Begin here: when you hear “ontological turn” you might imagine something abstract, ivory‑tower, far from the street‑level mess of politics, race, ecology. Yet the phrase marks a significant shift in anthropology, cultural theory, and beyond—one that asks: What kinds of worlds are we living in? Not simply what people believe about the world, but which worlds there are. As I’ll argue below, the ontological turn is at once a radical provocation, a seductive method, and a contested terrain: rich with promise, vulnerable to co-optation, in need of critical reflection. My aim here is to map three critical paths through that turn—its origins and claims; its productive implications; and its fault lines and futures.
The ontological turn explained
What is the ontological turn? In the first cut: it challenges the familiar schema of anthropological difference as variation of worldview within one world. Instead, it proposes something more daring (or more radical): that there may be different worlds, not just different representations of the same world. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Amazonian perspectivism insists that non‑humans can have subject-positions, a kind of “multi-nature” rather than one nature and many cultures. Bruno Latour’s critique of the nature/society divide opens the door to a flat ontology of humans, things, agents. Philippe Descola’s work among Amazonian Achuar argues that the Western opposition nature/culture is not universal; other ontologies mediate human and nonhuman in radically different ways.
This turn asks us to shift our orientation. Instead of starting with what people believe about the world (assuming there is one world), we ask what kind of world is being lived, enacted, produced in a given socio-material, cosmological horizon. Ontology here becomes method, theory, and politics. Methodologically: ethnographers are asked to take seriously the idea that their interlocutors may inhabit different ontological registers. Theoretically: the categories of being, agency, materiality, nature, nonhuman must be rethought. Politically: this turn gestures toward respect for difference, potentially undoing epistemic colonialism—but also raises new problems.
Why the ontological turn matters
Why should we care? What does the ontological turn enable?
First, it displaces the culture/nature binary. By moving beyond the default of one nature and many cultures, it allows for richer accounts of human–nonhuman entanglements. For example, rivers as persons, forests as actors—not metaphorically but ontologically.
Second, it demands a rethinking of agency, materiality, things. It forces us to ask: what counts as an actor? What fills the category “nonhuman”? What world does a given practice enact? It opens up a spectrum of new material-ontological possibilities—objects, humans, spirits, technologies. By treating things as concepts, we avoid flattening objects into mere functions.
Third, it renews ethnographic practice. Ethnographers attuned to the ontological turn begin to ask not only how culture works in a given world, but which world is enacted. They become less sure of the ground; they watch how actors—human and nonhuman—co-produce the world. This deepens ethnography into a kind of world-sensitive theorizing.
Fourth, there’s the political and ethical promise. If difference is more radical than mere interpretation of one world, then taking Indigenous, non-Western, nonhuman ontologies seriously becomes ethically potent. One can argue that recognizing ontological multiplicity is part of a decolonial practice: granting persons (and nonhumans) their worlds.
Critical Paths
But if the ontological turn is promising, it is also fraught. One of the most common critiques is that by saying “they live in a different world,” we risk re-essentializing the “other,” locking them into an unchanging totality of difference. Some anthropologists argue this sense of presenting others as having not different cultures, but different realities, is just a new form of essentialism. Another worry: if there are many worlds, how do they relate? Is there a meta-ontology policing traffic between them? Do we re-introduce dualisms via another route?
There’s also political ambiguity. The ontological turn’s ethical promise is not automatic. Critics have argued that ontology can be weaponized: governments and NGOs might use ontological difference to classify, manage, exclude. To embrace ontological multiplicity is not yet to enact political justice. Indeed, some ontological projects allow neoliberal or extractivist logics to slip by unnoticed, cloaked in the language of respect for difference.
Conceptual ambiguity is another problem. What exactly counts as an ontology? How is it distinct from worldview, culture, knowledge? Critics say the theoretical claims often outrun the empirical justification. When ontological difference becomes the analytic horizon, how do we still compare, theorize, critique, generalize—without slipping into relativism or anarchy?
So, what are the ways forward?
First: methodological reflexivity. Ethnographers should reflect on their own ontological commitments—not assume neutral ground. If we ask “which world?”, we must also ask “in what world am I?”
Second: political translation. Ontology cannot remain in the abstract. What are its implications for justice, environment, decoloniality? How do ontological claims meet material struggles—climate, land, technology?
Third: interdisciplinary integration. The ontological turn invites dialogue with philosophy, science and technology studies, and ecology. The challenge of human–nonhuman entanglement in the Anthropocene or digital age may benefit from ontological tools. But this requires clarity, flexibility, and a critical ear for conceptual overreach.
Writing this, I recognize I too stand in a world—and the world I imagine is shaped by academic frames, by culture, by the privileges of discourse. The ontological turn asks me: Which world do I assume you inhabit? Which world do you inhabit? And maybe more disquietingly: What if I am assuming the wrong world?
The ontological turn is not simply a new label for old relativism. It is a demand: look again at the foundational assumptions of our world-making as researchers, critics, citizens. But it must remain critical, not a new orthodoxy. The possibility of difference is thrilling; the risk of resignation to difference is real.
So: when you take up your next ethnography, social theory essay, media analysis—ask: what world am I describing? What am I taking as the ground? And whose ground am I ignoring? The ontological turn invites that posture of attentive unsettlement—a refusal of the familiar world as the only world. But it also asks: once unsettled, what do we do? That is the work ahead.