Key Thinkers in the Ontological Turn

The “ontological turn” is one of the most intriguing intellectual movements of recent decades. Emerging from anthropology but radiating outward to philosophy, STS (science and technology studies), and environmental humanities, it proposes a deceptively simple idea: different societies don’t just interpret the world differently—they may, in a meaningful sense, inhabit different worlds. The turn thus shifts attention from “how people represent reality” to “what realities are made, lived, and enacted.”

This shift echoes in the work of a cluster of influential thinkers. Each challenges the modern Western assumption that nature is one, culture is many, and reality is a single plane waiting to be described. Instead, they invite us to consider a plural, dynamic, and relational cosmos.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Amerindian Perspectivism

For Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, one of the most pivotal figures in the movement, Amazonian cosmologies reveal a world in which beings—humans, animals, spirits—share a common interiority but inhabit different bodily perspectives. The jaguar sees blood as manioc beer; the human sees it as blood; both are correct from where they stand.

Rather than explaining these “beliefs” as symbolic systems, he argues that they point to a different ontology—a different structure of the real. Amerindian perspectivism thus becomes a philosophical challenge to Western naturalism: multiplicity is not something to be explained away but a genuine mode of being. (for more: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Perspectivism and the Anthropologist Who Broke Reality)

Philippe Descola: Four Ontologies of the World

Philippe Descola extends this challenge through a sweeping comparative anthropology. In his typology—naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism—societies are differentiated not by culture but by how they distribute interiority and physicality among humans and non-humans. Western modernity’s “naturalism,” where only humans have interiority, is not universal but a provincial worldview.

Descola’s contribution is less polemical than structural: he offers a lens to examine how worlds are composed, without assuming one baseline reality beneath them all (read more: Philippe Descola’s Four Ontologies and the End of Western Exceptionalism).

Bruno Latour: Beyond Nature and Society

If anthropology pushed the ontological turn outward, Bruno Latour pushed it inward—into the heart of Western institutions and sciences. His actor-network theory (ANT) dissolves the boundary between nature and society, showing how facts and artifacts emerge through networks of humans, technologies, microbes, legal systems, and more.

Latour’s enduring point—made vivid in We Have Never Been Modern—is that the world is made through relations, and that modernity’s strict separation between nature and culture is more myth than fact. This profoundly influenced object-oriented philosophy, multi-species studies, and environmental political theory. (see We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour),

Donna Haraway: Situated Worlds, Companion Species

Donna Haraway adds an ethical and feminist dimension to the turn. Her concept of situated knowledges argues that all knowledge is partial and embodied, undoing fantasies of objective detachment. Her later work on companion species emphasizes co-evolution and interdependence: humans and dogs, microbes and bodies, technologies and ecologies shape one another continuously.

Haraway’s ontology is political: worlds are made through relations of care, responsibility, and entanglement.

Tim Ingold: Lines, Dwelling, and the Continuity of Life

Tim Ingold shifts attention from metaphysics to lived experience. He describes beings not as isolated entities but as lines of growth and movement—always becoming, always entangled. In contrast to “building a world,” Ingold argues for dwelling in one: life flows through environments, materials, and organisms in mutually shaping ways.

His anthropology is phenomenological, emphasizing perception, craft, and the unfolding of life in time.

Beyond the Canon: Expanding Ontologies

Other prominent contributors include:

• Marisol de la Cadena, exploring “earth-beings” and Andean politics beyond Western categories.

• Anna Tsing, whose work on mushrooms and multispecies survival highlights the precarity and creativity of ecological entanglements.

• Kim TallBear, rethinking kinship, land, and settler-colonialism from Indigenous ontological perspectives.

• Arturo Escobar, calling for “designs for the pluriverse” rooted in relational worlds.

Together, they reject the idea of one world with many interpretations, offering instead many worlds—each enacted, lived, and contested.

See also: Turning Ontological: Critical Paths in the Ontological Turn