Situated Ontologies of the Metareal asks a properly geographical question: how can the vernacular cultural landscape, not a picturesque view or an inventory of elements, but the immediately sensible "framework of human existence", extended to Non-human agency, a living palimpsest of entities, qualities, human and non-human performativity, intangible cultural signs, assemblages and correspondences, be read in a way that stays geospatially interrogable, scalable and comparable without dissolving either into the postmodern proliferation of theoretical discourse or into the disjunctive gaze of quantitative GIS? This excess, what eludes any single classificatory grid, and the condition of an era in which no unmediated landscape remains to be read, is what the project calls the Metareal. To hold this tension, oscillating from ontology to hermeneutics according to a metamodernist zetetic approach to ontic space and situated knowledge, the project entrusts the field itself with auditing, through a critical grounded logbook, concepts long debated in the humanities and social sciences – the Ontological turn in Anthropology, Archaeology of the contemporary era, More-than representational Geographies, Cultural studies, neophenomenological and post-humanist thinking – probing whether they become recognisable at the level of the single entity and relations through hermeneutical filters (HF, R-HF) and weighted along a three-axis vectorial signature traceable to its own observer and condition, probing as well how much they’re more than just theoretical postulates, and how they can set a conceptual dialogue with a native perspectival knowledge. Empirical validation follows a full-case-plus-probe-context design: an autochthonous case worked in full depth, set against three comparative fieldwork contexts the Omo Valley, West Papua, and a third context still to be confirmed, chosen for their extreme gradients of cultural variation. This grounding work rests on a formal backbone, the CIDOC-CRM ontology, the ISO standard for cultural-heritage interoperability, applied here, to the ordinary lived landscape rather than a museum, an archaeological site, or a heritage site. The horizon is inferential and ethical in a single act: : a semantic infrastructure and a complete workflow from the situated and polylogical observation and ontological disclosure to RDF treatment, from KG (Knowledge Graphs) query to processual cartographic outcome, where both social sciences concepts and native local categories are treated and discussed as authoritative knowledge rather than raw data. The project remains alert to the decolonial tensions any such formalisation carries, and stays cautiously open to a kind of culturally grounded GeoAI and cartographic inferential inquiry, as a diagnosis of the spatial and ontic behaviour of cultural processes in the Capitalocene era, in line with the call of UNESCO's Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability.
Giacomo Barni (Tue,) studied this question.