User talk:Kanheb Ahaw/Ontologicalturn

Quick review…

There's a lot of in-depth work here, covering a significant concept. I learned from it, and think it is generally helpful. However, I think it needs a couple major improvements.

There needs to be more about authorship, use, and influence at the start. Who writes in the frame of political ontology? When did they start? Do they all use this term? This a relatively obscure field, so you need to lay out these things from the start.
Throughout the text, make each paragraph have one or more clear statement of who is speaking.
Finally, I'm wondering if the placement of this text in "Ontological turn" is ideal. Mostly because the very large quantity of text can unbalance that article. Are there some paragraphs of this that might be better in a, yet uncreated, Mario Blaser article which then links back to this section?

More thoughts later. Carwil (talk) 19:58, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Circling back, I think that Political ontology makes sense as a separate article linked out from here, perhaps with an opening like

Political ontology is an approach within anthropology to … . It emerged as part of the ontolgical turn, particularly in works by Mario Blaser, <other names>."

Whether you opt for this strategy or not, it's crucial that you include more secondhand accounts of the term, by people who describe, extend, and even critique the concept. You will also have to demonstrate the notability of the concept in the opening if you write a new article. See WP:LEAD for advice on writing that effectively.--Carwil (talk) 20:57, 19 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ngoodell42 Review

I have similar feedback to the above--which I wish I had read before writing mine! I'll leave it in the original version, but know that I agree that you might have an easier time making these into two separate articles instead of one. You could still have them as one, but you'd need to do some significant edits to the structure/subheading/titles of subheadings and more signposting to make it happen IMO. But this is again a wonderful piece of writing and I'm so happy I can reference it in the future myself now!

EDIT 2: I just realized that you are editing an already existing wiki article on the Ontological Turn--my bad! It appears that your goal here is indeed to incorporate a "political ontology" section into the already existing article. So, a lot of what Carwil and I have said still stands, but ignore my other critiques of things that you didn't actually write. I hope that my signposting comments are still helpful, though! If you do decide to keep this all as one article instead of making a second one, I think that the signposting/structural edits will be the way you need to go. Ngoodell42 (talk) 04:22, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In-Line Edits

The "Ontology in Anthropology" subsection I think could use some edits to tone/style. By this, I mean that here I think your "essay" voice comes out a little too much and you lose some of the Wikipedia/encyclopedic style (that you do great at maintaining for the bulk of the article, to be clear!). For instance, the phrase you have about "Instead, ontological anthropologists are claiming that we "should allow difference..." might be rephrased to be more factual and less essay-like (it's written very well to be clear, but just I removing some of the tonality here to make it more neutral would be good). So, you might change it to read something like "Instead, ontological anthropologists claim that "should allow.......""

In the Development section, there are some missing hyperlinks for the anthro's you list off: Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Similarly to above, I think you might rephrase the first few sentences of the "Ontology in Anthropology" section to read a little more factually and encyclopedic in style. Instead of phrasing "The concept of ontology and what people mean by ontology is diverse; therefore, tracing the...." you might try something like "Anthropologists have adopted many different meanings of the word ontology. Some, like E Kohn, have argued for a definition of ontology that stresses xyz. Others, like Author X, have argued for an approach that stresses A and B." I think that doing the work to bring the authors out from behind the citations a little bit more and say exactly who you are talking about and what they think will help this section read more encyclopedic in style and (lack of) argument.

Typo: in the political ontology section, you say "One of the critics of political ontology..."--I think you mean "critiques" here instead of "critics".

Style note: In the same political ontology section as last comment, you start two sentences in a row quite similarly: "There is also another assumption" and then the next sentence starts with "This is another assumption"--you should consider rephrasing one of these two to help with the flow

General Comments

This is a great article! I have a few suggestions but overall you're off to a strong start and I look forward to reading the finished project! My main feedback is below. Focus and Structure: This is my main area of feedback for you...simply put, I wonder if this article is about Ontological turns generally or ontological turns in politics and anthropology? Right now, it seems like it is more about the latter, and so maybe some better signposting along the way would help the reader to see that. For example, I wonder if changing the "Development" subheading to read "Development in Anthropology" would better reflect the contents of that subsection? Another problem in this area is the Political Ontology section. My reading of this is that you actually do want your readers to think of this as related to anthropological ontology, as the way anthropologists think about politics with an ontological lens. If that is indeed what you want readers to get out of this, I think that doing more signposting, bringing the authors "out from behind the citations" more (more on what I mean by this in next bullet point) and also changing the way you have your subsections nested/their titles around would help make this more clear. To think about what I'm saying a different way, right now it feels like you have two articles. You have one about ontology in anthropology, and another about ontology as applied to politics. You absolutely can and should connect the two (and they're both extremely well written and well-researched!), I just think you need some better signposting and some restructuring/re-titling of your subsections to make that happen.

By bringing out the authors from behind the citations, I mean simply that you have a ton of really excellent citations and the work is all there, but showing the reader these authors more directly would help the article have that more distanced, objective tone. Instead of generalizing and saying "Anthropologists think X" and having the footnote citation, say specifically who and what they think; "Anthropologists, like Bob Johnson Smith, think XYZ." Ngoodell42 (talk) 04:02, 25 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]