In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality pp.92-93

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores define ==ontology simply as concerned with “our understanding of what it means for something or someone to exist” (1986, 30). Ontology has to do with the assumptions dif­fer­ent social groups make about the kinds of entities taken to exist “in the real world.”== Notice that this definition does not entail a strong realist position (the assumption of a common or universal under­lying real­ity); at the same time, this does not mean that “the mind” constructs the world (a kind of subjectivism); the definition tries to get at the existence of multiple worlds while maintaining a nonobjectifying notion of the real. Our ontological stances about what the world is, what we are, and how we come to know the world define our being, our ­doing, and our knowing—­our historicity. ­Here it is impor­tant to ==keep in mind the distinctions among epistemology (referring to the rules and procedures that apply to knowledge production, including what counts as knowledge and what the character of that knowledge is), the episteme (the broad, and largely implicit, configuration of knowledge that characterizes a par­tic­ul­ar society and historical period and that significantly shapes the knowledge produced without the awareness of ­those producing it), and ontology.==11 Mario Blaser (2010, 2013) proposes ==a three-l­ayered definition of ontology, where the first layer is the one already hinted at: the assumptions about the kinds of beings that exist and their conditions of existence—a sort of inventory of beings and their relations. The second layer refers to ways in which ­these ontologies give rise to par­tic­u­lar socionatural configurations: how they “perform themselves,” so to speak, into worlds. In other words, ontologies do not precede or exist inde­pen­dently of our everyday practices; worlds are enacted by practices. Fi­nally, ontologies often manifest themselves as stories, and ­these make the under­lying assumptions easier to identify.== This layer is amply corroborated by the ethnographic lit­er­a­ture on myths and rituals (of creation, for instance). It also exists in the narratives that we moderns tell ourselves about ourselves, which are repeated over and over by politicians in their speeches or, invariably, in the six ­o’clock news’ rendition of “what is happening in the world.” This “what is happening” invariably refers back to the ontological ensemble of the individual, the real, science, and the market, that is, to the fact that we see ourselves as self-­sufficient subjects confronting an “external world” made up of preexisting, self-­standing objects that we can manipulate at ­will, or at least hope to. In short, what CNN or the BBC reports on, from an ontological perspective, is the status of this ensemble, including threats to it, though ­these are invariably explained in terms of the same categories, never allowed to drift too far out into other cultural worlds.