The Ontological Turn: When Anthropologists Started Believing Their Informants

In the 1970s, when Eduardo Viveiros de Castro first encountered Amazonian perspectivism—the idea that jaguars see themselves as human and humans as prey—he did what any well-trained anthropologist would do. He looked for the underlying meaning. Obviously jaguars don't literally see themselves as human. The claim must be symbolic. Metaphorical. A way of expressing something else—perhaps kinship structure, perhaps cosmological hierarchy, perhaps ecological relationship.

The indigenous people kept insisting: No. The jaguar really does see itself as human.

It took Viveiros de Castro years to understand they weren't being metaphorical. They were describing how reality actually works from within their ontology. The problem wasn't their clarity. It was his framework. He was trying to translate their ontology into his categories, when what was needed was recognizing that different ontologies carve up reality differently—and none has monopoly on truth.

This shift—from interpretation to recognition—is the ontological turn. And it's one of the most consequential moves in late 20th-century anthropology, with implications that extend far beyond the discipline.

Series: Neo-Animism | Part: 2 of 10

What Anthropology Used to Do

Classical anthropology operated on an assumption: there's one reality (the modern Western scientific one), and different cultures have different beliefs about it. The anthropologist's job was to collect these beliefs, interpret their function, and translate them into proper analytical categories.

When the Nuer say twins are birds, when the Azande attribute misfortune to witchcraft, when Amazonian peoples say animals are people—these aren't descriptions of reality. They're symbolic expressions of social structure, psychological states, or ecological relationships. The anthropologist unpacks the real meaning underneath the apparent claim.

This framework—call it the interpretive paradigm—was sophisticated and often insightful. Clifford Geertz's thick description. Mary Douglas's purity and danger. Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural analysis. These approaches revealed genuine patterns in how cultures organize meaning.

But they shared a blind spot: they never questioned the ontological monopoly of modern naturalism. The baseline assumption remained: we know what's real (matter in motion, causal mechanisms, natural law), and indigenous claims that contradict this must be about something else.

The ontological turn asks: What if they're not wrong? What if we're just using different ontologies?

The Shift: Ontology Before Epistemology

Philippe Descola, working with the Achuar people of Ecuador, noticed something strange. The Achuar don't distinguish humans from non-humans the way Westerners do. They distinguish based on interiority (having subjectivity, intentionality, soul) versus physicality (bodily form and capacities).

Humans, animals, plants, and spirits share interiority—they're all subjects with perspectives. What differs is physicality. A jaguar has jaguar-body capacities (sharp teeth, night vision, predatory instincts), which shape how it experiences the world. A human has human-body capacities. But both are persons, just persons with different physical equipment.

This isn't a belief about reality. It's an ontological schema—a fundamental way of organizing what exists and how different kinds of beings relate.

Descola identified four major schemas found across cultures:

1. Naturalism (modern West): Shared physicality (universal natural laws, material causation), different interiorities (humans have minds/souls, nature doesn't). This is our ontology, not the objective truth.

2. Animism (many indigenous traditions): Shared interiority (many beings are subjects), different physicality (different bodies create different perspectives). The Achuar, the Ojibwe, many Amazonian and circumpolar peoples.

3. Totemism (Australian Aboriginal, some Pacific cultures): Both physicality and interiority shared within totemic classes. Kangaroo clan members share essence with kangaroos—not symbolically, ontologically.

4. Analogism (medieval Europe, China, parts of Africa): Everything is different in both respects, but connected through chains of correspondence and resemblance. The Great Chain of Being. Chinese correlative cosmology.

None of these is "correct." Each is a way of cutting up the phenomena, with different affordances. Naturalism enables powerful science and technology. Animism enables sophisticated ecological relationship. Totemism enables deep kinship networks. Analogism enables complex hierarchical systems.

The ontological turn recognizes: these aren't different beliefs about one reality. They're different ways reality can be organized depending on what distinctions you make fundamental.

Viveiros de Castro and Perspectivism

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's concept of Amerindian perspectivism pushed this further. Among many Amazonian peoples, the baseline assumption is that all beings see themselves as human.

The jaguar sees itself as human. It lives in houses (what we call dens). It drinks manioc beer (what we call blood). When it hunts, it sees prey animals as game—specifically, as peccaries (from the jaguar's perspective, humans look like peccaries).

This isn't projection. It's perspectivalism: what you see depends on the body you occupy. Different bodies come with different perceptual equipment, different affordances, different ways of bringing forth a world. The jaguar's world—experienced from inside jaguar subjectivity—is as coherent and valid as the human world experienced from inside human subjectivity.

