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Artefacts of Encounter
Amiria Salmond and Anne Salmond
University of Auckland

ontology. . . is part of the ship which, in Neuraths figure, we are re-building at sea. W.V. Quine, Speaking of Objects (1969, 16)

Geoffrey Lloyds paper, like his book Cognitive Variations (2007), brings together a range of discussions still playing out within and across various academic disciplines, relating to questions about the unity and diversity of the human mind; in particular, the degree to which people perceive, reason, and conceive of things differently. In his analysis of these largely disjointed projects, Lloyd draws out the broader implications of certain trajectories of research, examining underlying assumptions that are not always acknowledged within a given programme of study but which clearly influence the kinds of results achieved as well as their interpretation. In this sense, his work here as elsewhere (Lloyd 2009) concerns the ability of increasingly specialized disciplines to speak to one another, as much as it examines the issue of cognitive variation among individuals and groups of people. The query at the heart of his inquiry seems to turn on whether the variety of the ways in which we (qua disciplines or people) conceive of things is so great that we cant even discuss cognition meaningfully amongst ourselves (for example, within the Anglophone scholarly community) let alone with those who might be debating similar issues in other languages and intellectual traditions. Noting that interdisciplinary discussions of cognitive variation often stall over disagreements about the significance and scale of cultural differences held to influence reason and perception, in relation to aspects of cognition that may be considered universal, Lloyd marks out twin poles between which a range of positions may be taken, even within a given discipline. One is that of the universalist, convinced that diversity among humans, for example in colour perception or emotional experience, may be explained with reference to measurable variations in the cognitive equipment (physical and, less often, mental) with which all normal members of the species are born. The second is that of the relativist, preoccupied with identifying socio-cultural factors held to shape more or less profound differences in the ways in which groups of people perceive or represent the world. A primary concern for Lloyd is whether or how far the parties to the disputes are merely talking past one another in their divergent approaches to his central question. The query is apposite, because what is presented in Lloyds paper are the outlines of at least two quite separate conversations. Yet it is less a case of
Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2010 Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute DOI 10.1179/030801810X12772143410205

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cultural relativists versus scientific universalists (who often engage one another in their efforts to prove each other wrong). Rather, there is a set of discussions concerned primarily with biological and cultural aspects of perception and the ordering of experience, sketched in the first part of Lloyds paper, and then there is another, about reason itself and the possibility of multiple ontologies, which is dealt with in the second. It is important to recognize that the ground on which these discrete discussions are playing out is not the same. The assumptions that inform them, and their notions as to how problems of cognitive variation might be studied and addressed, are characterized by different (and, we would suggest, incommensurable) philosophical approaches one might go so far as to say that they belong to different worlds. For, while many exponents of stronger cultural relativist and universalist theories may indeed talk past each other in the sense of privileging very different kinds of evidence and explanatory frameworks (what Lloyd calls different styles of enquiry), those who debate variations in perception and the experience of phenomena including what is commonly called cognition are in fact contesting common philosophical territory.1 Although cultural relativists claim to deal only in representations, thus distinguishing themselves from universalists, who (like all positivists) consider themselves to be investigating truths about reality, the terminology habitually invoked in this distinction gives the metaphysical game away by begging the question of what, exactly, is being represented? As noted in the introduction to a recent edited volume that examined themes of ontological alterity:
[R]elativists are paradoxically just as inclined as positivists to accord special status to their own representations. Having barred themselves from appealing to truth, they appeal instead to what philosophers of social science called adequacy. . . According to this view, since all we have is alternative worldviews, the fantasy of explanation must be replaced by the necessity of interpretation rendering others representations in the idiom of our own. (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007, II)

While such an approach is clearly more pluralistic than positivism, in that all interpretations are in principle equally valid, it is at base just as universalistic, for:
Cross-cultural translation must be mediated by some point of comparison an element that can be posited, if not as supracultural, then at least as a point of cultural convergence. Enter the world. . . (Ibid)

