Academic discourse typically represents its

knowledge as detached, objective and universal.

Contemporary institutions of teaching, research,

governance and disciplinary thinking are

profoundly influenced by Enlightenment thinking.

Cultural geography reflects this inheritance. Yet

cultural geography’s discursive spaces often try

to displace and unsettle it. The ontological and

epistemological legacies of European colonial-

ism, however, are highly resistant. Even the most

liberal universities operate in ways that place

substantial domains of human experience,

thought and insight outside the conventional

bounds of legitimate knowledge. So, despite its

inclusive intent, much postcolonial cultural

geography privileges abstract theory rather than

grounded practice. Consequently, like other

academic disciplines, it produces a ‘hall of

mirrors’ in which self-consciously postcolonial

theory reflects its own views rather than engag-

ing with alternative ontologies – diverse ways of

knowing, being-in-place and relating to com-

plex, often contested cultural landscapes at

various scales.

This chapter argues cultural geography should

explore practical, theoretical and methodological

implications of ontological pluralism because

landscapes of cultural conflict are often as much

about different knowledge systems as about con-

tested claims to land, identity, resources or liveli-

hood. It considers the implications of multiple

knowledges (ontological diversity) for cultural

geography and seeks to unsettle and challenge

the dominance of Eurocentrism, which affects

even the new cultural geography, by taking

seriously the philosophies and experiences of

indigenous groups.

‘WESTERN’ PHILOSOPHY AS A

HALL OF MIRRORS

People interpret, make meaning and relate to

themselves, other people and environments in

many different ways. ‘Western’ philosophies,

which we broadly define as ‘Eurocentric’ knowl-

edges in this chapter, generally assume external,

objective realities exist. Definitional categories,

boundaries and relations are set as part of those

realities and are easily accepted as a static,

natural truth. This approach sets limits on how

legitimate knowledge is constructed in ‘western’

philosophical traditions. Christie uses Latour’s

imagery to describe how:

the production of knowledge business in the modern

world has been likened to a railroad industry in which

knowledge can only run on tracks already laid down

from the laboratory out. (1992: 1)

Eurocentric thinking, drawing on Enlighten-

ment science, industrial revolution technolo-

gies, market economics and/or Judeo-Christian

philosophies, run on the tracks of a naturalized

and externalized truth founded on a belief in

atomism, where the world is divided into distin-

guishable segments with essential differences:

In atomistic views of the world, identity is marked by

irreducible essences, and by discontinuities – by

boundaries between what (and where) something is,

and what (and where) it is not. (1992: 2)

Belief in an external world, an objective reality

that exists ‘out there’, disguises the cultural

construction of ontologies as external, unbiased

and naturalized (1992: 2). The assumption that

31

Ontological Pluralism in Contested

Cultural Landscapes

Richard Howitt and Sandra Suchet-Pearson

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