Status
Available
Call number
Collections
Publication
Melbourne, Victoria : Text Publishing, 2019.
Subjects
Original publication date
2019-09-19
ISBN
9781925773996
Local notes
Signed by the author
Description
This book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger's cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It's about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It's about how we learn and how we remember. It's about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it's about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.
User reviews
LibraryThing member willszal
Tyson Yunkaporta is an aboriginal Australian. There are a lot of books getting attention these days focused on "indigenous wisdom," and this is a standout.
The first thing that stands out to me about the book is its structure; to write each chapter, Yunkaporta crafted an object to serve as a
Yunkaporta begins by speaking about narcissists. He establishes that the difference between colonizing cultures and indigenous cultures is that the former have a mindset of "better-than." This is a very simple idea that also is very true.
Like a lot of books these days, "Sand Talk" gets pretty deep into ontology and epistemology. At the last chapter, he recaps the book through looking at five windows of knowing: 1) learning through close observation and demonstration, 2) passing on knowledge with a helping hand then gradually stepping back, 3) verbally, 4) memorization through deep listening, and 5) thinking, reflecting, and understanding. Like many themes in the book, this is a meta-framework that can be used to reinterpret the book itself.
In this way, it is a book that can be read many times, and new depths will be found with subsequent readings.
The first thing that stands out to me about the book is its structure; to write each chapter, Yunkaporta crafted an object to serve as a
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"mnemonic." I've experimented some over the years with using different methods of structuring writing, and I've heard many stories about aboriginal song lines, but I haven't seen anything like this before! It is a practice I'd like to reflect more on.Yunkaporta begins by speaking about narcissists. He establishes that the difference between colonizing cultures and indigenous cultures is that the former have a mindset of "better-than." This is a very simple idea that also is very true.
Like a lot of books these days, "Sand Talk" gets pretty deep into ontology and epistemology. At the last chapter, he recaps the book through looking at five windows of knowing: 1) learning through close observation and demonstration, 2) passing on knowledge with a helping hand then gradually stepping back, 3) verbally, 4) memorization through deep listening, and 5) thinking, reflecting, and understanding. Like many themes in the book, this is a meta-framework that can be used to reinterpret the book itself.
In this way, it is a book that can be read many times, and new depths will be found with subsequent readings.
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LibraryThing member leslie.emery
Not only does Yunkaporta provide his own interesting and expansive perspective in this books, but he also consults with many other indigenous people to share their perspective. I especially enjoyed his section on gender roles and the input he got from the expert he consulted for that section.
I
I find myself thinking back to this book regularly, and I'm sure I'll listen to it again in the future and get even more out of it.
I
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listened to the audiobook, which was read by the author and which I highly recommend. Because this book is about getting insight into indigenous thinking, it's especially helpful to hear it in the voice and delivery of the author himself, who is an engaging and very conversational speaker. Because the images in the book are very important to guiding the topic of each section, the publisher provided these illustrations in an online supplement for the audiobook, so it's easy to refer to them when they're indicated in the audio.I find myself thinking back to this book regularly, and I'm sure I'll listen to it again in the future and get even more out of it.
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LibraryThing member vanzaj
Complex adaptive systems (us too) yarning about living in a complex dynamic worlds.
Media reviews
Perhaps the most unusual science book of the year is Sand Talk. by Tyson Yunkaporta (Text), which he describes as "a series of yarns with diverse people who all make me feel uncomfortable". Yunkaporta examines subjects such as food, medicine, gender relations and financial and environmental systems
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by using visual symbols to represent his thinking – he carves objects, and draws pictures in sand. "I'm not reporting on Indigenous Knowledge systems for a global audience’s perspective," he says. "I'm examining global systems from an Indigenous Knowledge perspective." It's a dramatically new (to some) and absorbing way of engaging with the world, and stops just short of exasperation with self-important "western science". "Silly thinking is something everybody is guilty of from time to time," Yunkaporta writes. "It is forgivable as long as you're still listening." It illustrates perfectly that there is no such thing as "the science", that we should question anyone who tries to claim scientific thought as their own, and that intellectual curiosity is everything. Show Less
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