Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages

TLDR

The paper examines how differing conceptions of ontology—whether as an emergent assemblage of humans and non‑humans or as multiple shifting worlds—complicate discussions of indigeneity and its political implications. The study aims to investigate the political and epistemic implications of heterogeneous assemblages by proposing political ontology as a framework. The author contrasts geographic and ethnographic ontological projects, using a counterpoint approach to analyze their political consequences.

Abstract

The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two ‘ontological’ projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality conceived as an always-emergent assemblage of human and non-humans and troubles the politics that such assemblages imply. The other in ethnographic theory, that foregrounds that we are not only dealing with a shifting ontology, a (re)animated world, but also with multiple ontologies, a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways. Thus, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? I advance the notion of political ontology as a possible venue to explore this question.