CASPER BRUUN JENSEN & ATSURO MORITA, eds. 2019. Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies. New York: Berghahn Books. ISBN: 9781789205398
Keywords: Nature, culture, multispecies, anthropology, ontology
The eight chapters in this volume trace their shared origins to a panel convened by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita at the joint 50th Anniversary Conference of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA) and Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) held in Chiba, Japan in May 2014. Having attended this conference myself as a PhD student, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies is a welcome distillation of several panels’ stimulating discussions on nature and the ontological turn.
The Introduction by Jensen and Morita frame the volume’s key themes: the diverse forms relations between nature and culture take around the world, and how these multiple “nature-cultures” have been studied. The editors highlight how “minor” and “major” anthropological traditions have influenced, challenged, and become entangled with one another around such questions, recently culminating in the 21st century, multidisciplinary ontological turn within anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Jensen and Morita notably insist this cross-pollination is not new: citing examples from Japan and the introduction of novel concepts imported from French social theory – such as “nature” and the “social” – we find that such conceptual frictions (Tsing 2005) generated new terms and concepts as early as the 20th century, when the first Japanese equivocation to Western “nature,” shizen, first appeared. With this vivid example, readers are primed to journey through intersecting anthropological, philosophical, and scientific traditions, and the new configurations of nature, culture, and modernity they generate, in the following chapters.
In Chapter 1, Marylin Strathern calls for a re-examination of the very notion of relations, showing how Euro-American 17th century philosophy and science (biology, naturalism, genetics) led to transformations in understandings of kinship, in particular the shift to viewing entities as having external relations. This new understanding of kinship, Strathern argues, naturalized the Western ontological separation between nature and culture; indeed, the very emergence of terms and concepts like “identity” and “relation” may have also helped naturalize relations between entities as primarily external, obscuring possible internal connections, or relations inseparable from identity. In Chapter 2, Naoki Kasuga compares time as conceived in the Fijian Viti Kabani (Fiji Company) native movement and truth claims in physics, to show how ontologies of time are central to the production of past, present, and future realities. Blending ethnography of the Viti Kabani temporality known as “His Time,” or “New Time” – predictions made by the movement’s leader who died in 1946 – and a deep understanding of theoretical physics, Kasuga shows how temporal symmetry, consistency, and universality can be achieved through experimental, or alternative, ontologies of time. In doing so, Kasuga reveals fascinating possibilities for thinking with and beyond the limits of our ontological boundaries, and how different disciplines (anthropology, physics) might productively challenge each other.
Chapters 3 and 4 continue the conversation between anthropology and the natural sciences, specifically the production of evidence in en