity and difference (Detienne 2008
[2000]; Gingrich and Fox 2002; Kapferer 2012 [1988]). Unsurprisingly,
alterity and difference are precisely domains that concern much anthro-
pology associated with the ontological turn, as we shall discuss.
Third, what is at stake in the debate on the ontological turn is also a
concern with the discipline’s relation to both the domain of the political
per se, as well to the spectrum of possible analyses of how politics may be
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 5

constituted, enacted and analyzed. For some, as anthropologist Ghassan

Hage, the future of a critical anthropology is therefore one that has the
potential to ultimately encourage as well as generate different forms of pol-
itics. Such potential for a different politics to emerge from anthropology’s
radical orientation relies, in his view, precisely on a recognition of ontolog-
ically differentiated alterity and possibility (Hage 2012, 2015). Working
on often Latin American material, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena
(2014) provides a similar intervention into the debate. In her interpreta-
tion of what an ontologically informed anthropology means lies the pos-
sibility to unfold the situated conditions of politics in order, ultimately, to
unsettle modern politics’ hegemony (Cadena 2014). The potential of onto-
logical difference to shape novel forms of politics, expounded by Cadena
and Hage, has also made an impact beyond anthropology. For instance, as
famed radical political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negro write
commenting on the direction and potential of Amazonianist and anthro-
pologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “Our aim here—and Viveiros de
Castro’s too—is not to advocate an unmodern Amerindian ontology but
rather to use that perspective to critique modern epistemology and push it
toward an altermodern rationality” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 124).
Thus, the ontological turn can be viewed as a response to, and an
extension of, long-standing debates about the necessary diversification of
anthropology—also at the global scale and including emerging positions of
postcolonial anthropology external to age-worn traditions of thought in
Euro-American academia (see, e.g., Devisch and Nyamnjoh 2011; Mignolo
2011; Santos and Meneses 2010). Rather than a short-lived fad we consider
the ontological turn as part of anthropology’s long-­standing practice of
auto-critique: since the postwar period, anthropologists have taken it upon
themselves to be self-critical and engage in radical critiques of its founda-
tions and fundament. Think, for example, of the postcolonial turn, where
anthropologists like Talal Asad (1973; see also Mafeje 1996) contributed
importantly to initiating a critique of anthropology’s relations to colonial-
ism (see also, e.g., L’Estoile et al. 2005; Ntarangwi et al. 2006). Or recall
the so-called reflexive or cultural turn in the 1980s, with contributions
from, for instance, Marcus and Fischer (1986) which continue to impinge
on the discipline and its practice. In the ontological turn one may identify
a similar urge for a reconstitution of a radical anthropology that takes the
concern of the human itself seriously and does not, a priori, assume a sin-
gular political human being—a universal homo politicus (see also Pedersen
2012a). There is, however, a crucial difference between the ontological
turn’s general insistence on difference and the reflexive or c­ ultural turn of,
6 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

for instance, George Marcus who in 2007 argued that “few anthropolo-
gists would set out on research in the contemporary world while laying
claim to this pure purpose for ethnographic inquiry of exploring cultural
alterity as ‘Other’” (Marcus, quoted in Willerslev 2016, vi).3
However, in general and as these three briefly introduced aspects hope-
fully have indicated, the “what” and the “how” of anthropological practice
is destabilized by various interventions from the ontological turn—with
methodological as well as political implications. In sum, this includes a
turn of the focal point of the discipline and a re-accentuation—again in
the domain of difference and alterity—of anthropology’s objects which
should, according to Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(2004, 2015), be ontologies and not epistemologies (cf. Toren and Pina-­
Cabral 2011). But what constitutes “ontologies” in this context?

