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Recrafting ontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2021

Tamara Trownsell Open the ORCID record for Tamara Trownsell [Opens in a new window]
Tamara Trownsell*
Affiliation:
Universidad del Azuay, Cuenca, Azuay, Ecuador
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ttrownsell@gmail.com
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Abstract

A pluriversal encounter that includes interlocutors from other ways of knowing and being requires recrafting how we commonly approach ontology in IR. Our shared ontological register only acknowledges separation as the fundamental existential assumption, and not all lifeways depart from this assumption. The article prods us to move beyond considering ontology as the study of being, a more substantialist reading, to include other fundamental existential commitments so that we can address how distinct presuppositions shape and are shaped by how we perceive and engage existence. With this reorientation, the article first establishes how even relational approaches in the discipline, including variations of constructivism, poststructuralism, and new materialism privilege separation as the primordial condition of existence to the exclusion of any other option. A conceptual toolset is then elaborated to examine how a singular commitment to separation constitutes an ontological parochialism that enforces reductionism, exclusion, and domination towards lifeways that embrace the interconnection as fundamental existential commitment. Even though more effective engagement across pluriversal worlds would be crucial for developing more complex tools for confronting the current planetary crisis, the discipline's reductionist concept of ontology itself keeps us quite far from effectively being able to engage in such an exchange.

Keywords

OntologyOntological ParochialismOntological AgilityRelationalityPluriversal EncounterTheory of Knowledgeotros saberes
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 48 , Special Issue 5: Pluriversal Relationality , December 2022 , pp. 801 - 820
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

1 This article focuses on relations constituting the domain of IR. The international conceptually includes relations of nations of beings (human and non-human alike). Its reach is both cosmic and microcosmic so it can range from intergalactic relations to the nations of microbial beings that constitute the foundation of much of the planet. See Wendt, Alexander and Duvall, Raymond, ‘Sovereignty and the UFO’, Political Theory, 36:4 (2008), pp. 607–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stefanie Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 57.

2 Querejazu, Amaya, ‘Encountering the pluriverse: Looking for alternatives in other worlds’, Revista Brasileira de Politica Internacional, 59:2 (2016), p. 2Google Scholar. Engaging this plurality in human terms has been central to the post-Western literature including Smith, Steve, ‘The United States and the discipline of International Relations: “Hegemonic country, hegemonic discipline”’, International Studies Review, 4:2 (2002), pp. 67–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agathangelou, Anna M. and Ling, L. H. M., ‘The house of IR: From family power politics to the poisies of worldism’, International Studies Review, 6:4 (2004), pp. 21–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Acharya, Amitav, Buzan, and Barry, ‘Why is there no non-Western International Relations theory? An introduction’, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 7:3 (2007), pp. 287–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bilgin, Pinar, ‘Thinking past “Western” IR?’, Third World Quarterly, 29:1 (2008), pp. 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arlene Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds), International Relations Scholarship Around the World (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2009); Robbie Shilliam (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought (London, UK: Routledge, 2011); Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney (eds), Claiming the International (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013); Shimizu, Kosuke, Otaki, Masako, Honda, Takumi, and Izawa, Tomomi (eds), ‘In search of non-Western International Relations theory: The Kyoto School revisited’, Studies on Multicultural Societies, 4 (2013), pp. 3–65Google Scholar. For treatises dealing with actants beyond the human in IR, see Fishel, The Microbial State; Clara Eroukhmanoff and Matt Harker (eds), Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations: The Anthropocene, Security and Ecology (Bristol, UK: E-IR, 2017); Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden, and Emilian Kavalski (eds), Posthuman Dialogues in International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2018). Indigenous IR scholars have been making claims about both dimensions: Sheryl Lightfoot, Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution (London, UK: Routledge, 2016); Jeff Corntassel and Marc Woons ‘Indigenous perspectives’, in Stephen McGlinchey, Rosie Walters, and Christian Scheinpflug (eds), International Relations Theory (Bristol, UK: E-IR, 2018), pp. 131–7.

