Radical Alterity & the Decolonisation of Exchange: Not “Multiple Ontologies” but Ontic Capaciousness

ANTHROPOLOGY COLLOQUIUM SERIES

Radical Alterity and the Decolonisation of Exchange: Not “Multiple Ontologies” but Ontic Capaciousness

Dr. Chris Vasantkumar
Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Society and Culture, Macquarie University, Australia

Monday, December 1st, 2025
11:30 am – 12:45 pm
Cornett B235

This talk articulates a novel framework for understanding radical alterity (i.e., otherness that is more than merely cultural) in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. In it I argue that both ontological anthropologists and important critics of their work have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice. By contrast, I develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavour. I do so by elaborating a framework of “ontic capaciousness” centered on practice in a single, yet potentially plural world in which radical alterity can be understood as the materio-cultural precipitate of divergent modes of successful practical action. Framed in such a manner, I argue that the “bodies” of palpation-based traditional Chinese and dissection-based Western medicines are less different cultural representations of a single underlying Reality than they are material embodiments of divergent and incommensurable actionable realities. The talk concludes with some provocations concerning the potential of such a framework to aid in the decolonization of what I term the received settler-mercantile theories of exchange that have tended to over-stamp equivocal encounters between Indigenous peoples and Europeans in the era of colonial expansion as unequivocal examples of market exchange. Such over-stamping obscures the degree to which interactions such as the “purchase” of Manhattan Island were less the deals of the century than they were instances of the exploitative arbitraging of thresholds between value worlds.

EVERYONE WELCOME