Thinking Without “The World”

Abstract

This paper takes up the question of “the world” by attending to what kind of analytic, ontological, and grounding work this phrase does in anthropological writing. As a point of departure, I recount my dismay at learning that my close friend and housemate in Tanzania did not “know” that “the world” was round and her reciprocal dismay at my ignorance of the duality of being, of dimensions both seen and unseen. Approaching this encounter as ‘doing difference together’ (Verran 2013), I ask what was at stake for each of us in considering these characteristics as defining features of “the world”. Many anthropologists today approach such questions ontologically, considering how worlds— in the plural— are enacted through practices and composed via assemblages, rather than given a priori (de la Cadena 2015, Langwick 2011, West 2007). Meanwhile, critics of this approach accuse the ontological turn of an exoticism that implies different people exist in different worlds altogether (Graeber 2015, Doostdar 2018). In this paper, I think through the use of the term “world” by scholars on both sides of this debate, asking: What work does this term do? Does it impose connection or containment as a framing device? What temporal and spatial orientations might it presuppose, even when used in the plural? I conclude, ala Wittgenstein, by acknowledging that the “world-picture” is “Above all…the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting”, too (1969: 23e).