Variously constituted through colonial violence, control and appropriation over 500 years, alongside deeper histories, alternative modern societies are diverse and unequal. To appreciate commonalities between them and their differences from other-than-modern worlds, recently popular is the concept of ontology (metaphysical approach to nature of being).
Under this ‘ontological turn’, a particular modern ontology is observed and critiqued as pervasive. This categorial ontology divides nature from cultures, human subjects from nonhuman objects, and scientific facts from political interests and values. Modern science here is purged of all things cultural and believed to reveal universal reality. It is within this ‘one-world world’ grip of modernity, that diverse mobilities of more and less privileged people may be situated.
Where mobilities are grasped pluriversally – in a ‘many worlds world’ – the moving assemblages of modern tourists and digitalists are considered ontologically distinct from those of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers and other peoples (particularly when labelled as Indigenous). Mobile peoples are thus approached as living-making-knowing different worlds.
This alterity is framed by appreciating a world’s inherent ontology and distinguishing it from that of another world. Such an approach to alterity is categorial: it privileges a world’s internal characteristics over constituting relations that span worlds – socially and materially. I propose to approach alterity by attempting to prioritise relations over categories: focusing on topologies as durably interwoven patterns of socio-material relations that constitute worlds. Topologies are relational patterns that remain unchanged as worlds grow or shrink in size, or even as worlds are displaced.
Topological grasps of worlds may reveal how colonial relations of control and extraction are made manifest in modern worlds, while other relations like care and altruism are subdued. Crucial then are transformations demanded and enacted by decolonial movements, for the flourishing of many worlds where relations such as care and conviviality are foregrounded.
