Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:06:02.020Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Engaging Indigenous Knowledges: From Sovereign to Relational Knowers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2016

Morgan Brigg
Morgan Brigg*
Affiliation:
School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
*
address for correspondence: Email: m.brigg@uq.edu.au
Get access

Abstract

Increasing engagement with Indigenous knowledges (IKs) in mainstream tertiary educational institutions presents both ethico-political and epistemological challenges. This article engages these challenges by first cautioning against making wholesale distinctions between IKs and Western knowledges (WKs) and then examining the epistemological and politico-cultural entailments of the figure of the mainstream WK knower. Although the WK knower is typically cast as a sovereign being in command of knowledge, the practicalities of processes of knowing reveal the knower as at least partially relational. While the sovereign knower typically returns to his/her self in mainstream WKs, thereby disavowing or subsuming cultural others in ways that compromise serious engagement with IKs, relationality suggests more positive possibilities for becoming susceptible to Indigenous concerns and ways of knowing. This does not spell a relativist agenda. Rather, it shows that knowledge is established through relational processes and that WK knowers might better engage IKs by become less sovereign and more relational knowers.

Keywords

Indigenous knowledgespolitics of knowledgerelationalityepistemologymethodologywriting
Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 152 - 158
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agacinski, S. (1991). Another experience of the question, or experiencing the question other-wise. In Connor, P., Nancy, J-L. & Cadava, E. (Eds.), Who comes after the subject? (pp. 9–23). New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bell, A. (2014). Relating indigenous and settler identities: Beyond domination. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Brigg, M. (2008). The new politics of conflict resolution: Responding to difference. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar
Cajete, G. (2000). Native science: Natural laws of interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers.Google Scholar
Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dallmayr, F. R. (1981). Twilight of subjectivity: Contributions to a post-individualist theory of politics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Dei, G. J. S., Hall, B. L., & Rosenberg, D. G. (2000). Preface. In Dei, G. J. S., Hall, B. L. & Rosenberg, D. G. (Eds.), Indigenous knowledges in global contexts: Multiple readings of our world (pp. xi–xvi). Toronto and Buffalo: OISE/UT in association with University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. (1979). From the native's point of view: On the nature of anthropological understanding. In Rabinow, P. and Sullivan, W. M. (Eds.), Interpretive social science: A reader (pp. 225–241). Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, M. (1999). Some thoughts about the philosophical underpinnings of Aboriginal worldviews. Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion, 3 (2), 105–118.Google Scholar
Henry, M. (1991). The critique of the subject. In Connor, P., Nancy, J.-L. & Cadava, E. (Eds.), Who comes after the subject? (pp. 157–166). New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Huggins, J. (1998). Sister girl: The writings of Aboriginal activist and historian Jackie Huggins. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2002). War of the worlds: What about peace?. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Levinas, E. (1987). Time and the other and additional essays. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Levinas, E. (1991). Otherwise than being or beyond essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd, K., Suchet-Pearson, S., Wright, S., Burarrwanga, L., & Bawaka, Country. (2012). Reframing development through collaboration: Towards a relational ontology of connection in Bawaka, North East Arnhem Land. Third World Quarterly, 33 (6), 1075–1094.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meillassoux, Q., Brassier, R., & Badiou, A. (2008). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. London and New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Muecke, S. (2009). Cultural science? The ecological critique of modernity and the conceptual habitat of the humanities. Cultural Studies, 23 (3), 404–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press.Google Scholar
Nicholls, R. (2009). Research and Indigenous participation: Critical reflexive methods. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 12 (2), 117–126.Google Scholar
Ong, W. J. (1977). Interfaces of the word: Studies in the evolution of consciousness and culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London and New York: Methuen.Google Scholar
Poster, M. (1984). Foucault, Marxism and history: Mode of production versus mode of information. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. (1986). Asiwinarong: Ethos, image, and social power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar