1073011

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TCS0010.1177/02632764211073011Theory, Culture & SocietyFúnez-Flores

Article
Theory, Culture & Society
2022, Vol. 39(6) 21­–41
Decolonial and Ontological © The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02632764211073011
https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211073011
Anthropological Theory journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores
Texas Tech University

Abstract
In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological points of convergence
and divergence of two intellectual currents frequently referred to as the decolonial
and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory. Salient points considered
are the ways both theoretical projects unsettle modernity’s dominant ontological and
epistemological foundations by seriously engaging the conceptual potential of thinking
with alterity (ethical dimension) and from exteriority (geopolitical dimension). I compare
their subversive methodological contributions, examining, in particular, Enrique Dussel’s
analectical hermeneutic approach and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ethnographic
method of controlled equivocation. Lastly, I discuss how both theories and approaches
complement each other’s efforts to destabilize Western modernity’s philosophical and
anthropological foundations.

Keywords
alterity, analectical hermeneutics, controlled equivocation, decolonial theory,
exteriority, ontological turn

Analectics is not reductivist univocity, nor incommensurable equivocation, but resemblance

(similitudo). (Dussel, 1998: 483)

Since it is only worth comparing the incommensurable, comparing the commensurable is a task
for accountants, not anthropologists. ... An equivocation is not an error, a mistake, or a
deception. Instead, it is the very foundation of the relation that it implicates, and that is always
a relation with an exteriority. (Viveiros de Castro, 2004: 11)

Corresponding author: Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores. Email: jairo.funez@ttu.edu

TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org
22 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

In this article, I compare Latin American decolonial theory and anthropological theory’s
recent orientation toward ontological concerns to examine the ways both theoretical pro-
jects complement each other’s efforts to destabilize modernity’s dominant ontological
assumptions and epistemological commitments. These comparisons are not meant to be
exhaustive; I merely build upon recent comparisons (Savransky, 2017) by bringing these
two transgressive theoretical projects into dialogue, namely their conceptual and meth-
odological contributions. To unsettle modern categories and frameworks, Enrique
Dussel, whose philosophy of liberation is indispensable to the decolonial research pro-
gram (Escobar, 2007), advances what he terms analectical hermeneutics. This approach
draws from and seeks to go beyond dialectical modes of analysis and interpretation by
thinking from historically excluded geographies of reason (Gordon, 2011). Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro proposes controlled equivocation as a reflexive, conceptually subver-
sive, and experimental ethnographic method. Equivocation or equivocity may be under-
stood hermeneutically as the surplus meaning of discourse (Ricoeur, 1974), or negatively
as that which is erroneous. As the epigraphs above describe, controlled equivocation and
analectical hermeneutics propose similar methodological shifts against modern univoc-
ity or objectivism and postmodern equivocation or subjectivism/relativism. Here,
Otherness becomes the condition of possibility of unsettling modernity’s dominant
notions of reality and knowledge.
Opposing hermeneutics, understood as a theory of interpretation, with controlled
equivocation, conceived as an ethnographic concern with the ontological and existential,
as Savranky (2017) observes, may potentially reproduce one of Western modernity’s
foundational dichotomies between interpretation (epistemology) and reality (ontology).
Hermeneutics is not, however, limited to an epistemology of interpretation but may also
be extended to an ontology of understanding (Dussel, 1974; Ricouer, 1974). In other
words, it is the ‘living being which from all time has, as the horizon of all its intentions,
a world, the world’ from which a surplus of meaning unfolds phenomenologically
(Ricouer, 1974: 9). Indeed, exploring whether it is possible to graft anthropology’s con-
temporary ontological orientation with Latin American decolonial theory’s epistemo-
logical concerns is one of the aims of this article.
To destabilize the dichotomy between the ontological and the epistemological,
Viveiros de Castro (2015) conceives of reality in plural terms and as always intercon-
nected with and shaped by the conceptual. For instance, the images of thought of ‘indig-
enous concepts, the worlds they constitute (worlds that thus express them), the virtual
background from which they emerge and which they presuppose’ indicate the inextrica-
bility between the ontological and epistemological (p.19). By elevating Indigenous
thought to the level of conceptual reason, Viveiros de Castro’s controlled equivocation
engages in a transgressive act of translation that is both conceptually subversive and
creative. First, translation becomes an act of betrayal in the Benjaminean sense; it trans-
forms itself into an act of treason against Eurocentric modern concepts historically and
contemporarily used to misrepresent Others through dualist conceptions of nature and
culture. Second, controlled equivocation elevates Indigenous thought to philosophical
significance. Anthropology hence becomes a ‘formidable philosophical instrument in its
own right, capable of broadening a little the otherwise rather ethnocentric horizons of our
philosophy’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 22). Echoing the work of de Sousa Santos (2018),
Fúnez-Flores 23

Savranky (2017) suggests that ontological considerations should be integrated with a

‘decolonial imagination’ that combines social and cognitive justice with existential jus-
tice (p. 445). In a similar vein, Dussel (1988) describes analectical hermeneutics as an
ethical ‘point of departure in an affirmation of the real, existent, historical other’ which
he describes as the transontological moment of dialectics (p. 243). The historical Other
refers to the colonized around the world, the wretched beings Fanon (1963) referred to as
the damné, who refuse, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds, to be subsumed by
the Same. Dussel’s shift away from representation and toward the existential dimensions
of exteriority and alterity, as also proposed by Viveiros de Castro, begins to reveal the
commensurable space between the decolonial and ontological currents in social and
anthropological theory.
This is precisely the point at which Dussel’s and Viveiros de Castro’s philosophical,
methodological, and ethico-geopolitical projects intersect. Complementarity is possible
since the decolonial and ontological currents in social and anthropological theory remain
consistent in their aims to fissure and thus slow down, at the very least, modernity’s total-
izing discourses and practices intended to erase difference. Whereas Viveiros de Castro
(2014) notes, ‘Western metaphysics is truly the fons et origio of every colonialism’ (p.
44), Dussel (1985) asserts that ‘[o]ntology, the thinking that expresses Being – the Being
of the reigning and central system – is the ideology of ideologies, the foundation of the
ideologies of the empires, of the center’ (p. 5).
The significance of these preliminary comparisons indicates that both theoretical pro-
jects complement each other methodologically in their efforts to decolonize thought and
inquiry. Below, I provide an overview of anthropological theory’s ontological current
and Latin American social theory’s shift toward decolonial concerns. Further, I examine
both theoretical projects’ conceptual and methodological points of convergence and
divergence in more detail. Salient points considered deal with the ways they unsettle
modernity’s hegemonic epistemological and ontological foundations.

