Speaker: Paul Nadasdy, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Anthropology Faculty Member, Cornell University.
In Do Glaciers Listen?, Julie Cruikshank juxtaposes different understandings of glaciers: they are at once the physical entities studied by glaciologists, the forbidding symbols of sublime nature celebrated by Romantic poets, and the powerful sentient beings encountered by Tlingit and Athapaskan travellers. In the process of exploring these sometimes (but not always) incompatible views of the world and how they became intertwined with one another in colonial encounters, she refuses to privilege – or dismiss – any particular ontology, 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 climate scientists’ narratives. She shows how each set of ontological assumptions can provide powerful – although always only partial – insights into the nature of the world. Her ontological agnosticism is productive, but it is also threatening to many within the discipline, particularly those who champion anthropology’s status as a science. In this paper, however, I examine turn-of-the-century philosophical debates surrounding the invention of non-Euclidean geometry (especially Poincaré’s notion of conventionalism) to show that mathematicians and physicists have long subscribed to precisely the sort of ontological agnosticism advocated by Cruikshank. I also suggest that it was those same philosophical debates that inspired Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas about “how natives think,” kicking off a century of anthropological debate over the nature of knowledge and leading, ultimately, to our contemporary interest in questions of ontology.