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As a response to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's critique of my essay "Fetishes are gods in the process of construction, " this paper enters into critical engagement with anthropological proponents of what has been called the "ontological turn. " Among other engagements, I note that my own reflections on Malagasy fanafody, or medicine, are informed by just the sort of self-conscious reflections my informants make on epistemology, something that anthropologists typically ignore. After making note of the arguments of Roy Bhaskar that most post-Cartesian philosophy rests on an "epistemic fallacy, " I further argue that a realist ontology, combined with broad theoretical relativism, is a more compelling political position than the "ontological anarchy" and theoretical intolerance of ontological turn exponents.

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Yet at the same time, I am convinced that if it isn't, this is very bad news for the project of anthropology. In a very real sense, anthropology could be said to have

In this paper we explore the relationship between seasonality, social inequality, and the cultural efflorescence of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe. We begin with critical reflections on the concept of 'complex hunter-gatherers' and its current applications in archaeology and anthropology. Reviving an earlier tradition of anthropological research, we argue that a key feature of hunter-gatherer social life has been the ability to consciously alternate between contrasting modes of political organisation. Such alternations -including regular oscillations between egalitarian and hierarchical modes -were an emergent property of human societies in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age. In exploring them we aim to shed light both on the nature of "complexity" among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and on their millennial track record of pursuing non-egalitarian agendas, while avoiding the emergence of states.If we seek to know about the past, a field of study that has never seemed dishonourable to any discipline other than social anthropology, the point of departure should be hunter-gatherers in favourable regions, hunter-gatherers who might not have been such and probably remain such only by reason of restrictive social forms that for them are quite possibly a distant and glorious heritage.

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