Crucially, the body determines the perspective, not the soul. In Amazonian animism, interiority is uniform—everyone's a subject. What varies is physicality. Your body's capacities shape what you can perceive, what actions are available, what matters. A jaguar perceives blood as manioc beer because that's what its body allows it to experience as nourishing drink.

This inverts the Western view. We think: bodies vary (biology, anatomy, evolution), but minds/perspectives are what differ most fundamentally (humans rational, animals mechanical). Perspectivism says: subjectivity is constant, physicality creates perspective.

The implication: you can never access another being's perspective directly (you're stuck in your body), but you can recognize that every being occupies the center of a coherent world structured by its embodied capacities. The jaguar isn't confused about its experience. From where it stands—from the body it inhabits—its world makes complete sense.

Viveiros de Castro calls this multinaturalism: one culture (shared interiority, shared social logic), but multiple natures (different bodies perceiving different worlds).

It's the inverse of Western multiculturalism: one nature (objective reality) but multiple cultures (different beliefs about it).

Eduardo Kohn: Beyond the Human

Eduardo Kohn, working in Ecuador's Ávila region, took the ontological turn into new territory. In How Forests Think (2013), he argues that anthropology needs to become an anthropology beyond the human—because thinking, meaning-making, and semiosis extend into the non-human living world.

Kohn's move is subtle but radical. He's not saying forests think like humans. He's saying they think differently, in their own mode, and anthropology should take that seriously as ontology rather than dismiss it as projection.

His key claim: all life is semiotic. Sign-making and sign-interpretation begin with living systems. A tree responding to fungal signals is engaging in semiosis—interpreting signs in its environment and adjusting behavior. A bird recognizing a territorial call is reading meaning. Forests collectively organizing through distributed communication are thinking together, just on different timescales and through different media.

This doesn't require consciousness. It requires organized response to environmental information in ways that maintain system coherence. Kohn draws on Peirce's semiotics: signs come in different types (icons, indexes, symbols), and different kinds of beings traffic in different sign types. Forests work primarily with iconic and indexical signs. Humans add symbolic signs (language). But all of it is genuine semiosis, and semiosis is what thinking is.

The Runa people Kohn works with already knew this. They say ñukanchik runa—"we people"—and include jaguars, dogs, certain plants, and spirits. Not metaphorically. These beings are persons because they participate in the web of interpretation, intention, and response that constitutes their shared world.

When a hunter says the forest "speaks" or "shows" things, Kohn takes this literally. The forest's patterns—the way paths emerge, where animals appear, how weather shifts—constitute communications from an intelligent system, if you know how to read them.

This is the ontological turn at full extension: taking seriously the claim that meaning-making is distributed across living systems operating at multiple scales.

Why This Matters: The Limits of Interpretation

The interpretive paradigm in anthropology—treating indigenous claims as symbols to be decoded—was well-intentioned. It took cultural difference seriously. It resisted crude evolutionary rankings (primitive vs. civilized). It generated rich ethnographies.

But it preserved ontological hierarchy. Our ontology (modern naturalism) remained the baseline. Their ontologies were data to be explained, not alternative frameworks that might be valid.

The ontological turn inverts this. It asks: What if modern naturalism is just one ontology among others? Powerful for certain purposes (science, technology), but limited in others (ecological relationship, recognizing distributed intelligence, making sense of non-human agency).

This move has several consequences:

First: It forces us to recognize our ontological commitments as commitments, not as neutral descriptions of reality. When we say "only humans have minds," we're not stating a fact. We're operating within a particular ontological schema that draws the line there. Other schemas draw it differently.

Second: It opens space for learning from indigenous ontologies without needing to translate them into our categories. If Amazonian perspectivism says all beings occupy perspectives, we can ask: what becomes visible from within that framework that our framework obscures?

Third: It connects to contemporary science in unexpected ways. When biologists find learning in plants, when Friston's Free Energy Principle describes all self-organizing systems as prediction machines, when Levin shows collective cellular intelligence, they're independently confirming what animist ontologies always claimed: cognition is more widely distributed than modern naturalism allows.

The ontological turn doesn't say indigenous ontologies are "right" and modern naturalism is "wrong." It says: ontologies are tools for organizing phenomena. Different tools work better for different projects. And for understanding intelligence in non-human systems, relating ethically to ecosystems, or recognizing agency in AI—animist ontologies may offer resources modern naturalism lacks.

