What Are Indigenous Ontologies? (2022)

2007

This report presents a groundbreaking initiative to develop the PCI (= Cultural Heritage of Indigenous and Minority Communities) Ontology, a semantic tool designed to describe, classify, and index textual and audiovisual resources. The ontology aims to serve as a robust framework for preserving and valorizing both tangible and intangible cultural elements. By facilitating the multilingual and multicultural indexing of resources, it enables broader accessibility for diverse audiences, including researchers, educators, and policymakers, while addressing the unique needs of online archives, education, strategic communication, and policymaking. The methodology behind the PCI Ontology reflects a pragmatic and iterative approach deeply rooted in the empirical analysis of a rich audiovisual corpus comprising over 100 hours of material. These resources, featuring interviews, documentaries, and research seminars, were analyzed to identify recurring discourse subjects, narrative genres, and thematic structures, also called. topoï. Drawing on the principles of conceptual graph theory, the development process ensured that linguistic and thematic patterns were systematically integrated and contextualized. In parallel, pre-existing resources such as the UNESCO thesaurus and linguistic ontologies like GOLD were critically examined and adapted to enhance the ontology’s comprehensiveness and relevance. The iterative refinement of the ontology was supported by feedback from multidisciplinary stakeholders, ensuring its alignment with real-world needs. The PCI Ontology itself is structured around three core facets that work in tandem. The discourse description facet captures the structure and dynamics of narratives and rhetorical elements, providing a framework to analyze and represent how cultural knowledge is articulated. The World-PCI facet represents the social and cultural context of indigenous and minority groups, encompassing their traditions, practices, and interactions with their environments. Finally, the pragmatic description facet focuses on aligning the content with specific user profiles and contexts, ensuring its adaptability for various publishing scenarios. Illustrations of the ontology’s application highlight its ability to describe topics ranging from the cultural identity of the Huarpe community in Argentina to the intangible heritage of languages, oral traditions, and artistic expressions. It also documents technical know-how and ecological practices, alongside case studies addressing sociocultural dynamics. By employing conceptual graphs, the ontology integrates thematic and relational elements, allowing for nuanced exploration of content while preserving the context in which it was produced. The formalism underpinning the PCI Ontology is a hybrid of RDF/OWL and conceptual graphs. RDF and OWL ensure compliance with semantic web standards, facilitating interoperability and integration with linked data initiatives. Conceptual graphs, on the other hand, offer a rich and intuitive framework for modeling complex knowledge patterns, including causal, rhetorical, and spatial relationships, while maintaining contextual specificity. This dual approach enhances both the ontology's adaptability and its capacity for detailed semantic representation. The development process relied heavily on CoGui, a specialized ontology editor designed within the framework of conceptual graph theory. CoGui provided an intuitive interface for creating and managing vocabularies, relations, and nesting contexts while enabling dynamic updates based on empirical insights. Its visualization capabilities were instrumental in representing thematic hierarchies and conceptual graphs, offering clarity and scalability as the ontology expanded. The tool's alignment with the structural and semiotic principles of the PCI Ontology further reinforced its suitability for the project. What sets the PCI Ontology apart is its multifaceted innovation. While traditional ontologies, such as CIDOC CRM, focus on object categorization, the PCI Ontology integrates discourse and pragmatic dimensions to address user-specific needs. By combining cultural and linguistic frameworks with advanced indexing and representation capabilities, it provides a unique solution for preserving and enriching the cultural legacy of marginalized communities. In summary, the PCI Ontology represents a pioneering effort to document and disseminate cultural heritage through a sophisticated and adaptable semantic framework. By addressing the needs of diverse stakeholders and leveraging cutting-edge methodologies, it ensures that the voices of minorities and indigenous peoples are preserved, amplified, and made accessible in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Conserving Active Matter, 2022

This short essay introduces the Bard Graduate Center working group on Indigenous ontologies of active matter, defines its operative concepts, and frames the four contributing essays that follow. The so-called ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences has encouraged recognition of culturally specific theories of being that depart from those in the dominant Western tradition. These essays consider Indigenous conceptions of "objects" that privilege dynamic activity, multiple agencies, and relational networks and explore the implications of such notions for responsive museum conservation, care, and custodianship.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Human Ecology. Williams, L., McIntosh, A. & Roberts, R. (Eds.). UK.: Ashgate, pp. 73-88., 2012

Warnings of great transformational moments in the affairs of humankind that have echoed down through the ages signalled periods of profound change from which result either great, evolutionary leaps forward or cataclysmic destruction, regression, and ultimately extinction. In the case of the first scenario, these are often marked by what cultural historian Thomas Berry (1991, p.1) calls great overarching movements of people who arise to fulfil what he described in 1999 as the "Great Work of a people" adding each time new layers of human understanding, organization and consciousness. He includes in these the emergence of the Humanist tradition of the Greeks with its understanding of the human mind, the Great Work of Israel in giving voice and expression to a new experience of the divine, the Great Work of Rome in the gathering of all the peoples of the Mediterranean world and in Western Europe, the bringing about of ordered relations with one another. In the land known as China arose one of the most elegant and great civilisations ever known, and in the Americas, he says, (as in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and many other parts of the world), the Great Work carried out by the First Peoples was the establishment of an intimate relationship with the powers that brought the continent into existence. This chapter is concerned with the nature of that intimate relationship with these powers as it relates to the great crisis of this moment

