Call for Contributions: “Ontology and Practice – Interactions, implications and everyday life”

The journal Notas de Antropología de las Américas (NAA), a peer-reviewed open access (OA) publication of the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn, invites authors from the humanities and social sciences to submit unpublished articles for its fifth issue with the title “Ontology and Practice – Interactions, implications and everyday life“ to be released in 2026.

The issue is dedicated to the study of ontology in its everyday context, i.e. the question of how social beings culturally organize their own conditions of existence. In doing so, the volume opposes the “ontological turn” that has gained prominence in recent years, especially in Latin America, and which, from a cultural perspective, justifies the real existence of so many worlds as primary events in the world. These are worlds that declare themselves incompatible in the way they interact with the world, in which ontology and practice, as the basis of human existence, are seen as hermetically separated, incompatible, incommunicable, and thus as expressions of opposing worlds.

This issue does not primarily seek to offer a direct critique of the ontological turn and its rigid view of relativistic concepts that are normatively regarded as incompatible worldviews, but rather to invite readers to draw on their own practical experience to address the conditions that shape people’s ontology and practice. Because of its socio-cultural organization, this process promotes different ideas, i.e. ontologies and practices. The result of human interaction in the world is thus the creation of ontological and practical differences based on commonalities, but not on incompatible or contradictory worlds. This also seems important for understanding the new phenomena that humans are confronted with in the context of the Anthropocene and the Digitalocene, for example with regard to modern communication devices or their autonomization through self-learning capabilities such as artificial intelligence.

This dossier welcomes unpublished articles that reframe their empirical material to answer one or more of the following key questions:

• What connects and what separates ontological perspectives?
• In what situations do similar or completely different views of things, as they are, come to the fore, and how does this manifest itself in cultural interactions with them?
• To what extent are ontological perspectives, both in relation to matter and to language, a question that goes beyond individual ideas, i.e. an expectation of collectives that goes hand in hand with a normative claim to see things as something very specific and not as something else or relative?
• How does this difference manifest itself, for example, in modernity and the parallel ways of looking at things?
• To what extent do indigenous peoples and their groups and societies have an ontological perspective on things that serves both their tradition and their present, and how do they connect or separate these?
• To what extent does modern non-indigenous humanity act ontologically recursively when it comes to controlling the unknown, the new, the uncertain, or the foreign?

In addition to the dossier, the magazine also contains a section for thematically appropriate reviews of recent publications of all kinds (books/articles, audios/podcasts, exhibitions, films, etc.) as well as one for translations, which are also welcome.

We welcome manuscripts for articles, reviews or translations by email to notasaa@uni-bonn.de until 28 February, 2026. Decisions on contributions and notification of acceptance will be made in April.

Information on editorial guidelines, style guide and previous issues can be found here.