Work · Indigenous Philosophies
Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism
Essay arguing that many Indigenous languages of the Americas rest on a “nondiscrete” ontology in which things interpenetrate, so that pairs such as male and female are complementary rather than exclusive; read this way, gender need not be an essentialised category.
Introduction
The essay appeared in 2004 in the metaphysics part of “American Indian Thought”; it grew out of a keynote Waters gave in 1996 at a feminist philosophy conference at the University of Oregon. It distinguishes a “discrete binary dualism”, whose sharply bounded opposites permit hierarchies such as mind over body or male over female, from a “nondiscrete nonbinary dualism”, in which each term remains itself and is part of the other. Waters traces the first from Plato and Neoplatonism into the colonial encounter, where it shaped how Europeans misread Indigenous peoples, and finds the second surviving from the Anishinaabe to the Maya and the Diné. Feminist and race theory, Waters argues, should take this ontology into account when describing the identities of American Indian women.
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