The ontological turn is a movement in anthropology, philosophy, and science studies that emerged in the early 2000s, challenging the assumption that there is one nature and many cultures (multiculturalism) by proposing instead that different peoples may constitute and inhabit genuinely different worlds. Where earlier anthropology treated non-Western ontologies as beliefs, representations, or symbolic systems overlaid on a shared material reality, the ontological turn takes them as descriptions of how things actually are — not metaphors to be decoded but realities to be engaged.
The term draws together several distinct intellectual projects. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism and multinaturalism argue that Amerindian ontologies posit a shared culture (subjectivity, intentionality) distributed across all beings, with different bodies producing different natures. Philippe Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture (2005) proposes four ontological modes — naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism — as the basic configurations of how peoples organize relations between interiority and physicality. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory dissolves the nature/culture divide from the side of science studies, treating all entities as actants in networks of association.
What unites these projects is a refusal to reduce ontological claims to epistemological ones — a refusal to say “they believe X, but really Y.” This makes the ontological turn a direct challenge to the framework of substance metaphysics that underwrites Western social science, and a natural ally of relational ontology, which holds that relations constitute entities rather than connecting pre-given substances. The ontological turn provides the anthropological and philosophical evidence that relational ontologies are not speculative constructs but lived realities across many peoples.
Related terms
- Perspectivism — Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian ontological framework
- Multinaturalism — many natures, one culture
- Animism — the relational personhood of other-than-human beings
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position the turn supports
- Indigenous resurgence — the political movement these ontologies inform
- Process philosophy — the Western tradition closest to relational ontology