EP 282 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Law, Lore, and Learning



Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta about the ideas in his new book Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. They discuss a symbolic emu visitor on Jim’s farm, Aboriginal collective pronouns, Sand Talk‘s impact, wrong canoes, lore vs law, how Aboriginal law adapted to invasion, ritualized violence & rule-governed fighting, Aboriginal knowledge systems & peer review, signals & spirit in natural systems, the sacred as a way to deal with complex systems, Plato’s noble lie, restricted knowledge, Aboriginal law & the Jewish Torah, plague impacts, art as store of capital vs communal knowledge, the metaphor & mythology of water dowsing, Tyson’s upcoming book, how to be a deeply spiritual skeptical atheist, and much more.

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne and is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.