{"id":3859,"date":"2016-09-19T15:13:47","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T19:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/?p=3859"},"modified":"2025-06-10T09:15:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T13:15:27","slug":"repugnant-nature-straight-line-non-euclidean-geometry-conventionalism-ontological-turn-anthropology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/2016\/repugnant-nature-straight-line-non-euclidean-geometry-conventionalism-ontological-turn-anthropology\/","title":{"rendered":"Repugnant to the Nature of the Straight Line: Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<section class=\"w-screen px-6 cu-section cu-section--white ml-offset-center md:px-8 lg:px-14\">\n    <div class=\"space-y-6 cu-max-w-child-5xl  md:space-y-10 cu-prose-first-last\">\n\n            <div class=\"cu-textmedia flex flex-col lg:flex-row mx-auto gap-6 md:gap-10 my-6 md:my-12 first:mt-0 max-w-5xl\">\n        <div class=\"justify-start cu-textmedia-content cu-prose-first-last\" style=\"flex: 0 0 100%;\">\n            <header class=\"font-light prose-xl cu-pageheader md:prose-2xl cu-component-updated cu-prose-first-last\">\n                                    <h1 class=\"cu-prose-first-last font-semibold !mt-2 mb-4 md:mb-6 relative after:absolute after:h-px after:bottom-0 after:bg-cu-red after:left-px text-3xl md:text-4xl lg:text-5xl lg:leading-[3.5rem] pb-5 after:w-10 text-cu-black-700 not-prose\">\n                        Repugnant to the Nature of the Straight Line: Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology\n                    <\/h1>\n                \n                                \n                            <\/header>\n\n                    <\/div>\n\n            <\/div>\n\n    <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n<p>Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/111\/16-252-Soc-Anth-Colloquium-series-poster-v2-1.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Repugnant to the Nature of the Straight Line<\/a>: Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Do Glaciers Listen?, Julie Cruikshank juxtaposes different understandings of glaciers: they are at once the physical entities studied by glaciologists, the forbidding symbols of sublime nature celebrated by Romantic poets, and the powerful sentient beings encountered by Tlingit and Athapaskan travellers. In the process of exploring these sometimes (but not always) incompatible views of the world and how they became intertwined with one another in colonial encounters, she refuses to privilege \u2013 or dismiss \u2013 any particular ontology, arguing that the erasure of worlds entailed in such a dismissal is the essence of colonialism. Instead, she treats the worlds evoked by Tlingit storytellers as having the same ontological status as those brought into being by climate scientists\u2019 narratives. She shows how each set of ontological assumptions can provide powerful \u2013 although always only partial \u2013 insights into the nature of the world. Her ontological agnosticism is productive, but it is also threatening to many within the discipline, particularly those who champion anthropology\u2019s status as a science. In this paper, however, I examine turn-of-the-century philosophical debates surrounding the invention of non-Euclidean geometry (especially Poincar\u00e9\u2019s notion of conventionalism) to show that mathematicians and physicists have long subscribed to precisely the sort of ontological agnosticism advocated by Cruikshank. I also suggest that it was those same philosophical debates that inspired L\u00e9vy-Bruhl\u2019s ideas about &#8220;how natives think,&#8221; kicking off a century of anthropological debate over the nature of knowledge and leading, ultimately, to our contemporary interest in questions of ontology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thursday, September 29th 2:20pm &#8211; 4:00pm Loeb A720<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Repugnant to the Nature of the Straight Line: Non-Euclidean Geometry, Conventionalism, and the Ontological Turn in Anthropology In Do Glaciers Listen?, Julie Cruikshank juxtaposes different understandings of glaciers: they are at once the physical entities studied by glaciologists, the forbidding symbols of sublime nature celebrated by Romantic poets, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3859"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21034,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions\/21034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/socanth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}