Overview of the Ontological Turn

Anthropology’s recent ‘turn’ toward ontological questions is best understood as a meth-
odological project assigning conceptual priority to the ethnographic contingencies that
depart from and point to the limitations of modernity’s dominant assumptions of reality.
Rather than departing from epistemological relativism or notions that reality is known
through different worldviews according to a particular cultural lens, recent advances in
anthropology (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017) argue for ontological relativization whereby
the dominant assumptions of reality are seriously questioned reflexively, conceptually,
and experimentally through the ethnographic material rather than from established ana-
lytics. The point of departure is no longer the established conceptual frameworks
deployed to interpret ethnographic material. Instead, the latter is used as a theoretical
point of departure to address the limitations of canonically accepted categories grounded
in dichotomized conceptions of reality.
The categorical distinction between nature and culture used to analyze and interpret
reality and Others is of particular interest. Rather than presenting an a priori ontological
assumption of the world divided into categories, contemporary discussions in
24 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

anthropology revolving around ontological concerns tend to be less interested ‘with what
is, but with what could be’ (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 68), which transforms culture
into an ensemble of human and nonhuman interrelations constantly under conceptual
invention, as Wagner (1981) initially proposed. Asking ontological questions is not cen-
tered on discovering the ontology of the world or the essence of nature and beings, which
remains at the ontic level of reality, but rather seeks to study Other conceptualizations of
the world and the ontological assumptions these reveal regarding the interrelations
between human and nonhuman beings. ‘The epistemological problem of how one sees
things is turned into the ontological questions of what there is to be seen in the first place’
(Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 5). An ontological orientation thus demands a ‘willing-
ness to stage the encounter with ethnography as an experiment in conceptual reflexivity’
(Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 70). Through reflexive ethnography, modern concepts
are faced with explanatory and interpretive limitations as they confront ethnographic
contingencies that counter the analyst’s assumptions of reality. Categories such as social,
political, and cultural do not only deal with the epistemological concerns of how one
comes to know the particular configuration of these domains in any given context but
what these domains say about one’s notions of reality and what constitutes being and
existence across time and space.
Controlled equivocation, as described in more detail in subsequent sections, aims to
translate incommensurable ethnographic encounters to point to the limitations of domi-
nant ontological assumptions of nature and culture as well as the existence of Other
worlds configured by diverging notions of reality. Viveiros de Castro’s (2019) recent
work advances the notion of ontological anarchism to describe the modes of being within
the context of the Anthropocene, which is beyond the scope of this paper. It suffices to
mention nonetheless that ontological anarchism goes beyond radical ontological plural-
ism (Blaser, 2013) in the hopes that it will enable one to think with and through the
Anthropocene, which has accelerated time and contracted space to make the end (time)
of the world (space) as we know it not an imminent future but rather a living present
(Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). It is within this context where ‘no mode of
existence can be ruled out as illegitimate in the Anthropocene’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2019:
S298), particularly as other modes of existence point to alternative futures and possible
worlds, albeit without any guarantees.
It is thus that anthropology’s ontological concerns eschew reducing alterities and the
world-making practices found therein to worldviews, beliefs, or cultural representations
of nature (Viveiros de Castro and Goldman, 2012). Indeed, it challenges the ontological
assumptions of modern concepts and their analytical and interpretive power to capture
the so-called cultural realities of Others. Rather than being conceived as a paradigmatic
shift or radical theoretical rupture, in the Kuhnian sense, against anthropology’s intel-
lectual genealogies, ongoing ontological discussions give continuity to anthropology’s
reflexive (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), conceptual/intellectual (Strathern, 1980; Wagner,
1981), methodological (Geertz, 1973; Turner, 1980), and cross-cultural translation and
ethico-political contributions (Asad, 1973, 1986). The methodological subversion lies in
the aims to invent new concepts by translating, as opposed to capturing, alternative
modes of existence. As Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) clarify, “‘concept” here should be
read as more or less synonymous to the more grave-sounding expression of “ontological
Fúnez-Flores 25

assumption’” (p. 15). Thus, the ontological assumptions – e.g. the terms rather than con-
tents, as Mignolo (2021) points out – of concepts provide the foundations upon which
dominant modern modes of inquiry are based.
To take Others’ philosophical, ontological, and cosmological differences seriously,
modern conceptualizations of reality ought to be, at the very least, held at abeyance (or
bracketed to use a phenomenological term) by giving priority to the ethnographic contin-
gencies that enable the semantic or conceptual resignification/destabilization of nature
and culture, among other categories. Instead of inquiring about why and how a group of
people organize, behave, or inscribe meaning to ‘nature’ in culturally situated ways, the
ontological turn asks ‘what’ questions related to the assumptions of reality Other con-
cepts, practices, and relations articulate that depart from dichotomized notions of nature
and culture. When Indigenous peoples propose that humans are animals and that animals
are human, for instance, these conceptualizations materialize another world through the
relations they articulate, even if in constant threat of being destroyed. Rather than taking
these propositions as equivocal, erroneous, or rather ambiguous, referring first to the
possible limitations of dominant notions of reality enables the anthropologist to subvert
concepts to invent new ones that do not reduce alterity to illogical/irrational thought.
What worlds, relations, and practices do these propositions make possible?
Ontological concerns do not revolve around mapping cultural differences as structur-
alists once did (although affinity with structuralism is evident in Viveiros de Castro’s
(2014) work), where Indigenous peoples were bounded in space, that is, in a ‘closed
system of the universe of signs’ (Ricoeur, 1974: 65). Indeed, structuralism’s use of epis-
temology, synchrony, structure, signs, and univocity subsumed ontology, diachrony, his-
toricity, event, and the plurivocity of discourse. The ontological turn, in this sense,
unsettles the isomorphy of place and cultural representation and identity (Gupta and
Ferguson, 1992) insofar as it also refuses to conceive of other cultures as varying expres-
sions of nature. Indeed, it fissures the very conceptual foundations upon which the under-
standing of nature is built, and, in turn, denaturalizes the conception of culture being a
worldview of an already established and bifurcated reality (Whitehead, 2007). As I dis-
cuss in subsequent sections, the ontological turn also seeks to decolonize the notions of
reality by underscoring the conceptual limitations of modern human sciences, while also
taking seriously Other conceptualizations as concrete expressions of other ways of relat-
ing to, in, and with the world.

