Ontologies, anthropologists, and ethical life

What is ontology?There seem to be two versions in play in Geoffrey Lloyd's book, what we can call strong and weak ontology.Lloyd is often talking about what I am calling the weak form: "ontologies are . . .comprehensive accounts of whatever there is" (Lloyd 2012: 39).Thus he refers to a "picture" the Greeks held, and remarks that where Jesuits saw things, Chinese saw events (ibid.: 23).Such expressions treat ontology as a perception; the language of visuality suggests a world that different people share, but view in various manners: if Jesuits see something one way, Chinese another, they nonetheless seem to be looking in the same direction.Moreover, "the Chinese spoke not of elements but of phases."Thus we have a view manifested in words.Notice the double mediation: it's a verbal representation of an idea about the world.In all these cases, ontology turns out to be, or at least our access to it is by way of, a set of propositions or assertions.Lloyd's ancient Greek and Chinese examples are weak ontology; that is they are theories or interpretations of reality.A representation has the structure of what Brentano (1973) called "intentionality": it is about something.This "aboutness" seems to require that there be some kind of object other than the representation itself that the representation is about, however opaque or ultimately unknowable that object might be.But the ethnographers Lloyd discusses, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, seem to have something stronger in mind.Of Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism, Lloyd (2012: 21) writes, "different members of the human race have such different experiences, perceptions, and ways of interacting with their environment that we should think of them as living in different worlds."Now on first blush, this may seem to be merely a variation on, say, the linguistics of Whorf (1956: 158) when he suggests "Hopi 'duration' seems to be inconceivable in terms of space or motion," or the cultural analysis of Sahlins (1985: 110) in asserting that "Cook was welcomed as Lono."But the language of ontology