2020

This essay is about rock art and ancestral agency -how certain rock art practices reproduce a 7 world of ancestral presence and relationship for many First Nations people of North America, 8 historically and today. But, in making this argument, I wish to take a left fork off the well-beaten 9 path of constructivism in which a culturally-particular ontology is shown to be responsible for 10 the distinctive nature of the rock art -its form, its settings, and its practices. Pursuing an 11 alternate (no doubt more bumpy) track, I suggest that there is something more fundamental at 12 work in the way ancestral agency flows through rock art than explanations rooted in notions of 13 worldview would have it. Building on Norder's (2012) distinction between maker/meaning and 14 user/caretaker frameworks for interpreting the rock art of the Canadian Shield, I see the 15 user/caretaker model as symptomatic of a much broader set of relational knowledge practices 16 common to Indigenous peoples of the region (cf. Zawadzka 2019). Resisting the tendency to 17 explain these practices in terms of an off-the-shelf ontological model such as animism, I seek 18 instead to reframe the problem as one of understanding how certain routine forms of action and 19 attention shape emergent worlds -not just their perception or imagination by enculturated 20 subjects -but the worlds themselves. This leads to a definition of ontology as ontogeny -sets of 21 relations that tend to disclose (and foreclose) others within the self-transforming processes of 22 emergent assemblages. Three corollaries are that ontologies are: (1) endemic to particular 23 assemblages of practice; (2) inherently entangled with the actions and apparatuses of knowing; 24 and (3) moving targets, defined in particular ongoing relations of disclosure rather than in fixed states of being. Drawing on examples of rock art, stone cairns, and medicine wheels of the 1 Canadian Shield and Northern Plains, I show how a landscape of ancestral presence and agency 2 was realized (as opposed to merely perceived, imagined, or experienced) in particular modes and 3 media of action and attention. This, finally, leads to some conclusions about the value of 4

​ Current controversies about knowledge integration reflect conflicting ideas of what it means to " take Indigenous knowledge seriously ". While there is increased interest in integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in various disciplines such as anthropology and ethnobiology, integration projects are often accused of recognizing Indigenous knowledge only insofar as it is useful for Western scientists. The aim of this article is to use tools from philosophy of science to develop a model of both successful integration and integration failures. On the one hand, I argue that cross­cultural recognition of property clusters leads to an ontological overlap that makes knowledge integration often epistemically productive and socially useful. On the other hand, I argue that knowledge integration is limited by ontological divergence. Adequate models of Indigenous knowledge will therefore have to take integration failures seriously and I argue that integration efforts need to be complemented by a political notion of ontological self­determination.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2018

This Introduction to a Special Issue on World Heritage and the Ontological Turn examines the efficacy of three different ontological approaches for analyzing diverse types of heritage processes (UNESCO World Heritage designations, the heritagization of historic buildings and cityscapes, and intangible heritage practices). In doing so, it explores the utility of ontologically-oriented ethnographic studies, or ontography (Holbraad 2009), for making sense of the thingness of heritage. These different ontological approaches emerge from science and technology studies (STS), represented here by the work of Bruno Latour (1993, 1999, 2005), the related fields of political ontology (Blaser 2009, 2010, 2013) and cosmopolitics (Marisol de la Cadena 2010, 2015, 2017), as well as the method of “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2004, 2014; Holbraad 2012; Holbraad and Pederson 2017), and material (Peircean) semiotics (Kohn 2013). Case studies are drawn from Cuba, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, and the UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Archaeologies, 2020

In Canada archaeology sits between colonial and contemporary reconciled notions of heritage, and relationships between the descendant colonial State and Indigenous sovereigns. State-regulated Archaeological Resource Management (ARM) has slowly begun to shift away from archaeologistcentric values, as that management becomes less about preserving the material past, and more about fiduciary State obligations towards Indigenous sovereign rights over this heritage. These changes are also slowly destabilizing the role and authority of archaeologists in ARM: from experts and value makers of archaeological stuff to servicing other societal values within this contested material heritage. These changes have significant implications for how archaeology is understood by Canadian society to ''make meaning'' of human-material experiences in the past and present. Feeding into both old angsts and new anxieties over archaeological authority and the ''rightness'' of an archaeological ontology, current discourse invites the question: Is there a place for an informed, reflexive archaeological meaning-making within a resituated heritage conservation regime, and can it contribute to a State/Indigenous Sovereign-based archaeological management? This paper considers archaeology at a time when that practice appears to be moving beyond archaeological sensibilities, and the limits of archaeological ways of knowing are being expanded by other ways of knowing. ________________________________________________________________ Résumé: Au Canada, l'archéologie s'inscrit entre les notions d'un patrimoine réconciliant le colonial et le contemporain, et les relations entre l'état colonial descendant et les souverains autochtones. La Gestion des ressources archéologiques

