‘We all live well together now’: Ethics, ontology, and the face of the other

Ethics and ontology have become prominent concepts in recent anthropology, informing a variety of research endeavours. Despite their different approaches, agendas, and concerns, they share a central focus on alterity and the relationship between self and other: Who is the other? How should I relate to the other? In relating these concerns, ontological questions would appear to have logical primacy over ethical ones: after all, one must understand the other as a particular kind of being before entering into a relationship with them. But there are many situations in which we cannot be certain how to understand the other we are facing. Especially in the context of colonial or postcolonial encounters, when social and cosmological orders have become unstable, our expectations of who the other is may clash with our experience of them. This paper discusses the narrative of an Aché elder in which he reflects upon such a situation during the violent period when the nomadic Aché came into contact with Paraguayan settlers. The narrative tells the story of the death of a white logger at the narrator's hands. While morally justifying the killing with reference to deforestation and cruelties perpetrated by settlers, he also questions it, reframing it as an ethical dilemma. The dilemma stems from his loss of ontological certainty over what kind of being his victim was after looking into his face. This paper brings this dilemma into conversation with Levinas's argument that the ethical being‐for‐the‐other has primacy over the ontological being‐in‐the‐world, which comes to the fore in the experience of the face of the other.