(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionIt is mid-July 2012 in a large city in southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The heat is sweltering; rainy season has just started, and with rains have come mosquitoes. At Las Lomas1 new psychiatry interns, from less humid parts of Mexico, often think that patients suffer from skin allergies or rashes because of severity of mosquito bites that blanket patients' arms, legs, backs, and faces. The lack of mosquito netting on ward windows and broken fans only exacerbate problem. For patients who are tied to their beds, unable to swat away persistent insects, only thing standing between them and a bout of dengue fever is luck. The heat and mosquitoes are least of their problems: local press and online forums have described conditions inside this public psychiatric facility as horrific. This is no hospital, some have argued, but little more than a medieval dungeon.2Efrain, a 31-year-old Maya man from a rural community several hours away from Las Lomas, had spent four days locked inside psychiatric ICU when I first met him. When we spoke, he explained that he had been brought to Las Lomas because he had been possessed by a demon. Although his wife and child had beaten intruding presence out of his body, his mother had decided to take him to hospital to care for his injuries. When he was assessed at local clinic, he was referred to Las Lomas and transported to city by ambulance. When our interview ended, one of attending psychiatrists asked how interview had gone.It went well, I said, noncommittally.She raised her eyebrows in a bemused expression, he's psychotic, right?Was Efrain still psychotic? His doctors concluded that stress in his marriage and work-life resulted in severe depression with accompanying psychotic symptoms. They reached that conclusion because Efrain claimed to have been possessed by devil and because he claimed he could converse with birds (more importantly, that birds spoke back). However, Efrain assured me he was not mentally ill at same time he explained he had been possessed and his birds had spoken to him. What if we granted Efrain's devil and talking birds status, if we accepted their real-ness? In other words, is it theoretically productive to take his claims seriously?Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in so-called ontological in anthropology. The turn is characterized by an array of approaches which share a similar concern with exploring alternative ways of conceptualizing reality, albeit in different ways. Among others, these approaches include those that incorporate Amerindian cosmologies (Viveiros de Castro 2014, Descola 2013), new materialisms (Bennett 2010) and science, technology, and medicine (Mol 2003). These approaches share a concern with agency of non-human actors, including other forms of living and non-living matter. Within this growing body of literature, Latour's most recent book, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of (2013), AIME, attempts to go beyond his most recent iteration of Actor-Network theory, framework he outlines in Reassembling Social. AIME is result of 25 years of inquiry, presenting a framework for understanding the Moderns that examines not only connections between various networks and domains, but also coexistence of various modes of existence.In AIME, Latour identifies various co-existing modes of existence corresponding to different inter-connected domains ([LAW], [POL]itics, [NET] work, and so forth). This different domains intersect at different points called crossings, serving as a conceptual tool kit to recognize ontological pluralism of multiple modes of existence (182). This move forces us to break away from traditional western dualisms: subject/object, health/illness, and real/unreal towards a theory that frames reality as complex interaction of multiple modes of existence present across and between domains. …