This is indeed how most social anthropologists have approached the difficult task of trying to match different conceptual schemes against one another (Lloyd 2010, 203; pace Forster 1998), which leads them into a trap of metaphysical proportions. For:
It is just for this reason that the perfect Cartesian capsule of a word world-view does not strike our otherwise avid anti-Cartesians as oxymoronic. And it is for this reason also that they can be as presumptuous about the merits of their own analytics their interpretative tools as positivists are about their truths. Though each of us may talk partially, we all talk about the world, and therefore we can talk about others versions too. (Ibid., 12)
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A third range of approaches lately emerging in social anthropology and related disciplines, which Lloyd identifies with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola,2 might provocatively be grouped under the rubric relativist universalism (or indeed universalist relativism). This work offers the possibility of redefining the problems of cognitive variation by emphasizing that not everyone conceives (or has conceived) reality in terms of a singular world (in the sense of ontological sphere) populated by human beings interacting with phenomena of various kinds (not even in the West). The point of these arguments, we take it, is not to cast doubt on whether there is in fact only one world or physical universe, as demonstrated by modern science,3 but rather to expose the limitations of analytic manoeuvres that seek to engage with other ways of conceiving things while insisting on the authority of their own. This is not to say, of course, that scholars can or should attempt to achieve positions of ontological neutrality, or craft new metapositions from which to examine diverse ontologies, like cultures, from above; as Lloyd puts it, there is no theory-free way of accessing an answer to the question of what the world comprises. Rather, we might cultivate an awareness that it is always the answers to our own questions that will seem the most compelling. The common goal of this third, disparate collection of analyses, if there is one, is to introduce a greater degree of humility into the discussion. Among the most intransigent difficulties facing any attempt to approach questions of ontological variation is that our own most basic assumptions about time, space and what it is to be human cannot be set aside, so that, even when reflected upon, their ubiquity seems all but unquestionable. For Lloyd, it is his faith in the concept of a universal (though varied) humanity, borne out by years of study and deep understanding of historically and culturally distant peoples, that makes the idea of unbreachable barriers between human worlds both unconvincing and politically unpalatable. Against the idea of incommensurability he argues that since Viveiros de Castro and others have so skilfully described the worlds of their informants, these barriers cannot be impenetrable.4 While he is right to admire the success with which some ethnographers are able to render ontological alterity, however, such rare achievement is only possible after years of sustained engagement with their informants. Rather than a proof against incommensurability, these glimpses into other modes of existence show just how elusive, laborious and challenging the work of getting a handle on ontological difference can be. Lloyds bridgeheads of intelligibility are not out there conveniently to hand, waiting to be discovered, but are rather cultivated over years, often generations, of exchanges, debate and often conflict between people holding competing assumptions about the nature of reality.5 Even then, anthropological attempts to convey conceptual alterity can at best be described as approximate and uncertain. After years of fieldwork among people on the Trobriand Islands, conducted exclusively by means of the local language, for example, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski remarked upon the fundamental difficulties he suffered in conveying the insights he had gained to his peers.
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Musing on the complexities of translation, he noted the difference between giving a words rough equivalent, suitable for practical purposes and stating exactly whether a native word corresponds to an idea at least partially existing for English speakers, or whether it covers an entirely foreign conception. For, he continued:
That such foreign conceptions do exist for native languages and in great number, is clear. All words which describe the native social order, all expressions referring to native beliefs, to specific customs, ceremonies, magical rites all such words are obviously absent from English as from any European language. (Malinowski 1945, 299)

The only solution to this difficulty, Malinowski argued, was to produce detailed ethnographic accounts of the sociology, culture and tradition of that native community (Ibid., 300) to immerse oneself in the totality of social life:
Instead of translating, of inserting simply an English word for a native one, we are faced by a long and not altogether simple process of describing wide fields of custom, of social psychology and of tribal organization which correspond to one another. We see that linguistic analysis inevitably leads us into the study of all the subjects covered by ethnographic field-work. (Ibid., 3012)

But, he cautioned, this approach does not offer guaranteed success, for there is an even more deeply reaching, though subtler difficulty: the whole manner in which a native language is used is different from our own, for example some particles, quite untranslatable into English, give a special flavour to native phraseology, and in sentence structure, an extreme simplicity hides a good deal of expressiveness, often achieved by means of position and context (300).6 A similar point was later made by W.V. Quine7 when he noted the prevalence of objectifying structures in English and related languages:
We talk so inveterately of objects that to say we do seems almost to say nothing at all; for how else is there to talk? (Quine 1969, 1)

Answering his own question, Quine argued:

It is hard to say how else there is to talk, not because our objectifying pattern is an invariable trait of human nature, but because we are bound to adapt any alien pattern to our own in the very process of understanding or translating the alien sentences. (Ibid., 1)

This is a version of Lloyds point that there is no theory-free way of accessing an answer to the question of what the world comprises, but Quine goes a step further, arguing that the very project of objective ontological comparison is doomed, for:
When we compare theories, doctrines, points of view, and cultures, on the score of what sorts of objects there are said to be [for example], we are comparing them in a respect which itself makes sense only provincially. (Ibid., 6)8

