Anthropology’s Ontological Turn

This book is, at the base, about the phenomenology of objects. Also, it concerns the anthropological turn, which is the move to understand the spiritual nature of things, including animistic understandings of tribal peoples and the applicability of this cosmic view in things modern and in Nature.The animistic perspective is based on my fieldwork in an African tribe, as well as my library research on the subject.I explore the fact that awakened hunters experience the hunt as a spiritual encounter with Nature, as do shamans and seers. Animistic ethnographers explore the hidden spiritual nature of their subjects. Going deeper philosophically, I look into emergent properties of assemblages, the sentience and the ontology of stones and other inanimate objects. In this perspective, all objects have sentience - some visible to us and others only available through animistic intuition, which is the basis of the turn in ethnographic fieldwork and writing.