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Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provided the initial impetus for explicitly ontological research in archaeology. Their impact on archaeologists, however, has been quite different. What I call the \"metaphysical archaeologists\" trace their genealogy from Latour, though they are now equally influenced by \"new materialism\" and the \"new ontological realism\" ( Gabriel 2015 ). They have introduced an alternative metaphysical orthodoxy to archaeology. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro and colleagues have authorized the return of the grand ethnographic analogy to archaeology, particularly in the case of animism. A second, quite different tendency inspired by these same anthropologists is to engage with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice. I suggest that a point of convergence between the metaphysical and the latter anthropological approaches exists in their focus on the concept of alterity.

This book explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by contesting the widely held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy's sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the ‘demos’, they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy, and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength. Contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of ‘mutual recognition’ that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical ‘we’ which constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of ‘dissensus’ in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The contributors mobilise some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities—from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and post-colonial studies—to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of ‘democracy’ in the face of its contemporary crisis.

Based on Pierre Bourdieús habitus concept, this work proposes a theoretical scheme for the study of interethnic relations, highlighting contributions from three disciplines: social psychology, sociology and social anthropology. The theoretical scheme integrates micro- and macro-dimensions of ethnic identity and synthesizes the primordialist and instrumental perspectives of identity.

What does ontological anthropology promise, what does it presume, and how does it contribute to the formatting of life in our present? Drawing from our respective fieldwork on how Indigenous alterity is coenvisioned and how the lively materiality of hydrocarbons is recognized, we develop an ethnographic and theoretical critique of ontological anthropology. This essay, then, provides an empirical counterweight to what the ontological turn celebrates of Native worlds and what it rejects of modernity. In it, we examine the methodological and conceptual investments of ontological anthropology. The figure of the ontological as commonly invoked, we argue, often narrows the areas of legitimate concern and widens the scope of acceptable disregard within social research. We chart how this paradigm's analytical focus on the future redefines the coordinates of the political as well as anthropology's relation to critique. Finally, we formulate three conceptual theses that encapsulate our criticism and open this discussion to further debate.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital presents a new perspective regarding space exploration, focusing on a day in the life of six astronauts, which brings forward a potential discussion regarding the human condition in outer space, the duality (human and cosmic) of astronauts, as well as the condition that they must face while being in outer space: being rather “outsiders” compared to people on Earth, but not feeling quite entirely at home in outer space either. Therefore, the following paper focuses on the lives of the six protagonists as depicted in Harvey’s novel. Through a close reading and a narrative analysis, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which Orbital features the lives of six astronauts from a perspective that can be discussed from a theoretical standpoint that revolves around concepts such as alterity, exile (or rather self-exile), foreigner, and sublime (and cosmic sublime).

The work of Lorand Gaspar, a contemporary author of French expression, born in TarguMures, stands out for a poetic approach to existence, in which the presentation of ideas interferes with body consciousness, culture and nature. The relationships established between them retrace certain poetic, but also ethical and existential principles. The notion of non-belonging is fundamental to Gaspar's poetics. He projected himself as a nomad, subjected to both geographical and spiritual migration, something that became his main source of revitalization and an essential identity component. Besides, poetry remained for Gaspar the only country of belonging, and the road towards it ensured the coherence of the entire journey.

The concept of cosmopolitics developed by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour keeps open the question of who and what might compose the common world. In this way, cosmopolitics offers a way to avoid the pitfalls of reasonable politics, a politics that, defining in advance that the differences at stake in a disagreement are between perspectives on a single reality, makes it possible to sideline some concerns by deeming them unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant. Figuring the common world as its possible result, rather than as a starting point, cosmopolitics disrupts the quick recourse to ruling out concerns on the basis of their ostensible lack of reality. And yet, questions remain as to who and what can participate in the composition of the common world. Exploring these questions through ethnographical materials on a conflict around caribou in Labrador, I argue that a cosmopolitics oriented to the common world has important limitations and that another orientation might be possible as well.