Structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1955, 1962) laid the foundation for understanding how humans conceptually categorize their worlds through symbolic binaries and how these binaries shape social and ecological relationships. It is based on a modest, albeit unreasonable, premise that “nature” is untamed, and raw, and “culture” is organized and prepared. However, in reality, nature-culture dichotomy is a mere illusion perpetuated by modernity (Latour 1991, 2004). Humans must develop an ontological schema to (re)include non-human agency in scientific and political discourse. This leads us to rework the human system of governance and adopt Earth Centred Governance (ECG) (Ellis 2024a, b; Rockström et al. 2024). In this framework policies must be designed to voice the sentiments and concerns of both the human and the non-human worlds fostering the indispensable sustainability in the era of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). This shift in the ontology can be brought about by redirecting our attention toward Indigenous Knowledge Systems which represent relational ontologies (Ingold 2000) that view humans as essentially embedded within their immediate ecological systems and practice ‘making kin’, a form of multispecies relationality (Haraway 2016). This paper explores templates of sustainability, relationality, and reciprocity between the human and non-human worlds as depicted in folk ontologies, focusing on select Gond folktales from India, a tribe known for their deep ecological sensitivity as exemplified in their art, culture, and everyday practices.
