Towards the doors of the cosmos: cosmology and ontology in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century geographical, anthropological and ethnological thought

Keywords: Ontology, epistemology, cosmology
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 37

Abstract

This paper ventures into the speculative space of cosmopolitics. Despite recent calls for a return to earth (Latour 2018), ontological contradictions persist and demand recognition of distinct and separate understandings of physical, material, bodily, worldly entities and multinaturalisms from geographers, anthropologists and historians (Viveiros de Castro 1998; 2015 and 2018; Kohn 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Povinelli 2021). This is no novel phenomenon. The post-colonial thought and practice of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor effectively purposed cosmic coordinates in their conceptualizations of a future universalism of enriched particulars. The Afro-futurist philosophy of the jazz musician, Sun Ra (1974), theorized cosmological space as the possibility of unlimited becoming. This paper juxtaposes these twentieth-century cosmic imaginaries in scrutinizing the ontological debates about what lay within the sphere of concern, as well as epistemological ones about what might be known, in later nineteenth-century disciplines and discourses. It discusses the thought and practice of several late nineteenth-century British practitioners of geography, anthropology and ethnology variously associated with imperialism, and some with the scientization of racist and racialized theories and practices. The paper argues that these practitioners demonstrated a dependence upon, as well as unresolved tensions in, their verbal and visual construals of relations between, understandings of human and non-human, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, and cosmological ontologies.