Practical Ontologies Redux

Abstract

In this article I provide an overview and mini-genealogy of practical ontology and ontologies. Originating in sporadic formulations by Bruno Latour and by Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star in the late 1990s, practical ontology provided a handle for thinking through issues relating to nonhuman agency and the composition of uncommon worlds, an emerging focus of interest in parts of STS at the time. Following a discussion of some these threads, I describe how practical ontology has subsequently been shaped in conversation with two partly related approaches: the ‘ontological turn’ articulated in Thinking Through Things and onwards with inspiration from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marilyn Strathern, and political ontology given shape by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena. After touching upon issues including ethnographic concept formation and the aim of anthropology, the existence or otherwise of a one-world world, and questions of ontological politics, I end by suggesting that practical ontology assists in helping keep up to speed with the surprises of the multiverse.