Dualisms, such as mind-body, human- non-human and culture-nature, the ‘unbinding’ of the human life from nature and the human and from the non-human means positioning the human as the superior, the only one with a rational consciousness. Due to dualisms our ties to immanent life and our interrelationality have been undone.¹ René Descartes (1596 – 1650), a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, and the father of the Cartesian dualism, claimed that the body cannot think. While performing vivisections, he claimed that animals were mere machinale—non-thinking, non-feeling, soulless lower beings. Cartesian dualism rendered the natural world and its beings mute, deaf, inanimate and insentient. Subordinate servants to man, who claimed to be only one capable of communication and making meaning. Human exceptionalism, the idea of human intellect as something superior to that of all our co-beings, has led to the incapability to recognize and to respect their different qualities.

Cartesian dualism spread over the world like a wild fire became the fundamental worldview. It has driven and allowed for colonialisms, tremendous extractivisms, concentration camps for other animal species to maximize their potential for consumption, climate decline, and destruction biodiversity alongside with cultural and spiritual practices and belief systems.

Writer Amitav Ghosh² points out the Cartesian dualism as the root of the transition from animistic worldviews to humancentric. Utilizing and focusing on this modernist societies (and sciences) became patriarchal, racialised and reductionist- generating exploitative forms of knowledge that were needed for industrialization - and keep fuelling capitalisms. That have become the only “true knowledge”- as opposed to knowledges fostering pluriverse, regeneration, and cultivation that could be considered as vital knowledges, and continuums.

The modernist human has institutionalized gods and situated them outside the natural world.

In my research to oppose dualisms I have been working with Northern shamanisms for a long time. I have had the privilege to meet and work with many shamans in particular in Manchuria (Northeast China) and Southern Mongolia (Inner Mongolian Autonomic Reagion, China). Shamanic cosmologies urge for respectful treatment of the living, animistic and interdependent world that is mystical, complex and delicately resilient. In shamanisms, and in indigenous ontologies in general, there is no single external “reality” or  temporality. In this sense “reality” is a process or relationship or multiple relationships rather than an object.³ For a shaman, rituals are polyvocal, and are generative, deeply rooted points of knowledge production, affirming cosmic and worldly alliances and solidarity with interdependent worlds.⁴ Ancestors, spirits, animal gods and all phenomena, all entities and beings are active and vital subjectivities and knowledge –generating agencies. Across temporalities and spaces.

“There are magical phenomena, but they are all part of this world”.

For the modernist we enter here the terrain of extra-natural and unscientific. However I would rather see this as going beyond this limited understanding of science and its politics, to the terrain of the not-yet known, terrain of re-enfleshing of untangling the body from the violence of dualism (such as in modern science).

After all everything in the universe is energy. Nothing can exist without another.

Dualistic thinking enableb us human to create this mess, the period of human dominance and attendant extinction and environmental devastation known as the Anthropocene, that is the consequence of the “amputations” of the sensitivities and intellects of our co-beings and environments. We need regain our engagement, take responsabilty and humbly acknowledge that we are molecular, we are immanent, we are interdependent, we are intra-acting agencies, and not more (or less) than one being amongst other (beings): physically, emotionally, materially and ethically tangled with and embedded in Earth.⁵ We humans ourselves are, and are part of multispecies community. This necessitates rejection, or rather excorsims, of dualisms. As oppesed to dualities, continuums celebrate vital materialism and the self-organising forces of matter. Subjectivity of all being and entities. Multiple forms and agencies of knowledge vibrate and course through bodies and beings, organic, inorganic, thoughts, actions and imaginations, making the worlds.

“Within the porous landscape a shaman worships his holy mountain. May dried out rivers and waterfalls and the damaged land resurrect, come to life”.
- Excerpt from the film installation Flesh and Metal. Light and Oil. Kristiina Koskentola (2020): Reflecting the ceremony by böö (shaman) Altanduulag, Abaga Banner, Southern Mongolia (Inner Mongolian Autonomic Reagion, China).