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.
Table of Contents
Preface and acknowledgments
Keiichi Omura
1. Introduction
Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita
PART I: Entangled worldings
2. Earth-beings: Andean religion, but not only
Marisol de la Cadena
3. Vertiginous worlds and emetic anthropologies
Casper Brun Jensen
4. Doing and undoing caribou/atîku: Diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations
Mario Blaser
5. Maps in action: Quotidian politics through boundary translational matrix for world multiple in contemporary Inuit everyday life
Keiichi Omura
6. Climate change and local knowledge in Eastern Arctic Inuit society: Perceptions, responses, and practice
Shunwa Honda (Henry Stewart)
PART II: Space-time multiplicities
7. Landscapes, by comparison: Practices of enacting salmon in Hokkaido, Japan
Heather Anne Swanson
8. Spectral forces, time, and excess in Southern Chile
Cristóbal Bonelli
9. Temporalities in translation: The making and unmaking of "folk" Ayurveda and bio-cultural diversity
Moe Nakazora
10. Healing in the Anthropocene
Stacey Langwick
PART III: Exploring quotidian politics
11. Out of nothing: (Re)worlding "theory" through Chinese medical entrepreneurship
Mei Zhan
12. Traveling and indwelling knowledge: Learning and technological exchange among Vezo fishermen in Madagascar
Taku Iida
13. Worlds apart? Reflexive equivocations in the Alto Rio Negro
Antonia Walford
14. Translation in the world multiple
Shiho Satsuka
15. A multispecies ontological turn?
Anna Tsing
Afterword
Atsuro Morita
