You don't need to have prior knowledge of the pluriverse. You don't need to do any pre-reading, research - but you can if you wish to. Feel free and safe to answer exactly what comes to mind.

If you do choose to contribute consider the addition of an image, video, gif, art piece to add to your post (like we've done here).

The older post below are when we asked the same question prior to our UTAS Social Sciences Brown Bag presentation in August 2024. We are choosing to keep them to keep the conversation going.

The conversation started via email with Kim's train of thought around each of us outlining an element of our work in decolonising towards achieving health equity and justice, that is, shifting from universal to pluriversal thinking in our health education work with health students and health profession colleagues.

Well, to make the conversation easy, organic and not task oriented, we collectively (including Biscuit) decided to create a WhatsApp group called "Pluriversal-ing". In this brave space, we danced through conversations, we shared, pondered and responded to pictures, text and videos of how we understand and apply pluriversality to our lives, identities, our health research and teaching practices.

The D-day came for SocioHealthLab (Un)conference and we presented. The takeaway from our presentation was that our pondering, questioning and curiosity was still ongoing and evolving. In context of this "evolving-ness", we decided to keep going with our WhatsApp conversations, which birthed the idea to present at this Brown Bag seminar, shared by Penny. A team member (Horas) dropped at this stage due to commitments and later on Suellen was invited by Penny and the team to join our journey.

The journey to the Brown Bag seminar further produced rich ponderings, discussions and more questions in our everyday engagements and interaction with our environment, work and life, which we have brought to the TASA Conference for a co-exploration.

You will see that each column has different content. Feel free to add to column one (Acknowledgement of Country) especially if you are attending the session online, column three (what is your idea of pluriversality), column six (your pluriverse questions), and column seven(some pluriverse resources). Please also reply to any posts you wish. While we would say there are no real rules for this padlet, there is a foundation of kindness and respect which we hope you will apply.

I welcome you to this space of getting to know each other. I look forward to the messiness of our conversation and co-construction of knowledge that stems from our pluriversality. As proverbs from Nigeria states, "to get lost is to learn the way" and "one head alone does not go into council".

As a physicist and teacher trainer in 1980s Ile-Ife, Nigeria, Helen Verran thought she knew the answer to this question. But as she taught primary school maths and sciences, a gradual realisation dawned on her: Yoruba teachers and students counted differently.

Her book explores a Yoruba logic of numbering that is entirely consistent and yet entirely different from the Western number system. Western universalist accounts tell us there is single, objective number system: numbers are individual, linear and sequential; they can be placed on a number line that stretches to infinity. Addition and subtraction consist of moving up and down the number line. Higher maths are evermore complicated manoeuvres along the line.

But in a Yoruba number system, numbers are not individual points on a line, they are collectives that only exist in relation to one another. Numbers are bunches. They move together as collectives. Thus 60 is not an individual point at the 60th place on a line. 60 is twenty-placed-three-times. 70 is twenty-placed-four-times-take-away-ten. Numbers are vessels of quantity conceptualised in relation to other quantities.

Drawing on ethnography and the philosophy of science, Verran lays down a systematic, empirical argument that there is no such thing as a natural number. Numbers exist only in practice. As such, they are inherently social, a product of the society and times that generate them.

-Darryl

I was first exposed to the idea of the pluriverse (which was not called the pluriverse at the time, but nevertheless was the pluriverse) in my undergraduate education in the 1990s.

One professor in particular, Jean-Guy Goulet, was absolutely central to this. We could say he was a scholar of the pluriverse before the pluriverse.

Jean-Guy's anthropological fieldwork had focused on the experience of ritual and religion in two indigenous American societies. On several occasions during the course of his fieldwork in the 1970s and 80s he experienced dreams and visions that could only be explained by Western rationalism as "hallucinations" or "coincidence". Yet these experiences were entirely consistent with ways of knowing in his host society, occurred in the symbolic language of that society, and were considered very matter of fact by his hosts. He risked academic ridicule by writing about these experiences, but made (pluriversal) ways of seeing a cornerstone of his research program. Here is a brief vignette:

Consider the following case illustrating what the Dene Tha take as a case of knowing with the mind... In July 1984, I joined the elders who were sitting around a fire in a tepee discussing the preparation of ceremonies. As we progressed … smoke gradually filled the tepee. Annoyed by the smoke, which hurt my eyes, I wondered what could be done about it. I suddenly realised that I was looking at a detailed life-size image of myself. Here was my double before my very eyes, wearing the same clothes I was then wearing, kneeling by the fire, fanning the flames with my hat. I kept looking at the image, aware all the while, of the smoke in the teepee, and wondering who would do something about it.

Then someone - a non-Native - got up, went to the fire, knelt down, and started blowing on it. Immediately, with a loud voice, an elder told him not to blow on the fire, and instructed him to fan the fire with his hat or some other object. The rationale for not blowing on the fire was that such an action would offend spiritual entities and induce a violent wind storm in the camp. Listening to the elder, I realized that I had actually foreseen the proper way of fanning a fire. Up to that time, I knew neither the right nor wrong way of fanning a fire, nor the rationale behind the prohibition against blowing on a fire. Neither did I know that one could see so vividly, in image form, what the proper action should be in a given situation. From the Dene Tha point of view, I had experienced a form of teaching and communication that occurs not through the medium of words, but through the medium of images.

_{p.30, GOULET, J.-G. (1994). Dreams and Visions in Other Lifeworlds. In D. E. Young & J.-G. Goulet (Eds.), Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience (pp. 16–38). University of Toronto Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt2ttwb4.4}

At the time Jean-Guy was also among very few scholars writing through a gender diversity lens, considering gender identities/two-spiritedness in Dene Tha society as a manifestation of multiple lifeworlds/ontologies (though the ontological turn in anthropology and sociology was still ten years away). While many aspects of anthropological practice in the 1980s and 90s now seem dated, I realise now how far ahead of his time Jean-Guy was.

If anyone is interested, here is a charming series of interviews with him about his fieldwork that give some more insights on pluriversal themes (in French): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLem2YGGkt1Cvg3L5a_NfveL7s4IW72o3_

-Darryl

Lots of things cooking (brewing?!) in my head at any one point (such as the productive necessity of dissonance...), sincere commiserations to my co-chefs whenever my brain whizzes off in different directions!

- Sree

The Beechworth Arts Council quote John Algeo who states "To traverse the labyrinth is to bring into one wholeness all parts of our being". This is why I have chosen the labyrinth to be the backdrop to my pluriverse ponderings because part of what my pluriverse journey has been is to embrace completely the wholeness of being, to put the binary aside.

You can read the full details of the labyrinth here

https://beechworthartscouncil.org.au/whats-on/lake-sambell-labyrinth/

I have chosen the labyrinth for all my new posts in our padlet deliberately and intentionally. The labyrinth can feel constrained and a trap at first. It can feel repetitive and same. But every time I navigate it the world around it changes (weather, birds, people, my own self is renewed). I have filmed myself navigating it in hyperlapse to show how I feel navigating the world at the moment for my PhD and how Country holds space around me, encompasses and holds me.

Thank you for joining the journey with us.