Education as Anaesthetic, Learning Beyond Time and Space - A Conversation with Carl Mika

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If we look around us at Māori scholarship, and I think Indigenous scholarship generally, there's a huge amount of emphasis on knowledge. The word knowledge will come up all the time, and it's not an innocuous term. It sets a certain disposition of the self towards the all and towards the world that we can see as well. And so to that extent, it's quite problematic, I think.

Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining me again today for this episode. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As you can probably guess from the title of this episode, this conversation with the amazing Kyle Mika went pretty deep, pretty quickly. That's because underlying the most apparently basic concepts like learning or logic that people use all the time are some pretty fundamental assumptions about the way the world is. And what happens when we realize that these are not universal to all humans? What does educating our young people in how to read their worlds mean in this case? Karl Meeker is from the Tuarangi iwi, professor of Māori and Indigenous philosophies and head of school at Ōtahi School of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa, the country now known as New Zealand. Karl is the author of the amazing book Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence. In 2017, along with many articles and chapters on issues of colonisation and reductionism. In 2024, he was awarded the University of Canterbury Research Medal, as well as the University of Canterbury Faculty of Arts Kai Ranga Hou Māori Award for research in Māori philosophies and methodologies. So thank you, Karl. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to have this conversation.

It's having me here.

Yeah, no, it's, thank you. It's, as I said previously off air, I've, you know, been doing some fascinating explorations for myself. Lots of kind of different questions around different ways of knowing and obviously with people like colleagues and friends I know of yours, like Vanessa Andriotti on the podcast and Mary Baptiste, fascinating conversation with her on a previous episode. So yeah, no, just super happy to be able to have this conversation. It's, there's a huge amount in your work that I've, you know, it feels like I've got a thousand questions, but one of the things I've just found fascinating about your work is take these concepts that on one level you might chat with someone about a word like learning or a word like logic, and you know, you get this, these kind of relatively superficial, of course everybody knows what that means. And then as I've listened to you, you speaking and been reading your work about, you know, from a Māori philosophy, it kind of turns the whole thing. On its head and, and adds so much and so many questions to, like, for example, learning in an educational space has, it's kind of assumed that we know what that means. So maybe we can, if it's all right with you, start with that. Just, I may mispronounce it, but I was listening to you talk about wananga.

Wananga, yeah.

And you were saying that it was kind of, that it kind of meant learning or people would use it to signify learning, but actually it wasn't really. That. So yeah, maybe just an opening question about what, from a Māori perspective, how do you talk about learning itself?

Well, firstly, there was something you said there which is important to address, that is that Māori philosophy turns things on its head. I think a potential version of Māori philosophy does. I think probably any Māori philosophy, if it were taken to its furthest extent, would. So when we're talking about Māori philosophy in relation to my work, it's more how I've interpreted the word or a problem, right? Drawing on various things to form that particular argument. Someone else may come up with something a little bit different. So what I'm trying to say there is that what I've, what I've come up with isn't truth. It's more speculative.

Yeah.

But we do know, I think most of us would agree that there is a reductionism in translation that occurs and that that is important to address somehow. So whānanga is one of those things which I've been thinking, I've been thinking about whānanga so much, but the term wah, which forms part of that, wah means time and space. And if you don't have a concept of time and space in a culture, then there's something else at play. And so this is an example of where I'm doing my own interpretation of it. There are various interpretations of wah around and wā for some people is like a spiral or, you know, circular. And so in that extent, it's kind of holistic. For me, it's like there's no such thing as time and space really, because everything is completely one.

Mm-hmm.

So instead of talking about time and space, which immediately invokes some sort of linearity straight away, right? Then we have to think of it differently. So one of the things that I've thought about is that it's a kind of a reverberation. Wā is a reverberation, it's an utter presence. And so in that way, when we're invoking the term presence in English, there is a sense of time about it. It's utterly in the now, here and now. But it's so, the world is so packed, everything is so one that it sort of resonates. Wāonanga is the kind of, almost in a way, an extreme version of that in my view. So it's like things come into appearance and come into view and come into reverberation with the self such that the self has some revelation about it. And in that way, there is a kind of teaching and learning going on.

Yeah. Interesting.

Right.

Yeah.

