Heidegger's theorizing on the fundamental nature of being drew on ontological ideals that emerged from the traditions of the Platonic school.
Further, interest in ontology is associated with a greater understanding of existence, reality, becoming, and how these concepts relate to broad categories of entities.
However, the first influence of ontological understandings within anthropology emerged in the work of Roy Wagner, Marilyn Strathern, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
[19] For example, as a trained biologist turned anthropologist, Donna Haraway insists on including other beings, both human and non-human, in her accounts of living with pets.
The proponents of this movement claim that this way of framing cultural difference is the first attempt anthropologists have made in taking the beliefs of their interlocutors "seriously" or "literally".
Philippe Descola in his work among the Amazonian Achuar suggested that the category of nature is not a human universal and therefore, should not be considered a line of anthropological inquiry.
Instead, Descola claims that "Other civilizations have devised different ways of detecting qualities among existents, resulting in other forms of organizing continuity and discontinuity between humans and nonhumans, of aggregating beings in collectives, of defining who or what is capable of agency and knowledge".
[29] Meaning Descola treats animism not as some sort of mistaken belief, but as an extension of social relationality to nonhuman actors.
In this sense, Descola utilizes ontology as an elementary analytical tool to explore how worlds are constructed in a manner that is distinct from the way anthropologists generally discuss worldviews.
[29] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro utilizes a framework perspectivism in his synthesis of Amazonian ethnographic literature.
Viveiros de Castro's reflections on perspectivism lead him to conclude that we are dealing with a perspective that is fundamentally different from those which inform Western academic thought.
[37] Speaking for the motion were Michael Carrithers (Durham) and Matei Candea (Cambridge), and against were Karen Sykes (Manchester) and Martin Holbraad (University College London).