Singularity or Multiplicity: Ontology

and the Human

As is well known, there has been much temperature in exchanges about

the ontological turn—an aspect also dealt with by anthropologist Adam
Reed in his postscript to this volume. Much ink and megabytes have also
been spent deliberating on the turn’s possible merits and perils, possi-
bilities and problems (for merely a few examples, see Viveiros de Castro
2015; Graeber 2015; Sismondo 2015; de la Cadena et al. 2015). While
the modes of critique are as multifarious as that, for lack of a better term,
assemblage which is concealed by the shorthand “the ontological turn”,
many critics are particularly concerned with the term “ontology”, asking,
for instance, “is ontology just another name for culture?” (Carrithers et al.
2010). Such critique is often based on the ontological turn’s advocates
frequently being seen to fail to clarify how they approach the term ontol-
ogy differently from the use in philosophy—the domain from whence it
was imported, transmogrified and re-deployed, one might say. Graeber,
for instance, argued that it has been defined as a “way of being”, a “man-
ner of being” and the “nature of being in itself” (Graeber 2015, 15–18).
Lloyd (2012, 59) contends that ontology is also sometimes inferred or
defined as “accounts of what there is”, broadly speaking referring to phi-
losopher Martin Heidegger’s meaning of the term “ontology”.4
Critics such as Lloyd and Graeber are perfectly right to hold that there
are no singular, unifying definitions of ontology at hand—a diversity
which alludes to the multiple incarnations of an ontological anthropol-
ogy. However, and this is quite important, most scholars affiliated with
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 7

the turn do see such plurality not as a problem but as, precisely, part of the
project. This is illustrated by Viveiros de Castro’s recent definition—draw-
ing on his long-term inspiration from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze:
“Ontology is outlined here by the author as an anti-epistemological and
counter-cultural, philosophical war machine” (Viveiros de Castro 2015,
2; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1986; Viveiros de Castro 2014 [2009],
159–171).
Thus, given such a critical program of continuous movement and de-­
territorialization, to be within keeping of Viveiros de Castro’s Deleuzian
approach to ontology, it is no wonder that most emphasize aspects such as the
(continuous) production of plurality and practices of anti-hegemonic decon-
struction of dominant terms as, for instance, “nature”, “truth” and “reality”.
Furthermore, the turn may be seen to be composed of continued attempts
to decenter what being human entails and the porous or negotiated nature
of its boundaries to other species and materialities. For instance, in anthro-
pologist Michael W. Scott’s argument for the salience of a “poly-ontological
cosmology” approach to understand Makira socio-­cultural trajectories and
worlds (Scott 2007, 12–13), he defines ontology as “the investigation and
theorization of diverse experiences and understandings of the nature of being
itself” (Scott 2013, 859). This open and experimental approach to human
being, that is, a stance contra the a priori definition of what humanity is com-
prised of, is also what informs anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s (2015) work
on nature and forests. He defines “ontological anthropology” broadly as:

the nonreductive ethnographic exploration of realities that are not neces-

sarily socially constructed in ways that allow us to do conceptual work with
them. I see this as a response to a conceptual, existential, ethical, and politi-
cal problem—how to think about human life in a world in which a kind of
life and future that is both beyond the human and constitutive of the human
is now in jeopardy. (Kohn 2015, 315)

Again, the political impetus underlining this sense of urgency—and an urgency

to open up the discipline—is here clearly perceptible, specifically in relation to the
ecological crisis and the figure of the Anthropocene. A similar sense of urgency
as that expressed by Kohn also underlies anthropologist Anna L. Tsing’s analy-
sis of how humans must re-adapt and re-­connect with nature in new ways as
capitalism has destroyed major parts of the planet’s ecosystem and depleted its
resources (2015). However, expressions of urgency is not only confined to the
domain of ecology or the global impact of the Anthropocene, but is also inte-
gral to the ambition among many who are affiliated with the turn in the sense
of being true to the world which they describe. This ambition of “writing the
8 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