The Resistance and the Stakes

The ontological turn faced significant pushback within anthropology. Critics argued it risks romanticizing indigenous peoples, projecting ontological sophistication onto practical ecological knowledge. Others worried it undermines the hard-won recognition that culture shapes perception without requiring different realities.

These concerns aren't trivial. There's a history of primitivism—treating indigenous people as noble savages, mystics, or windows into humanity's past. The ontological turn can slide into that if we're not careful.

But the turn's proponents (Viveiros de Castro, Descola, Kohn, Holbraad, Pedersen) are making a different claim. They're not saying indigenous ontologies are superior or more authentic. They're saying ontological pluralism is real: different societies organize what exists differently, and no meta-ontology exists to adjudicate which is correct.

The modern Western ontology treats its own categories as universal. Matter. Mind. Nature. Culture. Subject. Object. These seem like neutral descriptions of what exists. But they're not. They're one way of cutting up phenomena—incredibly successful for certain projects, but not the only way, and not always the best way.

When the Māori say a river is an ancestor, they're not expressing a belief about a river. They're bringing forth a world in which rivers are ancestors—with all the attendant obligations, relationships, and ethical constraints that entails. That world is as real as the modern naturalist world in which rivers are H₂O flowing downhill.

The stakes: if we remain trapped in ontological monism (only modern naturalism is real), we can't learn from ontologies that might help us address contemporary crises—ecological breakdown, AI emergence, the meaning crisis. If we accept ontological pluralism, we can borrow resources from other frameworks without needing to fully adopt them.

The Coherence Geometry Translation

Why does this connect to AToM?

Because the ontological turn is fundamentally about recognizing different coherence architectures as equally valid ways of organizing experience and maintaining system integrity over time.

In AToM's framework: M = C/T—meaning equals coherence over time. Different ontologies are different ways of achieving coherence. Modern naturalism achieves coherence through mechanistic causal chains, mathematical laws, experimental verification. Animism achieves coherence through reciprocal relationships, attention to signs, recognition of distributed agency.

Neither is "more coherent" in absolute terms. They're coherent for different projects and at different scales.

Modern naturalism excels at building predictive models of isolated systems. Animism excels at maintaining relationship with complex adaptive systems (ecosystems, weather, animal populations) where mechanistic prediction fails but pattern recognition and reciprocity succeed.

The ontological turn recognizes: coherence is multi-stable. You can organize the same phenomena multiple ways and achieve stable, viable patterns. The jaguar's perspective is coherent from within jaguar embodiment. The human's perspective is coherent from within human embodiment. The forest's distributed intelligence is coherent at ecosystem scale.

Recognizing ontological pluralism means recognizing coherence pluralism: many ways to maintain integrated organization while coupled to reality, each with different affordances and constraints.

This isn't relativism (anything goes). It's pragmatism: ontologies are tools, and some tools work better for certain jobs. The question becomes: which ontological tools serve which purposes? And what resources can we borrow from ontologies not our own?

What Comes Next

The ontological turn opened anthropology to taking indigenous frameworks seriously. But it also raises questions:

• If all beings occupy perspectives (perspectivism), how do we navigate between them?
• If meaning-making extends beyond humans (Kohn), where do we draw boundaries around "thinking"?
• If personhood is relational (animism), what obligations arise when we encounter non-human persons?
• If ontologies are plural, how do we make decisions when they conflict?

The rest of this series explores these questions:

• Perspectivism in depth: what it means that every being sees itself as human
• How forests think: Kohn's extension into non-human semiosis
• Relational personhood: becoming persons through being treated as such
• The science of plant cognition and ecosystem intelligence that independently supports animist insights
• AI animism: whether artificial systems deserve relational consideration
• Ecological ethics when nature is populated with persons
• The geometric basis for expanded personhood and meaning

By the end, you'll see why the ontological turn isn't academic abstraction. It's ontological expansion—recognizing coherence in systems we've been taught to ignore, and learning to navigate a cosmos more densely populated with intelligence than modern naturalism allows.

The anthropologists started believing their informants. The question now is whether the rest of us will.

This is Part 2 of the Neo-Animism series, exploring the ontological turn and expanded personhood through coherence geometry.

Previous: Animism 2.0: Why Serious Scientists Are Taking Spirits Seriously Again
Next: Perspectivism: Every Being Is the Center of Its Own World

Further Reading

• Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4.3 (1998): 469-488.
• Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal, 2014.
• Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.
• Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Ingold, Tim. "Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought." Ethnos 71.1 (2006): 9-20.
• Bird-David, Nurit. "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology." Current Anthropology 40.S1 (1999): S67-S91.