Modernity and Spirit Worship in India This book investigates the entangled relations between people’s daily wor- ship practices and their umwelt in South India. Focusing on the practices of spirit ( b ū ta ) worship in the coastal area of Karnataka, it examines the relationship between people and deities. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book links important anthropologi- cal theories on personhood, perspectives, transactions, and gift-exchanges together with the Gestaltkreis theory of Viktor von Weizsäcker. First, it ex- amines the relations between b ū ta worship and land tenure, matriliny, and hierarchy in the society. It then explores the reflexive relationship between modern law and current practices based on conventional law, before exam- ining new developments in b ū ta worship with the rise of mega-industries and environmental movements. Furthermore, this book sheds light on the struggles and endeavours of the people who create and recreate their rela- tions with the realm of sacred wildness, as well as the formations and trans- formations of the umwelt in perpetual social-political transition. Modernity and Spirit Worship in India will be of interest to academics in the field of anthropology, religious studies and the dynamics of religion, and South Asian Culture and Society. Miho Ishii is an associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan. Her current research focus is on the relationship between spirit worship and environ- mental movements in South India. Routledge New Horizons in South Asian Studies Series Editors: Crispin Bates, Edinburgh University; Akio Tanabe, Kyoto University; Minoru Mio, National Museum of Ethnology, Japan Democratic Transformation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India Edited by Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Akio Tanabe and Shinya Ishizaka Cities in South Asia Edited by Crispin Bates and Minoru Mio Human and International Security in India Edited by Crispin Bates, Akio Tanabe & Minoru Mio Rethinking Social Exclusion in India Castes, Communities and the State Edited by Minoru Mio and Abhijit Dasgupta Modernity and Spirit Worship in India An Anthropology of the Umwelt Miho Ishii For a full list of titles please see https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-New- Horizons-in-South-Asian-Studies/book-series/RNHSAS Modernity and Spirit Worship in India An Anthropology of the Umwelt Miho Ishii LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Miho Ishii The right of Miho Ishii to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-41028-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82266-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra List of illustrations vii Preface ix 1 Introduction: towards an anthropology of the umwelt 1 PART ONE Humans and the wild ś akti of deities 33 2 The land of paddy fields, forests, and deities 35 3 The b ū ta shrine and deities in Perar 48 4 P āḍ dana : the oral epics of deities 60 5 Dances, oracles, and blessings in the ritual 70 6 The transaction of wild ś akti 82 7 Playing with perspectives 94 PART TWO Social transformations and the emergence of a new umwelt 107 8 B ū ta ’s agency in conflicts over the village shrine 109 9 Historical changes in land tenure in South Kanara 135 10 Modern law, customary law, and the reflexive imagination 164 11 Land reforms and deities as the ‘owners of land’ 183 12 B ū ta s in the midst of the development project 209 Contents vi Contents 13 The new umwelt in the industrial plant 236 14 Conclusion: being, pathos, and the umwelt 248 Glossary 263 Bibliography 275 Index 291 Illustrations Figure 6.1 The transactional network between humans and b ū tas 87 Tables 2.1 The number of households based on religion in Mudu Perar and Padu Perar 37 2.2 The number of households based on caste group in Mudu Perar and Padu Perar 38 2.3 Land use in Perar 41 2.4 The crop calendar and yearly rituals in Perar 42 3.1 The prominent families in Perar in relation to b ū ta worship 53 9.1 Land holding and land tax assessment of pa ṭṭ ad ā r in Mudu Perar (Fasli 1312) 151 9.2 Caste/type of pa ṭṭ ad ā rs 152 9.3 Total number of registered pa ṭṭ ad ā rs corresponding to assessed plots 153 9.4 Total number of registered pa ṭṭ ad ā rs belonging to Ba ṇṭ a (by family) 154 10.1 Mu ṅḍ abe ṭṭ u guttu family property partition plan 177 11.1 Types of applicants and landlords 185 11.2 Types of Ba ṇṭ a landlords 186 11.3 Types of land applied for rights in the Mu ṅḍ abe ṭṭ u guttu 186 11.4 Caste/group of households and population 187 11.5 Number of (a) landlord households, (b) tenant households, (c) domestic labourer households, and (d) other households by caste/group 188 11.6 Families of Ba ṇṭ a landlord households 189 11.7 Area of land holdings of landlord households (2008) 190 11.8 Classification of holdings of landlord households according to manner of acquisition 190 11.9 Landlord households that lost land due to land reform 195 In a sense, this book follows an established line of anthropological prede- cessors focusing on the dynamism of religious practices and/in modernity. It is, after all, primarily a book about b ū ta (or spirit) worship in South Kanara, a coastal area in Karnataka, India. B ū tas are generally considered to be deities or spirits that dwell in forests and embody the realm