world” comes very close to a related term, namely “ontography”—to describe

“things as they are”. Such a departure from general philosophical ontology in
order to return to particular empirical and historical circumstances—an ontog-
raphy for the science and technology studies—is expressed by, for instance,
Lynch (2013). Also indicative of such a reading of a naturalism, a form of neo-
positivism, for anthropology is that Holbraad chooses to use the term “ontog-
raphy” when synthesizing the methodological suggestion in his book Truth
in Motion (Holbraad 2012, 255–259). Indeed, departing from famed French
philosopher and historian Michel Foucaults’ understanding of discourse as cre-
ating its object while maintaining that there is a real world out there, Henare
et al. (2007, 13) pursue a radical constructivism by arguing that “[d]iscourse
can have effects not because it ‘over-determines reality’, but because no onto-
logical distinction between ‘discourse’ and ‘reality’ pertains in the first place.
In other words, concepts can bring about things because concepts and things
just are one and the same”. Such an orientation toward an unmediated world
(as opposed to its derivative concepts or established discourses) also fuels the
quest for what anthropological knowledge is, a quest that regularly probes the
difference or non-difference between the anthropologist and the native, as for
instance Viveiros de Castro (2013) does. The native is defined by anthropolo-
gists’ presupposition that the native’s relationship with culture is natural, while
the anthropologists must be able to express his or her culture reflexively, condi-
tionally and consciously.
In these attempts—from Tsing and Kohn to Henare and Viveiros
de Castro—one may identify a particular form of realism or, at least, an
ambition to produce anthropologies that are more directly informed by
ethnographic realities as these are understood.5 Put differently, what is
proposed may be seen to be modeled on an ideal that human and natu-
ral worlds should overlap with or complement anthropological worlds,
thus bypassing the problems of representation and discourse, cosmology
and epistemology. Paradoxically, this sense of convergence or overlap—a
hyperpositivism in a sense—is simultaneously informed by notions of onto-
logical difference or alterity.

Alterity and Difference, or the Engines

of the Ontological Turn

Given that the ontological turn shuns singularity—or at least universal-

ity—and given that it is oriented toward anti-hegemonic pluralization, it
seems fair to argue that a key premise of the ontological turn revolves
around a re-emphasis of anthropology’s long-term concern with alterity
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 9

and difference. One may even argue, as some do, that anthropology’s main
project is to grasp alterity (Nielsen 2013). However, the notion of differ-
ence has a protracted and complex history in anthropology—informing
analyses of local as well as national cosmologies in cultural anthropology
(see, e.g., Keesing 1992), being the motor or logic of analyses of dichoto-
mous pairs in structural anthropology (see, e.g., Lévi-Strauss 1968 [1958]
or Descola 2013 [2005]), as well as being crucial to any understanding of
boundary-making, in its broadest sense, in what can be termed political
anthropology (see, e.g., Malkki 1995). But difference has also informed
(and perhaps amplified) anthropological analyses of cultural distinction
where this was not always easily distinguishable from notions of race or
inequality (Hastrup 1995). Early anthropologists studied people that were
approached as inhabiting domains outside modernity and who were radi-
cally different not only in terms of living or technological approaches, but
also in modes of cosmology, sense of reality and the manner in which they
dwelled in their surroundings (Hage 2012, 288; see also Lévy-Bruhl 1926
[1910]; Sahlins 1995). In moments of self-scrutiny, anthropologists have
described this approach as producing a “savage slot” (Trouillot 2003) or
belonging to an era of “primitivist anthropology” (Hage 2012).
However, beyond various forms of primitivization of a wide range of
Others, the notion of difference is undoubtedly intrinsic to anthropology.
Particularly, it is linked up to one of the discipline’s foundational axioms,
namely that cross-cultural comparison necessarily presumes the simultane-
ous existence of (discovered or yet to be discovered) cross-cultural patterns,
actions, materialities, as well as radically different patterns, actions, mate-
rialities and so on. In this common anthropological perspective, the dis-
cipline’s critical potential is realized through its comparative exercise (see,
e.g., Kapferer 2012 [1988]; van der Veer 2016). This enduring comparative
ambition is shared by many of the ontological turn, but it emerges often
with a clear twist—as for instance by reinterpreting the anthropological cul-
tural critique dictum of expressing that people who live differently from us
are relevant to us expanded into showing that “we can be radically other
than what we are” (Hage 2012, 289). Indeed, the anthropologist Morten
Nielsen (2013) argues that conventional anthropological thinking in itself
can be said to engage in a particular horizon of knowledge that is rooted in
a fundamental separation between representations and things’ domains, and
the mutual relationship of the representations are determined by whether
they are able to reproduce reality as it is. Difference, in this approach, is thus
a function of the representation rather than the world at large. However,
argues Nielsen (2013), this way to represent matters carries a paradox which
10 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

