I presented my work on Viveiros de Castro at the 12th Ethnography Symposium this week. There was a pretty good turn out and I heard some very interesting papers, some in my panel, and others in Ed and Leo’s stream on extreme work and ethnography. The stand-out paper was perhaps a colleague’s “undercover ethnography” in a Spanish brothel.

Part way through my own presentation I had the strangest experience, a weird crystallizing moment where I realized that no one on the room quite followed what I was saying. Perhaps this is not correct; perhaps it is more accurate to say that the concerns that I was trying to vocalize and speak to with the paper were those that either were not shared by the audience or, because if their theoretical backgrounds,  that it had never occurred to them to be concerned about what I was proposing. This is not to speak ill of my colleagues, rather it is to say that I need to find a better way of explaining and contextualizing the problems of the ontological turn so that their importance can be better appreciated. This requires less in the vein of “strategic referencing” and more of a concern for developing better examples, through fieldwork, of the problems with which I am concerned. What follows is that paper in full, warts and all which I leave here so that I might keep reflecting upon how to improve it.

 

Organizing “the ontological turn”

Preamble

Organization studies is fairly conservative in its experimentation with the method of ethnography, at least when compared to anthropology, where ethnography seems on the surface to be constantly explored and reinvented. We can pick up a recent copy of The Journal of Organizational Ethnography or The Journal of Business Anthropology or indeed more mainstream journals and find very good ethnographic work, reporting on the nuance of the contemporary corporation but in the same ways and with the same preoccupations as were had by trailblazers like Van Maanen or Watson. That is to say, preoccupied with the same concerns of uncovering the everyday realities of practices etc. and not yet attentive to questions of representation, deconstructions of the ethnographer as subject, questions of the posthuman etc. This is where the “ontological turn”, a movement within anthropology to reconsider some of the assumptions upon which ethnography is based, becomes important for me. The paper that I want to give today speaks to this as it is born out of an interest in the “ontological turn” and a fondness for the work of Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in particular. Specifically, it hinges on the question of “What makes good ethnography?” I used to think that good ethnography was defined by good storytelling (Bourgois) but for reasons that I’ll outline here I now think that what defines good ethnography is the creation of “concepts”, tools for thinking that though inseparable from the milieu of the field can constitute a “way of looking” which emerges from it. In this paper I want to look at how Viveiros de Castro develops concepts and hopefully we might emerge from this talk with a better understanding of how to look at our ethnographic work in organizations and think about concepts.

As such, today I am concerned to address a fairly simple question: “What can the ontological turn help me to think about in my ethnographic work?”. The argument that I’m going to unpack is that the ontological turn offers organizational scholars a way to rethink (or unthink) how we engage with concepts. Writing about the ontological turn Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) cite the play of concepts (in addition to a heightened reflexivity and a willingness towards experimentation) as one of the things that the ontological turn does differently from what came before.

In order to develop this I want to think about the nature of concepts through a consideration of the concept of nature. In order to do this, I will consider the ways in which “nature” is depicted in the shopping centre (my now and former field site), and then develop out of a reading of Viveiros de Castro’s concept of “multinaturalism” a pedagogy of the concept of nature (and thus a concept of the concept) as it works therein. Finally, I want to conclude by developing a set of sensibilities that an ethnographer in the field-site  of a contemporary organization might use to be attentive to what I shall call the “ontogenesis of a concept”.

 

“Nature of business”

The concept of “nature” is one that is implicated in a number of debates, so many and so large that it would be foolish to try to speak to them all. As such, I want to give an example that I think illustrate simply a point that I want to make about concepts in general and the concept of nature in particular. I could give examples from newspaper archives or from recently published “management guru” literature but instead I’m going to give one that involves an ethnography at a British shopping centre.