Overview of the Decolonial Turn

The interdisciplinary Latin American decolonial turn aims to counter Eurocentric inter-
pretive frameworks and historiographies by thinking from and with other genealogies of
thought and practice (Escobar, 2007; Tlostanova and Mignolo, 2012), such as depend-
ency theory, anti-colonial thought, and theology and philosophy of liberation (Casanova,
1965; Césaire, 2000; Dussel, 1985; Fals-Borda, 1970; Fanon, 1963; Frank, 1970;
Prebisch, 1949). Decolonial theory may be distinguished from postcolonial theory since
the latter draws heavily on postmodern and post-structural thought and initiates its histo-
riographic reinterpretation and literary criticism with the English and French colonial
experience during the Enlightenment (Bhambra, 2014). The former, however, conceives
26 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

of the modern/colonial world system as a structure, or better yet, a colonial matrix of

power that initiated its global articulation in 1492 during the Renaissance (Tlostanova
and Mignolo, 2012). Although both articulate important critiques of colonialism, they
vary in temporal depth and geographic scope. Decolonial theory extends its analyses to
other histories and geographies constitutive of modernity/coloniality, which have been
left undertheorized by postcolonial studies’ Anglocentric and Francocentric perspectives
of colonialism (Coronil, 2008; Hulme, 2008). Decolonial thought, moreover, emphasizes
the discourses, institutions, and social practices that enabled the construction of Western
Europe’s geo-cultural identity and hegemonic geopolitical position (Coronil, 1996;
Dussel, 1996; Quijano, 2000), integrating thus the material with the symbolic dimen-
sions of domination.
Decolonial modes of theorizing intend to delink from Eurocentric interpretations of
modernity, history, knowledge, power, and being (Mignolo, 2007). Delinking must not
be interpreted as an essentialist move opposed to the knowledge production of Europe or
the United States. Indeed, sociohistorical and geopolitical identities are not singular but
plural. Europe, for instance, continues to experience the narrowing epistemological
effects caused by instrumental rationality’s hegemonic imposition against the historical
and liberationist reason characteristic of southern Europe (Quijano, 1989). Europe’s
intellectual canon, which has aligned itself with material and symbolic systems of domi-
nation, reveals that it, too, has silenced its most radical thinkers who have articulated
non-Occidentalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist modes of reasoning (de Sousa
Santos, 2009). Departing from Eurocentric knowledge also does not mean that the Global
South has a privileged epistemic vantage point. As Grosfoguel (2007) clarifies, it is
important to differentiate epistemic location from social location. The former refers to
systematically excluded geographies of reason while the latter refers to the social posi-
tion of those who do the enunciating. Being ‘socially located in the oppressed side of
power relations does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a
subaltern epistemic location’ (Grosfoguel, 2007: 213). Indeed, the modern/colonial capi-
talist world-system’s hegemonic position is contingent upon the geopolitics of knowl-
edge and the political economy of ideas. The latter two terms conceptualize the way
knowledge produced in the Global North is reproduced in the Global South through a
pyramidal global university system that has, since the 16th century, helped maintain
Western Europe’s and subsequently the United States’ hegemonic geopolitical economic
position (Grosfoguel, 2013). Eurocentric knowledge hence becomes a geopolitically
entangled imperial/colonial instrument of control justifying exploitation and domination,
which is contingent upon the selective participation of the colonized.
Decolonial theory advances three interrelated concepts to understand the social total-
ity reconceptualized as the modern/colonial capitalist world-system. The primary con-
cept is the coloniality of power, defined by Quijano (1992, 2007) as a matrix of domination
constituted by the systematic control of labor, sex, subjectivity, and authority. These
structures of domination are articulated globally by Eurocentric political, economic,
social, and cultural institutions. Although political-economic institutions are indispensa-
ble in the understanding of the coloniality of power, it is the hegemonic control of social
and cultural institutions that produces the subjectivities necessitated to reproduce the
former institutions (Rama, 1996). All other modes of organizing social life and
Fúnez-Flores 27

producing culture are hence rendered primitive institutions in need of development. The
coloniality of power may thus be understood as ‘a cognitive model, a new perspective of
knowledge within which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not
always primitive’ (Quijano, 2000: 552). This cognitive model refers to the coloniality of
knowledge (Mignolo, 2000), the symbolic/epistemic dimension of colonization always
already interconnected to material domination and exploitation, and the systematic inval-
idation and destruction of Indigenous knowledges and histories.
The notion of racial superiority and inferiority is conceptualized as the coloniality of
being. If the coloniality of power emphasizes colonial domination and capitalist exploi-
tation through a racialized division of labor and the coloniality of knowledge under-
scores the epistemic dimension justifying the former, the coloniality of being pays closer
attention to the phenomenological, psycho-existential, and racial dimensions of colonial,
neocolonial, and postcolonial lived experiences (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). The coloni-
ality of being also contains a historiographical and analectical hermeneutic dimension
centered on the reinterpretation of historical narratives and philosophical discourses that
naturalize Europe’s rise to power and inferiorize the non-European world, which Dussel
(1994) refers to as exteriority. It is the preoccupation with Europe’s exteriority and its
ontological and epistemological alterity that makes it possible to compare the decolonial
and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory.

The Sociology and Geopolitics of Knowledge

It is not surprising that these varying epistemological and ontological debates emerge
within a particular moment in history, social context, and political conjuncture. As
Mannheim (1952) brilliantly demonstrated long ago, ‘even in methodology itself, in the
guise of the various patterns of thought, what are, ultimately, in conflict are social forces
and social impulses’ (p. 207). He indicated that ‘there exists (a) no universally accepted
set of axioms, (b) no universally recognized hierarchy of values, and (c) nothing but
radically different ontologies and epistemologies’ (p. 207, emphasis added). Immediately
after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Zapatista movement, an interdis-
ciplinary group of Latin American scholars began to seriously question Eurocentric cat-
egories (Mignolo, 1995; Quijano, 1992) – for which Dussel and other philosophers of
liberation and dependency theorists had already laid the foundational work decades ear-
lier – in order to understand the ‘social-historical situation’ of neoliberal globalization’s
colonizing tendencies (Mannheim, 1952), the shifting sociocultural and political-eco-
nomic context, and the unfinished project of decolonization. Similarly, anthropologists
pointing to their discipline’s role in colonization (Asad, 1973; Stavenhagen, 1971),
which led to the crisis of representation and the reflexive turn (Clifford and Marcus,
1986), also established the ethical and political foundations to address the ecological
crisis undoubtedly related to neoliberal globalization Savranky (2017). The reflexive
turn, however, did not go beyond the critique of representation and move toward the
alter-ontologies made possible by the multiplicity of Indigenous struggles.
Stuart Hall (2019) suggested some time ago that sociopolitical conjunctures create the
conditions of possibility for theoretical moments to unfold within a shifting geopolitical
and economic landscape, not to mention an imminent ecological catastrophe. He was not
28 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

