ABSTRACT
The world multiple depicts a scene of radical heterogeneity. The study of practical ontologies is concerned with how, and by which actors, this world is composed and what it adds up to (or not). This raises the question—central to debates about the “ontological turn”—of whether practical ontologies are empirical objects, found, for example, in the mundane experiences of lived reality, or whether they are anthropological inventions generated through a labor of conceptualization, or something else altogether. Any attempt to give meaning to the world multiple must accordingly also deal with the question of where in the world the anthropologist sits, and what he or she does, or should be doing. This chapter examines the relation between the anthropologist and the world multiple, and leads to a characterization of what the author calls emetic anthropologies.