3 Acharya, Amitav, ‘Global International Relations (IR) and regional worlds: A new agenda for international studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 58:4 (2014), pp. 647–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bilgin, Pinar and Capan, Zeynep Gulsah, ‘Regional international relations and global worlds: Globalising international relations’, Uluslararas Iliskiler, 18:70 (2021), pp. 1–11Google Scholar.

4 Lily Ling describes the dangers of attempting to translate across worlds when one's very distinct fundamental existential commitments preclude being able to understand the Other on their own terms; see Ling, L. H. M., ‘The missing Other: A review of Linklater's Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System’, Review of International Studies, 43:4 (2017), p. 629CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This Special Issue highlights several examples of how this is already the case. See also Hutchings, Kimberly, ‘Dialogue between whom? The role of the West/non-West distinction in promoting global dialogue in IR’, Millennium, 39:3 (2011), pp. 639–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2015); Yong-Soo Eun, Pluralism and Engagement in the Discipline of International Relations (Singapore: Palgrave, 2016).

5 ‘Uses’ is intentional and specific; see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (3rd edn, New York: Macmillan, 1958), §7–§16. ‘Forms of knowing and being’ signals possibilities beyond ‘knowledge’, here understood as a substantive fruit of embracing separation in the first moment.

6 Other commitments may readily exist.

7 In the face of these crises, Aradau and van Munster recommend breaking out of the limited nature of our thinking regarding disruptive incidents through a politics-of-catastrophe framework, yet Mark Jackson observes:

It is not enough to appeal to the more-than-human or materiality, as we have been doing for some time now. We need to recognize that other people, other philosophies, other worlds, and other ideas have been making similar claims on wider ecological relations for hundreds, sometimes tens of thousands, of years, and crucially, in critical ways.

It is our current monopolised ontological register that leads to the first more materialist approach and does not and cannot take the latter perspectives fully into account. See Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe (London, UK: Routledge, 2012); Mark Jackson (ed.), Coloniality, Ontology and the Question of the Posthuman (London, UK: Routledge, 2018), p. xii.

8 Tickner, Arlene B. and Querejazu, Amaya, ‘Weaving worlds: Cosmopraxis as relational sensibility’, International Studies Review, 23:2 (2021), p. 391CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 José Chalá Cruz, Representaciones del cuerpo, discursos e identidad del pueblo afroecuatoriano (Quito, Ecuador: Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, 2013), p. 91. Many will argue that the ontological and multispecies turns have overcome this problem, but as I show below prior commitments to separation still imbue those literatures. See also Amaya Querejazu, ‘Cosmopraxis: Relational methods for a pluriversal IR’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue; Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Indigenous epistemes’, in Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully (eds), A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), p. 313; Joanne DiNova, Spiraling Webs Of Relation: Movements Toward an Indigenist Criticism (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), pp. 3–4.

10 Blaney, David L. and Trownsell, Tamara A., ‘Recrafting International Relations by worlding multiply’, Uluslararas Iliskiler, 18:70 (2021), p. 59Google Scholar.

11 Regarding the notion of ‘recrafting’, see Tamara Trownsell, Amaya Querejazu Escobari, Giorgio Shani, Navnita Chadha Behera, Jarrad Reddekop, and Arlene Tickner, ‘Recrafting International Relations through relationality’, e-International Relations (2019), available at: {https://www.e-ir.info/2019/01/08/recrafting-international-relations-through-relationality/} and Blaney and Trownsell, ‘Recrafting International Relations by worlding multiply’, pp. 46–58. Also, the term ‘primordial’ can be uncomfortable due to the way in which it encourages seeking out an ‘origin’ or ‘pure’ notion. I do not use it in this spirit but to indicate a fundamental existential commitment that does not have another one made before it. See Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 76–80; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 77–8.

12 I am also not insinuating that we all should (or even could) become indigenous. The argument is that we need to become ontologically agile. We need to learn to employ multiple ontological registers as a way to engage more effectively with others who start with other existential premises in order to have a better chance at synergistically diversifying our existential toolbox for the welfare of all life on the planet. See David Chandler and Julian Reid, Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019), p. 5.

13 While this article only creates the space for an ontological register that stems from the embrace of interconnection, others could exist.

