by Dr. Sayendri Panchadhyayi, Assistant Professor, RV University, Bangalore, India.
In her latest monograph Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics, Maggie FitzGerald, revisits the decolonial concept of the ‘pluriverse.’ Woven through a tapestry of 9 chapters, FitzGerald makes a case for feminist relational care ethics, essential to the pluriverse. Interestingly, the intellectual lineages and heritages of Latour, a harbinger of relational ontology and feminist STS is remarkable in FitzGerald’s approach. In a refutation of the colonial and capitalist project of ordering principles, pluriversalethics stands for ontological pluralism. It underpins alternate social and political life-worlds of living knowledge traditions (Rojas, 2016). In essence, the pluriversal ethics is a homage to relational ontology of posthumanism that advocates caring for the non-material human world based on the view that everything is part of the intimately entangled world (Hasse, 2022). FitzGerald’s relational onto-epistemology of care ethics is a prerequisite for engaging with non-human kinning wherein natural commons are treated as living entities.
Contrary to this, colonial logics render all kinds of differentiation and distantiation as anomalous and pathological. Attuned to the decolonial edifice, FitzGerald points out that this belief system has origin in the Euro-colonial modern project that champions the cause of ‘civilized’ human world and render all other logics of relationalities are deemed as expendable. Epistemological hegemony of European modern reason reduces indigenous subjects and their worlds as relics of the past. Modern science is weaponized for discrediting the life-worlds of the indigenous subjects and treating them as primordial, obsolete and expendable. Such hyperbolic articulations reduce them as objects of study instead of subjects of knowledge. This is rooted in the principle of ‘otherization’ and exoticization, that in turn perpetuate violent biopolitical interests. Deeming Europe as the geo-cultural centre projects European modernity as the reflexive conscience of world history and Eurocentrism as the organizing principle of order, propriety and governance.
Differences within the multiple worlds from a modern universalist standpoint are anomalous and pathological. Binaries of the modern world legitimize and (re)produce hierarchies and thwart their ability to express care towards others. To counter this, FitzGerald advocates for a pluriversal ethic, a radical alterity that recognizes multiple epistemologies, termed by her as ‘onto-epistemologies’. In a related work, she explains onto-epistemologies as “co-constitutive ontologies and epistemologies that are together enacted through collective practices and thereby constitutive of forms of life” (FitzGerald, 2023, p. 253). As we are all related and affected due to our ‘partial connections’, relational existence with a relational ontological mooring is an antidote to the hegemony of reason and rationalistic logic.
She espoused a care ethics approach to knowledge as it situates moral within the relationalities, web of connections and responsibility towards others. It shows it as contextual, situated and evolving out of specific social locations. The epistemic position of care ethics contests the objective and abstracted thinking and knowledge claims, eschew epistemic hegemony and decolonize episteme that leaves indigenous cultures reeling in the fringes. FitzGerald’s pluriverse is an ode to the decolonial narratives that affirms to exchange of knowledge, quell knowledge disparity and aim for decentralization. It could surmount the extension and existence of coloniality as colonialism as a political power, and move away from monoculture of knowledge to ecology of knowledges.
Pluriverse demands an approach to ethics of care that fuels moral thinking for critical moral ethnography and examination of moral forms of life that mutually co-constitute. The moral subject is not an atomistic individual rather a vulnerable processual self in the journey of relational becoming. The pluriversal ethics is committed to a continuous interrogation of moral knowledge and moral voices that acquire authority over the others. It deconstructs relations of power that devalues or undermines certain relational knowledge and practices. It is premised on relational ontology that accounts for the continually enacted, (re)produced, and unfolding relations of existence. In rhythm to the multiple worlds in the pluriverse, there are multiple pluriversal ethics.
Critique: Convergences, divergences and contributions
The concept of ‘pluriverse’ has continuities and convergences with theoretical lens that opposes epistemic hegemony. Besides the pluriverse, to counter and disrupt the invisibilization of these ‘otherized’ lifeworlds from the mainstream grand-narratives, relational othering could be a way forward. Relational othering promises to disrupt hegemonic authorities and epistemologies, and thrust for new pathways aimed at social change and building relationships (Dhamoon, 2019). Conceived out of the onto-epistemology of shared vulnerable relational existence, I found pluriversal ethics closely aligned to multi-species-isms. Speciesism favours the moral exclusion or discrimination of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species and buttresses systematic oppression and slaughter of different species by humans (Westerlaken, 2021). Critical Animal Studies (CAS) casts light on the parallel between speciesism with other oppressive structures like racism, sexism, colonialism and classicism. All these structural constraints contour along the lines of treating the ‘other’ as inferior, normalizing discrimination in the guise of instrumental rationality and universalizing Euro-centric modernist logic. It conceals biases, prejudices and power imbalances, and shorn of relational thinking.