so much interested in established theory per se but the political conjunctures that enable
praxeologically implicated modes of theorizing the present and its structural constraints
and political opportunities (Featherstone, 2017; Gilbert, 2019). Theory and alternative
modes of theorizing have ‘direct or indirect practical consequences’ (Hall, 2019: 175)
and, in dialectical fashion, political conjunctures create the conditions of possibility to
think otherwise. Decolonial and ontological modes of theorizing against the grain of
modern notions of knowledge and reality indicate that what is at stake is much more than
‘opening’ the social sciences to Others (Wallerstein, 1996). What we are dealing with
instead consists of a neocolonial context of ceaseless domination, exploitation, and eco-
logical destruction, resulting in the elimination of alter-ways of knowing (epistemologi-
cal), relating (ethical), and being (ontological) in the world.
As the disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences make gestures toward
decolonial and ontological currents in social and anthropological theory, what is impera-
tive here is not so much how these disciplines will be enriched but how they will be of
service to the geopolitical realities unsettling modernity’s most recent neoliberal expres-
sion. How, in other words, will the social sciences modestly serve the distinct realities or
ontologies enacted by sociopolitical and territorial movements? What these disciplines
will become ‘in the course of such a task will always remain an open question’ (Savranky,
2017: 23–24). These theoretical moments or turns in social theory (Castro-Gómez and
Grosfoguel, 2007; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017) are thus situated within particular (geo)
political conjunctures that have created the conditions for articulating these discourses
within different disciplines, which will inevitably be rearticulated in distinct forms.
These theoretical turns and moments should therefore be conceived more as intellectual
currents with diverging streams that are socio-historically and geopolitically situated and
less so as paradigmatic shifts emerging endogenously within the human sciences and the
intellectual activity of a particular scientific community.

Modern Foundations
The decolonial and ontological turns position their theoretical projects against modernity
in varying ways. The former takes a historical, philosophical, and sociological route to
examine modernity, and it links its analyses to colonialism, capitalism, Eurocentrism,
and race-based social classification (Dussel, 1985; Quijano, 2000). The latter, on the
other hand, takes an anthropological and archeological path to analyze the constitution of
modernity through its foundational categories, referred to by Latour (1993) as the Great
Divide between nature and culture. The ontological bifurcation of reality (Whitehead,
2007), resulting in the division of mind/matter, human/nonhuman, and ideas/bodies, is of
major concern, particularly as it is expressed in the social and natural sciences, as well as
the way these divisions enable the classification of colonized bodies into the apparently
static and exploitable realm of nature (Strathern, 1980). The bifurcation of reality makes
visible the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and modernity, especially if we
consider how the former two modes of domination constitute the darker underside of the
latter (Mignolo, 2011) in which nature, that is, matter, nonhumans, and humans, are
exploited.
Fúnez-Flores 29

Quijano’s (2000) conceptualization of modernity as ‘the [social] totality of the global

population and all the history of the last five hundred years, all the worlds or former
worlds articulated in the global model of power, each differentiated or differentiable seg-
ment constituted together’ (pp. 545–6), further elucidates the entanglement between
colonialism, capitalism, modernity/coloniality. He describes four distinct characteristics,
which are worth citing at length since they elucidate this entanglement:

[The modern/colonial world system] is the first where in each sphere of social existence all
historically known forms of control of respective social relations are articulated ... where each
structure of each sphere of social existence is under the hegemony of an institution produced
within the process of formation and development of that same model of power. Thus, in the
control of labor and its resources and products, it is the capitalist enterprise; in the control of
sex and its resources and products, the bourgeois family; in the control of authority and its
resources and products, the nation-state; in the control of intersubjectivity, Eurocentrism ...
each one of those institutions exists in a relation of interdependence with each one of the others.
(2000: 544–5)

Quijano’s definition hence departs from Giddens’ (1990) institutional analysis of moder-
nity as a mode of social organization that emerged in Europe in the 17th century, dis-
cussed by the latter as an endogenous process subsequently diffused to other parts of the
world. Quijano emphasizes, to use Williams’ (1977) conceptual framework, dominant
modes of colonialism and coloniality rather than residual and emerging forms. This
emphasis is not, as some critics have argued (Vickers, 2020), a historical distortion of
colonialism since other colonialisms are ignored. Indeed, Dirlik (2016) and Tlostanova
(2015) point to these residual and emergent modes of colonialism engaged in by China
and Russia. Latin American decolonial theorists’ focus is on the dominant form of colo-
nialism and coloniality, which has marked the region’s historical specificity or colonial
difference for over five centuries. This is the locus of enunciation or place of understand-
ing from which decolonial scholars choose to articulate their theories and situate their
investigations and geopolitical commitments.
It is undeniable that European empires, in addition to the United States, colonized and
continue to maintain neocolonial relations with the rest of the world, even if moves to
de-westernize, as Mignolo (2011) observes, are on the horizon. The decolonial turn in
Latin American social theory hence refuses the apologetic and indeed reactionary views
of colonialism that seemingly aim to complexify the understanding of colonialism by
referring to other colonial projects (e.g. Russian, Japanese, and Chinese), when in fact
what these arguments intend to achieve is to justify Euro-modern colonialism as merely
another mode of colonial domination that also brought progress, inter alia, to the colo-
nized world. While these reactionary discourses tend to naturalize colonialism as an
inevitable outcome of ‘human nature’, the decolonial turn refuses this line of argumenta-
tion which simply ignores the role of Euro-colonialism in establishing the first modern/
colonial capitalist world-system or global structure of domination articulated as a three-
dimensional colonial matrix of power, knowledge, and being.
That being said, the discourses and practices attributed to modernity are nonetheless
contested (Grossberg, 2010), and in many ways, these contain numerous paradoxes
30 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