of sacred wild- ness. In this book, I investigate the endeavours and struggles of people in village communities, who create and recreate their relations with the realm of sacred wildness through transactions with b ū tas, amidst social-political transitions such as colonisation, changes in land tenure systems, and devel- opment of mega-industries. However, I also attempt to introduce a novel twist to this anthropological genre. The theoretical core of this book is the notion of the umwelt pre- sented by Viktor von Weizsäcker, who uniquely developed Jakob von Uex- küll’s ideas on the existence of entangled and inseparable relations between an organism and its environment. By linking anthropological theories on personhood, perspective, transactions, and gift-exchanges to the theory of the umwelt, I attempt to consider the relations among villagers, land, na- ture, and b ū tas as part of the dynamic and creative interactions between humans and their life-worlds, including nonhumans. If this book successfully presents a perspective that exceeds, even a little, the limits of a monograph sticking to its discipline and geographical field, I owe it to the members of a research project titled ‘ Kansekai no Jinbungaku (The Studies of Umwelten)’, undertaken at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, since 2015. Discussions and conversations with colleagues from various academic backgrounds in the course of this project provided great inspiration in the writing of this book. These discussions also inspired an earlier version of this volume pub- lished in Japanese under the title, ‘ Kansekai no Jinruigaku: Minami Indo ni okeru Yasei, Kindai, Shinreisaishi ( An Anthropology of the Umwelt: Wildness, Modernity, and Spirit Worship in South India )’, by Kyoto University Press in 2017. Though the core of the argument has remained consistent, through the long process of rewriting, this volume has become not a mere translation, but a fresh creation. I deeply thank Dr Masakazu Tanaka, my colleague Preface x Preface and former supervisor, for his precious comments on the earlier version of this book. Drs Crispin Bates, Akio Tanabe, and Minoru Mio, the series editors of Routledge New Horizons in South Asian Studies, gave me great support from the earliest to the final stages of publication of this book. Without their support and encouragement, it would not have been possible for me to com- plete this work. Nick Kasparek and Dr Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe made great efforts to improve the quality of this book. Their sensitive and deep knowl- edge of English greatly helped me construct the whole argument in English. I am also very grateful to the editors at Routledge, Dorothea Schaefter and Alexandra de Brauw, for their support in the publication of this volume. After completing my doctoral and postdoctoral research on spirit wor- ship in Ghana, I first visited South India in 2008, in search of a new field site. It was Dr Chinnappa Gowda at Mangaluru University who first introduced me to the fertile world of b ū ta worship in South Kanara. Since the start of my fieldwork, Akshaya Shetty, her mother Baarati, and her father Harisha always provided me with warm and generous support. Vidya Dinker not only gave me wise advice, but also instilled the courage I needed to pursue difficult tasks in the field. Without their support and friendship, I could not have accomplished my research. Finally, I would like to thank Kenta Funahashi and our two daughters, Hina and Sui. They accompanied me on my fieldtrips and shared my joy and wonder through the entire process. They provided me with great inspiration and encounters that would not have been possible if I were alone in the field. Therefore, I would like to dedicate this book, a fruit of our collaborative field life, to them. Some of the chapters in this book are based on previously published pa- pers. All have been extensively revised for the present volume. An early ver- sion of Chapter 6 was published as a paper entitled ‘Wild sacredness and the poiesis of transactional networks: Relational divinity and spirit possession in the b ū ta ritual of South India’ in Asian Ethnology in 2015. Chapter 7 is based on a paper entitled ‘Playing with perspectives: Spirit possession, mi- mesis, and permeability in the buuta ritual in South India’ published in Jour- nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2013. Chapter 10 partly overlaps with a paper entitled ‘Traces of reflexive imagination: Matriliny, modern law, and spirit worship in South India’ published in Asian Anthropology in 2014. Chapter 12 is based on conference papers presented at the ninth and tenth International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in 2015 and 2017. Chapter 13 has evolved from the papers below: ‘The chiasm of machines and spirits: B ū ta worship, megaindustry, and embodied environment in South India’ published in 2014 in a volume entitled Ecologies of Care: Innovations through Technologies, Collectives and the Senses , edited by Gergely Mohácsi; ‘The ecology of transaction: Dividual persons, spirits, and machinery in a special economic zone in South India’ published in NatureCulture in 2015; and ‘Caring for divine infrastructures: Nature and spirits in a special eco- nomic zone in India’, which appeared in Ethnos in 2017. Preface xi The research on which this volume is based was financially supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 21720321, 24251017, and 26370949). Miho Ishii Kyoto July 2019 In the month of m ā yi during the hottest and driest season, b ū ta rituals are held in many villages in South Kanara, a coastal area in Karnataka. 