But it's not a conscious, I'm giving you this knowledge thing. It's not so much to do with that. It's more the state of affairs of the all as it comes to bear on the human self.

We don't, we dived straight in, eh? We, we went deep.

Well, you did ask.

Yeah. Exactly. I very much did. I mean, it's completely fascinating because, so the word that comes to me is some kind of unfolding of like somehow the world is unfolding itself to me as, as the learner. I mean, it's really difficult to use any language actually.

We can use those sort of as just kind of holding, right?

Hold them lightly, right? Yeah, exactly. But there's something about, yeah, an experience of the world, a coming to know of the world, a seeing, hearing. I heard you also use like some kind of regard, so there's like like something, there's a feeling about it, there's a kind of a coming to know that is so different. I mean, exactly as you say about as soon as you bring the linearity of time and space, it becomes this, this accumulation of things, of knowing and learning, right? It's like the bits of information that I'm gathering and accumulating because they're all these separate pieces that I'm kind of bringing into my possession somehow. And it's almost such a different concept and itself, right? It's like gathering and collecting these bits versus some kind of like fully embodied experiencing of, and again, this is me talking from a completely ignorant perspective of Māori philosophy or your version of Māori philosophy, but just a kind of a, maybe a sense of what I feel and hear more and more people in the education space talking about when they're questioning this, I, I think very superficial version of what learning is. Grasping for something much deeper, but not quite knowing what that looks like in a classroom situation or in a life experiential learning. You know, you get all these buzzwords coming in, but this thing at the heart of it is some kind of, yeah, an experience of coming to know the world somehow.

Yeah, I think you're right. There's, you know, one of the things that Vanessa and others have critiqued so well is this emphasis of the West on knowing, knowledge, right? Even if you don't, if you're not really seeking to know in a specific context, the word knowledge is still used. So somehow there's a fetish, yeah, with knowledge. And that's something that I became aware of quite early on in my work and wanted to critique. And then I started to consider what these, what these activities or terms or concepts would look like without knowledge being involved with them, whether it's knowing— even the word knowing is problematic because, you know, if we look around us at Māori scholarship and I think Indigenous scholarship generally, there's a huge amount of emphasis on knowledge. The word knowledge will come up all the time, and it's not an innocuous term, you know, it sets a certain disposition of the self towards the all and towards the world that we can see as well. And so to that extent, it's quite problematic, I think.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, even the phrase Indigenous knowledge gets thrown around a lot, right? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. I mean, with that, I think, you know, most of us would say, yeah, but we mean more than knowledge. And it's like, well, then let's find a different word. How do we, how do we feel about dropping the word? And then you'll find discomfort often sets in with people because they don't really want to drop the word because it might seem that they're starting to embrace something irrational, you know.

Right. But is that an irrationality pinned to a kind of a Cartesian version of, like, how do you mean irrational in that sense?

Well, it would be that, you know, viewing things as knowledge offers a certain comfort because it allows you to be able to still participate in mainstream society. And it would, and it means that you are capable of rational thought, you know, you are capable of stringing together things. In a conventionally orderly way. But actually, if we wanted to keep the term knowledge, then we would probably have to go and, you know, and do that in an ethical way which acknowledges our metaphysics centrally. Then we'd have to go back and look at what knowledge would be with a different set of logics, with an entirely different set of logics. And that's something that really fascinates me at the moment, because it might be that when we have a discussion, if we, if you and I were to have a discussion in a way that is consonant with Indigenous metaphysics or Māori metaphysics, then there would be a set of logics at play whereby our conversation wouldn't be going this way, you know. It would be, to some onlookers, it would be probably unintelligible because it's not connecting ideas in the same way, one utterance with another. There's no correspondence of truth between the ideas in the way that we are taught through education and so on, and in the science around us. Yeah.

I mean, that's absolutely fascinating to me because it kind of confirms some of the things that I was having with the conversations with Mary Battiste and with Vanessa and others, just, it's like it gets everywhere in the sense of the, what the it is, the kind of the assumed universality of certain ways of thinking and knowing, right? The kind of the Western, as you say, like the logic of this.

Yeah.

