Designs for the Pluriverse modernity 83–91; critical analysis of, 80; design and, 32; Eurocentric, 67–68, 81, 93; Nandy on, 128; ontological dualism and, 3, 19–20; pluriverse and, 129, 200, 256n8; Santos on, 68; Varela on, 97–100; von Werlhof on, 14

In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality Four Fundamental Beliefs in the Modern Onto-epistemic Order The Belief in the Individual The Belief in the Real The Belief in Science The Belief in the Economy

For science writer Dorion Sagan, modern approaches to the social and natural sciences have “block[ed] out most of the world” (2011); hence, what we are witnessing in the turn to animal, nonhuman, more-than-human, and posthuman studies is the return of all those unacknowledged aspects of the living that make life possible. In responding to Sagan from the perspective of Vine Deloria’s “American Indian metaphysics,” Kimberly TallBear (2011) argues that some of these trends and categories still endow nonhumans with human-like biographical and political lives that assume somewhat independent standpoints and, above all, that they are still inadequate to describe all relations among beings. She also pushes us to think about the ways in which some of the cutting-edge trends reproduce some of the modern binaries, including that of life and nonlife, resulting in the exclusion of, say, stones, trees, or thunder from being effective forces in the world, and even perhaps having sentience (on pansentience, see also Rose 2008; Goodwin 2007). Despite their efforts, do the recent tendencies continue to uphold in some fashion an intramodern (largely Euro-American) understanding of the world (as decolonial theorists might argue)? Do they continue to function within a much-renewed, but still primarily Western/modern, episteme?16 …[ phenomenology tried and failed to join reflection and experience, remaining trapped analysing experience through abstract rationality ] … … [ reflection itself is a kind of embodied experience ]

“Nandy’s caveat here is that we need to avoid narrow-minded traditionalisms that demystify modernity while remystifying tradition, and to allow for critical dialogue, interaction, and mutual transformation among cultures within a genuine intercultural communion” (104)