Much recent anthropological theory demonstrates a concern to defend indigenous ontologies against allegedly singular and oppressive colonial or modernist settlements. These Western settlements are said to rely upon conceptual separations such as that between nature and culture or between nature and beliefs. Such conceptual separations are held to be at the heart of the malign effects that Western modernity is perceived as creating as they are relentlessly imposed upon non-Western indigenous peoples. De la Cadena, for example, argues that a distinction between (scientific) truth and (cultural) belief has been at the heart of modernist projects to disallow or marginalise the everyday and ritual relations with non-human ‘earth beings’ (such as living sacred mountains) that she describes as being central to Latin American ‘indigenous’ ways of being. The moves to protect the tubuan, a ritual figure and non-human actor held to be of great importance by many of Tolai people in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province, could easily be read through this framing, in which a modern Western ontology imposes a separation between a ‘natural’ order and ‘cultural beliefs’, which are relegated to a secondary order of importance. Although this framing looks very much like the perspective sometimes adopted by certain Tolai, it is far from the only perspective that can be advanced. In particular, this framing tends to most often be strongly rejected by those who are severely critical of the emerging postcolonial indigenous elite in Papua New Guinea. In simply advancing a framing that celebrates non-human agency as a rejection of colonial ontological imperialism, anthropology risks not only deliberately flattening out the ethnographic richness of the shifting perspectives of the people we work with but, in particular, silencing subaltern perspectives in a world of rapidly increasing socio-economic inequality.

最近的许多人类学理论表明，人们担心捍卫土著本体论免受所谓的压迫性的殖民主义或现代主义殖民地的侵害。据说这些西方定居点依赖于概念上的分离，例如自然与文化之间或自然与信仰之间的分离。这种概念上的分离被认为是西方现代性被无情地施加于非西方土著人民的恶性影响的核心。例如，德拉卡德纳（De la Cadena）认为，（科学的）真理与（文化的）信仰之间的区别一直是现代主义计划的核心，目的是禁止或边缘化与非人类“地球”（例如生活）的日常和仪式关系她描述为拉丁美洲“土著”生存方式的核心。微风在巴布亚新几内亚东部新不列颠省的许多托莱人认为，这个仪式人物和非人类演员非常重要，可以很容易地通过这种框架来解读，在这个框架中，现代西方本体论将“自然”与“自然”之间的分离”和“文化信仰”，它们被降级为次要的重要性。尽管这种框架看起来非常类似于某些Tolai有时采用的观点，但它远非唯一可以提出的观点。特别是，对于那些严重批评巴布亚新几内亚新兴的后殖民土著精英的人们，这种构架往往会遭到他们的强烈反对。在简单地推动一个将非人类代理人视为拒绝殖民本体主义帝国主义的框架时，