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Here we are, we’re back at our webinar series on complexity, reaching out around the world. We started out with a beautiful embassy between Wales and Aboriginal Australia, and tonight Papua is coming into the mix with Merv Wilkinson, it’s really good to see him again. And of course, we’ve got the wonderful Beth Smith, trying to keep things nice for us here, and hopefully she’ll get a chance to talk for 30 seconds this time, because Dave Snowden’s here and he likes to talk a bit and I’m here, and we tend to sword-fight a little bit, as some sort of males of the species do.
So I’m Tyson Yunkaporta, I belong to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland in Australia, and I wrote a book once that people liked. And we’ve got… Beth, you wanna kick off, introduce yourself here and then we’ll get rolling.
Yeah, Bore da, good morning. I’m Beth, I’m from Wales, and if you don’t recall from last time, I made the distinction between being from South Wales, as opposed to Dave who is a North Walian. So Dave, over to you.
I have a confused identity, which is relevant to what we talk of. I grew up in North East Wales, which means everybody in West Wales thinks I’m a Liverpudlian, and everybody in South Wales thinks I’m a Gog. But my mother took me back to Cardiff every holiday, so I thought I was a South Walian even though I lived in the North, so these confused identities are a part of growing up. Either way, Dave Snowden, I’m also Welsh with a confused identity. I created the Cynefin framework and Cognitive Edge, and other stuff will come out as we go through.
So if you hear a native Welsh speaker, it's almost impossible to keep up with them, they're going so quickly. So I think this question of tone of voice is actually quite important to Welsh identity.
I tell you what, the lateral violence amongst the Welsh is just terrible. All these ancient tribal conflicts that we got going on, maybe one day yous’ll… The progress will sort you out.
Every time the English invaded, they had more Welsh troops fighting for them than English troops, because they used princely fights to destroy…
That’s it.
That’s how they conquered India as well.
Unlike Papua New Guinea, which actually has the the densest, the most dense linguistic diversity on the planet, which would indicate that traditionally for thousands of years, there probably wasn’t a lot of large-scale warfare and imperialism there, because otherwise, you’d have one or two languages on that island rather than more languages than anywhere else on the planet. And so coming out of that beautiful place with some of the world’s oldest agriculture and yes, actual agriculture, not contested agriculture, not maybe it’s agriculture, maybe it isn’t. Yes, agriculture, like pre-pyramids. We have Mervyn Wilkinson who is a champion. Merv…
Yes.
Introduce yourself better than I just did.
I don’t think I can keep up with that, Tyson, but thank you. And it’s great to be part of this great team, esteemed team, so I’m honoured. Yeah, we have… I have a younger sister, cousin, in Dulciana Somare-Brash, who I was hoping would be on. She is untowardly delayed there, but she would be able to give you the data in terms of how many languages, probably upwards of 800, and how many tribal societies, probably upwards of 800 as well, Tyson, and everyone listening in. So yeah, very ancient and quite complex.
So the tones, if someone speaks in English about someone else and tries to culturally or negatively appropriate the tone of voice or whatever against them, I have not noticed that much happening…
So I’m Merv Wilkinson. I’m a bit like Dave, a confused or a complex racial mix of English, your opposition there, Dave and Beth, just across there, the English, not far away from you. And also Irish, Malay and of course, Papuan. So that’s me, and happy to be here.
Beautiful. I’m also happy to be here in my house right now. I tell you, I really love COVID. It’s really good. I’m sick of doing all these in-person events that just really take it out of you. But I can just eat a pancake and then come and sit down on the computer, it’s deadly. And I get to talk to Dave Snowden, and I get to talk to Mervyn Wilkinson and Beth Smith live. It’s beautiful.