necessitates a radically other approach to difference and variety: if difference

is viewed as a function of cultural representations, then the division between
representation and reality becomes the standard that defines difference as
variation, rather than as difference (see also Strathern 1988). One conse-
quence of this approach is that no matter how absurd our informants’ ideas
about the world seem to be, they all fall within the category of cultural rep-
resentations. For Viveiros de Castro (1992), anthropology can offer criti-
cal perspectives by positioning itself in a space where otherness is radically
other while simultaneously speaking to us—also holding multiple possibili-
ties for productive forms of misunderstanding in such exchanges (Viveiros
de Castro 2004; see also, again, Hage 2012). Related, Isabelle Stengers, a
philosopher of science, argues that “[w]e do not have to invent ourselves as
radically different from what we are, for we are already very different from
what we believe ourselves to be” (2000, 165).
But which exact similarities and differences are presupposed by such
cross-cultural comparison? What is the ontological status of difference? In
the world? In anthropological thought, analysis and method? Is difference
merely treated as a heuristics—a set of metaphors for addressing mecha-
nisms of distinction, such as class, gender, race, culture or species that are
foregone in order to construe analyses comprising a multiplicity of realities
and a multiplicity of the potentialities of the human body (Hage 2015)?
Disagreements with and critiques of the ontological turn is largely con-
cerned with how anthropologists should study, define and write about dif-
ference (see, e.g., Vigh and Sausdal 2014). The broad uses of the term
difference in anthropology—oftentimes invoked in a commonsensical way
and sometimes more precisely defined—call for many questions, also if
invoked in relation to ontology. For one, should difference necessarily be
seen as alter—as part of a dialectic, a mirror image, the other of a pair—in
concrete socio-cultural or political contexts? Or should we see difference as
a figure undergirding the founding tales of anthropology—a re-­invocation
of the West and the Rest, North and South? Or, perhaps, a reinterpreta-
tion of great civilizational divides between distinct wholes, as some pro-
ponents of the ontological turn are accused of proposing? Does such an
understanding of Difference Writ Large risk erasing differences within an
“indigenous” population and neglect a study of, for instance, who has the
authoritative power to define? Graeber (2015, 33) alludes to such a conse-
quence when asking how to decide who inside a designated bordered area
“gets to define what should be considered ‘Nuer ideas’”. He thereafter cri-
tiques approaches to the ontological turn to “require universal standards for
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 11

