Grounding ontologies: considering diversity and practice in conceptions of non-humans in an Amazonian society

Abstract People’s environmental conceptions influence the manner in which they engage with the world around them and are fundamental to processes of environmental decision-making. In order to fully grasp the meaning of such conceptions, ontological approaches exhort anthropologists to reconceptualize their own notions in order to understand people’s statements. Such approaches foreground difference, to the extent that members of distinct societies are considered to live in fundamentally different, incommensurable worlds. These theoretical postures, however, have been criticized for their emphasis on radical alterity and for portraying ontologies as homogeneous and static, ignoring cultural change and ethnographic heterogeneity, typical of anthropological research. Additionally, important theoretical and methodological issues are still unresolved, e.g., how to know if people’s statements are meant to be taken as literal truths. This paper addresses this criticism and empirically explores conceptual arrangements by considering diversity and practice as constitutive of ontologies. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, this study explores the variety of notions of non-human beings held by members of an Indigenous Matsigenka community in Amazonian Peru. Ethnographic participant observation and a Bayesian statistical analysis of patterns of agreement and disagreement among community members suggest that ontological configurations are diverse, sometimes multiple and context-dependent, and are associated with specialized roles that influence people’s engagements with non-human beings in their daily lives. An understanding of these diverse, enacted conceptions sheds lights on complexities of human interactions with their surroundings.