This does not make comparison impossible it simply means that such a project can only be approached in ones own terms.9 Connections can be
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forged out of incommensurability, but their shape will ultimately be determined by their authors (or rather authors) assumptions about the nature of the things being compared.10 In this sense, according to this reading of Quine, it is correct to say that different ontologies are absolutely incommensurable, but this does not prevent limited understanding of one anothers concepts from being achievable in practice, through attempts at engagement over time.11 (And it is crucial here that such attempts need not, for present purposes, be restricted to the realm of language. In arguing that meaning has no existence outside linguistic behaviour, Quine disembedded concepts from the black box of mind, opening at least by implication the possibility of finding them in the form of all manner of behaviours, artefacts and practices.) Here it may be timely to expand briefly on what is meant by ontological incommensurability within social anthropology, especially as this has been a topic of recent debate. Davidsons well-known critique of The very idea of conceptual schemes (Davidson 1974) is perhaps what springs to mind for many when ethnographers talk of their informants as occupying different worlds, but his formulation is misleading in important respects, notably in implying a conflation of cultures, languages and ontologies qua conceptual schemes.12 On the contrary, most anthropologists deploying the term ontologies do so precisely in attempts to avoid the problems associated with the culture concept and to seek more productive ways of thinking about difference than those offered by cultural relativism.13 As a term that is still up for grabs within the discipline, however, it is used differently by different people. Whereas for Holbraad, for example, ontologies are categorically not phenomena out there to be found, but rather artefacts of anthropological analysis,14 others at least appear to defend a more substantive view of ontological difference. Viveiros de Castro (2003: 14) for instance speaks of his own anthropological project as one that seeks to advance the ontological self-determination of the worlds peoples, and has described Amazonian thought, according to Latour (2009, 2), as a fully domesticated and highly elaborated philosophy. Despite divergences in language, what these projects have in common is a concern to move beyond the image of a world made up of cultural packages, coherent inside and different from what is elsewhere (Mol 2002) that has dominated anthropological thinking for over a century. Instead of assuming forms of difference that map neatly onto groups, institutions and communities that are often in turn geographically circumscribed, ontology takes over the difficult problem of how this difference is to be located, situated, delimited (Candeia in Venkatesan ed. 2010).15 This is not of course to say that people living in the same place or participating in relationships of various kinds have nothing in common, nor that all differences between them are incommensurable. Rather, it is to point out that, were we to ask those we regard as other what it is that they share, and what makes them different from us, we might be surprised by their answers, which ought in turn to inspire us to re-think our own assumptions about sameness and alterity. Indeed, one can argue that it is precisely this work of mutual accommodation between those who hold different assumptions and theories
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about existence which constitutes one of the most fascinating aspects of what Lloyd terms cognitive variation. The point is not so much to ask whether certain ontologies are incommensurable or not; at certain moments at the very least, as we elaborate below, they clearly are. The more interesting question is how people work to overcome such incommensurabilities, crafting intelligibility between their own and others ways of being.16 For historical and ethnographic accounts abound with examples of occasions when peoples divergent notions about each others identity and intentions lead to dramatic misunderstandings, sometimes with fatal consequences, as well as creative accommodations. In early contact situations, in particular, radically different conceptions of reality and its possible manifestations are at work. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, European voyagers arriving at Pacific islands often thought they had discovered earlier and nobler versions of themselves, untainted by civilization (or, in other accounts, subject to untutored and savage passions). They, like others later, employed familiar artistic and literary tropes in their attempts to describe these primitive beings and their artefacts, technology and behaviour for the benefit of people back in Europe (Smith 1985; 1992; Thomas 1991). On the other side of these encounters, islanders drew upon very different presuppositions in their efforts to establish these strangers identity and to make sense of their peculiar behaviour. As Marilyn Strathern has argued, they did not necessarily regard their visitors arrival as unprecedented, nor are they likely to have interpreted the situation as one involving a collision of cultures. Instead, quite distinctive assumptions about reality were at play:
It has been something of a surprise for Europeans to realise that their advent to the Pacific was something less than a surprise. . . Their coming had been expected; they were previously known beings returned or manifest in new forms. (Strathern 1990, 25)