14 Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, and Atsuro Morita (eds), The World Multiple (London, UK: Routledge, 2019).

15 Cosmovivencia as ‘cosmic living/experience’ encompasses all possible ways of engaging in and interacting with existence. Ontologically it is more robust than ‘worldview’ because of its cosmic scope, emphasis on the living and doing through a wider range of sensory channels and no forced separation between the observer and the observed. See Tamara Trownsell, ‘Robust Relationality: Lessons from the Ontology of Complete Interconnectedness for the Field of International Relations’ (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing (3590400), American University, Washington, DC, 2013), pp. 35–6.

16 Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London, UK: Routledge, 2011), p. 34.

17 Morgan Brigg, Mary Graham, and Martin Weber, ‘Relational Indigenous systems: Aboriginal Australian political ordering and reconfiguring IR’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue.

18 I focus solely on ontology instead of ‘onto-epistem-ology’ or ‘ethics-onto-epistem-ology’ suggested by Karen Barad, because I am not convinced that an equivalence exists between the fruits of embracing separation or interconnection as the primordial existential suppositions such that they all lead to a need for epistemology, per se or even to the aspiration of producing knowledge as the end result of methodology. Leaving open the possibility of distinction in purpose between the fruits of these primordial assumptions about existence is crucial for generating new, more complex existential tools; see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 89–90.

19 Even though some would say ‘And for good reason!’, one indirect aim of this article is to provide the tools necessary for seeing how this response is the fruit of a particular fundamental existential assumption and that assumptions may be changed … just like that. The position expressed above is sympathetic to those working in onto-/cosmopolitics, as found, among many others, in Marisol De la Cadena and Mario Blaser (eds), A World of Many Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Arturo Escobar, Otro Posible Es Posible (Bogotá, Colombia: desde abajo, 2018). While this particular article focuses more on new materialist (multispecies) literature, the concerns developed here still speak to the ontological turn of anthropology. For a very interesting treatise on the relationship between these literatures, see Anna Tsing, ‘A multispecies ontological turn?’, in Omura et al., The World Multiple (2019), pp. 233–47.

20 Javier Lajo, Qhapaq Ñan: La ruta Inka de la sabiduría (Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala, 2003), pp. 86–93; Pachakutiq Ninanturmanya, ‘La Raíz Sagrada Wa y los Ciclos Cósmicos en la Cosmovisión Andina Qechwa’, Serpiente Emplumada (Lima, Peru: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Tradicionales, 2009), p. 4.

21 Separation-based relational approaches upend this significantly yet leave certain distinctions untouched. Distinctions do not disappear when we embrace interconnection as the primordial condition of existence; their ontological status fundamentally changes and they are processed differently (see below).

22 Nicholas Onuf, ‘What we do: International Relations as craft’, in Andreas Gofas, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, and Nicholas Onuf (eds), History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations (New York, NY: Sage, 2018), pp. 513–26.

23 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §240–§241, emphasis added.

24 In this sense I am addressing an area prior to the culture that is the centre of Yaqing Qin's arguments in ‘A multiverse of knowledge: Cultures and IR theories’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 11:4 (2018), p. 415. Both language and culture are specific expressions of a shared set of existential commitments.

25 In their textbook, Kurki and Wight define ontology as the ‘theory of being’ and explain that it responds to the questions ‘What is the world made of? What objects do we study?’. See Milja Kurki and Colin Wight, ‘International Relations and social science’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (3rd edn, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 15.

26 Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, pp. 28–34.

27 Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, ‘After postpositivism? The promises of critical realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44:2 (2000), p. 215; Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, p. 28.