So let’s say that you’ve been studying a shopping centre for about a year and notice an increasing number of store fronts covered over with large but well-designed canvass screens in order to hide the fact that they are now empty. Stores coming and going is not an unusual occurrence but it seems to you that over the last month there have been more than usual, remaining empty for longer than usual. When you ask an interlocutor, a former school-teacher in her sixties who lives literally “around the corner” from the shopping centre, what she thinks of this, she says something to the effect of, “That’s just the nature of how things are,”

I want to suggest that this is a watershed moment in the ethnographic work and from here there are two predominant paths that the analysis can take, one that I have to caricature because of time constraints and another that I want to consider more carefully. The former involves an analysis of disposable capitalism. Here the ethnographer basks in the glory of noticing something that they are not supposed to notice and begins to study rent inflation in the shopping centre or the ways in which the shopping centre constructs itself as a portrait of Middle-England while simultaneously trying to paint a more aspirational identity. A study begins to emerge of working class/lower-middle class v big business politics; the kind that critical-scholars might delight in and knowingly nod at and and connects to work in a Marxist tradition of organization studies that offers critique of class capitalism and the inequalities that it entails.

The second involves obsession. An increased sensitivity to what this statement, “That’s just the nature of how things are,” might entail, how it is used, to what ends etc. In so doing, one might find that the word “nature” will start cropping up everywhere (Baader Meinhof phenomenon), from in conversation about interlocutors’ trips into nature, to stores advertising products proudly telling consumers to Go Natural!, from strewn copies of newspapers on the floor of the bus with articles talking about business leaders and their visions of sustainable business that “cares for nature” or is “at one with nature” to the “Management and Leadership” section of the shopping centre’s bookstore in the form of titles like The Nature of Business. One may even find in the year end reports of the corporation that owns the shopping centre, a justification for the seemingly foolish fact that the company has sold off all of their holdings of property in the London area that reads as follows: “Since 2009, a key driver for growth in value within the UK real estate market has been exposure to central London properties […] however, given the cyclical nature of the property sector, we would not expect this trend to endure over the long-term cycle.”

While critical attention when it comes to the subject of “nature” is focused on the new vogue of “sustainability” and “sustainable development”, “business ecology”, the “circular economy”, and the ever-present“corporate social responsibility” there is some previous scrutiny applied to this conceptualization of nature. In a 2003 paper, for example, Banerjee traces the ways in which nature can be recast as a passive actor in a discourse of scientific and economic progress which ignores specific (often colonial) power disparities. He says “The reinvention of nature by biotechnology, apart from assuming no material ecological impact, provides legitimacy for the dominant order and ruling Elites” (Banerjee, 2003, p.167). Garland et al (2013) also analyze the ways in which hyperreal images of “nature” form a part of advertising for “green” vehicles like the Toyota Prius. For them the purposefully idyllic image of “nature” (blue skies, perfect grass, pristinely trimmed trees etc..) evokes a sense of nature as tamed in “an improved, rehabilitated future reality” (p.691) disciplined and controlled by the corporation in a show of its implicit power (see Adorno and Horkheimer). What is absent from these analyses is, however, is the multiple ways in which “nature” might seem to work in the shopping centre; its irascible, unpredictable and ultimately indifferent character that produces all of these empty shops.

 

The Ontological Turn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

So what does this question of the “nature of business” have to do with the ontological turn and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro? Perhaps the core of Viveiros de Castro’s project is the concept of “Amerindian perspectivism” and the consequent notion of “multinaturalism” both of which are best explained in and through the following quote, from his 1998 paper Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism, which attempts to explain the ways in which the various people of Amazonia (particularly the Araweté who are Viveiros de Castro’s main reference in terms of the peoples who belong to the Tupi–Guarani language group) experience their reality:

“humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture” ( Viveiros de Castro, 1998, p.470)

What Viveiros de Castro is sketching here is a complex system of species or being-specific points of view that materially shift the nature of “reality” based on relations to others. It is not that there is one reality, one true nature, wherein humans, animals and spirits all correspond to their “proper” Rather, within a perspectival metaphysics one assumes that the human, the animal and the spirit each have an anthropomorphic perception of self and world that constitutes a unique ontology. Viveiros de Castro (2015, p.71) offers the following description of the experience of life in Amazonia from different points of view:

“what we take for blood, jaguars see as beer; the souls of the dead find a rotten cadaver where we do fermented manioc; what humans perceive as a mud puddle becomes a grand ceremonial house when viewed by tapirs.”

