This study aims to examine the genealogy of the "Ontological Turn", an academic movement that has been centered around anthropology since the 21st century, and to explore a new methodology for presenting the vision of Korean anthropology.
The "Ont ...
This study aims to examine the genealogy of the "Ontological Turn", an academic movement that has been centered around anthropology since the 21st century, and to explore a new methodology for presenting the vision of Korean anthropology.
The "Ontological Turn" takes the Western-centered "modern" as reaching its limit, and seeks an alternative philosophy of futuristic anthropology through the cosmology of the non-Western. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazilian anthropologist who leads the "Ontological Turn", suggests the three historical moments of the "Ontological Turn". First, it's the crisis of the representation. Castro argues that in the 1980s, the ethnographic boundary between subject and object became blurred in Western anthropology influenced by postmodernism, and the preconditioned epistemological framework between person and object (or human and non-human) and between language and reality (or concepts and objects) began to disintegrate. Second, the rise of the Science and Technology Studies. Bruno Latour explored the discontinuities of science and politics anthropologically through the laboratory's 'knowledge practice' and found that (above) politics is a modern design. In other words, the modern-day confrontation between science and non-science is nothing more than a "model" that excludes batters from the West and compartmentalizes them outside. Therefore, Latour's research, which explored the discontinuity between science and politics, immediately shook up another larger compartment: between "we" and "them," between the West and the non-Western. Third, the 21st century resonates with the "Zeitgeist" triggered by the global crisis. It responds to the ecological crisis and its dialectically intertwined economic crisis. So concerns that really the "copernican transformation" of the human academic center may lead the world to an end (more precisely the end of the world created by mankind) begin to be examined as academic possibilities.
Now 20th-century anthropology had taken on an entirely new task by the 21st century. This is, on the one hand, an indication of the end of life in modern Western-centered thinking, and on the other hand, suggests that the academic competence of anthropology, which has traversed all parts of the world, has opened up a new field of knowledge.
"How Forests Think" by Eduardo Kohn published in 2013, goes beyond not only Euro-centralism but also human-centralism. Through Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotics, he extends "thought" to non-human, which men have regarded as an exclusive domain of human. As noted, Charles Peirce, fundamentally criticizes Descartic philosophy's ideological premise and problem-setting, and defines thought as “international participation in the endless process of reasoning that creates a chain of symbols or languages" rather than "internal perception of ideas", and thus produces a method of practice by Pragma. Kohn extends this non-human semiotics into non-human and captures the Amazon forest as “ecology of selves”.
In ecology of selves, multi-naturalism and perspectivism are understood in terms of semiotics. Castro says that every being lives on perspective of I in each universal nature-the product of an imprinted temperament on the body. And the perspective of I is only partially created as “the other” for another I. Kohn says that the perspective of I is not returned to the body and is cross-existent with another perspective of I by preference.
Therefore, Kohn is very persuasive about the fact that non-human beings think by constructing their own life activities in semiotic process. Furthermore, he restores the invisible world that has been pushed by modern into the realm of the supernatural(Weber 1917). Developed as an effect of scientific rationalism since the 19th century it has eliminated the invisible world-cosmology of totemism, shamanism and animism in modern knowledge and belief systems. But the invisible realms of semiotics are also real. If the generality of semiotics is real, it could be said that invisible forms are also real.
Since the 21st century, "re-enchantment of The World" (Kohn 2013) never separates humans from non-humans, nature from culture, but rather tries to connect the life and knowledge. As Tim Ingold discussed, living creatures on Earth, including human species, have been combined with the earth in life-lines mixed with light, wind and water(Ingold 2007). Furthermore, the emergence of artificial intelligence, a new species of human being beyond human beings, is calling for the dismantlement of the monopolistic and privileged nature of the subject that has supported modern humans, and deconstructing it into the semiotic worlds.