Thus, when the first European ship, the Dolphin, arrived off the coast of Tahiti in 1767, its crew unknowingly trespassed on a pluriverse with two distinct ontological dimensions, each inhabited by different kinds of being. Te Po, the invisible realm of the ancestors, associated with darkness and death, was the province of atua (translated as gods), `oromatua (ancestral spirits) and other powerful beings; while Te Ao, the everyday world, associated with light and life, was occupied by people. Atua could enter Te Ao, on marae (temples) through feathered images; in the persons of high chiefs and priests; or in the shape of particular animals. Tapu or ra`a was the state of their presence, of mana or ancestral power. There was also a seasonal flux in the relationship between these two realms, so that during the Season of Plenty, the atua and their followers, the `arioi, arrived from Te Po, bringing with them pleasure and prosperity; while on the day of the winter solstice, they departed, leaving the island in the grip of the Season of Scarcity. As it happened, the Dolphin arrived at Tahiti just as the winter solstice was imminent. According to oral histories, the Islanders were filled with consternation at the arrival of these atua-like beings at this inauspicious time. As they contemplated the ship, trying to guess what it might be, some
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thought it might be a floating island, like Tahiti itself, which had taken the shape of a shark and swum away from the nearby island of Ra`iatea (for islands were not necessarily stationary in the ocean). Others guessed that it was an aria (visible manifestation) of the atua `Oro, the god of fertility and war, while still others recalled the prophecy of a priest, Vaita, after the sacred headquarters of `Oro had been ravaged by enemy warriors. Appalled at the desecration, the priest entered a trance and prophesied that a canoe without an outrigger was coming to the islands, bringing offspring of Te Tumu (the creator) who would take over the land. Although their bodies would be different from those of the Tahitians, Vaitas prophesy claimed, they would, like the Islanders, also be descendants of Te Tumu, and therefore distant kin (Salmond 2005). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Tahitians hesitated to approach this canoe without an outrigger, and before coming alongside the ship their leader made a speech and threw a plantain branch as ritual offering into the sea, summoning the mana of the ancestors. At the same time on board the ship, Captain Wallis and his men rejoiced, thinking that perhaps at last they had discovered Terra Australis Incognita, the unknown Southern Continent. After long months at sea, the sailors were eager for fresh food, and they held up cloth, knives, beads and ribbons, grunting like pigs, crowing like cocks and pointing ashore in an effort to show what they wanted. Mystified by this performance, the Tahitians grunted, crowed and pointed in turn. When the sailors led some men to the animal pens, where they showed them pigs, chickens and turkeys, at the sight of the turkeys the islanders jumped overboard in terror. Several days later, on the day of the winter solstice itself, ceremonies were performed on the marae to farewell the atua. When Captain Wallis tried to send his boats ashore, hoping to barter for fresh food and water, the chiefs and priests sent out canoes to repel the boats, and the sailors retaliated with musketfire. Several days later when a Tahitian fleet attacked the Dolphin, Wallis ordered his men to fire their cannons and muskets in devastating barrages, killing many people. Afterwards, the islanders brought gifts of pigs, fruit, vegetables and young women to propitiate these powerful beings. Thunder and lightning were the signs of `Oros power, and it seemed likely that these new arrivals were emissaries of this potent, dangerous atua.17 Throughout Polynesia, such early meetings between islanders and Europeans people upholding diverse ontological assumptions (even among themselves) were littered with false starts and failures. In some places, these acted as a prelude to transactions that were concluded to mutual satisfaction, but they very often didnt. Whilst ostension pointing at desired objects, and holding up items offered in exchange sometimes worked (at least in achieving limited goals, e.g. procuring fresh food and water), it also frequently backfired, suggesting that purposes held as self-evident by some were defined very differently by others. Much philosophical discussion has been devoted to this question, which we will not rehearse here; suffice to say that it is not necessary to assume a unified material world held in common by all peoples however multidimensional in order to explain why ostension (sometimes) succeeds. Rather, it seems possible that even when
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acting on the basis of very different assumptions, people can quickly develop strategies with analogous, even overlapping (if not shared) goals, which, when executed in parallel, can open up possibilities for further collaborative action and developing (limited) understandings. Yet anthropologists and historians have habitually taken such accommodations between peoples previously unknown to each other as evidence of pre-existing commonalities, that lie undetected for a time until each realises the others basic and irreducible humanity.18 Marshall Sahlins might appear as an exception to this rule his account of the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 at the hands of Hawaiian warriors (in which Cook was taken as a god whose divine power had to be destroyed by men at the appropriate point in the Hawaiian mythological calendar so that it could rise again), seems to invoke a misunderstanding of ontological proportions, in which one set of assumptions about the events unfolding were asserted by force over another (Sahlins 1985). This is certainly how Gananath Obeyesekere read it; for him, Sahlins fell prey to a potent and hubristic mythology of his own rationalist culture that depicts benighted natives, in their ontological confusion, casting powerful Europeans actually as gods. Yet, like Lloyds cultural relativists and biological universalists, the two warring scholars may have been contesting common ground. As Marilyn Strathern has observed (1990), Cooks death for Sahlins was an unfortunate historical coincidence, albeit one that took place at the nexus of two different mytho-historical structures. In this view, Cooks mistake, according to Sahlins, was epistemological the explorer didnt understand (perhaps couldnt have understood) that the Hawaiians had their own version of (mytho-) history, which required certain kinds of events to unfold in particular ways. In Stratherns analysis, however, Sahlins apparently generous analytic move of according Hawaiians their own historical agency had the effect of foreclosing a different kind of explanation. Despite gesturing towards ontological alterity, his thesis and subsequent response to Obeyeskeres critique turned more on the question of how natives think differently about the world than on how their most fundamental assumptions as to the nature of that world might differ. In insisting on the authority of familiar assumptions in this case that the passage of time is conceived as a line between happenings, events linked by contextualizing chains of cause and effect (hence the structure of the conjuncture) Sahlins elided the possibility that events might be differently imagined. As Strathern argued, in seeking to define such instances of encounter:
We might have to seek the counterpart of our systematising endeavours in peoples artefacts and performances, in the images they strive to convey, and thereby in how they present the effects of social action to themselves. And this would not look like our history at all. (Strathern 1990, 28)

