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News of this book has been circulating well in advance of its publication, and it has been widely and eagerly anticipated.The many anthropologists who have been enthused and excited, as well as those who have been provoked or mystified, by various earlier manifestations of 'the ontological turn' have looked forward to a comprehensive and authoritative statement of its principles and programme.This book certainly provides that, and gives a virtuoso performance in doing so.It positively bristles with enthusiasm, energy, and new ideas.It is engaging and inventive, spirited, combative, self-consciously contentious, and clearly driven by a restless, proselytising spirit, but it also sets out not just to dazzle with its conspicuous cleverness but also to persuade by serious argument.It succeeds in a good deal of what it sets out to do, and even those who are least convinced will be given a good deal to think about along the way.It ought to be widely read -really, anyone who thinks seriously about the nature of anthropology will want to read it -and it will certainly change the terms of debate.This it will do for several reasons, not least that its contents will come to so many as a surprise.The prospect of nature being multiple, of the ethnographic record presenting us with multiple worlds of 'radical alterity' in places such as Amazonia, Melanesia, and northern Mongolia, each of which requires its own radically new concepts aligned with its radically other ontology: this was what many followers of 'the turn' have found most exciting and compelling.They are swiftly disabused of these fantasies in this book.From the outset, Holbraad and Pedersen are clear that this new updated version of the ontological turn makes no metaphysical claims.It is now a 'strictly methodological proposal' (p.ix), which may come as a shock to those who took away from Thinking Through Things (Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell 2007) the idea that 'epistemology' was little short of a human rights abuse.It is necessary, say Holbraad and Pedersen, to move on from debates around what they call the 'first wave' of manifestations of the turn, 'including some of our own writings'.Understandably, and on the whole justifiably, they do not dwell for long on just what in those earlier writings gave rise to such widespread 'misunderstandings' (although it may be going just a wee bit too far in self-exculpation to say that multiple worlds and plural ontologies were 'flirted with ' [p.156] in texts in which they occupied centre-stage theoretically, and often appeared in the titles).The important thing is that the revision be clear, and the new position understood.So Holbraad and Pedersen helpfully recommend that the word 'ontological' be used only adjectivally; 'never as a noun!' they almost shout from the page, and therefore never in the plural.The concept of 'the ontological' is now to serve wholly as a signal that the question of what kind of theoretical vocabulary we use should remain resolutely open, and open specifically to influence from ethnographic data.It is a call to a special and demanding form of