1 Accompanied by drums and wind instruments played by Puru ṣ a musicians, spirit mediums of the Pambada or Nalike castes dance around the precincts of local shrines, issue oracles, and interact with people. As apotheosised local heroes or heroines or as the spirits of wild animals dwelling in forests, b ū tas are generally regarded as deities. While b ū tas may travel across regions, they are generally believed to be closely linked to the land and nature of localities. Though normally invisible, their power, or ś akti , 2 fills the deep forests, hangs over the bush and ponds, and circulates through the woods, agricultural fields, and villages. Consequently, b ū tas are considered to originate from—and embody—a realm of sacred wildness Fieldwork for this monograph was mainly carried out in the two adjoin- ing villages of Mudu Perar and Padu Perar in Mangaluru taluk, Dakshina Kannada district. 3 Until administratively separated in 1904, these villages used to be a single entity called ‘Perar’, and are still collectively called ‘Perar’ by the villagers. 4 In Perar, b ū ta rituals are conducted in the geographical area that con- sists of houses surrounded by paddy fields, palm and areca nut farms, and deep forests and hills. As will be elaborated upon later, b ū ta rituals are closely related to the ranks and duties of families, matriliny, and land tenure. In village society, b ū ta worship is a sophisticated system that links people to land and nature. Embodying the realm of the wild, 5 b ū tas medi- ate the relationships villagers have with fields and forests, and b ū ta rituals facilitate the smooth succession of both lands and offices within families. Moreover, through the transaction of offerings and blessings ( pras ā da ) 6 in rituals, the b ū tas authorise the hierarchies and relations among village families. Direct encounters and interactions between people and deities is an essential element of b ū ta worship. Villagers directly present offerings at altars and small shrines in their houses, and they receive oracles and bless- ings from possessed mediums at village shrines. While b ū ta ś akti is gener- ally perceived as an invisible, fertile, and dangerous power that influences 1 Introduction Towards an anthropology of the umwelt 2 Introduction the lives and destinies of villagers, through spirit possession it can also tran- siently manifest in dreadful, androgynous forms. Drawing on the results of my observations of everyday practices in vil- lages and considering villager relations with what they characterise as ‘the wild’, a realm actualised through interactions with b ū tas, this book explores how all these various relations create and recreate the social, religious, and ecological milieu, or in effect the umwelt , of village residents. Before examining the notion of the umwelt in detail, it should be noted that rather than being static, the village communities studied in this book have been constantly adapting to changes since time immemorable. As de- scribed later, since the nineteenth century, rural society in South Kanara has been transformed through the development and penetration of modern legal and administrative systems. Since the mid-1990s, massive development projects in Mangaluru have also caused disruptive changes in rural areas, including the destruction of farmland and the eviction of villagers from the land they had farmed or otherwise had access to. Faced with these changes which can generally be called ‘modernisation’, people have tried to maintain or recreate their way of life by reorganising their relationships with others and by negotiating with strangers. Entangled as they are with various in- tentions and social relations, these endeavours are beset with conflict and difficulty. Moreover, for the villagers, relationships with b ū tas have always been central to their practices and decision-making. These relationships help them confront the challenge of incessant social change, both to keep what they have and to leverage the transitions as opportunities. When we investigate the mutual formation and transformation of people’s everyday practices and their umwelt in their reflexive interactions with mod- ern laws and systems as well as in transactions with the realm the wild and deities, three mutually entangled subjects of study become clear: humans, the wild, and modernity. In the following section, I will examine previous studies that have focused on modernity and the occult, as well as on ontology. Theories of modernity and the occult Magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, and spirit pos- session have long been important subjects in anthropology, and since the 1980s, many writers have considered how the occult in non-Western socie- ties relates to modernity (e.g. Comaroff 1985; Geschiere 1997; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999). 