And the, the linearity comes in immediately 'cause it's this after that. And then as you say, the cause and effect and this means that of this connected to that. But there's so much of the implicit acceptance that those are the only ways to be intelligible in the world somehow that from an educational perspective, obviously, you know, coming back to where I'm, well, both of us are in, in professionally, it's like, well then you teach those things because those are the things that will render you intelligible largely in most places around the world.

Civilized. Yeah.

Civilized in inverted commas. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's like the implication, I mean, Murray says marinating in Eurocentrism, right? And it's like, it's so deeply in everything that it's actually really, as you say, like, what does it even mean to have different logics? But it doesn't, I mean, it's still a cultural artifact, right? Then I would say, I don't know, and more from an anthropological perspective, others might disagree. But maybe could, could you say more about that idea of like, how would that manifest or what would it look like or how, yeah, how would it show up in conceptual spaces or, you know, or even practically between people in interaction?

Well, one of the ways in which we can start to work on that is to go back to our original cosmologies. And if we go back in ours, we find that there's mention of nothingness and darkness before there's light. But I say before because actually that's a linear idea of creation. So instead of trying to clarify things down to the greatest degree possible that we tend to do in order to shed light on something, then there's— it would be almost the opposite to that. It would be to obscure and to protect the the spirituality of the idea or the object, the spiritual ether of it, and the integrity of it by not going directly to it, but to approximate it or to, to talk about it in very obscure terms and not try to clarify it. In education, that would be a very interesting exercise because you would have a different story being told that when you go to write an essay, for example. You might, and this is what I've been writing about, you undermine everything you've just said. Like it's a sort of undermining when it becomes too clear of your own words and your own statements.

Yeah.

And what happens then is a different story emerges rather than the one where everything's tightly interwoven and you go from one point to the other and that leads up to a finding of sorts, you know, in conversation in many Māori forums. And I've written about this as well. You'll often see people not immediately addressing what's just been said. And to the onlooker, it would seem that there's some sort of weird logic going on because there's no addressing of what the person's just said. There actually is, and it ends up being productive. It's just that the person who's just spoken, their words aren't central to that.

Okay.

And so the meaning isn't addressed. The meaning of that person or the desire of that person isn't immediately addressed when they ask a question or when they say something. So in effect, it's actually de-emphasizes the ego of any speaker at any one time, but it opens, it's productive in an almost lateral divergent way.

Fascinating. And how much in that kind of particular example are there also other signifiers or exchanges happening in other ways that are non-propositional, right? So like embodied ways or gesture or 100%. I don't know. I don't know what the others are. That seems to be—

vibe, general vibe.

Yeah, exactly.

Something's up with that particular statement, or I'm not too sure about that, you know. I mean, we all get that, but I think that's very important in Māori setting. So there's that, and then there is body language and stuff like that, of course, and that's also important. Silence. Silence is also another Silence speaks volumes, right? Exactly. Yeah, actually, meaning within silence, and, and that happens quite often in Māori forums as well.

Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely fascinating because I often think about our obsession in a weird setting, right, in a Western kind of educational setting obsessed with it being explicit and being propositional. So it's like if it's not explicit or propositional, it's basically not happening, doesn't exist.

That's right.

You know, if I can't say it and I can't therefore mark it in the essay or whatever, and it can't be implicit unless maybe you are in a creative subject and then you can play with a little bit of implicit, but basically it needs to be, you need to say the thing that you mean.

That's right.

It's like, that's basically what happens in this Western version of education that's now been exported around the world. And it's like, how unbelievably superficial is that of the full depth of what it actually means to be a human inhabiting a space and exchanging with others, right?

I guess it's really efficient and effective in a certain way.

Right.

I mean, I do think it's incredible. What it's achieved. Because that sort of propositional thing is also behind science in a certain way as well. And it's, and it's behind our everyday exchanges. So although I think it needs to change, I think there are certain amazing things about it. And there are probably instances— I'm not discarding it either. I mean, it's, it would have happened, I'm sure, in traditional times that you had that, that mode of exchange happen, or that logic behind exchanges and interactions and so on and developing ideas which would end up being very productive. But it's certainly not the only one. It's like, you're right, it is privileged.

And there's also something else you said which I've used a couple of times, because I just think it's a brilliant description, that the West is constantly in search of something else. And we would consider that, we being from a Māori perspective, I think you're saying there, would consider that to be a disorder. So it's like not only the explicit and the propositional, but this like constant searching for something else.