(Quijano, 1989), since modernity can also contain a realist, romantic, classical, and
baroque ethos (Echeverria, 2010). My aim for the remainder of this section is to examine
the way modernity, at least its dominant Eurocentric expression, has and continues to be
conceived and performed, even at the risk of simplification since an exhaustive discus-
sion of modernity is beyond the aim and scope of this article. The intent is rather to
compare how the decolonial and ontological theoretical turns conceptualize modernity to
better understand how their subversive methodological projects unsettle its foundational
categories.
It is important to nuance, nonetheless, how Eurocentric perspectives conceive of
modernity. From a historical perspective, modernity is characterized by its European
‘temporal and spatial origins’ understood linearly and in the following stages: Ancient
Greece, Medieval Europe, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, French Revolution,
and Industrial Revolution (Escobar, 2007: 81). These religious, epistemic, political, and
technological transformations, as they are understood hegemonically, emerge from and
culminate in Europe. Sociologically, modernity is conceptualized through its distinct
institutions and their normative principles and functions; culturally, modernity is under-
stood by examining the nexus between the dominant liberal lifeworld, instrumental
rationality, the nation-state, and the scientific knowledge sustaining its universality and
superiority; philosophically, modernity tends to be conceptualized as the anthropocentric
metaphysical emergence of Man and his ability to dominate nature (Escobar, 2007).
Ultimately, these perspectives follow the logics of development and progress, which are
supported by two foundational myths of modernity, namely, unidirectional evolutionism/
diffusionism and dualism (Blaut, 1993). Indeed, these two hegemonic paradigms natu-
ralize and thus justify capitalist exploitation, colonial domination, and cultural and racial
classification and hierarchization.
The unidirectional conception of history or evolutionism/diffusionism, as Quijano
(2000) examines, is the central axis around which modernity articulates and reconfigures
itself. Progress, development, and, most recently, neoliberal globalization, are presented
as natural processes emerging from Europe and its Anglo-American extension. Non-
European peoples and places, racialized/dehumanized through colonization, are catego-
rized as underdeveloped, despotic, undemocratic, and traditional. These labels trap or,
better yet, freeze frame Others to a primitive past, simultaneously positioning them in a
social and racial hierarchy according to their apparent proximity to nature. The state of
nature becomes the primary reference point to a savage and barbaric past out of which
only Europe could successfully project itself. Important to note is that this Eurocentric
historiography is dependent upon telescoping techniques and a ‘historical tunnel-vision’
(Blaut, 1992: 295), which enable historians to find European origins in Greece while
omitting everything contradicting its tunnel vision (e.g. African (Bernal, 1987) and
Islamic civilizations (Grosfoguel, 2013)). It is thus that decolonial scholars engage in
frontal attacks against these distorted historical discourses that naturalize superiority/
inferiority and the social classification of colonized Others into racial categories.
Unidirectional evolutionism and dualism are inextricably linked since Eurocentric
historiography takes a dualist theoretical departure by naturalizing the superiority of the
vanquisher and the inferiority of the vanquished. Codifying differences (e.g. East/West,
modern/traditional, and rational/irrational) between European and non-European,
Fúnez-Flores 31

combined with the first (political) and second (biological) secular redescriptions of the
human (Wynter, 2003), provided the conceptual foundations to articulate a dualist per-
spective of reality. With a linear vision of history and a dualist ontology configured, the
Other is instrumentalized symbolically and materially to represent, justify, and naturalize
the Occident’s superiority. Dominant discourses and practices simultaneously negate the
role of imperialism/colonialism in maintaining the Occident’s hegemonic geopolitical,
economic, technological, and epistemic position. The coloniality of power, as Quijano
(2000) conceptualizes the co-constitutive configuration of modernity and coloniality, is
thus not clearly understood without taking into consideration unidirectional evolution-
ism/diffusionism and dualism, two foundational myths that find continuity in contempo-
rary diffusionist perspectives of globalization supported by dualist conceptions of the
global (modern/universal) and the local (traditional/particular).
The ontological turn reveals, albeit more subtly, how modernity is defined by its rela-
tion to colonized Others. Modernity is ‘doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the
regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and van-
quished’ (Latour, 1993: 10). The simultaneous birth of humanity and nonhumanity, as
observed by Latour (1993), is linked to European colonization in the 16th century. The
ontological turn in anthropology, however, tends to place greater emphasis on the mod-
ern categories that create the conditions of possibility of sustaining modernity’s colonial
project (against human and nonhuman beings alike). As mentioned previously, it concep-
tualizes the constitution of modernity through its Great Divide – between humans/non-
humans and nature/culture – which provides the foundation upon which other dichotomies
have been instituted, such as the division between the sciences and the humanities.
The ontological turn elucidates how nature is conceived and instrumentalized beyond
economic utility. It clarifies the role the conception of nature plays in positioning Others
– the nonmoderns, the non-Occidentals, and the nonhumans, including women and colo-
nized Others – in proximity to nature (Viveiros de Castro, 2014). In this regard, racializa-
tion positions colonized Others in the apparently static realm of nature. Moderns are
presented as acultural and raceless scientific beings while Others are marked by an infe-
rior race with cultural expressions/variations of, and determined by, nature (Latour,
1993). The ontological turn, namely as it is advanced by STS studies, traces the intricate
connections and networks modern science assembles with other domains. Here, modern
notions of the political, economic, social, and cultural are understood as heuristic devices
rather than actually existing divisions, since these domains are simultaneously traversed,
intersected, entangled, and relationally implicated in one another. As Viveiros de Castro
(2019) explains, the aforementioned domains should be understood as ‘models of’ rather
than prescriptive ‘models for’ reality, which can only result in social and geopolitical
engineering and colonization when the latter are deployed. Domains, in other words, do
not have fixed boundaries in practice. Dominant discourses around objective science,
however, portray scientific labor as disconnected from other domains to maintain the
notion that scientific thought is pure, uncontaminated by and unimplicated in colonial
domination, capitalist exploitation, and the geopolitics of knowledge production.
It is the emphasis on science, technology, and society that makes the ontological turn
significantly different from the decolonial turn in its examination of modernity. The for-
mer’s examination of science surpasses the latter’s examination and critique of Descartes’
32 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