7 In his early work, Taussig analysed Bolivian miners’ worship of Tio, the spirit owner of the tin mines, as a cultural response of neophyte proletarians towards the capitalist mode of production. According to Taussig, peasants working in the mines understood wage labour and the new socio-economic system as evil and unnatural, and the devil figure of Tio strikingly articu- lated this interpretation. Devil worship thus represented both the predica- ment of the peasants and their critical consciousness and struggle against Introduction 3 the exploitative modern capitalist economy (Taussig 1980, pp. 17–22, 144– 145, 232–233). Geschiere, by posing the idea of ‘the modernity of witchcraft’, has also presented a fresh viewpoint for analysing the relationship between moder- nity and the occult. According to Geschiere, in postcolonial Cameroon and other African societies, discourses about witchcraft have burgeoned in modern sectors such as politics, sports, institutions of formal education, and so forth. Such rumours and discourses expose concern about the prolif- eration of novel forms of witchcraft, but they also reveal the popular interest in various hidden opportunities to acquire and accumulate new forms of wealth. In Africa, rumours and practices related to witchcraft are evidence of people’s efforts to interpret changes brought by modernity and to gain control over them. Thus, Geschiere argues that we should focus on the ‘mo- dernity’ of witchcraft, rather than considering witchcraft in contraposition to modernity (Geschiere 1997, pp. 1–9; Ciekawy & Geschiere 1998). Likewise, using the concept of ‘occult economies’, Comaroff and Co- maroff (1999) analysed the relation between the rise of occult phenomena and social economic conditions in postcolonial South Africa, where there has been a dramatic rise in fear and suspicion of occult phenomena such as witchcraft, Satanism, zombies, and ritual murder. According to the Coma- roffs, these occult phenomena express the discontent and despair of people distressed by the mysterious mechanisms of the global market economy, but they are also symptoms of an occult economy waxing behind the civil surfaces of the ‘new’ South Africa. The practice of witchcraft and other mystical arts in postcolonial Africa was ‘a mode of producing new forms of consciousness; of expressing discontent with modernity and dealing with its deformities’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999, p. 284, emphasis in original). Focusing on modernity and the occult in non-Western societies, many observers argue along the same lines. When discussing transformations of traditional societies under the pressure of modernisation, people’s occult practices are held to be significant in modern situations. They are often inter- preted as distinctive responses to, or critiques of, changing social conditions. Such an analytical frame may be embedded in the conventional meth- ods and practices of anthropology, wherein anthropologists from Western societies have long felt impelled to study ‘pre-modern’ occult practices in non-Western societies and to publish the results to their own reading pub- lic. In this context, magical-religious phenomena such as witchcraft, magic, and spirit possession in non-Western societies have often been collectively regarded as a reference point not only to antithetically define ‘the modern West’, but also to disclose what ails the West through difference or meta- phoric connection. Regarding this, Sanders wrote, Anthropologists have thus foregrounded resistance and critique in many forms, from large-scale revolts and revolutions to their everyday and more spectral manifestations. Anthropological explanations here 4 Introduction suggest that occult forces and discourses can be seen as offering a sus- tained critique of the genesis or intensification of capitalism, modernity, neoliberalism and globalization, specifically, of the novel inequalities and exploitations these things engender. Through the occult, the argu- ment goes, Others in faraway places expose unsettling truths about our contemporary world and its woeful workings. (Sanders 2008, p. 111) Perhaps it was inevitable that anthropologists—tasked with studying the lives of non-Westerners and representing values and logics different from those in the West—would tend to analyse magical-religious practices in non-Western societies as critiques of or alternatives to a value system based on rationality, individualism, material possession, market economy, ex- change value, and concepts understood to constitute modernity. Similar in- terpretations of the occult, however, predate anthropology and were already in evidence in mid-seventeenth-century Europe: Discourses and legal actions naming and constraining “spirit posses- sion” over the past four centuries helped to create the dual notions of the rational individual and the civil subject of modern states. The silhouette of the propertied citizen and free individual took form between the idea of the automaton—a machine-body without will—and the threat of the primitive or animal, bodies overwhelmed by instincts and passions. (Johnson 2011, p. 396) Johnson observed that according to the early modern philosophy of Europe, a person in the modern West who was overwhelmed by spirit possession was seen as the inverse of the rational, autonomous individual. This tendency to compare and contrast images of the self in Western and non-Western socie- ties