Yeah.

Rather than the presence or the being or the staying with.

I, yeah, I think that, but I do think that that affects Māori now as well. So when we talk about the West, we're actually talking about ourselves as well. So we're talking more a certain philosophy which was introduced, which meant people sort of dissociated from being in the world towards something which privileged the mind and so on, you know, and between that and a philosophy which existed here prior to colonization, which I suspect was the opposite to that. And, you know, people do say it's the opposite to that, but we, I say I suspect because I wasn't there, so we can't know for sure, but I'm fairly certain that that's the way it would've been. And we haven't worked on, and maybe we don't want to, I don't know, because maybe that pathologizing is not of our own culture, but we haven't worked on our set of pathologies if we wanted to go there for what is a form of disorder or illness. So we know that, you know, there are certain things that are seen to be undesirable, criminal, unhealthy, or bad in the West, and we know what those are, but we haven't yet developed fully from the get-go what those might be in a theoretical way, those signs that show that something's in a state of disorder.

Yeah.

Vaguely we do. Vaguely we say things are out of balance, you know, but the everyday individual behavior, not so much.

Yeah.

I think we're still adhering to what those introduced notions of deviance or disorder or whatever. Right.

I've heard you again, heard you speaking about it and you write about it a lot, the kind of this grammar of interdependence and it relates back in a way to the wah that you were talking about, but it's like the, the importance of that. And it's interesting cuz it's also, you know, more and more people are, I see in my networks talking about those kinds of things. Like we're all interconnected and, you know, that should be a, an important injunction to like change our systems or, you know, or whatever for, you know, because we're all interconnected and an increasing realization of that. But it has felt just getting to know your work that that is from a Maori perspective is so fundamentally important in, in the way that it influences then everything else as you think about things. So even as to your point about disorder or deviance or whatever, that there's a danger in a, in a more of a biomedical model way of just treating separate things as separate things as dysfunctional somehow. But if you go then go back a few steps, it's like, well, if everything's one and everything's interconnected, there is no individual dysfunctional separate thing.

That individualism is a key component of all the institutions like health.

Right.

Law is another big one, you know, where someone's individually culpable or individually holds property or whatever. Yeah. Education is the same because ultimately it's the individual who's being cultivated and in current times being schooled up with knowledge. Yeah, right. Wānanga incidentally has a sense of community or collective immediately anyway, even if you, even if you don't think of it as reverberation like I was talking about, reverberation leading to some sort of knowing or some sort of understanding, even if you want to think of it as ordinary teaching and learning, it's still very collective. But what I find interesting about the term also is that any Māori term is possibly not starting with a human being at all. It's starting with the non-human communing. So there is a communing that happens all around us that we're not aware of. There is a wānanga of sorts happening, and if we were to understand it, we might, with our narrow colonised minds, think of it as just they're teaching and learning with each other. But there is something going on there, you know, some sort of thing that we have no access to essentially, or limited. But we just have to know that there is this communing going on with the non-human as well. And when we become aware of something or we, when we have a revelation or an understanding about something, it's because of the non-human, the communing of the non-human. Yeah, it's partly through our own efforts, of course, but it's also, we have to honour and acknowledge that it's from there. And the systems that we engage with, I'm of two minds about that, whether they have to change or whether we have to set up thoroughly new ones, which, right, have that very centrally. Yeah.

Right. Well, exactly. And that came to mind if from a Māori perspective, you know, these fundamental concepts that the, in inverted commas, education system is built around, and from a, from a Western perspective, it's built around very particular definitions of those concepts, like knowing or learning or community or all of these things. How would, I'm not gonna ask you to design the system here and now, but like, I'm, I'm just interested in how, from a Māori perspective, does this thing called education manifest differently? Whether that's now or historically, or, you know, it's, it's hard to separate obviously in recent times from the experience of colonization, I, I guess. But yeah, how does it show up? How does this kind of, this educational process or educational exchange show up?