It is not that the jaguar’s perception of, say, the human as a gourd of beer is a hallucinatory aberration or primal misperception, rather each perspective constitutes its own reality. What perspectivism stresses is that the world is inhabited by many different types of subject all of which understand “reality” from different and distinct points of view. It is therefore, incorrect to speak of “the world” rather than “a world” because perspectivism does not assume a thing-in-itself (i.e. that there “really” is blood on the floor which the jaguar “mistakes” for manioc beer), rather, it operates on the assumption of absolute relativism; that there are simultaneously multiple interfacing realities in existence, each of which constitutes an equally “true” or veridical perspective on the world and lies in the Tupi-Guarani creation myths where, at some point in our collective history only people existed and it is they who would evolve into the animals and spirits that populate the earth now. What this implies is that there is not one but many “natures” the perception of which is contingent upon one’s “point of view”.

Such a mythological system confronts the anthropologist with a problem which has historically been difficult to articulate: does one account for these differing points of view by calling them “beliefs” and treating them as a unique culture which possesses a “different” understanding to what Western science and metaphysics “know to be true” about the natural world and the evolution of species or does one try to understand, through dedicated conceptual engagement, a world wherein “nature” means something different, where the so called “natural order” of things is suspended and where “human” means something other than we understand it to be, such that Araweté mythology can be true? It is the choice of the latter that characterizes the ontological turn and though the “strawman” of the former can often be problematic (see Graeber, 2015), there is a definite shift in how we think about the concepts that we encounter in the field. In one sense the ontological turn thus asks if we can “de-natural-ize” our thinking

These are big questions that link to debates around Nature/Culture that encompass the work of other anthropologists like Wagner, Strathern, Descola and Levi Strauss as well as eminent scholars like Latour and Stengers; too much for us to cover today. So I want to leave them hanging and briefly explore the what I want to call the ontogenesis or emergence or most appositely the becoming of this way of thinking, this concept of “nature” in Viveiros de Castro’s fieldwork with the Arawete, as recounted in his 1992 book From the Enemy’s Point of View. In his fieldwork, he notes that “The difference between men and animals is not clear” and  that he could not “find a simple manner of characterizing the place of ‘Nature’ in Arawete cosmology”  for they seem to  think of the “natural” and “cultural” distinction differently to the way that is germane to anthropological thought and by extension that of advanced Western civilization.  In a subsequent article, he elaborates with an example:

“Amerindian words which are usually translated as ‘human being’ and which figure in those supposedly ethno-centric self-designations do not denote humanity as a natural species. They refer rather to the social condition of personhood” (Viveiros de Castro, 1998, p.476)

What is at stake here is that, via perspectival thinking, “humanity” ceases to be a “natural category” and rather, becomes a social condition, something “culturally” constructed. In the same paper, Viveiros de Castro develops this critique of the nature/culture distinction by building upon the work of Philippe Descola (1996) to consider of what can be described as a “Western naturalist ontology”, the assumption that “nature” functions as an inert and impervious reality, “out there” while “culture” functions as the human perceptions of or interventions in it. That is to say, rather than there being multiple cultures and a single nature, Viveiros de Castro suggests that we try to imagine the existence of multiple natures and a single culture; a multinaturalism as opposed to multiculturalism. A singular human experience common to beings (human, non-human, spirit etc.) which corresponded to different ontological realities based upon material considerations (particularly of body or encasement). As Viveiros de Castro (2015, p.72) suggests

“Cultural relativism, which is a multiculturalism, presumes a diversity of partial, subjective representations bearing on an external nature, unitary and whole, that itself is indifferent to representation. Amerindians propose the inverse: on the one hand, a purely pronominal representative unit-the human is what and whomever occupies the position of the cosmological subject; every existent can be thought of as thinking (it exists, therefore it thinks) , as “activated” or “agencied” by a point of view- and, on the other, a real or objective radical diversity. Perspectivism is a multinaturalism, since a perspective is not a representation.”