has persisted in recent studies of spirit possession and personhood. For instance, Smith (2006, pp. 19, 74–75) argues that spirit possession, as the ex- posure of the fluid and permeable nature of personal identity, coincides with features of South Asian personhood, which are fluid, divisible, and perme- able. Here the possessed, or indeed the South Asian person, is construed in contrast with the ideal, autonomous, Western person. More recently, however, interpretations of occult practices have gone be- yond the simple inversion of idealised images of society and personhood in the modern West; rather, occult practices are now seen as exposing ‘unsettling truths about our contemporary world and its woeful workings’ (Sanders 2008, p. 111) or as critiques of modern Western values which presume the impor- tance of individualism and material possessions (see Johnson 2011, p. 417). Since the 1990s, when new notions such as the ‘modernity of witchcraft’ and ‘occult economies’ were introduced by some anthropologists, it has be- come common to interpret informant discourse on the occult as evidence of ambivalent attitudes towards modernity. For example, analysing occult Introduction 5 narratives of the Mawri about roads in postcolonial Niger in terms of the materialisation of people’s experience of modernity, Masquelier argues that roads are part of a complex economy of violence, power, and blood— objects of both fascination and terror. Thus, their tales linking roads with the occult should be understood as ‘creative efforts to articulate local understandings of mobility, morality, and marketing in all their literal and metaphorical meanings’, which brings to light people’s troubled encounters with moder- nity (Masquelier 2002, pp. 829, 831–834). 8 These recent studies have examined new dimensions and meanings of the occult in non-Western societies by considering it in relation to comprehen- sive modern phenomena, such as globalisation and neoliberalism. Even so, taking the occult in non-Western societies as a reference point that both enables a definition of what is modern and Western and provides an op- portunity to critique problems with the West, most writers are still tied to the general viewpoint of previous studies. In other words, magical-religious practices in non-Western societies continue to be analysed in terms of their relation with, and response to, powers and social economic changes origi- nating in the West. Such an analytical framework has led some anthropol- ogists to refer to the occult too generally, without a deep analysis of the particular history, specificity, and locality of each phenomenon. 9 Moreover, as is obvious in discussions of occult economies (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999), studies of the occult in a non-Western context tend to as- sume that the modern values and systems that cause radical change in local society are beyond the understanding of local people, and consequently, oc- cult practices are an imaginative expression of people metaphorically inter- preting these changes. Framing magical-religious practices as imaginative interpretations or metaphorical critiques of modernity seems to obscure an understanding of how these practices are entangled with modern values and systems in concrete situations. Before considering this aspect in more detail, in the next section I will examine a recent trend in anthropology which also focuses on magical- religious phenomena in non-Western societies, but provides different ideas and methods for their analysis. Ontological questions and ‘the reality of the other ’ Since the end of the 1990s, a host of new anthropological studies conducted through the lens of ontology have been published. Researchers have turned to ontology in order to criticise the anthropocentrism of modern social science and to complicate and invert the nature–culture dichotomy and its assump- tions of the universality of nature and particularity of culture. To transcend these issues, multinaturalism, radical essentialism, the ontological self- determination of the other, and other alternative frames have been proposed. Leaving aside the varied anthropological studies approaching ontology through philosophy, phenomenology, and science and technology studies, 10 6 Introduction in this section I will mainly examine the arguments concerning what has been called the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007). It should be noted that the theoretical trend examined here, hereafter called the OT, does not cover all anthropological works that are ‘ontologically attuned’ (Kohn 2015, p. 323), that is say, that deal with onto- logical questions as an underlying theme; rather, this section is more nar- rowly concerned with recent discussions of the ontological turn. 11 In addition to criticising the modern dichotomy of nature and culture, advocates of the OT also see it as means of freeing anthropology from the shackles of epistemology. Since the goal is ‘taking things encountered in the field as they present themselves’ (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 2), proponents of the OT take issue with focusing epistemologically merely on people’s worldviews and with the reductionism entailed in describing field- work observations through modern rationality. Accordingly, following the