Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 364
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-78348-857-5 • Hardback • December 2016 • $184.00 • (£142.00)
978-1-78348-858-2 • Paperback • December 2016 • $62.00 • (£48.00)
978-1-78348-859-9 • eBook • December 2016 • $58.50 • (£45.00)
Pierre Charbonnier is a researcher in Philosophy at the National Center for Scientific Research, EHESS, Paris.
Gildas Salmon is a researcher in Philosophy at the National Center for Scientific Research, EHESS, Paris.
Peter Skafish is a maître de conférences associé at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale and the Collège de France, Paris.
Introduction / Part I: Comparison, symmetry, pluralism / 1. Varieties of Ontological Pluralism, Philippe Descola / 2. On Ontological Delegation: The Birth of Neoclassical Anthropology, Gildas Salmon / 3. Connections, Friends and their Relations: An Issue in Knowledge-making, Marilyn Strathern / 4. We Have Never Been Pluralist: On Lateral and Frontal Comparisons in the Ontological Turn, Matei Candea / Part II: Conceptual Alteration: Theory and Method / 5. Anthropological Meditations, or, The Discourse on Comparative Method, Patrice Maniglier / 6. The Contingency of Concepts: Transcendental Deduction and Ethnographic Expression in Anthropological Thinking, Martin Holbraad / 7. Breaking Out of the Modern Circle: On Conceptual Issues of Critical Anthropology, Pierre Charbonnier / Part III: Life and Agency Outside Nature / 8. Thinking with Thinking Forests, Eduardo Kohn / 9. Nature from the Greeks: Empirical Philology and the Ontological Turn in Historical Anthropology, Arnaud Mace / 10. Moving to Remain the Same: Towards an Anthropological Theory of Nomadism, Morten Axel Pedersen / Part IV: Cosmopolitics and Alterity / 11. Metaphysics as Mythophysics. Or, Why I Have Always Been An Anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro / 12. Metamorphosis of Consciousness: Concept, System, and Anthropology in the Thought of American Channels, Peter Skafish / 13. Ordering What Is: The Political Implications of Ontological Knowledge, Baptiste Gille / 14. A Dialog About a New Meaning of Symmetric Anthropology, Bruno Latour / Notes on Contributors / Bibliography / Index
the collection assembles an impressive cast of anthropologists and philosophers from across the Anglo-French academic divide ... a profound disciplinary recomposition arising from the encounter between anthropology and philosophy.— Radical Philosophy
In short, this more or less voluminous book. . . is of great importance to those interested in some of the most important debates of contemporary anthropology in general. [Translated from original Spanish]
— Anthropos
This is an exceptionally stimulating collection of essays by seriously brilliant writers. If you think the ontological turn is simply something to be for or against this is not for you. But if you are after some powerfully reflexive thinking that puts the comparative at the foundation of existence then this will not only make you ‘turn’, it will make you jump, dig tunnels and fly.— Ghassan Hage FAHA, Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, University of Melbourne
Inspired the turn among some anthropologists away from culture and nature, the editors of Comparative Metaphysics gather together a who's who of contemporary French, British, and American philosophy and anthropology to ask what discipline has the best chance to define the multiple, irreducible forms of thought that count as ontology and thus to open thought to the crisis of contemporary anthropogenic climate change.— Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University