Designs for the Pluriverse Index: 4–7, 117, 170–71, 190; autonomy of, 175, 184; bioregionalism and, 5, 45, 142, 143, 196; definitions of, xvi, 257n15; design for, 198; dialogic, 52, 161; Gutiérrez Borrero on, 205–6; of interculturality, 181; invisibility of, 68; Manzini on, 130, 164, 208; Maturana on, 205; modernity and, 129, 200, 256n8; political ontology and, 66–70, 86, 94–95, 216–18; rationality and, 211; risks in, 256n8; sustainability and, 59, 189; transitions toward, 15–17, 188; Zhang on, 131

definitions of the pluriverse

DFTP - Preface and Acknowledgements p.xvi

To conclude, I can say, in retrospect, that my overriding concern is with difference, and how difference is effaced or normalized—and, conversely, how it can be nourished. This concern embraces difference in the biological realm (hence, my interest in biodiversity), epistemic difference (coloniality), cultural difference, and—as one might say today— ==ontological difference, or the pluriverse. Today, difference is embodied for me most powerfully in the concept of the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity.== This has been the central problem that, largely intuitively, has reverberated throughout my intellectual life. It has also been about “living fearlessly with and within difference,” as feminists from the Global South often put it (e.g., Trinh 1989; Milczarek-Desai 2002), that is, about an ethical and political practice of alterity that involves a deep concern for social justice, the radical equality of all beings, and nonhierarchy. It’s about the difference that all marginalized and subaltern groups have to live with day in and day out, and that only privileged groups can afford to overlook as they act as if the entire world were, or should be, as they see it.

In the Background of Our Culture - Rationalism, Ontological Dualism, and Relationality note 5:

“the idea of multiple legitimate domains of real­ity and multiple explanations of them by observers.”

DFTP - Conclusion p.257n15;

The pluriverse, one can say, is fractal, or endowed with self-similarity: anywhere you look at it, and at any scale, you find similar (yet not the same) configurations, meshes, assemblages … that is, the pluriverse