Paper short abstract:

This paper surveys some of the issues and contexts of relativism and relationality within the literature. Guided by an ethnography of Eastern Tibet, it articulates an ecology of moralities, which prioritises the relationships that shape and create always-contingent entities.

Paper long abstract:

Within Anthropology and beyond, the usefulness of relativism, as a concept, has been variously critiqued and defended. In the process, versions of relativism - as extreme, strong and mild - have emerged, with commentaries on how these connect to issues of political critique, moral imperative and philosophical axiom. Notwithstanding the insights afforded by the literature, this paper starts from a different question. Rather than take for granted the stability of entities that form relationships and that may then be placed "relative to" each other, the paper explores how, and to what extent, relationships create always-contingent entities. Guiding this question is an ethnography of Eastern Tibet and, particularly, the relationships between human pastoralists and nonhuman animals and worldly beings. When animals are liberated, moral injunctions alter pastoralists' relationships with animals because of changing relationships with worldly beings. Yet relationships with worldly beings - visible in one way, non-visible in another - themselves interplay with environmental and political contexts. What emerges is a methodological approach - an ecology - that is sensitive to the quality of relations and contexts in any situation. The implications of this different logic are explored in conclusion, by the playful set-up of an ecology of "the beast", namely, relativism in its various versions.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a Batesonian framework, this paper shows how attention to the commons among Peruvian Urarina is linked to a moral stance characterised by its respect for singularity.

Paper long abstract:

Rejecting the conventional environmentalist separation of the natural and the cultural, Bateson recognised the interconnectedness of the "three ecologies" of mind, environment, and social relations. Such a perspective suggests the possibility of an approach to moral life as contingent upon shifting configurations of social and ecological relationships, and a comparative approach that avoids the pitfalls of relativism. This paper develops this idea in showing how for the Urarina, a native people of the Peruvian Amazon for whom the human and non-human form an interconnected field, their relational embeddedness leads them to prioritise a distinctive moral stance characterised by its far-reaching respect for individual autonomy and uniqueness, which is quite distinct from modern possessive individualism. An orientation towards ecological and other resources that are held in common, rather than publicly or privately owned, inhibits the development of principles of equivalence of the kind that underpin Western notions of individualism and equality, and allows for an understanding of common being as founded on singularity.

Paper short abstract:

I consider two perspectives from Bateson’s thought, the first regarding how cultural contact often yields values simplification, the second involving what values are maintained by changing others, even when the values allowed to change may be more fundamental ones to long term system survival.

Paper long abstract:

Perspectives from the later work of Gregory Bateson can be useful in placing resource extraction projects in context. They can help us ask some of the necessary difficult questions. I shall describe two such perspectives and apply them to the cases at hand. For the first, in a 1991 talk, Bateson looks at the systemic simplifications that often accompany cultural contact. Using my own summarizing terms for what Bateson describes via example and implication, he sees in these contact situations, (1) a simplification of existing cultural understandings or values -- his favored examples involve religious concepts themselves seen as relational communications; (2) a placing of these understandings or cultural forms in an encompassing larger culture but in a way which trivializes them; and (3) the bringing in of a universal language of quantification, especially involving money. For the second Batesonian approach relevant to these projects one turns to his cybernetic work on what he termed the economics of flexibility. In any system which is living or composed of living beings, some factors or variables are enabled to be stable by the changing of others. Thus in any system, from the most local to the national, transnational, or global, we can ask what is that system maintaining as a stable value, at the cost of which changes in other parts of the system. But are the values allowed to change the ones which would be more fundamental or conducive to long term system survival?

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores ethnographically the notion of truth in an Australian Aboriginal desert society, where traditional meanings rub up against Christian beliefs, ongoing struggle for political self-determination and against economic deprivation.

Paper long abstract:

In some form or other, truth must feature in any moral system; it is a fundamental aspect of social life and of cultural episteme. This paper explores ethnographically the notion of truth in an Australian Aboriginal desert society, where traditional meanings rub up against Christian beliefs, ongoing struggles for political self-determination and against economic deprivation. As part of my current research into an emergent Anangu ontology, and drawing on long-term fieldwork at Ernabella (Pukatja) on the APY Lands in South Australia, I examine the meaning range of the antonyms 'mulapa ngunti' (real, true as opposed to false, made-up), as used by adults and children, and in intercultural communications that can include the ethnographer as perceived moral 'judge'.

Paper short abstract:

Ganma is an allegory 'gifted' by elders of two Yolngu clans to mathematics educators at Yirrkala in the 1980s. A diagram of two rivers which have actual existence meeting in a lagoon forming vortices as waters mix, the allegory piloted the episode of maths curriculum development that followed.

Paper long abstract:

The paper elaborates how a contemporary Indigenous Australian community went about negotiating a place for indigenous thought in their schools' mathematics curriculum. It shows how the Ganma allegory piloted collective moral judgement and governance in the episode.

Determined that the elements of Yolngu Aboriginal conceptual consciousness which lies at the core of their knowledge traditions, should find a place in the modern elementary school mathematics taught in the community school, they engaged in a form of conceptual negotiation with state curriculum officials. The outcome of the negotiations conducted over a period of eight years (1988-1996) was a radically alternative yet still official mathematics curriculum for a group of Yolngu Aboriginal schools in Australia's Northern Territory.

The curriculum, known in some places as "Living Maths," took as analogous two mathetic formalisms that at first glance seem incommensurable. A mathetic formalism is a prescribed base of disciplined of learning, and in modern life the exemplar is the enumerated entity; it performs a stabilising function in social, economic, and political arenas. The primary school curriculum inducts children into the practices by which enumerated entities as formalisms come to life and work. In Yolngu Aboriginal life the analogous mathetic formalism is a genealogical entity. Thinking through the Ganma allegory, a partial but strict analogy between the workings of the enumerated entities of modern life and the workings of the genealogical entities in Yolngu life was effected to become the conceptual core of the four strands of the Living Maths curriculum.