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.

In this article, I describe the social topography of apocalyptic futurism among recently contacted Ayoreo‐speaking people in Paraguay to examine the novel senses of being in the world that are emerging in harsh postcontact conditions. I show how apocalyptic futurism exceeds the temporal confines of both “traditional culture” and “Christianity.” Rather, it derives from the afterlife of violence and a general consensus that biological survival now requires a reconstitution of the terms of humanity. Apocalyptic sensibilities are concerned with more than local values or the transcendence of death; rather, as I show, they mark a new threshold between the human and the nonhuman.

This review surveys a resurgent ethnographic interest in radio media in order to identify the contours and potentials of an emergent anthropology of radio. We first locate such scholarship in relation to long-standing questions about the nature and power of technological mediation, as well as voice, sound, and aurality. This allows us to reveal how conceptualizations of a singular ontology of radio often implicitly underwrite most accounts of its social power. Finally, we draw attention to how recent but rarely consolidated anthropological efforts to engage ethnographically with radio technology and its sensorial affordances require critically rethinking the relationships among radio, ontology, and mediation. In doing so, this review advances a new working definition of radio: not as an old medium on the verge of obsolescence, but as a vibrant domain for acoustically resignifying the ontological that merits sustained ethnographic exploration.

AbstractThis essay describes the politics of voluntary isolation, an emerging category of indigeneity predicated on a form of human life that exists outside of history, the market, and wider networks of social connection. It traces a recent controversy around one such “isolated” population—Ayoreo-speaking people in the Paraguayan Gran Chaco—to suggest how these politics of isolation may represent a new regime of what Didier Fassin has called “biolegitimacy,” or the uneven political parsing and authorization of valid human life, within global formations of indigeneity. Here, I identify how international human rights law, multiculturalist state policies, humanitarian NGO programs, and genetic science all share an investment in the moral defense of isolated life. I explore how this investment may divide the kind of humanity authorized or claimed as “indigenous” into opposing legitimacies that are set against one another and vertically ranked. The essay argues that what is at stake in this process is not merely a new technique of the self or the enduring romance of the primitive, but the redistribution of the meaning and value assigned to those domains of human life imagined in opposition to social relation itself.

ujnarone y otras formas de discurso ritual como fuentes de la autenticidad cultural de los ayoreo, estos ultimos han abandonado estos cantos, e incluso, muchos de ellos acualmente los consideran peligrosos. Este ensayo argumenta en contra de la fetichización de las prácticas tradicionales como ujnarone, y provee una manera alternativa de conceptualizar el discurso ritual no como opuesto, sino como precedente, al cristianismo y al uso de las tecnologías electrónicas de comunicación. [Palabras claves: ayoreo, cantos terapeúticos, Gran Chaco, radio, cristianismo.]