Much like FitzGerald, Leslie Butt takes up the limits of rationalism and what it means for the anthropological scholarship. She chides the tendency to shore up emotional appeal and claims of closeness in representations as it may further stereotype and distance the marginalized subject. Thus, inadvertently producing the image of a ‘suffering other’. A suffering stranger is one belonging to an impoverished world languishing and reeling, while her suffering makes it to the elite-niche academia without actually ushering in praxis. In a contradistinction, they are voiced and represented through those with academic capital and continue to remain embroiled in the grid of power struggles. A universal and transcendental moral framework, hence is dangerous as it can smuggle in hierarchies in the pursuit of the right approach to moral thinking. Moral universalism and normativity will benefit the privileged. Such narratives de-historicize and de-contexualize marginalized subjects or communities, and topple the de-objectification stance of critical anthropological studies. A reading of both together evinces that moral universalism is a discursive tool for the minority of elites to assert and monopolize over the majoritarian subjects who do not have equal access or sometimes no access to these platforms to narrativize their experience. Butt is careful to point that countering a universalizing mono ideal of a global public through overlapping and multiple public discourses is hardly an alternate discourse. Rather, a social justice informed activist anthropology and human rights culture could move the needle, run past armchair globalism, take cognizance of global entanglements, scrutinize the nature of moral debates, foster a more accountable public sphere and promote a more conscientious exchange.
Besides these conceptual and theoretical leitmotifs, semblance to Virginia Held (1995, 2004, 2006) and Maria Puig De la Bella Casa (2012 and 2017) is salient. Held views care as the most basic moral value and the wider framework within justice. Much like FitzGerald’s discomfort with the neutral and universalizing global ethics, Held critiques virtue ethics for eliding the principle of partial connections partly constituted by their relations with others and caring relations. Similarly, Bella Casa’s emphasis on thinking with care and care beyond the material human world is complementary to the pluriversal ethic. Attuned to Latour’s influential Actor Network Theory (ANT), she resonates the enmeshing and entwining of the human and non-human world, and dynamic relational existence as a moral principle. All these are a critique against human-centredness, human exceptionalism and human exclusivity.
Ontologies and identities are affected by collective politics and positionalities; how we relate affect the building of positions and relational ecologies. Feminist ethics of care that upholds relationality and practices to sustain the relational selves, ingredients of constituting a pluriverse – multiplication of worlds of mutual vulnerability shaped by relations of power. Morality here is a collaborative and collective endeavour of continuous examinations. Thinking with care casts light on what we care for, the relatedness built through and its real-time and long-term consequences for the world.
Ethics of care, I would argue, is a self-aware approach that promulgates entwined living, fosters community feelings beyond differences and historicizes situated knowledge and subjectivities. A pluriverse is not possible without thinking with care as political relatedness, acknowledging vulnerabilities and fostering mutualities as worldlings. Albeit, it cannot undo epistemic violence in the annals of history, however now it can promote care justice. Care is housed within the political and thinking with care is a political movement on its own.
There is an impassioned appeal for a paradigm shift towards shared vulnerable existence in an interconnected pluriverse quite salient in FitzGerald’s framing and articulations. Anchored in decolonization to create space(s) for multiple worlds to flourish, pluriversal ethic for her is a step towards reconfiguring the hierarchies and power asymmetries. Her work is a fluid rendition and an extension of the feminist STS that emerged as a polemical discourse against the ‘un-caring’ and cold modern regime. Hitherto, FitzGerlad’s work is far from a flagship venture. However, she claims her merit and stands on her own as she gingerly teases out the limits of a universal ethic of care and Anthropocene as the custodian of this universalizing logic. Pluriversal ethics bear profound intellectual moorings in the feminist relational ethics of STS which, I would argue is conceived out of feminist solidarity scholarship. This is an expression of feminist relational ethics that goes beyond the objective of standalone pathbreaking achievement and contributes to extending and deepening these conversations. FitzGerald’s book will strike a chord with researchers, scholars and professors interested in the areas of care studies, gender and feminism, political ethics, sociology of knowledge and decolonization. In fact, it could be a companion guide for advanced stage social science courses.
About the Author:
Sayendri teaches Sociology in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at RV University, Bangalore, India. Her interests span across social gerontology, care and lifecourse, medical anthropology, feminist STS, and death and bereavement. She is an editorial member of En-Gender.
How to cite:
Panchadhyayi, Sayendri (2024), review of “Care and the Pluriverse: Rethinking Global Ethics” by Maggie FitzGerald. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022, 252 pp., En-Gender (online).
References
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Hasse, C. (2022). Humanism, posthumanism, and new humanism: how robots challenge the anthropological object: posthumanism. In The Palgrave handbook of the anthropology of technology (pp. 145-164). Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.
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