ABSTRACT
A significant body of social science research engages in categorizing, classifying, and/or prioritizing human behavior. Researchers carve the social world into variables that they then place in statistical models to measure mathematically the relationship between them. These categories, these variables, have a tendency to solidify over use into what Beck has referred to as zombies. "Zombie categories are 'living dead' categories which govern our thinking but are not really able to capture the contemporary milieu". A major component of the ontological turn is the problematization of binaries and embracement of ecological conceptualizations. Binaries structure think about categories and relationships between variables, and thereby have structured social science research. Local, indigenous knowledge tends to be situated on the 'nature' side of the nature/culture binary, thereby delegitimizing non-Western ways of knowing, and refusing to acknowledge indigenous peoples as belonging to 'culture'. Women's knowledge has also been subjugated to the delegitimization, whereby women's ways of knowing are rejected by the dominant discourses.