So we’re going to try and do a mash-up today of topics that usually don’t go together very well, because that’s how we do in Complexity. We’re all polymaths here, we’re gonna make it all fit together. So we’re gonna look at… I think we’re gonna look at some issues of identity and then see what light that sheds on. We’ll do some economics. Is everybody up for economics today? We’re gonna look at the history of money and maybe in… And maybe we won’t do the usual thing of going right back to the beginning, if we do, like five minutes tops, and then we’ll come through and see what things we can cook up together.
Now… So I’m gonna kick off… I think I’m gonna do a bit of Welsh face, just to see how that flies and then we’ll discuss. If I don’t get cancelled for that in the next 30 seconds, then we’ll ask ourselves the question of why. So Dave, if you were to do an impression of me that was sort of something like, “My boomerang won’t come back” or something like that, that would pretty be much… Pretty much be the end of you, I think, that you’d be finished. However, in our last meeting offline, we were wondering why it’s okay for me to go, I don’t know, “Last night, Lord Baden Powell visited me in spirit world. Myfanwy, he said… ” What… So how does that make you feel, Dave and Beth, and why is it alright for me to do that and it’s not all right for you to do an impression of me?
I think, to be honest… Although if the first person who cursed you is Baden Powell, you have my deepest sympathies.
It’s interesting, there’s a BBC radio comedy called Dead Ringers, which is meant to be a satire, but certainly they went out to destroy the leader of the Welsh Nationalist Party by exaggerating a Welsh Valleys accent to make it foolish. And I think he’s staying with Irish accents, so the way that you see the English use Welsh and Scots Irish accents is really to generate, to make them, oh, these are really quaint rural people that we… We look after them because they need to be looked after. So I do think it’s actually increasingly negative, yeah?
…there's a BBC radio comedy called Dead Ringers….they went out to destroy the leader of the Welsh Nationalist Party by exaggerating a Welsh Valleys accent to make it foolish.
Yeah.
It’s a type… It’s another type of appropriation but Beth may feel differently.
Yeah, I raised this, I think, in our informal chat before. Have you ever seen a TV portrayal of a Welsh person who’s actually smart or educated? And…
Yeah, Lloyd George.
Yeah, Anthony Hopkins played one once.
It was Lloyd George, and we still produce the best Shakespearean artists. And we also, interestingly, Wales has the highest proportion of elite opera singers in the world per head of population but you never see that.
But then they will always perform in an English accent.
Yeah, that’s it.
Anthony Hopkins, whenever you see him winning his Golden Globes and whatever else he wins, he’s performing in an English accent.
But he played that poet once, I can’t remember, one of your poets. He played that role and he did the accent.
Dylan Thomas.
Dylan Thomas, alright.
Yeah, and Thomas, the form of Dylan Thomas’ poetry is distinctly Welsh, he just throws words together to create poetry, the concept of Bible black, for example. So that sort of alliterative thing, Cader Idris, tempest-torn, Plinlimmon old in story, these are phrases which are designed to give meaning by the tone of the way they’re said. It’s quite interesting, if you look at Welsh, the first letter of every noun changes according to the word that comes before it and what that means is a sentence can be sung as a word. So if you hear a native Welsh speaker, it’s almost impossible to keep up with them, they’re going so quickly. So I think this question of tone of voice is actually quite important to Welsh identity. So if it’s mocked, it’s actually… It’s anything worse, you know?
Maybe that’s why the British hate you because they had to… They didn’t get to just change words to make them fit with the poetic devices, they had to solve it like a puzzle.
With some of the lateral kind of infighting here is that a Welsh accent can vary between two miles down the road. Based upon somebody’s intonation or the way they’ll say one particular word, you can almost locate them to a particular village.
Yeah, “tatties” being the great one, “tatties” is different depending on where you are in the world.
So Mervyn, what do you think is the factor here in why my incredibly offensive Welsh face is okay?
