Paper short abstract:

The narrative ability confounds our attempts to unravel our ontological binaries. Situating this within the ‘ontological turn’ I attempt to move beyond the pitfall of the “analytic of mixture, showing that storytelling reveals a meaningful world in which we can better understand our informants.

Paper long abstract:

As the Enlightenment conception of the human as being a rational (individual) animal in exclusive possession of logos continues to unravel, we have been forced to continually move our markers of human exclusivity closer to the chest. However, there remains one human ability that has markedly resisted our attempts at resituating in a way that does not reproduce the ontological cleavages we have long laboured against. This, as Tim Ingold has termed it, "skill of skills" is the narrative ability, or put simply: storytelling. In this paper I attempt to situate this problem within recent debates in anthropology broadly falling under the heading of the 'ontological turn'. I do this in an effort to secure philosophical foundations on which we may overcome this binary affliction in the hopes of closing the host of rifts it produces, broadly between semiosis and material. In pursuing this I put forward a possible direction to go beyond what Eduardo Kohn has called the "analytic of mixture" that has plagued our posthuman responses, merely constituting a mixing of categories, and thereby an a priori acceptance of their existence. Rather, I argue, with the help of philosophers, poets, anthropologists and the wisdom of their informants alike, that story has always-already been a constitutive aspect of the world. With these grounds cleared we can return to the meaningful world, and thus better understand those with whom we work as anthropologists, and the world itself in which we are enmeshed.