Whilst Western ideas about time, gods and humans have proved remarkably resilient, even in anthropological discourse, Pacific assumptions have also endured. In Polynesia, despite generations of efforts to convince islanders of the irrationality of assumptions about the efficacy of ancestors, these still persist today, if unevenly and not among all descendants. As soon
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as islanders and Europeans developed sufficient linguistic resources to debate such matters, they began to argue about the relative validity of European and Pacific conceptions, for instance, in an exchange in 1814 between John Liddiard Nicholas and a Maori chief, when the second missionary party arrived in New Zealand. Irritated by the restrictions associated with burial grounds, the head and hair of a chief and the roof of a chiefs house, all of which were tapu or imbued with ancestral presence, Nicholas told his Maori companion that taboo taboo [tapu tapu] was all gammon. But, he continued:
I found that opinions imbibed in infancy and cherished to the period of manhood, were as difficult to be eradicated from the minds of the New Zealanders, as from those of Europeans; for turning sharply round to me, he replied that it was no gammon at all; New Zealand man, said he, say that Mr Marsdens crackee crackee [karakia prayers] of a Sunday is all gammon. No, no, I rejoined, that is not gammon, that is miti [maitai the Tahitian word for good]. Well then, retorted the tenacious reasoner, if your crackee crackee is no gammon, our taboo taboo is no gammon, and thus he brought the matter to a conclusion; allowing us to prize our own system, and himself and his countrymen to venerate theirs. (Nicholas 1817, quoted in Salmond 1989, 64)

Although at this early stage, Maori may have been unwilling to make ontological concessions, fifty years later, after the onset of epidemic diseases and the outbreak of musket warfare had thrown their lives into turmoil, a priest named Te Matorohanga lamented that the bases of the Maori world were being overturned, rendering it inexplicable and incoherent. Speaking of ancestral knowledge taught in the whare wananga, for example, he remarked:
The teachings of these Schools of learning are in shreds, because the basket of these taonga (ancestral treasures) has been pulled apart, so that some are kept and others are lost; some have changed and others have been elaborated. Because the mana (ancestral efficacy) of the conduct of the karakia [incantations], the tapu [pl. ancestral presences and powers] and the atua [ancestor gods] has declined, now there is no mana and everything has changed. The tapu [plural] have ended, the ancient teachings are gone, the karakia are lost and they are no longer known. Because tapu is the first thing, if there is no tapu the works of the atua have no mana, and if the gods are lost everything is useless people, their actions and their thoughts are in a whirl, and the land itself is confused. (quoted in Smith 1913, 12. Retranslated by Anne Salmond 2010).

