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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.

The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku ( Anthropology as critique of reality ) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the “the ontological turn” in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in “ontological matters,” and it offers an entry point for understanding Japanese interpretations of, and responses to, this set of issues and concerns. The forum comprises an introductory piece by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, outlining the histories within Japanese anthropology that led to Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku , an interview conducted by Jensen with Professor Kasuga on his intellectual genealogy in the context of Japanese anthropology, and a translated and edited chapter from Anthropology as critique of reality , Miho Ishii’s “Acting with things: Self-poiesis, actuality, and contingency in the formation of divine worlds.” These pieces are followed by commentaries from Marilyn Strathern, whose work provides a key source of inspiration for the Japanese turn to ontology, and Annelise Riles, who has had long-standing relations with Japanese anthropology, including Professor Kasuga.

Ontology has recently gained renewed attention in science and technology studies and anthropology (e.g. Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Yet, it has a considerably longer pedigree than these recent debates might lead one to think. Experiments, of course, have long held the attention of sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Collins 1985; Gooding 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). And infrastructures have been the focus of sustained inquiry in the sociology and history of technology (Bowker 1994; Hughes 1983). Once these terms are put into conjunction, however, each gets a somewhat different inflection. The following note briefly explores the conceptual purchase of considering infrastructures as ontological experiments.