Introduction

Exploring Multifarious Worlds and the Political within the Ontological Turn(s)

Authors

  • Kathrin Eitel Goethe Universität Frankfurt
  • Michaela Meurer Universität Marburg

Keywords:

Ontological Turn, Practical Ontology, Political Ontology, Human-Environmental Relations, Hauntology

Abstract

This introduction to the issue presents the political dimensions of research carried out within the framework of the ontological turns that stretch between Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on the concept of political ontology, practical ontology, and the papers assembled in this issue, we embrace the political to be practically sitting transversally in different political fields that foster the constitution of new forms of life as alternative ontologies. In this sense, politics is a critical endeavor to unravel power asymmetries. It attempts to not only illuminate different ontologies, but to realize and co-constitute them. To avoid getting trapped in a mere description of alteritarian worlds and their political power structures, we propose focusing on the largely invisible moments of ontological uncertainties. These eerie moments, which exist in common but non-contemporaneous environments appearing in between something and -time, can provide a learning opportunity for understanding inheritance as responsibility. Their appearance jumbles time and ontological orders, granting us insights into automatic modes of action that normally go unseen. We thus sketch a policy for making oddkins throughout worlds, including its specters.

Author Biographies

Kathrin Eitel, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Kathrin Eitel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Eu-ropean Ethnology at Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. Following studies in an-thropology, history, and politics from universities in Heidelberg and Istanbul, she conduct-ed ethnographic research on recycling infrastructures in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of her dissertation project. Kathrin Eitel is particularly interested in environmental issues emerging from human/non-human practices and sociomaterial constellations, with a focus on infrastructures and ontologies in the fields of anthropology and science and technology studies. She has written articles on waste, infrastructure, and urban environments and poli-tics, traversing disciplinary boundaries, searching for the composition of life.

Michaela Meurer, Universität Marburg

Michaela Meurer is a social and cultural anthropologist living in Marburg, Germany. Her research and teaching focuses on human-environmental relations in all their facets and dimensions—and especially on the history of environmental anthropology and the ontological turn, the anthropology of climate change and the anthropology of conservation. For her PhD, she studied ontological multiplicities in a Brazilian conservation area where locals, civil society, and state agencies engaged in co-management of natural resources. Her postdoc project at Marburg University concentrates on climate initiatives and local responses to environmental transformation related to climate change in Mozambique and Brazil.

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Published

2021-06-21 — Updated on 2021-06-21

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How to Cite

Eitel, K., & Meurer, M. (2021). Introduction: Exploring Multifarious Worlds and the Political within the Ontological Turn(s). Berliner Blätter, 84, 3–19. Retrieved from https://berliner-blaetter.de/index.php/blaetter/article/view/1122

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