In spite of Te Matorohangas apocalyptic lament, however, tapu and mana did not die out in New Zealand. Rather, these fundamental forces in Te Ao Maori (the maori or ordinary, everyday world) endured through changing conditions that reduced (in some dimensions) their sphere of influence. Despite a barrage of criticism from the churches, a series of Maori prophets and leaders repeatedly attempted to reconcile ancestral assumptions with Christianity, and, more recently, with Western science. The chiefs houses at the heart of Maori communities were transformed into meeting houses lined with ancestral carvings, where life cycle rituals and debates could be conducted in dialogue with kin group forebears. Ancestral taonga (treasures) and the associated knowledge continued to be passed down to descendants,
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albeit in changing ways and using new technologies, including writing. Indeed, the concept of taonga itself has been inserted into New Zealand legal discourse, transforming conceptions of property in powerful and unpredictable ways (Henare 2007). Still, it remains questionable whether tapu, mana, taonga and the like have become more intelligible over time to those who have not imbibed them in infancy, in Nicholas terms. To grasp the ontological force of such concepts, it is necessary to accept the efficacy of ancestors and their ability to act in Te Ao Maori, and this remains as difficult as ever for those raised in late modernist traditions (including many Maori people). This is also true for anthropologists and historians, committed as they are to rationalist projects. For this reason, very few anthropological accounts of tapu and mana give a real sense of the power of ancestors to reshape the world, and the force they may bring to bear upon their descendants. Tapu can be a source of terror it is not just an exotic, esoteric concept, held up for antiquarian inspection. Indeed, as Holbraad (2007) has argued, principles such as tapu and mana, which transgress distinctions between concept and thing, force and action, quality and state (taken as axiomatic within the bulk of our intellectual traditions), have largely defeated anthropological exegesis. Claude Lvi-Strausss (1987: 55) attempt to explain away such anomalies, for example, by suggesting that mana terms act as floating signifiers, peculiarly empty of meaning, is described by Holbraad as perverse, since it flatly contradicts the conceptions upheld by people who insist that mana is a real power). Instead of thinking about mana and trying to make sense of it within our own conceptual economy, he suggests, it would be better to think through it, using its transgressive potential to interrogate the way in which our own assumptions often hobble our understandings of others; and to speculate on the kinds of ontological configurations within which such concepts might make perfect sense. Before we are tempted once again to fall into thinking of ontology as a comfortable by-word for culture, however (Holbraad in Venkatesan ed. 2010), it is important to address Lloyds argument in favour of ontological diversity within given cultures and societies. Quine is again useful here. Whilst he is perhaps most famous for exploring the problem of incommensurability through the example of radical translation using an encounter between an anthropological linguist and a newly discovered tribe whose language is without known affinities (Quine 1969, 1), as illustration he in fact argued that the impasses evident in such extreme cases were a characteristic of communication in general; as he put it: radical translation begins at home (46). His argument to this effect involved a complex disquisition on the inscrutability of reference, and the problems both of direct and deferred ostension (3848), from which we extrapolate a point important for present purposes: that even neighbours or close family members often talk past each other (in Lloyds term), since all communication requires us to translate others utterances into our own unique conceptual schemes. It is therefore no surprise to find ontological diversity and disagreement within cultures such as the Ancient Greeks.19 Yet Quine goes still further. The situation of the natural bilingual, he argues, or that of the anthropologist gone native,
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holds no advantages over others when it comes to translation for although such people might themselves possess the ability to shift between incommensurable ontologies, the problems they face in conveying the concepts of one to subscribers of another is just the same. All this would be rather depressing were it not for the fact that ontologies themselves are dynamic and subject to change as Lloyd points out in his critique of Descolas fourfold schema. For Quine, a persons conceptual world evolves over time, and in relation to those of others (for example, babies acquire the art of objectification from their mothers). This explains both why absolute incommensurability of ontological outlook is unavoidable (no two peoples life experiences are identical, nor is it possible to see through anothers eyes), and why the construction of bridgeheads of intelligibility is possible (we can learn creatively through our attempts to engage with others).20 Perhaps this is the most interesting question, after all when ontological configurations radically differ, just how and how far can people create intelligibility between them? Notwithstanding Quines argument about bilinguals, some people are clearly unusually gifted as translators. Take for instance Tupaia, the high-priest navigator who forged a close relationship with Joseph Banks and his Royal Society party of scientists and artists during Cooks first visit to Tahiti in 1769. In a matter of weeks, he learned to sketch in the European style, producing a number of images that for years were attributed to Banks or one of his shipboard companions.21 Tupaia taught Cook and Molyneux, the Endeavours master, some principles of Polynesian navigation, and when the Endeavour sailed from Tahiti, he appropriated this wooden world, piloting the ship through the Society Islands, dictating a list of more than 100 island names to Cook, and working with him to compile an extraordinary chart of the Pacific ocean.22 Later described by George Forster as a genius, Tupaia had already visited islands in the Australs and the Tongan archipelago, and when the Endeavour arrived in New Zealand, he was able to master the phonetic shifts necessary to understand what Maori were saying (although later Tahitian visitors could not grasp the dialect). His presence as translator and mediator throughout this part of the voyage transformed Cooks 6-month circumnavigation of New Zealand. Maori oral histories record that local people thought that the Endeavour was Tupaias ship, and when Cook returned to New Zealand on his second voyage, they came out in their canoes, calling out the Tahitians name and weeping when they were told he had died in Batavia. Contrary to Quines claim that bilinguals or anthropologists have no particular advantage when it comes to ontological translation, then, the example of Tupaia suggests that those who become accustomed to shifting between competing conceptual configurations may sometimes develop special skills in producing knowledge about others or communicating certain aspects of their own. Once again, however, this does not constitute an argument against the incommensurability of the different worlds such a person may inhabit either ancestors exercise real efficacy or they dont the two positions cannot be fused, merged or otherwise reconciled, except through the inconsistencies of practice which means that ultimately, within the terms of
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a one-world ontology at least, someone must be speaking metaphorically, be mistaken, or be simply incorrect. Lloyd appears to acknowledge this when he notes that such learning is always hard work and never complete: there is no algorithm for success. We just have to make the best use we can of such bridgeheads of intelligibility as will enable us to begin to make sense of others (Lloyd 2010). This is precisely because of ontological alterity the difficulty, perhaps sheer impossibility, of any attempt to make sense of truth claims that contradict our own assumptions about what is and what isnt possible in the world(s) we ourselves inhabit (twins are birds, etc.). In order to maintain an image of those who make such claims as rational (human) beings,23 we are forced into complex intellectual gymnastics (they are speaking symbolically; its a form of subaltern resistance; all traditions are invented anyway) designed to excuse people from asserting things that clearly cannot possibly be true in our terms. Surely it would be better to recognize the inevitability of such contradictions, to acknowledge incommensurability and to work instead on accommodating difference differently, however we can.

