Radical alterity is just another way of saying “reality”

As a response to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's critique of my essay "Fetishes are gods in the process of construction, " this paper enters into critical engagement with anthropological proponents of what has been called the "ontological turn. " Among other engagements, I note that my own reflections on Malagasy fanafody, or medicine, are informed by just the sort of self-conscious reflections my informants make on epistemology, something that anthropologists typically ignore. After making note of the arguments of Roy Bhaskar that most post-Cartesian philosophy rests on an "epistemic fallacy, " I further argue that a realist ontology, combined with broad theoretical relativism, is a more compelling political position than the "ontological anarchy" and theoretical intolerance of ontological turn exponents.