dualist ontology, which separates the reasoning/knowing subject (secularized soul) from
the known object (body/nature/res extensa). The decolonial turn tends to solely scruti-
nize the social sciences and the humanities, falling short of gauging the implications of
scientific discourse and practice beyond the critique of instrumental reason and the colo-
niality of knowledge. The entanglements of politics, science, and technology, as Latour
(1993) rightfully notes, are at times omitted even by critical scholars claiming to unsettle
‘epistemology, the social sciences, [and] the sciences of texts’ (p. 5). Power is thus also
implicated in the ways in which we conceive and enact the Great Divide between nature
and culture and the countless ways the human sciences, social organization and racial
classification, economics, and educational institutions reproduce modern ways of being
and knowing.
This ontological bifurcation, expressed almost naturally in all spheres of life, is pre-
cisely the foundation upon which the fragmented architecture of knowledge is built. This
does not make disciplinary knowledge less valid or universalizing; rather, what we
understand as universal knowledge is contingent upon the ontological division between
nature and culture, the principal categories validating the bifurcation between nomo-
thetic and ideographic epistemologies (Dilthey, 1989; Snow, 1993; Windelband, 1958).
As long as this bifurcation is perpetuated by our knowledge practices, we risk perpetuat-
ing that which the ontological and decolonial turns aim to unsettle, that is, the naturaliza-
tion of the modern/colonial order of things. By focusing on the ontological bifurcation of
mind/body and nature/culture, for instance, the ontological turn varies significantly from
the decolonial turn’s analectical hermeneutic and historiographic project directed at
modernity. These observations demonstrate how both theoretical projects take on diverg-
ing paths conceptually but which converge, nonetheless, in their contrapuntal analyses
(Said, 1978, 1994) and unsettling of modernity’s categorical imperative of universalizing
its way of being and knowing, as well as its imperial/colonial will to power.

The Critique of Power

Latour (1993) maintains that it is an urgent task to transcend the critique of the constel-
lation of material and symbolic forces subjugating Others. These modes of inquiry and
analyses help create an almost inescapable social reality unable to be altered (Kelly,
2014) – where the negation of alterity reaches a point of no return at which critical theo-
rists ‘begin their analysis only at the point where almost everything is over’ (p. 359).
Scholarship focusing solely on domination, as Ortner (2016) also observes, tends to
silence possible emergences by centering its attention on that which she categorizes as
‘dark’ ethnography or anthropology. In this dark scholarship, which is greatly informed
by Foucault’s (2010) concept of governmentality and biopolitics, violence, suffering,
torture, death, dispossession, and displacement are highlighted at the expense of resist-
ance and actually existing alternatives, however small in scale or residual they may
seem. While analyzing the negation of life and the systematic destruction of difference is
critical to the understanding of Western capitalist modernity, limiting our work to cri-
tique for critique’s sake leaves little conceptual and political room for thinking and doing
otherwise. The ontological turn, combined with ‘the negative procedure of
Fúnez-Flores 33

deconstruction’ (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 12), proposes a positive methodological

shift toward reconstructive possibilities enabled by ethnography.
As the decolonial turn also points out, even a postmodern critique of power and
Eurocentrism is still very much Eurocentric (Mignolo, 2011). This form of critique may
also result, albeit unintentionally, in a fatalism fostering indifference, apathy, pathetic
nihilism, and passivity. To use Castoriadis’ (2011) argument against capitalism’s techno-
science, postmodern theory may also be used for ‘propagating the desert’ of indifference
(p. 27), while proclaiming itself to be the only valid site of symbolic resistance via
deconstruction. By adopting a positive/reconstructive approach, in addition to a nega-
tive/deconstructive position toward dominant narratives, conceptual frameworks, and
social practices, the decolonial and ontological turns amplify alternative ways of being
and knowing silenced by modernity/coloniality. Amplifying alterities is political insofar
as it also entails making alternative knowledges, worlds, and practices of resistance more
conceptually visible, refusing thus the negation of their existence.
The primary concern of anthropology’s ontological turn is thus the (re)conceptualiza-
tion that ensues from taking alterity seriously. Rather than turning its back on those who
for so long have been represented negatively against the backdrop (or hegemonic
ontological assumptions) of modernity, the ontological turn in anthropology seriously
considers incommensurability as a necessary condition of the possibility of unsettling
modernity’s colonizing concepts. Viveiros de Castro and Goldman (2012) propose a
methodological shift or a ‘turning’ toward non-Kantian or post-Kantian anthropologies,
where a priori categories no longer determine the interpretation of other experiences and
cultural identities. They refuse to engage in incessant analyses and interpretations of
Others since these knowledge practices have historically been employed to inferiorly
position ‘natives’ in the abyssal space of delirium where ignorance and nonbeing dwell.
Dussel’s analectical hermeneutic approach to thinking with alterity and from exteriority,
as I discuss further below, aims to destabilize modernity’s conceptual hegemony and
assign epistemic priority – as opposed to epistemic privilege – to historically colonized
and excluded geographies of reason. Epistemic priority is an ethico-political move
toward thinking with Others and from other places of understanding rather than assign-
ing a naturally privileged epistemic vantage point, which would reproduce an essentialist
epistemic position. Giving priority to thought enunciated from other places of under-
standing is the ethical position adopted by analectical hermeneutics, which involves dia-
lectics but which also demands the interpellation of those regions, peoples, histories,
struggles, and philosophies eclipsed by modernity’s ceaseless thrust toward progress.
One can argue, therefore, that the ontological turn in anthropology is significantly
different from the decolonial turn’s theoretical point of departure. The former initiates its
project with a confrontation with modernity’s dominant ontological assumptions, foun-
dational categories, and scientific discourses, while the latter positions itself primarily as
a decolonizing epistemological project against the coloniality of power, knowledge, and
being. ‘What’ constitutes modernity (bifurcated reality), as opposed to ‘how’ modernity
is known (methodology), interpreted (epistemology), and reproduced (discourse/prac-
tices/institutions), is ultimately what makes these two projects radically distinct. Although
the theoretical points of departure vary, their refusal to categorically separate the onto-
logical from the epistemological, as well as their interest in alterity and exteriority,
34 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

reveals that these two transgressive conceptual projects may complement each other
methodologically.