recognizing legitimate authority (even across ‘worlds’), it proposes that

those authorities be granted authority over determining the nature of real-
ity itself, within their designated territory, whether or not the individuals in
question actually wish to be granted such authority!” (2015, 33).
If we take into consideration this critique by Graeber, can we rather
understand difference as a part of a heterogeneous, multiple and perpetu-
ally mutating totality where exchange and interchangeability dominates
and where the assemblages produced are such that it would be next to
impossible to analytically exorcize a core—an essence? In order to respond
to such questions, an earlier incarnation of Bruno Latour may be help-
ful, namely his We Have Never Been Modern (1993) which simultane-
ously rejects the object/subject distinction and attacks the Western and
anthropological premise of difference itself. However, in the ontological
turn, “difference” may well obtain another discursive and epistemological
status than what was the subject matter of Latour’s critique: Instead, some
suggest that rather than viewing differences as the product of how reality
is subjectively appropriated, some forms of difference should be under-
stood as the product of different realities (Hage 2012, 302).
At this point we also need to underline that a number of anthropologists
that are concerned with difference, domination and reality are inspired
by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s argument which, crudely put, would
approach difference not as variations over a theme of sameness or reduc-
ible to schema of representation. Instead, difference-in-itself is seen to be
related to singularity and becoming, not to the hegemony or domination
of regimes of similarity, sameness or identity. Difference—and by its exten-
sion alterity—thereby holds promises for those anthropologists that draw
on Deleuze to first recognize the singular, unique and potentially disrup-
tive characteristics of events, individuals, conceptions and, indeed, cos-
mological or ontological frameworks (Deleuze 2004 [1968]). Deleuze’s
approach to difference is what drives the radical anthropological projects
of figures such as Viveiros de Castro in his and others’ attempts at attain-
ing forms of representation that evade transcendence—or elude forms of a
priori transcendence that undermine the singularity of the object studied
and the force of difference contained within that.
It should be clear by now that rather than ontology being “(just)
another word for culture”, as the 2010 GDAT (the Group for Debates
in Anthropological Theory at the University of Manchester) discussed
(Carrithers et al. 2010), representatives of the ontological turn is instead
concerned with exploring, theorizing and analyzing forms of alterity
12 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

beyond “culture” or “epistemology”. Argues anthropologist Aparecida

Vilaça (2015) based at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, compared
to the notion of “culture”, “ontology” has the advantage of including
both cultural plurality and diversity of nature. This facilitates a more radi-
cal understanding of difference as well as situates “peripheral people and
their symbolic systems on an equal footing with Euro-Americans” (2015,
3). A similar approach to ontology was expressed at the abovementioned
GDAT debate when anthropologist Matei Candea (2010, 175) argued for
the necessity of a turn to ontology to radicalize anthropological theoriz-
ing on alterity and difference because “cultural difference is not different
enough, or alternatively that acultural difference has been reduced by cul-
tural critics to a mere effect of political instrumentality”. Put another way,
as reflected in parts of this turn, ontological difference is within or between
worlds (however these are conceived) rather than between epistemological
worldviews. This distinction has far-reaching consequences since recogniz-
ing the existence of multiple (if not wholly separate) realities “opens up
the possibility to perceive domination not only as the product of a struggle
within a reality but also the struggle between realities” (Hage 2012, 302)—
producing effectively a tense and conflictual relation between realities.
Finally—and this is crucial—also in another way alterity is not always invoked
as residing or found in localizable worlds or cultures—as differences to be
empirically identified by the anthropologist in her quest to understand the
world. Rather, as Holbraad and Pedersen point out in their particular take on
this (Holbraad and Pedersen 2016), alterity is a quality of the relation between
analytical assumptions and the ethnographic material at hand. Conceived in
this way, alterity translates as a tool of intensified relativism against conven-
tional ways to connect anthropological reasoning with empirical material.
Drawing on all these diverse and somewhat conflicting conceptualiza-
tions of alterity and difference, in this edited volume we have identified
three admittedly broad forms of analytical strands that we consider to be
central to the ontological turn: vistas, materialities and politics. We argue
that this threepronged analytical approach in various ways decenter what
it means to be human by emphasizing and rethinking difference and alter-
ity. The first, vistas, includes explorations of how worlds are imagined and
engaged and here the critical, conceptual and methodological framework
often termed “perspectivism” is central. For the second, materialities, any
sense of strict boundary between human beings and a range of (analyti-
cally and theoretically significant) non-human others translate into making
impossible, difficult or unsettled notions of difference between human
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 13

and non-human. For the third, politics, an emphasis on ontological (as

opposed to epistemological, cultural, etc.) difference or alterity aim to
severely undermine encompassing notions of human universality whilst
opening the horizons of political possibility.
This tripartite analytical typology is, alas and necessarily, a caricature as
there are myriad ways of approaching ontology that are not covered by
such triangulation. However, we believe that by framing the approach in
this way significant aspects of the contemporary debates about the onto-
logical turn may be opened up for critical engagement, re-assessment and
recalibration.