It must show up in the course of life, not as a consciously discrete area where you go to in order for that thing to happen. I do, I have heard Elders say that that's what it used to be back in the old, you know, back in the day, was people learnt as they went through life. Some of the biggest, you know, lessons, they would have gone to school, of course, but the greatest learning happened everyday interactions within, you know, within everyday life. But more theoretically than that, I think it's important to— this is always one of the big questions for me is how would we feel if we had to let go of those things which we've treasured for so long and which have made us very comfortable? And this is something Vanessa talks about. We fetishize education, actually. And it's not just education we're fetishizing, it's the certainty that the concept gives alongside any other particular unmovable monolithic concept. You know, how would it be to actually give that up would be the first thing that we would need to ask. It's sort of like going to counseling, you know, to give that up. It's like a little addiction. Massive addiction.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because it makes you feel good.

Right. What exactly? That's what I was just thinking. It's like, it also feels like a good thing in inverted commas, right? It does. It somehow doesn't feel like a dangerous addiction to a damaging substance. It feels like, 'Surely we're doing something good here,' right? Like it's full of hope and future growth and development. And how can you argue against that, right?

It's an anaesthetic peacefulness, right? You know, that's something that I don't think we would have agreed with traditionally. And if we did, we certainly shouldn't now because it does, you know, it just dampens you down. It makes you less than what you are. Yeah, that's a big problem.

That's fascinating. So can you say a bit more about what you mean by that? It makes— because again, in the narratives, education does precisely the opposite. Apparently it enables you to come into the fullest version of yourself, right?

Starting with the bigger question of whether we should get rid of the concept, holding on to the monolith is anaesthetic regardless of whether we're talking about education or anything, but then education itself. If we then delve, go into the next level and go into talking about education, this has been talked about by various people already, but it is this thing of filling people up with knowledge. This is how you are meant to address things in the world. You're meant to look at them in this particular way and talk about them in this particular way. And that ends up being repetitive and boring anyway. For the student. For Māori in tertiary settings, sitting down and writing something bears very little resemblance to really how the world is for us, I think. And so I don't know how you would describe the effect of that psychologically, but it must be over time, it must wear you down, you know, I think it does to most of us because it, and it's probably not just Māori that it's like that for, but disregarding the, and I find it hard to find the words for this, but disregarding the the darkness around a concept or the term and trying to illuminate it all the time is, I suspect, not in correspondence with how we would've done things. And it's certainly not in correspondence with what our utterances are or what our desires are about our future. So, you know, we've got a problem there and that's anaesthetic. I guess I would call that anaesthetic. Very one directional, you know, it's very one directional.

Yeah. And I, I wonder, talking to Mary Baptiste, she has this whole concept and, you know, really fascinating developed work around trans-systemic knowledge systems. And again, it's, I recognize it's built around knowledge, but perhaps if it's possible to move that to one side, this, this idea of kind of holding multiple ways of knowing together somehow? Because I think what she seems to be saying there is that, you know, referring to other people that have used similar but different framings, is it something that, for example, that what you've just been describing could be held alongside a more of a, a Western, more propositional way of knowing so that there's, as she says, something more transsystemic. It transcends somehow so that you're, you, Mina Salami, who I've had on the podcast as well, talks about kaleidoscopic. It's more like it kind of, it allows different frames to then see the world through somehow, if, you know, again, metaphorically, but it's different ways of coming to know the world that afford different things. Clearly there's a cultural tradition aspect. But there's— I just, yeah, I just wonder whether you feel that that's even a possible thing.

Yeah, I do. But I would go back to what we were talking about originally, and that is the grammar we're using in order to do it. We have to be very aware of that. So even the word knowledge there, for instance, you know, putting it to the side, that's fine. But that's just one example we've already gone over. But there will be others that we have to be aware of and do something about somehow. So it has to be a very a very self-conscious, systematic approach. I think you have to carry awareness with you while you're doing it, right? It's almost negative as well, because what you're doing is— and I haven't read that part of Murray's work, but to me, just bringing them together is not gonna be enough. There's gonna have to be a very determinedly watchful, and as I say, almost negative approach to what pops up at certain points. I think, you know, propositional, you call it propositional, I think that's a good word, propositional ways of talking about things, or propositional logics, we call it that for the time being. They're okay if you want to use them productively as not part really of what your final aim is. Part insofar as that they constitute it, and that's fine, but constitute it in a way that you've being able to deal with it and use quite clearly for the next step. And it could be that you, you make that propositional logic illogical by some form or other that could be productive.

Yeah.

