1st Edition The World Multiple The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds

The World Multiple comes out of an international symposium that was held in Japan in 2016, and it is also the title of the book which collects the contributions from many of the participants in that symposium.
 
The original impetus for this project was a collaborative research grant led by Keiichi Omura (Open University of Japan), which was to anthropologically examine the interactions of “modern science” and “indigenous knowledge,” through ethnographic studies from around the world, informed especially by Omura’s own studies of Inuit in the Canadian North. The binary of “modern” and “indigenous” became a departure point from which the multi-layered and complexly interconnected configurations among situated knowledges and practices could be brought into relief.
 
The idea at which the editors arrived to make sense of these configurations became the World Multiple. The name is connected to Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple. Like Mol shows in her book, we see the world multiple not as some real or imagined point where different knowledge systems converge, but something more like what a “busy intersection”: a place where a number of distinct processes intersect. In the World Multiple, this crossroads is what we call the “quotidian,” the space of the everyday in which subjects and their forms of conduct continuously transform each other. Forms of life that are simultaneously epistemological, ontological, and political encounter each other in the quotidian, colliding or interfering with each other, problematizing their distinctiveness. Sometimes, they might simply pass each other by. The World Multiple is itself part of a busy intersection, as can be seen by the proliferation of works dealing with ontological politics, the Anthropocene, and postcolonial research in anthropology. The chapters range from ethnographic discussions of what kinds of worlds emerge from mountains in the Andes, caribou in Canada’s arctic, and boulders in Chile, to conceptual chapters, as in the introduction, which examines how to think about politics from multiple worlds.
 
As Atsuro Morita (Osaka University) writes in the afterword to our volume, our contributors collectively helped bring into view a tension that lies at the heart of our “world.” In the world multiple, the singular “world” always implies the plural “worlds” and vice versa. As Morita puts it, the contributors highlight “the tension between the world as a relational object enacted in practice and as an “ever expanding horizon” of worlds that is, quoting Marilyn Strathern, “larger than any of its moments.”
 

(Written by OTSUKI Grant Jun, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2024)