ABSTRACT
The complexity of everyday life challenges the assumption of a single universal reality that everyone should share. This introductory essay introduces the notion of the “World Multiple,” which the chapters in this volume collectively explore in an attempt to understand the multiplicity of the worlds that people experience and generate in their everyday practices. The introduction traces the genealogies of “worlding” to mobilize it as an entangled, non-Newtonian, material-semiotic analytic for understanding how worlds are made through quotidian practices in multiple ways. It argues that this approach requires attention to various practices that generate space-time, and to the everyday politics enacted in those worlds. It then introduces chapters that examine how humans and non-humans, caught among the social and material legacies of colonialism and capitalism and the hegemony of modernist technoscience, strive to craft worlds worth living in diverse manifestations. This essay addresses the importance of paying close ethnographic attention to people’s worlding practices and to exploring the possibilities of life in a world respectful of multiplicity.
