Full Description
The World Multiple, as a collection, is an ambitious ethnographic experiment in understanding how the world is experienced and generated in multiple ways through people's everyday practices. Against the dominant assumption that the world is a single universal reality that can only be known by modern expert science, this book argues that worlds are worlded—they are socially and materially crafted in multiple forms in everyday practices involving humans, landscapes, animals, plants, fungi, rocks, and other beings. These practices do not converge to a singular knowledge of the world, but generate a world multiple—a world that is more than one integrated whole, yet less than many fragmented parts.
The book brings together authors from Europe, Japan, and North America, in conversation with ethnographic material from Africa, the Americas, and Asia, in order to explore the possibilities of the world multiple to reveal new ways to intervene in the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism that inflict damage on humans and nonhumans. The contributors show how the world is formed through interactions among techno-scientific, vernacular, local, and indigenous practices, and examine the new forms of politics that emerge out of them.
Engaged with recent anthropological discussions of ontologies, the Anthropocene, and multi-species ethnography, the book addresses the multidimensional realities of people's lives and the quotidian politics they entail.
Contents
Preface and acknowledgments 1. Introduction PART I: Entangled worldings 2. Earth-beings: Andean indigenous religion, but not only 3. Vertiginous worlds and emetic anthropologies 4. Doing and undoing caribou/atîku: Diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations 5. Maps in action: Quotidian politics through boundary translational matrix for world multiple in contemporary Inuit everyday life 6. Climate change and local knowledge in Eastern Arctic Inuit society: Perceptions, responses, and practice PART II: Space-time multiplicities 7. Landscapes, by comparison: Practices of enacting salmon in Hokkaido, Japan 8. Spectral forces, time, and excess in Southern Chile 9. Temporalities in translation: The making and unmaking of "folk" Ayurveda and bio-cultural diversity 10. Healing in the Anthropocene PART III: Exploring quotidian politics 11. Out of nothing: (Re)worlding "theory" through Chinese medical entrepreneurship 12. Traveling and indwelling knowledge: Learning and technological exchange among Vezo fishermen in Madagascar 13. Worlds apart? Reflexive equivocations in the Alto Rio Negro 14. Translation in the world multiple 15. A multispecies ontological turn Afterword
