2021 Volume 86 Issue 1 Pages 057-075
This paper explores the potential of an anthropological perspective in which modern and indigenous ontologies are symmetrically understood under the conditions of the actual world where human and non-human activities are inseparably entangled. For this purpose, I compare the ontology of the Inuit with the modern dualistic ontology, scrutinizing how each works in people's everyday activities and contributes to the continuous generation and maintenance of their life-world composed of humans and non-humans. Based on this analysis, I demonstrate that ontology is indispensable to human beings, not because it delivers a genuine account of how the world really works but because it functions as the engine of the worlding systems through the cyclic operation of which people's life-worlds are multifariously generated. Then, I propose that anthropological studies should devote effort to elucidate how diverse ontologies function as the engines of various worlding systems and explore the potential of multiple worlds generated thereby.
