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"Worlds otherwise": Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference

"Worlds otherwise": Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference
"Worlds otherwise": Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference
The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/ or oppositional in any straightforward sense.
0011-3204
896-912
Alberti, Ben
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Fowles, Severin
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Holbraad, Martin
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Marshall, Yvonne
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Whitmore, Chris
916e358f-45c1-4ac6-ae30-fd367031430d
Alberti, Ben
66ecd251-d38f-4730-9a38-a862d9704f48
Fowles, Severin
e9427860-d5d3-4f4e-a470-e854bdf25dc4
Holbraad, Martin
fb0e586c-6f5d-46bd-9b73-3ece764bf47f
Marshall, Yvonne
98cd3726-90d1-4e6f-9669-07b4c08ff1df
Whitmore, Chris
916e358f-45c1-4ac6-ae30-fd367031430d

Alberti, Ben, Fowles, Severin, Holbraad, Martin, Marshall, Yvonne and Whitmore, Chris (2011) "Worlds otherwise": Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference. Current Anthropology, 52 (6), 896-912. (doi:10.1086/662027).

Record type: Article

Abstract

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/ or oppositional in any straightforward sense.

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Published date: December 2011
Organisations: Archaeology

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 206279
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/206279
ISSN: 0011-3204
PURE UUID: 40df45e2-e6c6-4c45-a03b-601dbd2aefa3

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Date deposited: 19 Dec 2011 14:29
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 04:36

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Contributors

Author: Ben Alberti
Author: Severin Fowles
Author: Martin Holbraad
Author: Yvonne Marshall
Author: Chris Whitmore

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