Non-binary Dualism

 

Native American culture, particularly the religions of the Desert Southwest, speak of the duality of existence, the duality of the universe, and the need to never stray too far from a center path.

Compassion and aggression, for example, exist in each of us, but too much of either can weaken our souls.  The chief purpose of healing ceremonies is to help the patient get back into balance, back to that center path. This is a concept that I have long embraced.  One that I felt sure I understood until a few days ago. 

That’s when I came across an incredibly racist  article claiming that non-Indians couldn’t possibly understand Native American religion because our thought systems are based on  binary thinking! 

The statement was made by a woman who is a Native American.  It’s the kind of statement I could never get by with, but members of minorities often make with impunity – but maybe that should be a subject for a later day.

Native American Professor Anne Waters, writing in American Indians in Philosophy for the American Philsophical Association says that while most European/American thought is based on binary thinking, Native Americans see the same dualism in a nonbinary way. 

Binary dualism is the division of things into two (opposing) categories. Good and evil, light and darkness, man and woman,  stillness and motion, and the list goes on ad infinitum. In European/American culture and tradition, thought and language are built around this notion of binary dualism.

Waters goes on to explain that a nonbinary, complementary, dualist construct would distinguish two things:

(1) a dualism, such as male/female that may appear (in a binary ontology) as opposites or different from one another in some important respect; and
(2) a nonbinary (complementary) syntax that puts together these two constructs without maintaining the sharp and clear boundary distinctions of a binary system.

A nonbinary (complementary) dualism would place the two  together in such a way that one would remain itself, and yet also be a part of the other. In this way, any hierarchical valuing of one as being better, superior, or more valued than another  is excluded by the nonbinary logic.

She says that such complementary (nonbinary) dualisms can be found today in language and religion of such diverse indigenous people as the Ojibwa (Chippewa) in Canada,  the Mayan in South America, and in the metaphysics of the Southwestern US tribes such as the Hopi and Navajo.

Maybe my tiny bit of Choctaw blood somehow made me immune from the stupidity of White Folks, but I’m pretty sure that I grasped the concept of a nonbinary dualism a long time ago.  I find her notion that people of European ancestry are incapable of the subtlety of thought necessary to understand such a concept to be extremely annoying.