Worlding, a definition

Three month countdown

I promised only a monthly reminder about Speculative Relations, and the time has come for our three month countdown. You can pre-order HERE. Share it with a friend?

Here’s a story: I was talking to my mom a couple months ago, and she asked me what the book’s title was. By now I have a rhythm I use when I say it: Speculative Relations (pause) Indigenous woRlding (I really lean into the ‘r’) and Repair.

Mom: “What do you mean by worlding?”

Me: um…well…it’s like…you know…like worlding…like…

And it dawned on me that I needed to find a way to explain ‘worlding’ to my mom, and people like my mom, the mom’s of the world, which doesn’t mean to water down the definition, but to condense its ideas and to get to the point.

Most of what happens when I try to explain things is I hem and haw over not being able to contextualize everything, to tell the full range of nuances and etymological detail. But that isn’t always necessary. There is value in knowing how to calibrate a response to different audiences.

I think of worlding as the way Indigenous communities live our lives. Indians doing Indian things. It’s how we do things, how we uphold our relations and our methods of thought and action. Worlding is the effect of being an Indigenous person living Indigenously. (That last sentence is weird, I know, but I think it makes sense).

Another way to put it: Worlding is the word I use to describe the practices that give meaning to the communal knowledge that Indigenous Peoples’ have accrued over millennia.

The more academic context turns to Gayatri Spivak’s engagement with Heidegger, and how the worlding of the world is a colonial form of erasing Indigenous presence. And yet, my quibble with Spivak, is that the worlding of the colonial world does not ever actually take place on “uninscribed earth” as she puts it. The land is never absent Indigenous relations, and thus the worlding mechanisms of Indigenous communities are always predicated on the emplacement of our relations and their accrual over time.

This engagement with Spivak was actually a response to a very kind suggestion from one of the manuscript’s peer reviewers (you know who you are), and I appreciate the invitation to think more clearly about what the history of this term has been in the context of postcolonial and decolonial studies.

I also make a distinction between worlding and world-making because I don’t think it makes sense to think of a practice of ‘making’ the world, or re-making it. We are always in relation to the world, and so, to make the world, in my view, isn’t actually something we are capable of doing, and if we were to try to ‘make’ the world, in fact, we would be contravening the relational precepts that give the world substance.

Instead, we world along with the beings and histories that have always been worlding.

It is a more humble term, I think. Perhaps worlding is a bit of a mouthful, but it nevertheless gets at the active engagement, the verbing, of the practice of being in relation to beings, histories, and knowledge that allow us to understand how things work, in this world, and the others that we imagine, know, and inhabit.

To world, we relate. To world, we enact our relations. To world means living up to the practices and responsibilities that operate with or without us, in the dynamic systems of law, art, culture, and language that are always ongoing.

The thing about worlding that I wanted to convey was that it has always been happening. We just have to see it, to reflect on it, to relate to those worlding practices in a way that considers how we should act as humans in a world that is not actually about us, but which sustains and cares for us—if we know how to world. If we know, in other words, how to reside in the world as part of the worlding that is us. That is our stories. That is our relations.

Does that make sense?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash