Nothing is numerous or few in itself

Pre-colonial Hone-speaking society, that is, the early twentieth century and before, and the religious and economic practices of its member resonate in the liminal sites that now form the edgelands of villages and hamlets. There, stones remain filled with spiritual agency, and traces of how power was organized in relation to the spiritual world reveal some of the old strategies that helped to avoid monopolization of power in order to retain the openness and porosity needed to resonate with the world. Nouns in Hone only rarely could express plurals of things and people, and most of the time lacked any means to categorize the referents they described. Hone&s;s ideas about the opacity of words with regard to classification were in direct opposition with Western academic ones, which led to conversations about the deeper connections with other epistemologies and people, referring to old narratives about an origin in the east, at a place now located in Armenia. The chapter is concluded with a fantasy: what if the people once made a decision to deliberately and creatively get rid of their linguistic categorization devices in order to make the world more transparent?