Ocean, travel, and equivocation: A response to Anne Salmond's "Tears of Rangi"

Abstract

Salmond's paper speaks to two significant but rather underexplored aspects of the turn to ontology: travel and equivocation. In current debates, the ontological turn is often taken as a (re)turn to the radical alterity of non-Western modes of conceptualizing and composing worlds. The radical alterity of non-Western ontologies can be fruitfully understood in light of histories of travel that have brought about the encounter between Western and non-Western ontologies. Focusing on travel obliges our arguments to begin from the middle-ground where different parties encounter, exchange, and diverge. In these encounters equivocation plays a significant role.