The World Multiple The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds

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.

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

Keiichi Omura is Professor in Anthropology at the Open University of Japan. He is the author of Kanada inuito no minzokushi: Nichijoteki jissen no dainamikusu (Ethnography of Canadian Inuit: Dynamics of Everyday Practices) (Osaka University Press, 2013). He is currently interested in the ethnographic study of Canadian Inuit language and knowledge, their subsistence, Inuit ways of life and social relations, and comparative studies of indigenous knowledge and modern science. Grant Jun Otsuki is Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research focuses on technology, cybernetics, and media in Japan and North America. He is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled Human and Machine in Formation: An Ethnographic Study of Communication and Humanness in a Wearable Technology Laboratory in Japan. Shiho Satsuka is Associate Professorof Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Nature in Translation: Japanese Tourism Encounters the Canadian Rockies (Duke University Press, 2015). She is currently preparing a book manuscript tentatively entitled The Charisma of Wild Mushrooms: Undoing the Twentieth Century. Atsuro Morita is Associate Professorof Anthropology and Science, Technology and Culture at Osaka University, Japan. In the past several years he has been exploring the global network of hydrology and water management technology, particularly the travel of technologies, ideas, and expertise among Denmark, Japan,the Netherlands, and Thailand. In this research he is particularly focusing on simulation technologies and cultural imagination about landscape transformations in the Anthropocene.