OT, rather than elaborating on worldviews, anthropologists should engage with the ontology of the people in the field. Consequently, peoples who are assumed to have different ontologies, such as Euro-Americans and Amer- indians, are understood as not just perceiving the same world in different ways, but as living in different worlds (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, pp. 10–12; Holbraad 2009). In the OT, the concept of ‘ontology’ thus sug- gests a multiplicity of worlds and is inseparable from differenc e and alterity (see Gad, Jensen & Winthereik 2015, p. 70). Here, these concepts do not refer to epistemological differences between worldviews, but are reserved for denoting ontological differences between lived worlds. A central tenet is radical alterity (Henare, Holbraad & Wastell 2007, p. 8), which cannot be reduced to modern rationality. Proponents of the OT often use magical- religious discourses and practices in the field as their main evidence of this radical alterity, focusing on myths, divination, animism, shamanism, and other things which have been looked upon as ‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (Sperber 1982). 12 While the way the OT focuses on magical-religious practices in non- Western societies may seem similar to conventional approaches in the an- thropology of religion, there are some critical differences between them. As seen in discussions of rationality, 13 most previous studies have tried in various ways to portray beliefs and practices in non-Western societies both as some variety of distinctive logic or function incompatible with modern rationality and as rationally apprehensible by Westerners despite their uniqueness. By contrast, proponents of the OT are critical of such attempts to transform the phenomena of a different ontological world into something else by interpretation and rationalisation. The starting point of the OT—to take things in the field as they are— is motivated by an advocacy of ‘the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples’ (Viveiros de Castro 2003, 2011a, 2014a). In other words, the OT does not attempt to interpret or represent its objects of study; rather, it wants to leave room for the people themselves. Specifically, Viveiros de Introduction 7 Castro has stated that, since the ontological turn, anthropology is obliged to ‘make room for the other’, that is, to create the conditions for the ontological self-determination of the other. For him, the role of anthropology ‘is not that of explaining the world of the other , but rather of multiplying our world ’, and as such, anthropologists should avoid ‘explain[ing] too much’ or ‘try[ing] to actualise the possibilities immanent to others’ thought’, but instead, ‘en- deavour to sustain [these possibilities] as possible indefinitely’ (Viveiros de Castro 2014a; see also Holbraad, Pedersen & Viveiros de Castro 2014). Critiques of the OT The fresh, radical ideas of the OT have greatly influenced academia. This stimulation has also given rise to criticism. While most commentators ap- preciate the endeavour to reconsider the modernist view of humans and the nature–culture dichotomy, they question notions such as radical essential- ism and ontological alterity, and also wonder about the methodology of tak- ing things in the field as they are. For instance, expanding on his argument supporting the motion tabled at a debate on anthropological theory that ‘ontology is just another word for culture’ (Venkatesan 2010), Candea pointed out that ‘many accounts of ontology specify as their subjects human populations, broadly geographi- cally conceived’ (177), and that the outline of disparate ontologies tends to map onto what would previously have been called cultural groups. Thus, the idea of ontological alterity is not free from the ‘difficult conundrums which dogged the anthropological study of cultural difference’ (Venkatesan 2010, p. 179; see also Laidlaw 2012). Vigh and Sausdal (2014) have also criticised the OT notion of ‘radical alterity’ owing to the methodological problems of translation and com- munication it brings, and because it diminishes the possibility of mutual understanding across ontologies. They also wonder how it could be possible to take things in the field as they are . By promoting the idea of accepting, without interpretation, what people tell us about their world, they say that the OT ‘becomes an argument for pure indexicality with an almost one- to-one relationship between signifiés and signifiants ’ (Vigh & Sausdal 2014, p. 61). Consequently, this kind of ‘ontic’ argument that ‘things are what they are’ can be fundamentally undermined ‘by people’s frequently expressed doubt and ambivalence about the nature of the real they inhabit’ (Vigh & Sausdal 2014, pp. 56–57, 61; see also Graeber 2015). Gad, Jensen, and Winthereik (2015, pp. 73–75) have similarly pointed out that while proponents of the OT insist on the importance of ‘things’ to understand the ontological world of the other, they largely rely on dis- courses recorded during fieldwork or culled from other sources. The precept of ‘taking things in the field as they are’ may help researchers avoid con- jectures and interpretations, but this approach also encourages researchers to take the discourses of their informants at face value and to regard their