The World Multiple

The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds

Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Atsuro Morita, Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Atsuro Morita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429852589
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1 Introduction

Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita

At 5:00 a.m. in Nunavut, in the Canadian North, an Inuit elder leaves his comfortably heated home to look out at the sea and check on weather and ice conditions. His extended family lies fast asleep. Satisfied with his grasp of the morning, he goes back inside and switches on his living-room radio. As the aroma of his morning tea fills the room, he plays a hand of solitaire while listening to a weather report in the Inuktitut language and waits for his family to wake. Around 7:00 a.m., one of his sons enters the living room and asks the elder whether today will be for hunting. The elder gestures for his son to check the forecast on the computer. They then sit to discuss the weather on the basis of information from the radio and the internet, the elder’s own early morning observations, and his Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit—Inuit knowledge, IQ. As the elder’s other sons join them from their own homes, the day’s plan is fixed. Some prepare to hunt, donning thermal clothing, fueling snowmobiles or outboard motors, and bringing out rifles, harpoons, and nets. Just before 8:00 a.m., a group leaves to hunt for niqinmarik—the real food of fish and meat. The niqinmarik will be shared among the hunters’ families. This fulfills a moral responsibility: the animals will offer their bodies to the hunters only if, in return, the hunters share the food with kin. Sharing the meat in this way makes it possible for the animals’ spirits to be reincarnated. While some members of a family are hunting or fishing, others will go to work at the co-op or the hamlet office to earn the money needed for equipment and fuel. All of this needs to be done to generate their world, nuna.

Inuit hunters live complex realities where the world of technoscience and that of their indigenous knowledge, IQ, are entangled. Nuna is an intricately connected world of humans and non-humans which the Inuit know, generate, and maintain through a long tradition of hunting activities. At the same time, nuna is a world filled with modern technologies, such as the internet and snowmobiles, and market relationships and wage labor as people in the community work as government officials, co-op managers, and artists. When preparing their equipment for an expedition, they link labor at government offices with the moral obligation to participate in the reincarnation of wildlife. On the ice, they use snowmobiles and rifles to fulfill their responsibility to share niqinmarik among kin. Hunting is an important act of negotiating with animal worlds while connecting with spirits, ancestors, and people in the community. Their use of internet weather reports and snowmobiles to hunt seal or polar bear maintains nuna, but also entangles their lives with a national weather-monitoring network, the conservation policies of the Canadian nation-state, and a planetary satellite system. These practices create channels to worlds outside their immediate communities, making everyday Inuit life irreducibly multidimensional (see Omura, Chapter 5 in this volume). These practices sustain nuna, although they are never free from friction, tension, or transformation. Nuna is a world multiple, an assemblage of partially incommensurable knowledges and partially connected practices.

Nuna is not another interpretation of a single material world. Such a conceptualization is a product of what John Law (2015) calls the “one-world world” doctrine. This doctrine assumes the existence of only one natural world, and takes different cultures to be no more than interpretations of that world. This doctrine makes it possible to believe that the truth of these cultures can be measured by the standard of the natural world, privileging modern science as the authoritative means of knowing it.

The world multiple is an inspiration and a guide for thinking beyond the one-world world. The world multiple is both a world and worlds. It is fractal (cf. Law 2015); it may be constituted by more worlds inside, and may be itself part of another world, none necessarily simpler or more complex than others. To paraphrase Donna Haraway, one world is too few, but two are too many (Haraway 1991, 177; cf. Strathern 2005, 36). In our use, the singular form will always imply the plural, and vice versa. But the question of how many worlds there actually are is of little importance. What matters more is to make sense of the complex and multidimensional realities that people like the Inuit hunters are living. To do this, we need to consider the relationships between modern technoscience and other forms of knowledge and practices—often described as indigenous, traditional, folk, or vernacular—in people’s engagements with the world. How should we attend to the simultaneous existence of the different material consequences generated by the entanglement of modern technoscience and other knowledges and practices? This book represents a collective experiment in exploring these questions with the figure of the world multiple.