28 Ibid.; Ira Cohen, quoted in Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 109.

29 Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, p. 28. For an earlier injunction toward this end, see Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid (eds), Identities Borders Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

30 Ibid., pp. 20–3.

31 Emanuel Adler describes distinct constructivist programmes in ‘Constructivism in International Relations: Sources, contributions, and debates’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations (2nd edn, London, UK: Sage, 2013), p. 115. This division is also treated in Yaqing Qin, ‘A multiverse of knowledge’, p. 422; Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon, ‘Reclaiming the social: Relationism in anglophone international studies’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 32:5 (2019), pp. 582–3. In contrast to the new materialisms, who, arose directly through scientific debates in both philosophy of science and science and technology studies, relational approaches based on linguistic philosophy had to go to greater lengths to be considered part of the social scientific endeavour. Certainly, breaking through the canons in any discipline is challenging especially for a literature as fantastically revolutionary as the new materialisms, but once barriers are broken, their line of academic pedigree eased the task of showing themselves to be ‘scientific enough’. It is precisely from this positionality, as Anna Tsing poignantly asserts, that new materialists from ‘within’ science have been able ‘to demonstrate the importance of contaminated categories in shaping interactions across multiple ontologies’; see Tsing, ‘A multispecies ontological turn?’, p. 235.

32 David McCourt promotes the ‘true value’ of practice theory, relationalism, and constructivism by asserting that they keep ‘IR scholarship sensitive to the social and cultural contexts in which international politics takes place’, even though he recognises that this particular manoeuvre resulted in a scientific ontological bestiary of ‘norms, culture and identity’; see David M. McCourt, ‘Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism’, International Studies Quarterly, 60:3 (2016), pp. 475–7.

33 For this reason, ‘not all practice-theoretic and relational scholarship fits comfortably under the rubric of constructivism’; Jackson and Nexon, ‘Reclaiming the social’, p. 582.

34 From the perspective of new materialism, theoretical currents based on the linguistic turn not only cannot respond effectively to environmental crises but their embraced anthropocentrism actively nurtures the problem, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 132–7.

35 Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein (eds), Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017), pp. 1–2.

36 Karen Barad, ‘Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart’, Parallax, 20:3 (2014), p. 168. In their introduction, Coole and Frost make explicit their ‘conviction that it is now time to subject objectivity and material reality to a similarly radical reappraisal’ in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

37 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

38 Jane Bennett, ‘A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism’, in Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, p. 62.

39 Bennett, ‘A vitalist stopover on the way to a new materialism’, p. 55.

40 Ibid., p. 56.

41 Ibid., p. 63.

42 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), §7.

43 Fishel asserts: ‘If the argument is not whether we rely on metaphor to understand the world, but instead that the world is shaped through these metaphorical constructs, then this relationship can be transformative as well as descriptive. This is the effectivity of metaphor. See Fishel, The Microbial State, p. 51.

44 Jarrad Reddekop's analysis of ‘human’ and ‘runa’ clearly illustrates this point. Jarrad Reddekop, ‘Against ontological capture: Drawing lessons from Amazonian Kichwa relationality’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue.

45 From an Andean perspective this idea is not anthropocentric. Since all beings vibrate with life force, they all participate in co-creating fruits.

46 The latter aspect beckons us to recognise how each assumption effects in unique ways at distinct moments.

47 Here I am not referring to simple logocentric binaries. Below I address the different manners of understanding these pairs and the need to be aware of the lens that we use to interpret them. The inseparable character of the components in (A) is the basis for Bhabha's discussion of not being able to get rid of the ‘dark shadow’ and for the Andean language of Quechua treating the whole compound as ‘one’ or ‘juk’. As Rengifo explains: ‘Juk in Quechua is not the exclusive number one of the decimal system; instead it is the way of referring to the couple: one with its complement(s).’ See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), pp. 62–3; Grimaldo Rengifo Vásquez, ‘The Ayllu’, in Frédérique Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC, The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development (London, UK: Zed Books, 1998), pp. 89–123.

48 Some Native American traditions refer to this concept as ‘All Our Relations’. See Jamie Sams, Earth Medicine (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994); Joseph Marshall III, The Lakota Way: Stories and Lessons for Living (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2002).

49 For more in-depth discussion, see Lajo, Qhapaq Ñan, pp. 81–5; Intip Megil Guamán Pacary, Illa: El sentido de la existencia desde una perspectiva Tawaísta (Lima, Peru: Paqarina, 2007).

