Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Colloquium
Repugnant to the Nature
of the Straight Line:
Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology
Thursday, Sept. 29
2:30pm - 4:00pm
Loeb A720
In Do Glaciers Listen?, Julie Cruikshank juxtaposes different understandings of glaciers: they are at once the
physical entities studied by glaciologists, the forbidding symbols of sublime nature celebrated by Romantic
poets, and the powerful sentient beings encountered by Tlingit and Athapaskan travellers. In the process
of exploring these sometimes (but not always) incompatible views of the world and how they became
intertwined with one another in colonial encounters, she refuses to privilege – or dismiss – any particular
ontology, arguing that the erasure of worlds entailed in such a dismissal is the essence of colonialism. Instead,
she treats the worlds evoked by Tlingit storytellers as having the same ontological status as those brought
into being by climate scientists’ narratives. She shows how each set of ontological assumptions can provide
powerful – although always only partial – insights into the nature of the world. Her ontological agnosticism
is productive, but it is also threatening to many within the discipline, particularly those who champion
anthropology’s status as a science. In this paper, however, I examine turn-of-the-century philosophical debates
surrounding the invention of non-Euclidean geometry (especially Poincaré’s notion of conventionalism)
to show that mathematicians and physicists have long subscribed to precisely the sort of ontological
agnosticism advocated by Cruikshank. I also suggest that it was those same philosophical debates that
inspired Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas about “how natives think,” kicking off a century of anthropological debate over the
nature of knowledge and leading, ultimately, to our contemporary interest in questions of ontology.
Paul Nadasdy
Paul Nadasdy is Director of Undergraduate Studies, Anthropology Faculty
Member, Cornell University. Paul has been conducting ethnographic
research in Canada’s Yukon Territory since 1995, principally with the
people of Kluane First Nation, the indigenous inhabitants of the southwest
Yukon. His research has focused on the politics surrounding the
production and use of environmental knowledge in wildlife management,
land claim negotiations, and other political arenas. He is currently
conducting a sociocultural analysis of land claim negotiations among the
governments of Canada, the Yukon Territory, and the Kluane First Nation.
This lecture is part of the Carleton Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series
and co-sponsored by the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture.
For more information, please contact marlene.brancato@carleton.ca.
Please contact Frances Slaney at
frances.slaney@carleton.ca ideally
by Sept. 20, 2016 and at the very
least one week in advance, should
you wish to request sign language
interpretation services for this event.
carleton.ca
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