From body into world

The idea of “the world multiple” emerged in initial conversations between Keiichi Omura and Shiho Satsuka about the key theme for the workshop that led to this book, which was held in Osaka, Japan in 2016. The workshop was a part of Omura’s collaborative research project, funded by the Japan Society for Promotion of Science. While the title of his funded project was “A Comparative Study of ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Modern Science,’” Omura had been searching for an analytic framework that would avoid the binary opposition of “indigenous knowledge” and “modern science.”¹ From the nearly three decades that Omura has been working with the Inuit, he has become deeply committed to their IQ advocacy project. He feels uncomfortable with the framing of the Inuit and other indigenous peoples as passive recipients of global forces such as modern science, which makes the creative and multidimensional reality of their everyday practices invisible.

In Omura’s observations of heterogeneous practices among the Inuit and in his attention to the material aspects of reality and ontological multiplicity, Satsuka detected resonances with Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple (2002). In her ethnographic analysis of atherosclerosis treatments in a Dutch hospital, Mol illustrates the ontological multiplicity in a diseased body—a disease is not a single objective reality waiting to be discovered and diagnosed, but a phenomenon made real through the coordination of different medical practices. She demonstrates that these practices do not all fit together easily to generate a single reality; inasmuch as different specialists in various disciplines act on the body using different forms of practice, and as patients experience the disease, the body manifests materially in different ways. Yet these different practices are coordinated to make a diagnosis. The body with atherosclerosis is the ontological achievement of these coordinations. Mol’s analytic approach seemed relevant to Omura’s, but the conjuncture also brought Satsuka new realizations about the contradictory and complementary practices of mushroom scientists and their material effects that she has been observing over the past ten years. She had been wondering how to make sense of the tension in her scientific interlocutors’ project on artificially cultivating matsutake mushrooms, a project that can potentially belong to both the world of capitalist resource extraction and that of interspecies care and affection (see Chapter 14 in this volume). Satsuka thus presented Omura with the challenge to extend Mol’s insights from the body to the world multiple.

During the 2016 symposium that first brought the contributors to this book together in one place, the possibilities of the world multiple came alive as ethnographic insights drawn from around the world crossed with diverse conceptual tools. But moving away from a hospital in the Netherlands to diverse settings in the world required us to deal with a broader array of unanticipated connections, unruly companions, and unfinished historical business. Mol’s work provided us with a powerful provocation, but the “intricately coordinated crowd” (Mol 2002, 9) of the body multiple is a rather cordial one. In Mol’s hospital, different bodies are enacted in the practices of experts in different departments, providing a map with which to trace the multiple embodiments of atherosclerosis. In the world beyond the hospital, crowds are rarely so easily managed. Everyday life is full of people engaging with practices from competing or incommensurable ontological genealogies. Our fields are often messy; practices do not neatly correspond to the social order that defines different communities of experts. Furthermore, in other worlds it is impossible to turn a blind eye to the legacies and ongoing practices of colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and capitalist exploitation. These require us to consider how we encounter and think about multiplicity in the world, which we may find mangled by politics or disfigured by violence imposed on human and other-than-human beings. Attention to worlds brings into stark relief the political, historical, and social chains that encumber what kinds of worlds are possible.

