Distant tribes, post-colonial subjects, and other ‘exotic’ contexts that have offered the ethnographic baselines for the ‘ontological turn’ have also invited a barrage of criticism. Some of these criticisms can be fair, but many are misplaced and fail to recognise why many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities have found it very useful to make an analytical distinction between epistemological and ontological approaches. This presentation will explore the extent to which post-conflict forms of memory management and the social imaginaries of global governance structures (themselves entertaining a resolutely unique ontology) have misunderstood the sociality of the very populations they believe they are over-seeing and reconciling in the states of the former Yugoslavia. It is argued here that a political ontological diagnosis offers new resources and remedies to an intractable situation, but also reconfigures our understandings of basic concerns around ‘multiculturalism’, new forms of political protest across Europe and abroad, and the potential for new political and economic dispensations more generally. Ontology matters, and it does not require a long-haul flight to prove as much.

(*)El autor o autora no ha asociado ningún archivo a este artículo