Vistas
Broadly speaking, what we have labeled the vistas approach within the
ontological turn gives particular attention to the study of cosmological
formations that are understood as fundamentally perspective-­generating
or ontogenetic systems. Such cosmologically informed approaches include
the framing and imagination of worlds (Abramson and Holbraad 2014)
and ethnographic analyses of a variety of religious practices, such as how
material and spiritual worlds intersect. Aparecida Vilaça’s (2014) study
of how the Amazonian Wari group’s conversion to Christianity must be
understood not as a transition between ontologies, but rather as con-
stituting a complex of unstable positions characterized by non-linearity
and openendedness, is but one example. Particular relevant here, how-
ever, is a figure that has greatly influenced ontologically oriented think-
ing within anthropology, namely Marilyn Strathern. In her seminal book
After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (1992),
Strathern distanced herself from the nature/culture distinction, arguing
that anthropologists had studied kinship systems as if these social con-
structions were built on natural facts. The terms in which these “facts
of life” were examined and understood, Strathern argues, were already
incorporated into culturally constructed social relations. This recognition
led Strathern to work on relationality itself and to develop the notion
of dividuality—theoretical developments that has profoundly influenced
anthropological thought, not least the work of Holbraad and Pedersen
(2009, 2016). Moreover, Strathern has emphasized that her attraction to
the Amazonian perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro is based precisely in his
approach to it as ontology, not epistemology: “It is not about what one
knows but about how one is, about the nature of the body with which one
14 B.E. BERTELSEN AND S. BENDIXSEN

inhabits the world and apprehends it. The body is the organ of percep-
tion; perspectives are different according to the body one has” (Strathern
2005, 140).6
Coming from a background in Brazilian anthropology and having
worked on Amazonia, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s works have been
highly influential in anthropology in both Europe and the Americas. One
of the starting points for his work is to contrast what he labels the “mul-
tinaturalism” of Amerindian thought with what he terms the “multicul-
turalist” approach of Western cosmology—cosmology here seen in an
embracing sense. According to Viveiros de Castro (1998, 470):

Where the latter [multiculturalism] [is] founded on the mutual implication

of the unity of nature and the plurality of cultures—the first guaranteed by
the objective universality of body and substance, the second generated by
the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning—the Amerindian concep-
tion would suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity. Here, culture
or the subject would be the form of the universal, whilst nature or the object
would be the form of the particular.

This shifting of perspectives between human and animal is predicated on

the idea, also taken from the Amerindian context, of an “original state
of undifferentiation between humans and animals” (Viveiros de Castro
1998, 471). Viveiros de Castro proposes we recognize such a perspectival
shift as it opens up the world in a different way to us, claiming “whatever
possesses a soul is a subject, and whatever has a soul is capable of having
a point of view” (1998, 478). Primary in this approach is that any being’s
condition is limited and defined by its bodily limits, which is what Viveiros
de Castro calls “perspectivism”. While perspectivism was first associ-
ated with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his colleagues at the Museu
Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, it has become one of the dominant paradigms
for anthropologists working on the Amerindian context, be they situated
in Brazil, Europe or the Americas (Course 2010).
But what is perspectivism? Magnus Course sums the school of thought
up this way: “Put simply, it is the observation that in many indigenous
American ontologies different kinds of beings see different worlds in the
same way” (Course 2010, 250). Viveiros de Castro offers a more com-
plex analysis and describes Amerindian perspectivism as predicated on
the notion of deixis (1998). In general, the term deixis denotes an utter-
ance’s referential meaning that is contingent on the spatial, temporal or
personal position from which it is produced. However, in perspectivism,
 RECALIBRATING ALTERITY, DIFFERENCE, ONTOLOGY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL... 15