It doesn't have to be productive necessarily, but if, if people can't give up the idea of productivity of some sort, then that's maybe a way of getting there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the language traps are everywhere, aren't they? But, but maybe is science a useful example, because in some ways, I mean, you know, the debates around, again, in inverted commas, indigenous science is, I've heard you talk about a science that is based on a, an ontology of non-separable things. Well, you know, that's a completely different thing.

Yeah.

To a science that is based on the parts that you can separate and then we can analyze, et cetera, the traditional scientific method. So I don't know, is that, is that a as an example of how could you hold those two approaches to science together? I don't know whether that's a useful example.

You know, we were talking earlier about what would it be like to discard, how would it be to not do with them? How would it be to not treat with them as much as possible? I've had this debate or discussion, not debate, cuz some people have agreed, you know, that we can entertain the idea that we can't hold them together. I'm not advocating that, but I'm just saying it's a very valuable exercise to consider what it's like to not hold them together. Where they actually are so incommensurable that they can't come together. What would that be like? Because I hear a lot of people talking about, yeah, we can hold them together and all that sort of thing. But what is the reverse of that like? What if they were so fundamentally incommensurable that they don't go together? That I think is more worrying for people than going, we can hold them. So that's why I think we hear less of that.

And yeah, I mean, in a way I would personally would say they are pretty fundamentally incommensurable because they're based on different ontologies.

Yep, they are. And the thing is, where you can hold them together is being in awe of them both in a way.

Mm-hmm. I love that.

Acknowledging the way that they have a mystery about them or a majesty about them. Each of them. That doesn't mean they're together. It means that they are mind-blowingly amazing in their own right, but in a fundamentally different way from each other as well.

That's amazing. That's amazing.

Yeah.

That's super interesting because then, yeah, that, that feels a little bit like what you were saying about this, the kind of almost sacred or the spiritual aspect of learning in the sense of not looking at it or not shining the light on it, or just, you know, acknowledging the thing in its incredible, like, wow-ness, you know?

Yeah, that's right. It's like, um, if you had that more as a part of learning, if you wanted to retain a conscious system of education or learning, one based on that wellness would be a really interesting thing.

Yeah, there you go. We just designed a new system.

There we go. I don't think it'll get funding.

I don't think it will.

No.

That's cool. Just, I mean, given that we're joking and laughing, and maybe that's a good point, 'cause I did really want to ask you this question, and this is slightly unrelated, but I just think I've never asked anyone this question, and I've heard you talk about it, and I think it's really interesting. The humor, the role of humor and the holding things lightly, like being irreverent, you know, having a laugh. Well, how do you, how does that come into your work around some of these really quite big and deep concepts that we've been talking about?

Well, I think if you can joke about the statements you make within your own work, that's a form of obscuring the propositional nature of them.

Okay, nice.

Yeah. What we do in universities, but I do see it being used as a tactic within Māori forums as well. Not necessarily a self-conscious one, but sometimes. Yeah, I think it's a very important thing. It's important that we retain those irreverent styles of humour. Because I think the moment we don't have those, we've been fully colonized and that's a colonization of part of our emotion and our ways of interacting. Yeah. So yeah, there's quite a bit to that, I think. And I think it'd be really interesting to have a, someone did a PhD thesis whereby they used humor as a method. Would be quite interesting.

Yeah.

Whether it's a play on words or whether it's, that's their way of revealing some understanding about a topic, whether it's mocking their own statements or whether it's gently looking at the the terminology of someone else and gently exposing some sort of wordplay in there. I think it would be a really, really cool thing. It's not just for Māori, by the way.

Do you mean by that there's other, you know, of other examples? Or you just mean generally as humans?

As humans, yeah, I think it would be a useful thing to do, or a very interesting thing to do for anyone, not just Māori. We often talk about in our own circles how important humour is for Māori, or how it's there. It's always there and it's often very irreverent. So somehow it must be part of our philosophy.

Yeah. Interesting. It throws up for me kind of, I don't know, humility somehow. It brings in a humility if you, there's a self-mocking sometimes, or a, you know, but, but as you say, also an obscuring or a, an implication of the in-between, you know, sometimes between what you're not saying is, is perhaps more important than the thing that you are saying. And yeah, there's a playfulness, I guess, isn't there?