Acknowledgments
We are grateful to participants in the discussion Whats wrong with Quine that took place in the Theory in Anthropology group on the Open Anthropology Cooperative website: http://openanthcoop.ning.com/, in AprilMay 2010, for their insights and for directing us to important sources. Warm thanks are also due especially to our formal reviewer Fernando Dominguez Rubio, and to Ilana Gershon, Martin Holbraad, Philip Swift, and Sari Wastell, for their generous and thoughtful comments on drafts of this paper we hope we have done justice to the important points they raised. Finally, we thank Geoffrey Lloyd for his stimulating and provocative intervention in the debates sketched above, and to the editors for the opportunity to contribute to the fascinating and wide-ranging set of discussions published here.

Notes
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As Holbraad (forthcoming) notes, the idea of cognition (however distributed) owes its coherence to a biological ontology in which the human ability to represent the world is conceived as a function of mental capacities stemming from natural processes centred on the brain. Edward Ardener, Terry Evens, Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner might also be included in this company. For a discussion of the significant differences between Descola and Viveiros de Castros positions, see Latour (2009). Bruno Latour (2004, 458), for example, is explicit on this point.

This argument was famously advanced by Davidson (1974, 6), among others, and has been refuted by Forster (1998, 140; footnote 35). And, as the military etymology of the term suggests, such bridgeheads may be best imagined as advance positions within contested territory, rather than as fields of shared meanings. For Malinowski, however, these structural differences were the product of evolutionary trajectories, whereby primitive uses of language, with their functional, pragmatic role, are augmented in more highly developed languages by reflective and cognitive modes, geared towards the framing and expressing of thoughts.

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Who cited Malinowski in at least one version of Word and Object (Quine 1960, 58, f.n.). Quines ontological relativity was conceived as a problem of translation, and he remained committed to his own scientific ontology, often described in the literature as physicalism or naturalism: Our physics is provincial only in that there is no universal basis for translating it into remote languages; it would still never condone defining physical identity in terms of verbal behaviour. If we rest the identity of attributes on an admittedly local relation of English synonymy, then we count attributes secondary to language in a way that physical objects are not (Quine 1969, 20). As Fllesdal has argued, though, Quines thesis on the indeterminacy of translation follows from his empiricist view of evidence rather than any ontological dogma (Neale 1987, 305, citing Fllesdal 1975). The question of multiple ontologies itself, for instance, naturally appears as a matter of dispute within an ontology that insists upon the singularity of its own universe, and from the vantage of which, therefore, anyones claims to the existence of multiple worlds (whether made by an anthropologist or their informants) can be nothing but a contradiction in terms. As Davidson put it, Since there is at most one world, these pluralities are metaphorical or merely imagined (Davidson 1974, 89). For anthropologists who feel themselves obliged to take their informants seriously, however, the possibility must be allowed that people who uphold the existence of different ontological spheres may not simply be talking metaphorically and if they are not, who are we to claim that they are wrong, and on what grounds? To the extent that one-world ontologies preclude the possibility of multiple ontological spheres, the two positions are incommensurable. See Holbraad and Pedersen (2009) for an elaboration of this and related points with particular reference to the work of Marilyn Strathern. Martin Holbraad (forthcoming) has argued that such processes necessarily involve the creation of novel (previously inconceivable) concepts, through a process which, after Roy Wagner (Invention of Culture) he christens inventive definition (or infinition for short). See also William Pietz on the fetish, which is not of any one of the two cultures coming into contact. It is a concept-thing (an idea and a material thing at the same time) that arises in the gap that comes about at the moment of contact. . . (Pietz in Povinelli 2001, 324). Indeed, this very issue was the topic of a formal debate in 2008 at the University of Manchester, run by the Group for Debates in Anthropolo-

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gical Theory (GDAT), entitled Ontology is just another word for culture (Carrithers et al 2010). By retaining the notion of schemes in his defence of conceptual alterity, Davidsons critic Forster (1998) makes this conflation even more explicitly. As Candeia (in Venkatesan ed. 2010, 179) notes, however, the problems of culture do not simply disappear when transposed to ontology If anything the conundrums are sharpened. Holbraad (in Venkatesan ed. 2010) and forthcoming. For Viveiros de Castro, as Candeia points out, the designation Amazonian ontologies is part of an explicitly tactical and political analytic strategy, not dissimilar to Marilyn Stratherns invocation of Western orthodoxy as an heuristic device holding a strategic position internal to the structure of the. . . account, rather than empirical fact (Strathern 1988, 12). In Viveiros de Castros own words, his deployment of the language of ontology is designed as: a counter-measure to a derealizing trick frequently played against the natives thinking, which turns this thought into a kind of sustained phantasy, by reducing it to the dimensions of a form of knowledge or representation, that is to say an epistemology or a worldview. (Viveiros de Castro 2003, 8) In contrasting Maori and Tahitian thinking with that of eighteenth-century Europeans, we attempt here a parallel move, not intended to deny the variety and dynamism of ontologies (or indeed epistemologies) to be found among people within those groups (see also Ingold 2000, 63), but rather to emphasize that the stakes are often higher in such meetings than the familiar trope of cross-cultural encounter would suggest. (Latour (2004) makes a similar argument). Whether Tahitians or Maori (or eighteenth-century Europeans) would emphasize the same contrasts is of course another matter. Povinelli and Latour are among those who have drawn explicit attention to the political dimensions of such processes, noting that projects of commensuration are often undertaken by governments, institutions and other bodies concerned to uphold their own conceptions and to defend them against those they construct as other. Forster argued along these lines when he framed Davidsons argument against radically different conceptual schemes as a sort of philosophical rationalization for imperialism. (Forster 1998, 166). See Salmond (2009) for further details of Wallis sojourn in Tahiti.

