Echology is a neologism using the Greek ἔχω [ékhō, 'to have'], rather than oikos ['house'] forming both 'ecology' and 'economy'. It is an alternative concept to ontology, the study of existences or beings, and is here proposed to designate modes of belonging.

For that is what one seems to encounter carrying out field philosophy in Indigenous Australia. There is much talk of attachment: people 'belonging' to one another through kinship, 'holding onto' culture, having inalienable connections to Country: there are multiple echologies. Bruno Latour seemed to suggest this, following Gabriel Tarde in the initiation of a philosophy of relations, which replaces the 'being' of philosophies of existence, with the 'having' of attachments. And in Indigenous Australia there seems to be little existential talk—pointless, really. In the vernacular, we talk rather of what something 'has got going for it', a process echology. In the process of describing what something is, we usually end up listing its attachments, rather than fixing on its identity or essence: what it needs to get along in its world in the form of its attributes and extensions.