50 Roland Barthe's concept of ‘and/or’ on which Cynthia Weber draws for queer theory, whereby things or people cannot be made to ‘signify monolithically’, can still be encompassed in this framework. She uses his ‘description of the and/or as an “and” that is also at the very same time an “or”’ as the basis for a queer logic whereby ‘one can be a boy or a girl while at the same time being a boy and a girl.’ See Cynthia Weber, ‘From queer to queer IR’, International Studies Review, 16:4 (2014), p. 598. The approach addressed here though is not an anthropocentric conceptualisation.

51 For a more in-depth treatise of how the fundamental existential assumption of separation encourages the use of teleological measuring sticks, which in turn drives exclusion and domination, see Trownsell, ‘Robust Relationality’, pp. 290–300.

52 Yves Guillemot, ‘Prólogo’, in Lajo, Qhapaq Ñan, p. 30.

53 These manoeuvres are masterfully described in Alan W. Watts, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (New York, NY: Collier Books, 1963). The attempts to eradicate the less-desired extreme are indicative of what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as a ‘yes-saying’ ‘aristocratic system of values’; see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, pp. 34–5.

54 Guillemot, ‘Prólogo’, pp. 53–6.

55 Select books that use this term include Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Jeffrey Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

56 Relata is commonly used in speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and (new) materialism. One telling example comes from an object-oriented ontological perspective: ‘not all relations leave a lasting trace on the relata that enter them.’ See Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2018), p. 259. This quote enables us to witness in action the intimate connection between Harman's embraced order of ontological appearance and his conceptualisation of reality (that relata somehow enter into relation in a secondary and uncertain way). More importantly, it shows how an indiscriminate use of this same term would wreak ontological reductionism on a robustly relational conceptualisation, shearing off the possibility of grasping the logic corresponding to components of relation.

57 For more on parity-based relations, see Lajo, Qhapaq Ñan, pp. 81–5. For a discussion of these notions from the perspective of the Dao, see L. H. M. Ling, The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), pp. 39–45.

58 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2:1 (2004), p. 14. In this Special Issue, Querejazu addresses the conceptual implications of equivocations for how we approach relations.

59 Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation’, p. 10.

60 Suzana Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 35.

61 Mario Blaser, ‘Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations’, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 1:1 (2018), pp. 47–64.

62 On substantialism, see Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel Nexon, ‘Relations before states: Substance, process, and the study of world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 5:3 (1999), pp. 291–332; Patrick T. Jackson and Daniel Nexon, ‘International theory in a post-paradigmatic era: From substantive wagers to scientific ontologies’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:3 (2013), pp. 543–65.

63 For a corresponding discussion in anthropology, see Martin Holbraad, ‘The shapes of relations’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 50:6 (2020), pp. 495–522 and Paolo Heywood, ‘Anthropology and what there is: Reflections on “ontology”’, Cambridge Anthropology, 30:1 (2012), pp. 143–51.

64 English-based renditions of relationality in the discipline continue to reapply this distinction. See Jackson and Nexon, ‘International theory in a post-paradigmatic era’; Jackson and Nexon, ‘Reclaiming the social’; McCourt, ‘Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism’.

65 This manoeuvre raises other pertinent questions on how to deal ethically with lifeways that do not abide by this primordial commitment to separation: Is it acceptable for scholars to filter the daily practices of those who act based on distinct first-moment assumptions through a ‘scientific’ logic that insists on separation as an initial starting point? How does this continue to reinforce colonial logics within the academy? How does continuing to privilege certain ways of knowing and being over others and forcing those others only to be understood through the privileged filters limit how and what we know and therefore the kinds of tools that we can generate to engage complexity.

66 McCourt, ‘Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism’, p. 475. For a solid overview of the different strains of relationalism within ‘anglophone’ relational social theory, see Jackson and Nexon, ‘Reclaiming the social’.

67 McCourt, ‘Practice theory and relationalism as the new constructivism’, pp. 475–6.

68 Giorgio Shani, Religion, Identity and Human Security (London, UK: Routledge, 2015), pp. 40–62.

69 See Giorgio Shani and Navnita Behera, ‘Provincialising International Relations through a reading of dharma’, Review of International Studies, this Special Issue; Mustapha K. Pasha, ‘Islam and the postsecular’, Review of International Studies, 38:5 (2012), pp. 1050–5; Stephen Chan, Plural International Relations in a Divided World (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), pp. 108–10, 148–55.

