Belief and the Ontological Turn

My paper places Jacob Mackey’s argument about belief in conversation with anthropologists of the Ontological Turn like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, and Peter Skafish who problematize the way that ethnocentrism persists in the form of tacit positivisms in the study of human difference. These anthropologists have advanced a methodological “perspectivism” which problematizes precisely the language of “representation,” “perspective,” and even “world” and “its object” upon which Mackey relies to defend “belief” as a universal form of cognition. As a means of reform, these anthropologists suggest replacing talk of multiple views with talk of multiple worlds. I will show how Mackey’s work can be in constructive conversation with the Ontological Turn, particularly in the context of the latter’s challenge to a representationalist account of belief and the “worldview” model of difference it underwrites.