Recent anglophone ontological anthropologies have an important Latin American intellectual and political history that is rarely fully acknowledged. This article outlines some of that history, arguing that debates about the politics of this ‘ontological turn’ should be read in the context of a tension between political economy and cosmological approaches that have been a feature of Latin American anthropology in some form since the early 20th century, and that are deeply implicated in histories of conquest and colonialism, including internal colonialism. This conceptual history helps to explain both the desire of some scholars to avoid a certain kind of politicisation and the argument that methodological and theoretical innovation within anthropology is political in itself. But it also means that ontological anthropology encounters some of the same challenges faced by indigenous movements confronted with similar choices.

最近的英语本体论人类学具有重要的拉丁美洲知识和政治历史，但很少被完全承认。这篇文章概述了其中的一些历史，认为关于这种“本体论转向”的政治辩论应该在政治经济学和宇宙学方法之间存在紧张关系的背景下阅读，而宇宙学方法自早期以来一直以某种形式成为拉丁美洲人类学的一个特征。 20 世纪，这与征服和殖民主义，包括内部殖民主义的历史有着深刻的联系。这段概念史有助于解释一些学者避免某种政治化的愿望，以及人类学中方法论和理论创新本身就是政治的论点。