Taking a Longer Path: Weaving Words and 'Thought Experiments' with Special Guest Dr Tyson Yunkaporta

Taking a Longer Path: Weaving Words and 'Thought Experiments' with special guest Dr Tyson Yunkaporta and Dr Paul Mason

 

In this YarnPod episode, Dr Paul Mason sits down with Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk (2019) and Right Story, Wrong Story (2023) to share a wide-reaching yarn that might have you hitting the pause button every couple of minutes.

Tyson is from the Apalech clan from the Western Cape York of Australia. An Aboriginal scholar and founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, Tyson describes some of his work as 'reverse anthropology.'

Tyson's most recent book - Right Story, Wrong Story is a sequence of 'thought experiments', which are, as he writes, ‘crowd-sourced narratives where everybody’s contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included…the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call “yarning”.’

In this YarnPod, Yunkaporta challenges his interlocutors to question the status quo, to delay forming opinions before taking the time to consider issues from multiple perspectives, and to reconsider how we construct narrative, truth and connection. Every listener is sure to take home something different and no listener will finish this YarnPod unchanged. 

 

More about Tyson Yunkaporta.

More about Paul Mason.