A World of Many Worlds

by Marisol de la Cadena (Editor), Mario Blaser (Editor)

A World of Many Worlds is a search into the possibilities that may emerge from conversations between indigenous collectives and the study of science's philosophical production. The contributors explore how divergent knowledges and practices make worlds. They work with difference and sameness, recursion, divergence, political ontology, cosmopolitics, and relations, using them as concepts, methods, and analytics to open up possibilities for a pluriverse: a cosmos composed through divergent political practices that do not need to become the same.

Contributors: Mario Blaser, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Déborah Danowski, Marisol de la Cadena, John Law, Marianne Lien, Isabelle Stengers, Marilyn Strathern, Helen Verran, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Ecology, Nature, Indigenous, Philosophy

232 pages, Paperback

Published November 23, 2018

About the author

Marisol de la Cadena is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few very interesting essays exploring nature(s) and our relation to it/them.

And there were a few great lines, like: "Our author does not seem prepared, himself, to accept the highly likely possibility that we—the people of the (capitalist) core, the overweight, media-controlled, psychopharmacologically stabilized automata of technologically advanced societies that are highly dependent on a monumental consumption (or rather, waste) of energy—that we, when the chips are down, might be the ones who will have to scale down our precious ways of living" (p.185).

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, how conflicted I feel! First of all, I was high in expectations, being the first book I read from Marisol de la Cadena and given the writers. I found myself with an impressive introduction, full of powerful concepts: what I was left was with a kind of void, for the rest of the book! The pluriverse was fantastic; of Strathern I got nothing; Corsín was boring. Stengers was great, for sure. Verran's story was compelling too, and I liked her bad faith and good will. John Law's work was kind of boring to me, already having read about salmon's in Norway in Arts of living on a damaged planet. The final piece of Danowski and Viveiros de Castro was absolutely brilliant. So some of them are not really that good, but others are fantastic. Take a look at it yourself!

[Tarun Balaji · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was one of the very first books that BROKE my brain when I first started my major coursework for anthropology. In hindsight, I definitely did not appreciate the book as much as I should’ve the first time reading this.
The shortest way I can describe de la Cadena’s work is as a prologue to academic esotericism, and how we think about ontology. The only reason this book is a 4/5 for me personally is because of the intense weight I feel immediately after pacing through her chapters, which is DEFINITELY a sign of amazing writing. It’s not a light read tho!