deixis refers to how the world is dependent on the position from which its
perception originates. Viveiros de Castro calls this “cosmological deixis”.
All beings, in perspectival ontologies both appear human to themselves
and relate to each other as humans would, possessing human “culture”
(Course 2010). The main point here is that Amerindian ontological per-
spectivism postulates that “the point of view creates the subject; whatever is
activated or ‘agented’ by the point of view will be a subject” (Viveiros de
Castro 1998, 476f, italics in original). Rather than a “natural” essence,
it is the (temporary) holding of such a subject position that defines one
as “culturally” human (Course 2010). These perspectives are, then, not
fixed or systematically ascribed along typologies of species. Instead, to
be “human” rather than non-human is defined by one’s ability of seeing
before being seen, of being a perceiving subject rather than its object.
Perspectivism has implications for “nature” and “culture”—heav-
ily criticized distinctions that nevertheless are central to anthropological
approaches to difference. Viveiros de Castro contrasts perspectivism with
conventional thought in this way: “If Western multiculturalism is relativ-
ism as public policy, then Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multinat-
uralism as cosmic politics” (1998, 472). For Viveiros de Castro taking such
perspectives from Amerindian cosmologies is integral to anthropological
critique which, according to him, must continually approach a “perma-
nent decolonialization of thought” (Viveiros de Castro 2014 [2009]).
And here we are at crucial aspect of the ontological turn: It may also be
approached as a project of radical dehierarchization and for Viveiros de Castro
(2013) it constitutes an attack on the authority of the anthropologist versus
the subject/object of anthropological inquiry—in his terms, “the native” (see
also Blaser 2014). In its place, he proposes reconceiving “anthropological
knowledge that is founded on the basic premise that the procedures involved
in anthropological investigation are of the same conceptual order as the pro-
cedures being investigated” (Viveiros de Castro 2013, 477, italics retained).
In this willingness to attack the premise of the reduction of the native to an
object, not a subject, at least two veins of Deleuzian thinking emerge: For
one, Viveiros de Castro’s celebration of the Other as opportunity or possibil-
ity—as a being that may be actualized—bear clear resemblances to Deleuzian
notions of virtual and actual, both, of course, famously constituting different
aspects of reality (see, e.g., Deleuze 2006 [1977]). On this Viveiros de Castro
is clear: “Without an Other the category of possibility disappears: the world
collapses, reduced to the pure surface of the immediate, the subject dissolves,
turning into a thing-in-itself” (Viveiros de Castro 2013, 478; see also 1992
[1986], 1998, 2014 [2009]).7
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
By Georges Pellissier. Authorized English version by Anne G.
Brinton,
together with a General Introduction. 8o, pp. 479 $3.50
The eminent French critic, M. Ferdinand Brunetiere says of
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of contemporary French literature. In addition, it is also the
philosophy of, or rather describes, the evolution of the literary
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AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1607-1885.

By Prof. Charles F. Richardson, of Dartmouth College. Two vols.,
8o,
pp. xx. + 535, 456 $6 00
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PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

A course of lectures delivered in the Lowell Institute, Boston. By
John Bascom, author of “Problems of Philosophy,” etc. 8o, pp. xii. +
318, $1.50
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STUDIES IN GERMAN LITERATURE.

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THE HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE.

I. From its Origin to the Renaissance.
II. From the Renaissance to the Close of the Reign of Louis
XIV.
III. From the Reign of Louis XIV. to that of Napoleon III.
By Henry van Laun. Three vols. in one. Half leather, cloth sides, 8o,
pp. 342, 392, 467 $3 50
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with all classes of persons.”—N. Y. Evening Post.

A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH

PEOPLE.
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comprehension of the beginnings of things and of the causes
that have brought about effects.”—New York Times.

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, New York and London.

 Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious errors in punctuation and inconsistencies in proper names have been silently
corrected.
Page 17: “he rest of Europe” changed to “the rest of Europe”
Page 263: “Bogdanóvich’s Pysche” changed to “Bogdanóvich’s Psyche”
Page 313: “shine in the bark” changed to “shine in the dark”
Page 315: “mary him” changed to “marry him”
Page 321: “aphabetical order” changed to “alphabetical order”
Page 352: “more stupid that our” changed to “more stupid than our”
Page 418: “are overthown” changed to “are overthrown”
Page 438: “learny our parts” changed to “learn our parts”
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANTHOLOGY
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