Summary
Marina Simić: Ontological craft
Introduction to the cultural theory of alterity
The subject of this monograph is a set of new approaches in social theory that can be collectively labeled as ontological craft, perspectivism and multinaturalism. The ontological turn, as the last in a series of "turns" in the theory of the 20th and early 21st centuries, throws a challenge to the basic assumptions of Western civilization, including science. The author presents this challenge from a viewpoint shaped by anthropological theory, especially by the contemporary understanding of alterity, i.e. the problem of the "other", starting from the assumption that "the ontological craft as a theoretical-methodological procedure or school of thought can also be understood as a cultural theory with a focus on understanding otherness". Although it is an ontology, in the words of the author herself, "this is not a metaphysical study of what the world is, but an attempt to seriously confront the theory of culture with the otherness that it cannot assimilate with the conceptual apparatus it usually handles". Therefore, a radical transformation of that apparatus is necessary, for which support is found in native, non-Western traditions, which set the fundamental relations "between thing and subject, object and subject, materiality and sociality" in a completely different way... What needs to be emphasized and what gives special importance to this book is the fact that it is about the latest ideas, formulated in the last decade or two. They are currently the subject of lively debates in the interdisciplinary field where philosophy, anthropology, social theory and cultural studies meet.
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