This chapter explores assumptions about what things are made of (physicality) as revealed by ethnography and the study of antiquity. The history of Greek speculations on the problem reveals a striking diversity, where Aristotle’s ontology based on the primacy of substances was certainly not universally accepted by other theorists. A very different view on the question is common among ancient Chinese writers, who usually focussed not on stable substances but on interacting processes. This allows us to qualify some of the conclusions proposed by the anthropologist Descola in his account of the contrast between naturalism and animism.

This chapter reviews the complex evidence for differing conceptions of the locus of cognitive and affective faculties that have been entertained, as reported in modern ethnography and in the evidence for ancient societies such as Greece and China. The contrast between physicality and interiority that Descola uses to draw up a taxonomy of ontological regimes is subject to qualifications insofar as mind–body dualism is only one of a number of schemata that are to be found across cultures.