Book completed

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, by Tyson Yunkaporta. The author is part Aboriginal Australian and part Scot, educated in the Indigenous traditions of the group with which he is affiliated. He is also a university academic. In the first chapter, he spends some time discussing the frustrations he experiences at not always being considered sufficiently "authentic," but it turns out that a large fraction of the people with Aboriginal Australian ancestry are to some extent cut off from their heritage, so this problem is common. I liked what he had to say, but it also took me a while to realize that the very reason he wasn't being as abstract and academic as I would prefer was because the traditions he's sharing are very much grounded in personal anecdotes, poetic metaphors and symbolism, and including art in daily life. Under those conditions for communication, he's probably actually reasonably direct, because he's teaching by doing.

If I were ever to talk with him directly, the thing I'd probably be most interested in exploring further is his frustration with the Western style of education that invented the idea of adolescence, a period during which he sees people who would be considered adults in traditional culture instead experiencing a prolonged childhood during which they are taught to become good, compliant workers or soldiers, etc. Although I fully agree that the way our education system mechanizes time and teaches compliance is not optimal for developing well-rounded adults, I would be interested to hear what he would think about the discoveries in neuroscience that our brains are not fully developed in terms of judgment and responsibility until we're around 25 - sexual maturity greatly precedes social maturity and self-discipline.