This concept of “multinaturalism” powerfully reshaped how we think about nature and human/animal relations and its ontogenetic moment lies in noting something as innocuous the Arawete not really having a term for “nature” and allows Viveiros de Castro to develop a complex conceptual structure to explain this.

 

Implications for ethnographers

So how do we adopt this kind of thinking in our ethnographic work in organizations? For many academics (see Holbraad, 2007) the play and invention of concepts is core to the means by which an ethnographer might regard the field differently in light of the ontological turn. There are two things that we can learn here from Viveiros de Castro, firstly, from his concept of “multinaturalism” we can begin to unthink the mono-naturalism that is invoked in the earlier experiences of the shopping centre and the way things “naturally” seem there and call into question the images of nature that the modern corporation uses in order to invoke a sense of quality, beauty, serenity, authenticity etc.. Secondly, and more importantly, we can follow the method that Viveiros de Castro uses to think, that is, through concepts developed by taking seriously the things that interlocutors say to us. This is contra the often popular wisdom that the last person that you can trust to tell you what’s going on is your interlocutors and complicates many of the concerns that we have when “studying up” but it involves the ethnographer in a process of thinking through the implications of a reality wherein “that’s just the nature of how things are” is a true and veritable statement, not underpinned by any implicit biases or internalized logics of boom/bust capital that need to be critically denaturalized but one reflective of a “truth” of the space and by consequence, a nature wherein these truths make sense, wherein the ethnographer does not know what “nature” means in this context. A concept born in conversation in the field. This links intimately to what Viveiros de Castro calls a method of “equivocation” which we do not have time to fully address here but suffice it to say that it begins from the assumption that the “native” and the “ethnographer” speak about a concept (whether this is the gift, or nature, or power, or money) they do so from non-equivalent conceptual regimes that inevitably lead to misunderstandings. What is truly at stake here is the ethnographer’s status as a rational, thinking subject because they are forced to ask “what is it about how I define nature that makes the idea of its cyclicality make sense or the idea of its multiplicity rendered via perspectivism not make sense?”. I have alluded to the fact that there are resonances here to what we have classically called denaturalization but it is far more intensive and prompts flights into abstract contemplation. Perhaps one might consider that there is a fundamental transience to the “natural reality”  of corporate personhood within contemporary capital; that their cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth should take place ever so brief a period as a few months and that their eulogies should exist in erasure- a well decorated board to hide that nothing is there anymore. Understanding this we might reconsider what it means for a corporation to act as a “person” and furthermore what it means for it to “die” and by consequence what “person” and “death” mean as concepts for the human; the shopping centre here becomes the radical other whose “nature” contrasts our own (even if it share our culture) by which we garner a more profound understanding of ourselves.

 

Concluding Thoughts

In summation then, what might we learn from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the ontological turn? Organizational scholars are already unpacking what this turn means (O’Doherty, 2017) but there is still, we argue more work to be done when it comes to the importance of concepts. In a 1966 article that seems to foreshadow much of what he would write about over the subsequent decades, Gilles Deleuze (2004, p.92), describes the challenge of our times as to:

“set up a new image of thought: a thinking that no longer opposes itself as from the outside to the unthinkable or the unthought, but which would lodge the unthinkable, the unthought within itself as thought, and which would be in an essential relationship to it”

For Viveiros de Castro, a keen reader of Gilles Deleuze, I would suggest that this ring true and informs his project of comparative metaphysics. What Deleuze is enshrining here is the imperative to think differently, creatively and in a circumspect way about the ideas and concepts that we encounter in our fields. I remain unsure of whether I can define “good ethnography” on these terms but it might be the case but an ethnography attentive to the concepts of the field may be a good start.