“Repugnant to the Nature of the Straight Line:” Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology" - Paul Nadasdy, Cornell Anthropology

Monday, February 13 at 4:30pm

374 Rockefeller Hall

Department of Science and Technology Studies Spring 2012 Seminar Series

Abstract: In her multiple award winning book, Do Glaciers Listen, Julie Cruikshank juxtaposes different understandings of the massive glaciers that straddle the southern Alaska-Yukon borderlands: they are at once the physical entities studied by contemporary glaciologists, the forbidding symbols of sublime nature celebrated by the Romantic poets, and the powerful sentient beings encountered by indigenous Tlingit and Athapaskan travelers. In her analysis, Cruikshank refuses to privilege – or dismiss – any particular view, arguing that the erasure of worlds entailed in such a dismissal is the essence of colonialism. Instead, she treats the worlds evoked by Tlingit storytellers as having the same ontological status as those brought into being by the narratives of climate scientists. Ontological agnosticism of this sort has become increasingly common in anthropology of late. The burgeoning interest among contemporary anthropologists in questions of ontology has given rise to talk about an “ontological turn” in the discipline. Although many view the new focus on ontology as theoretically productive (and politically necessary), others – especially those who champion anthropology’s status as a science – view it as a threat to the discipline. In this paper, I examine turn-of-the-20th-century philosophical debates surrounding the invention of non-Euclidean geometry to show that Cruikshank’s brand of ontological agnosticism is hardly confined to the postmodern social sciences. I then suggest that it was those same debates that inspired French philosopher and sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl to develop a new approach to the anthropological study of knowledge, kicking off a century of debate and leading, ultimately, to our contemporary interest in questions of ontology.