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 2018

AU1 6 29 While ontological perspectives are theoreti-30 cally quite diverse and have been influenced by a 31 vast array of authors and disciplines, they never-32 theless agree that the theoretical standards and 33 practices of the previous century are inadequate. 34 They criticize the idea that archaeology should 35 focus on humans and argue that there is more to 36 archaeology than recognizing the "web of inter-37 pretations" weaved by human actors. Ontological 38 perspectives place archaeology closer to current 39 trends in anthropology, to approaches developed 40 in science and technology studies, and political 41 ecology. 42 Methodologically, ontologies favor credulity 43 and wonder in face of that which goes against 44 our westernized, rational, and modernist view of 45 reality; it favors approaches which perceive real-46 ity as built upon relations between objects (human 47 and nonhuman); and it also favors the exploration 48 of the material properties of objects, and how 49 these properties change and are changed in their 50 own emergence. 51 Definition 52

American Anthropologist, 2019

Currently on the rise in archaeology, ontological approaches promise new ways of engaging with alterity of various kinds-different people, different times, different forms, even different worlds. This work promises to aid in critical reflections on the arbitrary nature of the Western gaze and to recognize and incorporate non-Western knowledge in new manners. There are, however, several challenges to address. First, as noted by several leading thinkers in this area, the present range of ontological approaches include contrasting theoretical underpinnings. Second, these approaches are rarely considered in relation to the practical challenges of specific archaeological cases, particularly contexts of settler colonialism in which practitioners are attuned to the potential colonial nature of their work. I divide ontologically engaged archaeologies into three related but distinct groups and use a small museum assemblage of seventeenth-century Wendat materials from Ontario to help think through these three theories. In comparing approaches, I outline their respective strengths, weaknesses, and points in need of further clarification. I conclude that the ontological turns offer new and valuable angles of articulation with archaeological materials but that archaeologists must adopt them cautiously if they are to avoid repeating or continuing some of the darkest parts of our (colonial) disciplinary history. [ontology, archaeology, new materialism, archaeological theory, effigies, colonialism, Iroquoian archaeology, Ontario] RESUMEN Actualmente se estánest´están desarrollando en la arqueología, aproximaciones ontoí ogicas que prometen nuevas formas de comprometerse con la alteridad de varios tipos-personas diferentes, tiempos diferentes, formas diferentes, aun mundos diferentes. Este trabajo promete ayudar en reflexiones críticas sobre la naturaleza arbitraria de la mirada occidental y para reconocer e incorporar conocimiento no occidental en nuevas formas. Hay, sin embargo , varios retos para abordar. Primero, como señaladose˜señalado por varios pensadores destacados en está area, el rango actual de aproximaciones ontoí ogicas incluye fundamentos té oricos contrastantes. Segundo, estas aproximaciones son consideradas raramente en relací on con los retos prácticospr´prácticos de casos arqueoí ogicos específicos, particularmente los contextos del colonialismo de pobladores en los cuales los profesionales estánest´están sintonizados con la naturaleza colonial potencial de su trabajo. Divido las arqueologías comprometidas ontoí ogicamente en tres grupos relaciona-dos pero distintos y uso un ensamblaje pequeñopeque˜pequeño de museo de materiales de los hurones del siglo XVII de Ontario para ayudar a pensar a travéstrav´través de estas tres teorías. Comparando las aproximaciones, bosquejo sus debilidades, for-talezas respectivas, y puntos en necesidad de clarificací on adicional. Concluyo que los cambios ontoí ogicos ofrecen ´ angulos de articulací on nuevos y valiosos con materiales arqueoí ogicos, pero que los arqué ologos los deben adoptar con cautela si van a evitar repetir o continuar algunas de las partes m ´ as oscuras de nuestra historia disciplinaria

International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2024

Imaginaries are representational assemblages of the past, ways to understand and(re)create history and projections of the self and others that ground ever-changing identities. They are embedded in the cultural meaning-making systems of each society. However, researchers and practitioners within the heritage field have not directly analysed heritage as a product-producer of imaginaries or conceived heritage itself as an imaginary. This conceptual article proposes imaginaries as a useful analytical lens to critically study heritage. Imaginariesenable us to uncover how people assume and signify heritage from various positions and experiences. Furthermore, this article aims to shed light on how alternative imaginaries grounded in non-western ontologies enable us to rethink heritage meaning and practice in the encounters and conflicts between different systems of meaning in daily life. More concretely, we identify three significant contributions of using imaginaries as a lens for the study of heritage. To illustrate our theoretical propositions, we incorporate empirical examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Ecuadorian Andes.