Methodological Projects
Without a doubt, Dussel’s (1985) philosophy of liberation has enabled decolonial schol-
ars to think, act, and reinterpret the world from an ethical and geopolitical position of
exteriority. He refers to this hermeneutic phenomenological approach as analectical, a
method that entails the interpellation of historically colonized and silenced Others.
Exteriority is not a physical space outside of Western modernity; rather, it ‘is the sphere
located beyond the [ontological] foundation of [modernity’s] totality’ (p. 158), which
eclipses all that dwells outside of its physical and conceptual frontiers. Analectics draws
from dialectics but it also extends its metaphysical and theoretical horizon to the inter-
pellations expressed from exteriority, the places and peoples excluded from modernity’s
linear dialectical thrust. In this case, to go beyond the totality imagined dialectically by
Hegel and Marx, where the negative thrust of dialectics results in the synthesis ad infini-
tum of the Same and not of something Other, analectics opens up the possibility of new
metaphysical unfoldings. Similarly, the ontological turn in anthropology is a methodo-
logical project aimed at maintaining this metaphysical horizon ‘perpetually open’
(Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017: 11). Analectical approaches thus transgress conventional
methods insofar as they are integrated with, interpellated by, and committed to a ‘con-
crete historical praxis’ of a decolonial geopolitics of liberation (p. 160), without which it
would remain in the realm of speculation. It does not suffice to think about those who are
exploited and dominated; rather, it is an ethical imperative to think with the realities,
knowledges, and practices emerging from social struggles in which the interpellations
and existential cries of the wretched of the earth form a constitutive part.
Dussel’s (1985) analectical approach adds a positive, that is, affirming moment to
Hegelian/Marxist dialectics that is more than the synthesis of thesis and antithesis.
Analectics transgresses a Eurocentric interpretation as it is interpellated by exteriority
and the non-Beings Fanon (1963) referred to as the damné who apparently dwell outside
of history and are mere receivers of modernity’s totalizing historical force. As Dussel
(1985) expresses, the ‘point of departure is an ethico-political option in favor of the
oppressed of the periphery: respect for the exteriority of the Other; geopolitically and
socially speaking, listening to the word of the other’ (p. 175). The exteriority of the
Other, the needy, the poor, the exploited worker, the colonized, the racialized, the woman,
the LGBTQ, and their exigencies and interpellations, is what creates the condition of
possibility of unveiling and resisting modernity’s totalizing force. Listening, as opposed
to merely seeing, the Other is the ethico-political commitment analectics proposes. The
conceptual and methodological praxes of analectics, therefore, takes as a philosophical
point of departure that which ‘sets out from non-Being, nothingness, otherness, exterior-
ity, the mystery of no-sense’ (Dussel, 1985: 14). Otherness is not an abstract entity but a
historically, symbolically, and materially colonized, exploited, racialized, dehumanized,
and inferiorized Other. The Other, in this case, is also the decolonial scholar thinking
geopolitically from a particular locus of enunciation and ethically with distinct places of
understanding.
Fúnez-Flores 35

Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) cannibal metaphysics resonates with Dussel’s analectical

approach since his thinking from metaphysical exteriority entails the (conceptual/onto-
logical) self-determination of Others. Here, self-determination refers to the refusal to
neutralize difference through inquiry and to elevate Other ideas to the level of concepts
rather than leaving the former in the realm of beliefs. Viveiros de Castro (2014) concep-
tualizes this approach as controlled equivocation, a comparative method that takes as its
object of study Other concepts to translate them in such a way that it ‘controls’ for mis-
understanding or equivocation, not as a means to avoid equivocation but to indicate the
anthropologist’s conceptual threshold rather than the apparent irrationality of the Other.
It is, in other words, the intentional disfigurement of the analyst’s conceptual world,
opening reality thus to ambiguity or equivocation. Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) method of
controlled equivocation may be described as a comparative method of (cultural) transla-
tion that challenges conventional ethnographic methods that seek to ‘explain, justify,
interpret, contextualize, [and] reveal the unconscious’ of Others (p. 57). The aim is to
translate Other concepts as a way to transgress modern concepts while elevating the
former to philosophical status. Both theoretical turns’ methodological advancements
thus position themselves as ethical-political projects affirming the existence of alterna-
tive ontological assumptions and epistemological commitments within a modern world
that presents itself as the only narrative worth enacting till the end of time.

Why Alterity or Exteriority?

The question remains why thinking with alterity and from exteriority is necessary in the
first place. I have suggested that these methodological shifts toward alterity and histori-
cally excluded geographies of reason aim to decenter modern conceptual frameworks by
amplifying alternative metaphysical assumptions (Chakrabarty, 2000). However, why
should these alternatives emerge from alterity or Otherness? Is Otherness the conceptual
and hermeneutic condition of possibility, virtuality, and utopia? Is the Other an a priori
structure, as proposed by Deleuze (1969) and taken up by Viveiros de Castro (2015),
which enables the construction of another world? Can we understand ‘the effects of the
Other’s presence through the effects of its absence’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 9–10)? Is
the Other ‘the existential possibility of those parts of the world that lie beyond actual
perception’? Is it an exaggeration to propose that ‘[w]ithout an Other the category of
possibility disappears; the world collapses, reduced to the pure surface of the immediate,
and the subject dissolves’? Is, then, the Other ‘the structure of the possible’ and an
‘expression of a possible world’ (p. 10)? Viveiros de Castro and Dussel answer these
questions affirmatively. Dussel (1996) proposes that to think from exteriority is indeed a
utopic project that is ultimately ‘the affirmation of “that-which-has-no-place” (ouk-
tópos) since utopia refers to peoples who are denied to exist with dignity within the
dominating modern/colonial totality (p. 7). The ethico-political project at hand, as pro-
posed by the analectical method, is to learn how to think from the speech acts articulated
from exteriority, that is, from the expressions and interpellations made by Others. In this
sense, to think from and with other topoi/places of understanding is a utopic project that
takes as its theoretical point of departure the virtual dimensions of thinking with alterity
and from exteriority rather than only thinking about the actual modern/colonial order of
36 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

