Artifice of Binaries

Binary	Challenged in Indigenous Epistemologies	Challenged in Philosophical Critique of Abstraction
Animate / Inanimate	All beings are relational and potentially sentient (volcanoes, rivers, stones)	Posthumanism and new materialism contest passive matter (Barad, Latour)
Nature / Culture	No divide—landscapes are cultural and spirits are ecological	Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), Descola
Transcendent / Immanent	The sacred is embedded in place, not outside it	Nietzsche, Spinoza, Agamben on immanent theologies
Economy / Politics	Economy embedded in kinship, ritual, land-use; not abstract	Foucault (governmentality), Agamben (oikonomia)
Sacred / Profane	No strict division—ritual life pervades all relations	Bataille, Durkheim, Asad (sacrality as constructed)
Legal / Illegal	Law is oral, customary, embedded in land; not code-based	Benjamin, Derrida (law’s violence, exception)
Wet / Dry	Binary collapses in multispecies ecologies (e.g., seepage, humidity)	Haraway (response-ability in fluid boundaries)
Inside / Outside	Places are porous, interwoven; community is processual	Nancy, Butler (subject formation is relational)
Land / Water	Often indivisible in cosmologies (e.g. water-spirits in land)	New geographies of fluid territories (Massey, Steinberg)
Cosmology / Economy	Intertwined: labor, ritual, and meaning are not separable	Federici, Agamben, Stengers (cosmopolitical critique)
Mind / Body	Knowledge is embodied, sensed, danced, dreamt	Merleau-Ponty, Grosz (embodied cognition)
Reason / Emotion	Affect is epistemic; animals and weather are felt knowers	Ahmed, Lugones (emotional knowledge, decolonial feeling)
Universal / Particular	Place-based universals (e.g., land as teacher)	Haraway (situated knowledges), Dussel (transmodernity)
Subject / Object	Subjectivity distributed across beings and relations	Derrida, Barad, Latour (object-oriented agency)
Living / Dead	Ancestors are alive in land, water, volcano	Mbembe (necropolitics), Indigenous metaphysics
Past / Future	Time spirals or dwells in place; future emerges from land memory	Benjamin (non-linear time), Bergson
Public / Private	Commons ethics collapse this binary; stewardship over ownership	Arendt, Federici, Fraser
Myth / History	Myth is geographic truth; history is storied place	Anzaldúa, Benjamin (history as montage, mythopoetic)
Reality / Representation	Maps, stories, and rituals constitute reality	Baudrillard, Butler (performativity of the real)
Secular / Sacred	No such divide; spirits inhabit all domains	Asad (secularism as a mode of power), Deloria
Individual / Collective	Identity is co-constituted with kin, land, beings	Nancy (being-in-common), Moten
Fixed / Moving	Place is migratory, seasonal, rhythmic	Massey (space-time as eventful)
Disaster / Ceremony Water/Fire	Volcanic eruptions can be cosmological negotiations	Stengers, de la Cadena (event as cosmopolitical rupture)