Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South

Benjamin Baumann is postdoctoral associate at Heidelberg University's Department of Anthropology. Before joining Heidelberg University in April 2020, he was research associate at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin's Institute of Asian and African Studies. Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, his work examines rural life-worlds, socio-cultural identities, and local language games. His ethnographic research has focused on the interrelationship between religion, social reproduction and communal belonging in the border regions between Thailand and Cambodia.

Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South.

1. Introduction; 2. Rethinking the Social: Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Social Inequality; 3. The South Against the Destroying Machine: An Interdisciplinary Attempt to Theorize Social Ontology for a Decolonial Project in the Social Sciences; 4. Reconceptualizing the Cosmic Polity: The Tai mueang as a Social Ontology; 5. Developmentalism and the Misacknowledgement of Socio-Ontological Difference: The Coloniality of Being in the Colombian Pacific Basin; 6. The Social Ontology of Caste; 7. Colonial Social Ontology and the Persistence of Colonial Sociocultures in Contemporary Indonesia; 8. Social Ontologies as World-Making Projects: The Mueang-Pa Duality in Laos; 9. Clashing Social Ontologies: A Sociological History of Political Violence in the Cambodian Elite; 10. Social Inequality, Sociocultures and Social Ontology in Brazil; 11. Collectivity and Individuality in Contemporary Urban Kenya: Social Ontologies in Nairobi; 12. Pre-Modern Local Collective Structures and their Manifestation in Contemporary Society: A Case Study from Japan; 13. The Sociocultural Making of Inequality in Today's China: Symbolic Construction and Collective Habitus.