things. The ontological and decolonial turns, at least the interdisciplinary scholarship
drawing from the work of Viveiros de Castro and Dussel, assign ontological and epis-
temic priority rather than epistemic privilege since this would, as mentioned previously,
reproduce an essentialist position rendering Other worlds naturally superior. Epistemic
priority instead refers to listening to those who have been systematically denied exist-
ence, history, and knowledge. What reasons can we provide to refuse to think from Other
experiences, concepts, and worlds without pushing them violently to the abyss of non-
existence and historical and philosophical insignificance?
The ontological turn is not occupied with searching for ontological foundations, but
rather with giving ‘precedence to a distinctly anthropological task, namely that of giving
full expression to the contingencies of a given ethnographic situation’ (Holbraad and
Pedersen, 2017: 68). Ethnographic contingencies evidence the limitations of dominant
modern categories, such as nature and culture, and amplify Other philosophies that
depart from universalistic and dichotomized conceptions of reality. As mentioned previ-
ously, the ontological turn in anthropology aims to elevate Other ideas to the philosophi-
cal status of concepts. Concepts do not only represent but also articulate a way of
organizing social life, and their production is also the production and development of
social existence. This means that the production of concepts is not a superfluous luxury
of speculative pursuits but a praxis that makes political commitments more explicit since
it refuses to neutralize the ontological implications of concepts – i.e. the worlds that
Other concepts articulate.
Taking other worlds seriously does not mean that the ethnographer or philosopher
‘believes’ the Other’s expressions and practices. Take, for instance, the way Viveiros de
Castro (2013) addresses the political and conceptual implications of refusing to reduce
Other truth claims to beliefs, which tends to position Indigenous thought in the realm of
falsehood. He uses the proposition, ‘peccaries are human’ (p. 492), to point to an onto-
logical assumption that one may easily identify as illogical since peccaries are not human.
Viveiros de Castro (2013), however, poses the following question to untangle the com-
plexity of this proposition that moves beyond logical atomism and toward an analectical/
analogical/equivocal direction: ‘What is the point of asking oneself whether the Indians
are right in this respect – do we not already “know” this? What is indeed worth knowing
is that to which we do not know the answer, namely what the Indians are saying when
they say that peccaries are human’ (p. 494). What world do Indigenous peoples concep-
tualize and materialize when they say that two living beings are the same rather than
different? Viveiros de Castro (2015) explains the political implications and pedagogical
dimensions of thinking with alternative concepts (understood here as concepts emerging
from alterity), which consists of a native interlocutor teaching the ethnographer what
peccaries mean relationally, that is, how peccaries and humans are implicated in one
another. Ultimately, these mutual implications express a different metaphysics in which
a world is articulated by radically different relations than the ones permitted by moder-
nity’s dualist ontology.
Likewise, Dussel (1973) discusses the pedagogical implications of using analectics as
a method to listen to the speech acts of Others (e.g. We fight for the dignity of our terri-
tories and our peoples). These speech acts are the interpellations that transform the
Fúnez-Flores 37

philosopher into a student who has the ethical obligation to learn from Others whose
humanity and dignity have been denied.

To consider the word of the Other as resembling those of my world, while preserving the
metaphysical distinction of the Other, is to respect the analogy of revelation. It is a duty to
commit oneself to humility and meekness in the pedagogical path of the word of the Other, as
teacher, traces every day. ... Philosophy in this case, originally analectic, walks dialectically
alongside the word of the Other. The philosopher ... knows that the beginning [of this
pedagogical relationship] is trust, and faith in the ... veracity of the Other; today it is trust in the
woman, the child, the worker, the underdeveloped, the student, in a word, the poor. (Dussel,
1973: 171)

Thus, the ontological and decolonial turns propose an inter-metaphysical and inter-epis-
temic dialogue that may result in not only decentering modern foundations but also in
generating concepts and amplifying radically different worlds through analectical her-
meneutics and controlled equivocation. The dialogic relationships Indigenous peoples
form with non-human beings, as Viveiros de Castro (2015) acknowledges, are usually
beyond the ethnographer’s metaphysical or ontological assumptions. The ethnographer,
however, can employ controlled equivocation to translate Other worlds and philosophies
to initiate the creative process of coalescing and transmogrifying modern categories.
Translation, in the end, is not a representation of reality but a transgressive conceptual act
against dominant notions of reality.
To clarify, the ontological turn in sociocultural anthropology is metaphysical insofar
as it is concerned with weakening modern categories and inventing concepts from the
distinct realities, worlds, or ontological questions that emerge from ethnographic situa-
tions or contingencies. The double movement of weakening old and inventing new con-
cepts is a subversive methodological shift since it uses ethnography to create concepts
that make other conceptual worlds more visible. In a world apparently lacking alterna-
tives to Western capitalist modernity, the ontological turn’s conceptual project becomes
more political than it first appears, since it amplifies the existence of other conceptions
and enactments of other worlds (Blaser, 2013; De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). Resistance
perhaps is not made as explicit as the decolonial turn; however, by amplifying the co-
existence of other worlds despite the longue durée of colonialism and the destructive
expansion of capitalist modernity, concrete expressions of resistance are also made more
visible, thus opening the horizon of possibility. And, as Gordon (2011) notes, to appear
is always already a political and decolonizing act, while the negation of existence is
always colonial annihilation.
As proposed by Dussel (1985) and the decolonial turn’s adoption of his analectical
approach, it is necessary to take alterity and exteriority as two theoretical points of depar-
ture that make possible the construction of situated philosophies. Analectics and con-
trolled equivocation begin, furthermore, from what is beyond modernity’s metaphysical
totality, namely, that which is violently left outside its horizon – forgotten, silenced, and
systematically made nonexistent. By examining the points of convergence and diver-
gence between the decolonial and ontological theoretical turns, I hope that I have helped
advance the discussion around the varying ways two distinct projects affirm the
38 Theory, Culture & Society 39(6)

ontological and epistemological self-determination of Others. Placing the decolonial and

ontological turns closely together was necessary to indicate the ways they complement
each other conceptually and methodologically. By disrupting the overrepresentation of
the modern ethnoclass and its categories, as well as the misrepresentation and subjuga-
tion of Others (Wynter, 2003), both theoretical turns ultimately oppose the erasure of
difference. On the one hand, they unsettle modern concepts that continue to be used as
instruments of control and domination, and, on the other, they simultaneously highlight
the existence of worlds and knowledges otherwise. Both theoretical projects are acts of
decolonization insofar as they propose ethically and politically committed methodologi-
cal approaches to recreate and advance concepts that point to the resistance, existence,
and resiliency of exploited, dominated, and colonized peoples, places, and territories. To
amplify the existence of Other worlds does not suggest that the problems faced by the
dominated are magically interrupted. To use Kohn’s (2015) observations regarding the
political implications of thinking otherwise, both theoretical turns refuse the notion that
‘there is no longer any conceptual space “alter” to the logic of this [modern/colonial]
kind of domination. For this would be the final act of colonization, one that would sub-
ject the possibility of something else, located in other lived worlds, human and other-
wise, to a far more permanent death’ (p. 320). Both theoretical turns’ methodological and
conceptual projects thus contribute to ontological and epistemological decolonization
and the self-determination of Other worlds, which, despite modernity’s totalizing dis-
course and practice, continue to exist.

ORCID iD
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8107-309X

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Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at Texas Tech

University. Broadly speaking, his research is situated at the intersection of cultural studies, deco-
lonial theory, and qualitative methodology. His ongoing research is centered on Latin American
student movements, the ontological turn in anthropological theory, and critical hermeneutics.