Rethinking both metaphysical foundations and anthropological realities: Bridging the Vattimo- Girard debate through the ‘loose ontology’ of Henza culture and the crossing of gendered binaries

This essay reframes the debate between Vattimo and Girard—between ‘weak thought’ and anthropological facts—through Okinawa’s Henza culture where identities are established through a ‘loose’ ontology. This ontology presents a mythical-metaphysical reality that structures male-female complimentarity, though also allowing individuals to cross genders for cultural reasons. This essay contrasts ‘loose’ ontology with the ‘strong’ ontologies of western culture/religion where individual identities are ‘fixed’. For his part, Girard defines cultural intelligibility through acts of exclusion (scapegoating), though when the ‘other’ is not a fixed entity—even if an anthropological fact—new possibilities appear for metaphysics in relation to identity. Susan Sered’s reading of Henza culture enables a reimagining of the nominalist-realist dispute replayed in the Vattimo-Girard debate, and provides a solution akin to Martin Jay’s‘ magical nominalism’. We need neither get rid of metaphysics nor fully identify with it—something Girard had foreseen with profound theological consequences.