A World of Many: Ontology and Child Development among the Maya of Southern Mexico

by Norbert Ross

Overview

A World of Many explores the world-making efforts of Tzotzil Maya children from two different localities within the municipality of Chenalhó, Chiapas. The research demonstrates children’s agency in creating their worlds, while also investigating the role played by the surrounding social and physical environment. Different experiences with schooling, parenting, goals and values, but also with climate change, water scarcity, as well as racism and settler colonialism form part of the reason children create their emerging worlds. These worlds are not make believe or anything less than the ontological products of their parents. Instead, Norbert Ross argues that by creating different worlds, the children ultimately fashion themselves into different human beings - quite literally being different in the world. A World of Many combines experimental research from the cognitive sciences with critical theory, exploring children’s agency in devising their own ontologies. Rather than treating children as somewhat incomplete humans, it understands children as tinkerers and thinkers, makers of their worlds amidst complex relations. It regards being as a constant ontological production, where life and living constitutes activism. Using experimental paradigms, the book shows that children locate themselves differently in these emerging worlds they create, becoming different human beings in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978830332
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2023
Series:	Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	207
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

NORBERT ROSS is associate professor of Anthropology and Theater at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method and the co-author (with Douglas L. Medin and Douglas G. Cox) of Culture and Resource Conflict: Why Meanings Matter. 

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 A World Where Other Worlds Can Be at Home

3 Ontology and Resistance

4 Folk-Biological Knowledge, Education, and
Framework Theories

5 Study Design and Methods

6 Complexity, Niche Theory, and Cultural Models

7 From Subsistence to Extraction: Globalization, Change,
and Spatial Organization in Chenalhó

8 Knowledge Sources and Learning Biases: Experience,
Values, and Ontologies

9 Growing Up in Chenalhó: Knowledge Sources and the
Spatial Distribution of Change and Modernity

10 What Is It Called? Plant Knowledge in Chenalhó

11 Concepts of “Alive and “Living Kinds”: Experience,
Culture, and Ontology

12 How Alive Is It? Revisiting the Concept of “Alive”

13 Being in Space

14 One of Many: The Making of a Diversity of Worlds

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Norbert Ross questions the foundations of everything—the architecture of reality, knowledge, and learning—in his investigations of the Mexican community of Chenalhó. The observations and experiences of Tzotzil maya children help us understand what it is to be human, to be alive, and to have a soul and how life is activism. This methodologically innovative and theoretically intricate project invites readers to appreciate in a nuanced and profound way diversity in humanity and ways of being in the world."
 

co-editor of Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in early Modern Mesoamerica - Kathryn Sampeck

"I love books like this that challenge us to turn our thinking about ontology upside down. Scholars of young people often begin by examining what ontology teaches about childhood. We can forget how valuable it is to explore how notions of childhood actually reshape ontology. A World of Many is a successful experiment in inverting our assumptions about what we think we know about what we know."

co-editor of Up, Down, and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power - Rachael Stryker