Roundtable

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Anthropocene

Secondary Theme: Materiality

(5-0910) The World Multiple: The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Worlds

The aim of this roundtable is to explore possibilities for engaging and analyzing worlds beyond the “one-world world” of modernist Western technoscience using the figure of the world multiple. Worlds multiple are social-material worlds generated through quotidian practice. They draw from and subvert dominant modes of worlding associated with the modern West, and help us make sense of how people strive to make worlds living in and for. We work with the world multiple to think through the diverse forms of resistance, resilience, and adaptation that people enact in their everyday worlding practices.
The past few decades have witnessed a heightened concern over environmental issues framed at a planetary scale, such as climate change, rises in sea levels, contamination of the biosphere, and species extinctions, that have come to be known as signs of life in the “Anthropocene.” How might we join critical reflections on the violence imposed upon human and non-humans on this planet? How can we do so while maintaining a critical wariness towards the holisms conjured forth by this new planetary consciousness?
In parallel to this development, we have also observed growing attention to indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge as a way to navigate the Anthropocene. Knowledges that were previously marginalized for their “irrational” mixing of “social” and “natural” entities are now being seen as promising ways to engage the natural environment in more scientific ways. While there is an inclusive drive to make up for past epistemological discrimination and violence, the incorporation of indigenous and traditional knowledges into existing frameworks prolongs the hegemony of modern technoscientific expertise, and its basic assumption of a one-world world. We ask: how might we think beyond “incorporation,” and give heed to the interactions between modern, indigenous, and traditional forms of life?
This roundtable explores these questions by focusing on the quotidian practices through which worlds are conjured as social and material realities, that is as worlds multiple. Moreover, we attend to the multiplicities immanent in and engendered by these practices, and the politics that they embody. We especially consider the relationships between modern technoscience and other forms of knowledge and practices—described as indigenous, traditional, folk or vernacular—in peoples’ engagements with the world. To do so, this roundtable brings together anthropologists working on multispecies ethnography, ontological anthropology, and postcolonial theory to explore the world multiple as a figure for thinking beyond the “one-world world,” and make sense of the complex and multidimensional realities that people live in the current moment.

Chair(s)

• Marisol de la Cadena

  University of California Davis

Presenter(s)

• Moe Nakazora

  Japan Society for Promotion of Sciences/ Institute for Resesarch in Humanities, Kyoto University

Discussant(s)

• Stacey Langwick

  Cornell University

Presenter(s)

• Keiichi Omura

  Professor
  The Open University of Japan

• Mei Zhan

  University of California, Irvine

• Sasha Welland

  Associate Professor, Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
  University of Washington

• Elaine Gan

  New York University

• Shiho Satsuka

  Associate Professor
  University of Toronto

Organizer(s)

• Heather Swanson

  Associate Professor
  Aarhus University

Chair(s)

• Anna Tsing

  University of California-Santa Cruz

Organizer(s)

• Grant Otsuki

  Lecturer
  Victoria University of Wellington

Discussant(s)

• Grant Otsuki

  Lecturer
  Victoria University of Wellington