That Yeah, there is serious consequences though.

Right.

Yeah. It's, it is playful at the time and there's a lot of, you know, um, I've seen it happen where people have been, um, you know, unwittingly, they've basically had the piss taken out of them. Right. Yeah. I don't know if you say that in your— Oh yeah, exactly. And it's kind of relentless and unwatchable at, at one level, but it's, it's also quite enjoyable at another because it, in a particular way, it opens up another way of, um, thinking about what's, what's being talked about and opens up other avenues to talk about it. Yeah.

Is it, is there maybe a kind of a dampening of an ego if it's, maybe it's not your ego, it's somebody else's ego or, you know, a kind of a, almost a shaming happening. If, if, if people are, it just makes me think of—

Yeah, that can happen. But people are loath to do that if the reatha call in a way, because I, unless it's really, really called for. Depending on what they've done. But mostly it's, I think, a way of saying to someone, don't take this too seriously, or don't take yourself too seriously, right? And most of it's done quite gently, you know. Okay. But not all the time.

No, it's fascinating. As I say, it's not a topic I've covered ever on the podcast before, but I just think, I think there's something really interesting in it about, yeah, just as humans, it's clearly a thing, right? It comes up culturally in so many different manifestations. Across the world, across history. And it's clearly a thing that we do, but it's interesting to see, yeah, how it intersects with things like learning and things like, you know, all these more supposedly serious topics that I often end up talking about. Yeah. Interesting. And can I ask you, can I ask you this one more question? 'Cause I'm just fascinated and curious, as I say, with different Indigenous scholars that I've been speaking to as part of many conversations that I have. But I do see more and more people kind of reaching for, again, inverted commas, indigenous knowledge or indigenous knowledge systems. And these phrases keep coming up, as can be in an almost a kind of an exploitative way that says, here we will find the wisdom that we've been searching for because modernity has lost its way. And Tyson, I mean, Tyson Yunkaporta, who I've spoken to on the podcast, talked about it as a gold rush on indigenous knowledge. I mean, he's nicely irreverent as a guy, but it, you know, it's an interesting point, right? I think there's a real danger in that as people are a bit lost and, you know, there are some pretty big hefty challenges that people are facing, the world is facing, and they're looking around for other ways of being and knowing, and they're looking for wisdom in different places. And, you know, there's often a very, a well-intentioned move there, but the sum total of that could be another form of extractive or kind of colonial behaviours somehow.

That has already happened. I've thought about this quite a bit and I've only got so far as thinking that when we publish on this sort of thing, we are putting it out there, but perhaps that's not enough and we need to make it really clear to people from outside our cultures that we're speaking from that they need to work with us on the things we're talking about. It needs to come from some sort of core, otherwise it doesn't appear to be kind of valid, or it has a certain hollowness about it, I think. And to avoid that happening, you know, people should be working alongside us rather than taking off, running off and doing their own thing with it. I mean, sometimes that can be humorous actually, when I come back. I can imagine, because it does seem so hollow, but then I understand it because people are looking for, you know, as you say, they are looking for different ways ways to move forward. But yeah, just that really, I think they, you know, it's just that they need to work alongside Indigenous peoples with that.

But there's an interesting flip side to that as well, isn't there? Of, as you, you know, we started this conversation and you were quite quick to say that, you know, you were speaking from your own interpretation and speculation around Māori philosophies. There isn't one essential true, you know, set of truths that is Māori or you know, Aboriginal. And so there's also somehow it's the, it's also guarding against this idea that there is an essentialism that can easily happen.

Yeah, we can pick it up and run away with it. And it's that commodification of knowledge that was, you know, talked about so much in the '90s. Right. But even before then, yeah, that things can be packaged up as knowledge and then exchanged between people. But it's not that simple. Not with the stuff that we're talking about, you know, because of a whole lot of things. And one of them is that there's a whole spiritual inheritance behind what's going on that can't be replicated or needs to be, you know, needs to be honoured while something has been put on. So yeah.

Yeah. Fascinating. It's, I mean, yeah, absolutely amazing. And I so appreciate your work and you sharing. It's just, yeah, fascinating learning for me and conversation. Thank you so much.

Thanks again for inviting me to talk here with you. It's been good.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.