70 Manuel Vásquez, ‘Vascularizing the study of religion: Multi-agent figurations and cosmopolitics’, in Keller and Rubenstein (eds), Entangled Worlds, pp. 228–50.

71 For an Andean example, see Trownsell, ‘Robust Relationality’, pp. 169–85, 242–60. For examples from South Asia, see Giorgio Shani, ‘Why Sikhi?’, International Studies Perspectives (2020), pp. 14–18 and Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Teaching a more “rooted” IR!’, International Studies Perspectives (2020), pp. 25–8.

72 Spelling varies in Quechua/Quichua. See Denise Y. Arnold, ‘Hacia una antropología de la vida en Los Andes’, in Heydi Tatiana Galarza Mendoza (ed.), El desarrollo y lo sagrado en los Andes (La Paz, Bolivia: ISEAT, 2017), pp. 31–4. For more on camay, see Frank Salomon, ‘Introductory essay: The Huarochirí manuscript’, in Frank Salomon and George Urioste (eds/trans.), The Huarochirí Manuscript: A Testament of Ancient Colonial Andean Religion (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 16; J. McKim Malville, ‘Animating the Inanimate: Camay and Astronomical Huacas of Peru’, Cosmology Across Cultures ASP Conference Series, 409 (2008), pp. 261–6; Trownsell, ‘Robust Relationality’, pp. 102–03.

73 Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Bennett, ‘A vitalist stopover’, p. 48.

74 Arnold, ‘Hacia una antropología de la vida en Los Andes’, pp. 17–18.

75 Here I delineate what I mean in a simple example: In the academy one can learn about bioprospecting and the kinds of havoc international intellectual property laws may wreak on indigenous communities, yet classes are not offered on how to communicate with plants as a healer might do in her community, even though ironically it is the very activity that provides the fodder that feeds the practice of bioprospecting itself.

76 Trownsell, ‘Robust Relationality’, pp. 139–42. Hardly an anthropocentric or embodied notion, these complementary opposites can include electric-magnetic, down-up, left-right, etc.

77 On proportionalization, see Guillemot, ‘Prólogo’, pp. 53–6. On the wider conversation, see Rengifo Vásquez, ‘The Ayllu’, pp. 89–90.

78 Arnold, ‘Hacia una antropología de la vida en Los Andes’, pp. 18–21.

79 For a focus on doing (ruay/llamkay), see Lajo, Qhapaq Ñan, pp. 168–9; Guamán Pacary, Illa, pp. 14–19.

80 Ccory Ribeyro, ‘Prefacio’, in Guamán Pacary, Illa, p. 5.

81 Alice Fulton, ‘Cascade experiment’, quoted in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 39.

82 Yes, even other species or life on exoplanets don't need or deserved to be ‘discovered’ and then ‘managed’. Still highly relevant to this whole discussion is the review of tropes and other colonising mechanisms in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London, UK: Routledge, 1994), pp. 137–77.

83 Tsing, ‘A multispecies ontological turn?’, p. 234; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 3.

84 Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

85 Barad, ‘Diffracting diffraction’, p. 168.

86 For an intriguing argument on this matter, see Ascott, Roy, ‘Technoetic pathways toward the spiritual in art: A transdisciplinary perspective on connectedness, coherence and consciousness’, Leonardo, 39:1 (2006), pp. 65–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Elías Ortega-Aponte, ‘The door of no return: An Africana reading of complexity’, in Keller and Rubenstein (eds), Entangled Worlds, pp. 299–316.

88 Ling, ‘The missing Other’, pp. 628–30. Kosuke Shimizu also tells of how the Kyoto School relational philosophy was politically reinterpreted to justify Japanese imperialist expansion posterior to the First World War; see Shimizu, ‘Why Kyoto School?’, International Studies Perspectives (2020), pp. 18–21.

89 The forms of imbalance to which I allude include global pandemics, rampant forest fires, the bleaching of large expanses of coral, rising temperatures, strange shore-ups of hundreds of whales, declining bee populations, bacterial resistance, etc. They also refer to the incredible levels of social imbalance and violence among humans today.