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What is wrong with this image (among other things) is that eighteenth century Pacific Islanders had to be introduced to the (unstable) concept of humanity then being debated in Enlightenment Europe before they could even begin such a process of realization, and even then the kind of concept they deployed must have been one crafted in relation to their own. Where the Greeks regarded themselves as offering competing definitions of the same phenomena, however (though phenomena presumably meant something rather different, two thousand years before Kant), the different (meta-)physical worlds they were proposing would not have been incommensurable in the sense of not comparable or weighable against one another (since the phenomena were ultimately there to render one of them right and one of them wrong even if securing proof one way or the other was all but impossible in practice). Learning is conceived here not as induction into a realm of shared meaning, nor initiation into an ontology but rather, after Quine, Wagner, Holbraad and others, as a creative process of trial and error in which hypotheses are formulated that are continually struck down by the evidence and have to be reconceived in different terms. Whereas Mary Douglas considered Quines account to amount to an empty cultural relativism in which we are always forced to speak within the categories of our own language (1972, 27) we consider his argument to offer considerable scope for conceptual dynamism in this sense. Just as Tupaias contributions as pilot, translator and negotiator in the Society Islands and New Zealand to Cooks first voyage were long elided, scholars took it for granted that these sketches must have been made by one of the Europeans on board the Endeavour. It was only when a letter from Joseph Banks recently came to light, describing one of these images in which Banks was exchanging goods with a Maori and saying that it was sketched by Tupaia, that the artist of this series was identified (Salmond 2009, 1757).

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This chart, which was jointly produced by Cook and Tupaia, is a complex amalgam of eighteenth century navigators and `arioi assumptions about time, space and islands. It seems that in order to show the location of particular land masses, Tupaia pointed to indicate their bearing relative to Tahiti (or each other), giving the number of po (or nights) that would pass on the journey from one island to another. In this way he asserted two key aspects of Society Islands navigational systems the reliance of an array of bearings from one particular island to a number of possible destinations; and the number of nights that would pass on each journey. Some of these islands, however, existed in the dimension inhabited by atua, rather than people (and thus would not have been real to Cook and his companions). Other major elements of Tupaias navigational system also proved impossible to communicate, including the starpaths (or sequence of stars that would rise during the night on a particular bearing, allowing a navigator to follow his course between one island and another) and patterns of wind and currents. Ostension did not work when the names of the stars and the configuration of particular constellations were quite different, and when currents were felt rather than seen, for instance. In producing the chart, Cook took such information as he could grasp within his own assumptions about space-time, translating the bearings into compass directions and the elapsed nights into miles, and then representing these using familiar cartographic conventions, thus locating the islands (including the mythological islands) on his scaled chart, while correcting the location of those islands that he had already charted (Salmond 2009, 2213). Scientists acting within earlier political climates apparently felt less impelled to squeeze square pegs into round holes contrary to Lloyds suggestion, there was of course a time, for example, when evolutionary biology was deeply concerned with variation in cognitive capacities among human groups only then it called itself Eugenics.

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Notes on contributors
Dr Amiria Salmond is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. A former senior curator and lecturer at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), she is currently co-directing the 3-year project Artefacts of Encounter, funded by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (UK) with Professor Nicholas Thomas. Her book Museums, anthropology and imperial exchange (2005) was published by Cambridge University Press, and she co-edited the volume Thinking through things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically (Routledge, 2007) under her former name, Henare. Correspondence to: amiriasalmond@gmail.com Dame Anne Salmond is a Distinguished Professor in Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland. She has written a number of works about contemporary Maori life, early encounters between Maori and Europeans, European exploration in the Pacific, Polynesian voyaging and the early contact period in Tahiti. At present she is the principal investigator in the 3-year project, Te Ao Tawhito: The Ancient Maori World, funded by the Marsden Fund under the Royal Society of New Zealand, and is completing a book about William Bligh in the Pacific. Correspondence to: a.salmond@auckland.ac.nz

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