Distinguishing ontologies Comment on LLOYD , G . E . R .
نویسندگان
چکیده
Geoffrey Lloyd’s latest book is an essay on comparative ontology, how to conduct such a comparison and why. Apart from its intrinsic merits—acute analytical insight, vast erudition lightly worn, clarity of purpose, and an engaging style of writing—the book is timely, given the prominence the issue of ontologies has gained in recent works both in anthropology and philosophy. Lloyd draws on three main sources to develop his arguments: ancient Greek metaphysics, classical Chinese political and scientific writings, and contemporary anthropological accounts of “exotic” (mainly Amazonian) ways of world-making. On the one hand, he is dealing with textual sources referring to ontological premises more or less explicitly stated; on the other, with implicit ontologies inferred by anthropologists from observed practices (including discursive ones) and reported in terms that allow them to be understood by Western readers. But are these different brands of ontology, treated as equivalent, really comparable? The two anthropological examples Lloyd deals with are taken from the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, exemplifying two quite distinct approaches, as Lloyd himself acknowledges. What Lloyd presents as Descola’s (2003) ontologies are, in fact, no such thing; they are models—in classic structuralist fashion—of entities that have no empirical existence, namely ideal-types of the kind of worlds which would be generated by the strict application of rules of composition of principles of identity and difference (the building blocks of any ontology) along two axes, “physicality” and “interiority.” 1 The four ontologies produced in this manner are thought experiments, since no actual society or
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