Entangled realities for livable world

At the symposium, our interest in challenging the one-world world took on a new sense of urgency. We were asking questions about how others strive to make worlds worth living in and for, and how anthropologists might best become part of these worlds. The past few decades have witnessed a heightened concern over environmental issues framed on a planetary scale: climate change, rising sea levels, contamination of the biosphere, and species extinctions. The term “Anthropocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) was coined to signify the intensity of human impact on the Earth, indicating that human activities have become a major geological force working on a planetary scale. It has caught the popular imagination for how it epitomizes an awareness of the past centuries of industrialization and devastating resource extraction inscribed on the Earth. It also captures anxieties about the livability of our planet in the future. The sciences and technologies of global environmental change—modeling, simulation, and remote sensing—have guided our optics toward a planetary view of the environment. This planetary consciousness has generated momentum among social scientists who have been critically reflecting on the centuries of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism that have caused the violent exploitation of humans, and enabled the destruction of many other-than-human beings on the Earth. This moment requires both contending with the technoscientific consensus that human activity is impacting life at a planetary scale, while maintaining a suspicion of universals and the politics and interests they might obscure (Chakrabarty 2009, 221). How might we join critical reflections on the violence imposed upon humans and non-humans on this planet? How can we do so while remaining critically wary of the holisms conjured forth by this new planetary consciousness?

Parallel with this development, indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge has drawn interest as a way of navigating the twilight of late modernity. Modern science is often critiqued as abstract, mechanistic, and reductionist, perceiving the natural world based on a dualistic ontology that separates nature from human society. In opposition, indigenous knowledges are characterized as embodied, organic, holistic, and composed from entangled relationships between humans and the other-than-human. This binary has long cast IQ explanations of hunting interactions as little more than irrational myths, because they “inappropriately” mix the human and the animal, with neither clearly belonging to the domain of the “natural” or the “social.”² But now, the very entanglement of the natural and the social in indigenous knowledges such as IQ is being considered the key to overcoming the limitations of the abstract technoscientific approach. Since the 1980s, social scientists have advocated for the effectiveness of indigenous and other traditional knowledges in conserving biodiversity (e.g., Collings 1997; Freeman 1985, 1993). As a result, these knowledges have gradually been incorporated into decision-making processes, and consulting with their practitioners has become a policy requirement in some governments in North and South America (e.g., Blaser 2009; Nadasdy 2003; Omura 2005, 2013; Usher 2000; Wenzel 2004). Yet, as many critics have pointed out, indigenous and traditional knowledges have been assumed to be static cognitive frameworks: the holders of these knowledges are treated as though they are in the grip of epistemological paradigms that have remained unchanged from ancient times (Agrawal 1995; Krupnik and Vakhtin 1997; Omura 2007). While there is an inclusive drive to make up for past epistemic discrimination and violence, the “incorporation” (Nadasdy 1999) of indigenous and traditional knowledges into existing frameworks prolongs the hegemony of modern technoscientific expertise, and its basic assumption of a one-world world. How might we think beyond “incorporation,” and give heed to the interactions between modern, indigenous, and traditional forms of life?

The world multiple also reverberates with the fundamental rethinking of space and time that we have learned about from interlocutors in the sciences. Karen Barad’s writing on quantum physics (2007, 2017) shows how science itself is not all about a one-world world, but can offer up provocative ways to think about how worlds come into material being through entangled relationships. Using quantum physics pioneer Niels Bohr’s writings on the behavior of light, Barad (2007) explains that the way matter exists in the world cannot be determined prior to its “intra-actions” with its surroundings. The quantum puzzle of whether light is really a wave or a particle misses the point that light becomes wave or particle depending on the constitution of the socio-material assemblages—that is, the experimental apparatuses—with which it is entangled. Moreover, this does not simply change how we think about “what” light is, but also “when” and “where.” Light is not a thing that flies freely against the background of a flat, Newtonian space-time. It demands different times and spaces depending on whether it becomes a point-like particle or an arrow-like wave. Light exists as a heterotemporal, heterospatial matrix which shifts the nature of its being, time, and space contingent upon the specific relations in which it is placed. Anthropologists may usually have little to do with the ontological multiplicity of photons, but we have yet to fully come to terms with the fact that flat Newtonian space-time is no more than a partial way of imagining the world. As beneficiaries of modernity, we easily fall back into thinking about worlds as flat spaces and times occupied by our human interlocutors. But we can take insights like Barad’s as a warrant to explore the dynamics of multiple, entangled realities...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Entangled worldings
• Part II Space-time multiplicities
• Part III: Exploring quotidian politics