Individuals are Identified Through Their Relations

Individuals, whether events, particles, or subsystems, don’t have intrinsic names or labels or coordinates. They are distinguished and named only by what they know about the rest of the system through their interactions or shared relationships, ie by what they see when they look around. This is expressed as the view of that individual… so we never think of an individual particle as placed or moving in a background space. We think of an individual only in terms of its view of the rest. — Lee Smolin

In modern physics the essential stuff of the universe cannot be reduced to billiard-ball atoms, but exists as relationships and fluctuations at the boundary of what we call matter and energy. Indigenous science teaches that all that exists is an expression of relationships, alliances, and balances between what, for lack of better words, we could call energies, powers, or spirits. — David Peat

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time; events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an “event.” It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. — Carlo Rovelli

Relationality doesn’t mean that there is one way to do and conceive decoloniality, and that it happens to be the way we—the authors of this text—do and conceive it. For us to think that we are in possession of a decolonial universal truth would not be decolonial at all but modern/colonial, and for you, the reader, to assume that this is the way we think would create misunderstandings from the very beginning. Relationality also doesn’t mean simply to include other practices and concepts into our own. Its meaning references what some Andean Indigenous thinkers, including Nina Pacari, Fernando Huanacuni Mamani, and Félix Patzi Paco, refer to as vincularidad. Vincularidad is the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is a relation and interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet. — Catherine E. Walsh and Walter Mignolo

The universe is a collection of events, connected through interactions and relationships. Humans are no exception. Despite the insistence of Western individualism, humans do not exist in isolation as things but rather in networks of relationships that give rise to their becoming. Each of us has a distinct and unique view of the universe that is revealed by what we see when we look around.