Questions of ontology are socially as consequential as gossip. In saying this, I do not mean to belittle them but, on the contrary, to emphasize their pervasive ubiquity and importance. Paradoxically, however, it is that ubiquity that all too often reduces them to a banal and unthinking obviousness: the relationship between experienced reality and the discourses that render it palpable have often--like gossip--escaped critical attention, filtered out of anthropologistsÕ awareness by the singularly unrewarding opposition between “symbolic” and “materialist” approaches to the study of culture and society.