La apertura ontológica de la antropología contemporánea/The Ontological Opening of Contemporary Anthropology

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of works in anthropology which refer to matters ofontology. They reflect anthropological concerns with the nature of being and reality, and at the sametime critically review the boundaries and categories of Western modernity. Yet to what extent havethese ontological anthropologies interrogated or transformed fundamental anthropological conceptssuch as culture, difference, materiality, alterity, comparison or ethnography? This article offers anoverview of the key theoretical and methodological contributions of ontological anthropologies (bothconceptual versions, such as the so called «ontological turn», and more ontic versions), with respectto issues which include the notion of radical alterity, the return to animism, the idea of symmetricalanthropology or the methodological proposals of recursivity and controlled equivocation. At the sametime, the paper outlines the main debates which have emerged in our discipline as a result of thisopening up to ontological matters, such as the discussions around the nature-culture dichotomy, thefrontiers of alterity, the nature of reality, and the reach of ontologically informed political programmes.