Zuzanna Sadowska has been invited to participate in a workshop led by Edurado Viveiros de Castro at the University of Tübingen. Zuzanna will work on the potentials and limitations of applying the methodological assumptions of the ontological turn in ethnographic research.

Perspectivism was born as a response to the challenges posed by ethnographic observations. The ontological turn was also born from a sense of disappointment with the analytical concepts used by anthropologists, which were unable to describe the reality experienced during research. The result was an affirmation of radical otherness, or rather radical alterities, and attempts to describe alternative ontologies.

However, such an approach can lead to the exclusion from ethnographic descriptions of situations in which alterity does not seem so radical. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Brazil on practices related to the use of the herbal infusion known in Western science as ayahuasca, Zuzanna shows how perspectivism helps to analyze only some phenomena, but cannot be considered as a superior way of describing how people act and think in all circumstances.

The infusion works through força, an animate force that can be experienced after its consumption. This force is experienced through embodied experiences and perceptual changes that can allow the person to sense the circulating powers associated with other people, plants, animals, and spirits. Força can sometimes allow for communication with these entities, but it is not always experienced in this way, and not all people share the same ontological assumptions about the infusion. There are also many social explanations for how the infusion works, based, for example, on references to power relations and social inequalities.

How can we approach the ontological complexity of the things/concepts we encounter in the field in an anthropological description? How can we avoid creating homogenous ontological models that suggest that people experience reality in the same way and obscure the complexity of the relationships that shape these experiences, including power relations and social change?

Workshop website:
https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/research/centers-and-institutes/college-of-fellows/focus-groups/interdisciplinary-anthropology/#c1771441