Ontologies in the Making

This volume comprises the texts of a workshop that took place at the UCLouvain in May 2022 that brought together anthropologists and archaeologists to present ontology-oriented research and discussed the impact of the ontological turn on both disciplines. Although the broad range of recent approaches with an interest in the material and a focus on solid matters are in no way a homogenous field of research, they still share some common ground. For example, they do not dismiss human agency but call for – more or less radically – a displacement in perspective, allowing a greater importance to the material world. How do we move from investigating people and/or things – with a preferential focus on one or the other depending on the discipline – to approach society or culture to understanding networks of actants or meshworks of beings, now or in the past? What does this theoretical shift in perspective entail in terms of methodology? How do we trace and document relations in a less anthropocentric way? Could this focus on relationality somehow help to build bridges between archaeology and anthropology?