#Worlds
In “Being One, Being Multiple,” Marilyn Strathern suggests that academics might be divided into two types, depending on how they imagine the future: either as “a road ahead of them, stretching into the distance” or as as already hiding in their surroundings, “jumping out to everyone’s surprise, where you never know what is going to appear or who is going to walk through the door, or for that matter, when you open a door… what you are going to see outside.” (2015, 124). The same could be said of the world. One way to imagine the world is as one vast space awaiting exploration; the other is to see it as what is “within range” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3), and what lies virtually in it, multiple plateaus whose “development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 22). Speaking of anthropology’s future, Strathern suggests that anthropology “must be at one recognizable as itself (as one entity) and be able to flourish in numerous and unforeseen circumstances (be multipliable)” (2015, 124). Locating_NatureCulture_, the journal, and the worlds enacted therein, requires attending to a range of analogous tensions. The journal is nominally “Japanese” and “anthropological” in origin and institutional affiliation, but its contributors and outlook are significantly influenced by European, English, and American anthropologies, philosophies, and STS, in ways that place it off the center of anthropology in Japan. It is linked to an intellectual moment in these Euro-American disciplines when the “modern constitution” (Latour 1993) of nature versus society, and the separation of the material from the cultural was undergoing critique. Indeed, many scholars central to such discussions in the “West”—among them Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern—have been contributors to the journal. But, their presence does not mean that ideas were simply “imported” from the center to Japan, as much as they were brought into contact with intellectual traditions where the dualisms of Western thought had already been the target of decades of critique (see Jensen and Morita 2012; Fischer 2016).
One of the key aims of the journal has been to explore contemporary empirical and conceptual transformations in figures such as the Human, the Social, Nature, and Culture. As Naoki Kasuga, the founder of the journal, wrote in the piece that inaugurated _NatureCulture_ (2012), new questions must be asked of these figures, which have long been taken to be the protagonists of anthropology: “Could they be merely a bundle of effects caused by some combination of or linkages between various other things, living or non-living, tangible or intangible?” (Kasuga 2012, i). Calling on the work of Strathern, Bruno Latour, and others associated with the “ontological turn” in anthropology, Kasuga points for the need to think about these figures as ontological effects in the world rather than beings that are detached from it. Humans, for instance, should no longer be imagined as beings privileged with a standpoint of transcendental detachment from the world, but as ontologically enacted in and with _their_ world.
This argument resonates with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s invocations of ontological _perspectivism_ (2012), in which different beings—human, animal, and otherwise—do not see the same world in different ways, but different worlds in the same way. But thought they partake of a turn towards “ontological matters” like their colleagues abroad, scholars writing in and around _NatureCulture_ intellectual dwell a slightly parallel world, one in which the conceptual consequences of attending to ontological _differences_ between worlds is always kept in productive tension with a deep focus on the ontological _enactments_ of worlds in practice (Jensen and Morita 2012. See also Omura et al. 2019). The difference between these is not of an external orientation in opposition to an internalist one, but of how attention to the actual and singular on one hand and the virtual and multiple on the other, sit in relation to each other. As Kasuga suggests, it is not enough to say that different beings enacted in and by ontologically diverse worlds. We must also ask how these differences can and are universalized, and the limits of this universalization. We must take a “postplural attitude” (Gad 2013, 60) that attends to worlds as both _diverse_ and _interrelated_.
This postplural attitude has been a source of generativity in how _worlds_ have been conceptualized in _NatureCulture_.For Ishii Miho, such ecologies are understood as assemblages of “humans, nonhumans, and their milieu created through transaction” (2015, 12), in her case transactions between humans and deities in a Korean-operated petroleum plant in Karnataka in India. These ecologies are like actor-networks, but they do not imply limitlessness and endless expansion, as actor-network theory sometimes does (see Amsterdamska 19XX). Būta rituals enact relations between devotees, priests, deities, managers, engineers, and machines, but they also performatively enact “cuts” in the network (Strathern 1996), marking the boundaries of a hybrid ecology around the plant. A world is temporarily conjured into being through ritual practice.