I don't know, but I don't notice the mimicking or the poking fun type of thing. Because everyone speaks different languages, everyone hears everything and it's sort of not necessarily a big deal
Well, let me come at it from a Papuan perspective, if I can. So coming back from the… And I’m not sure how many, but there’s 800 or so different languages, and within the context of, say for example, the capital city of Port Moresby, and if Dulciana was here, she’d be able to add more, it is not monolinguistic. So the tones, if someone speaks in English about someone else and tries to culturally or negatively appropriate the tone of voice or whatever against them, I have not noticed that much happening, because people speak about 12 different languages each individually, so it’s a sort of a different linguistic context, and then they hear probably another 12 languages because we’ve come out of a, and this is just my guessing, I’m not an anthropologist, but out of an atomised society.
So whilst English is the main vernacular and there’s different accents according to where people have come from, I personally have not noticed people commenting, it may be an Australian English cultural phenomenon, I don’t know, but I don’t notice the mimicking or the poking fun type of thing. Because everyone speaks different languages, everyone hears everything and it’s sort of not necessarily a big deal, because there’s English, there’s Australian English, there’s what we call Oxford English, ’cause lots of people speak the Queen’s English, so-called, there’s Pidgin English, there’s Motu and then there’s Pisin Tok English. So for example, I can speak about six and I can hear about six, but it’s too hard to mimic someone else. I wouldn’t be able to do the great complex…
Here’s what I think happeed. I think when everybody’s father was saved by your mob on the Kokoda trail, they decided to lay off you for a century or so. But it’s coming. It’s coming. You’re gonna get it.
My dad was one of those on the 39th battalion. He was one of them, yeah.
Yeah. There’s a beautiful poem called Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels dedicated to that, which is a bit weird. It’s not exactly Welsh in its lyricism, in fact, it’s a pretty clunky old bit of fun, that one.
We may have some racial conflict with the Pacific Islands coming this Saturday. I gather you’re bringing a few New Zealanders as well in the All Blacks team, but it’s mainly Pacific Islanders, right? So that’s on this Saturday in Cardiff. I think, there’s a saying in Wales, English is too good for the English and we generally think most things are too good for the English. But if you actually look at it, English is the new Latin. It is a hugely rich language, it’s got more words in it than any other language, I think by a factor of three ’cause it keeps assimilating words from other languages. Shakespeare brought 750 words from Welsh into the English language, ’cause he liked the sound of them. And the amount of Hindi words is huge. So I think we have to treat the English language separately from the English, it’s a lingua franca.
I think we have to treat the English language separately from the English, it's a lingua franca.
Yeah. But that’s a growth thing. I don’t believe it’s a language that increases in complexity. I don’t think it’s structurally capable of that, it’s basically a trade creole. What it is… It’s infinitely expanding, much like the purpose of what it was created for, but there’s not a lot of complexity developing within it, except for when I use it because I’ve taken it for some tight spins around tight bends.
There’s a lot of Welsh and Irish and Indian poets and authors who’d disagree with you on that, Tyson.
Yeah, it’s true. Where it gets interesting is in its creolised forms around the world, where people are picking it up and sort of hybridising it with other things. Look, I tell you, it frustrates me always talking to complexity scientists. It’s like you’re all terrified of the P word. Yeah. Nobody’s mentioned power yet. So we’re talking about identity…
Yeah. And the reasons for why offence may be given or received, and no one mentioned power yet.
Yeah.
I think it links with cultural appropriation. It’s actually quite interesting. The Welsh national costume was created by English for their tourist industry in the 19th century. So they took artifacts of work in people’s lives and then effectively created their own cultural artifact from them. And the kilt was invented to keep a Hanoverian king happy. Braveheart is a complete nonsense. There were no kilts until the 19th century and then they created… And ironically, if you don’t know it, a Welshman created a book of clan tartans, because he could make money out of selling it and that’s taken off ever since. I think this issue about, it’s a sort of cultural appropriation. There’s also a degree of compliance in it. It’s like, “Well, if this is the way we deal with the bastards, by playing up… ” And I remember Aunty Beryl, right, who we both know and she…
I think this issue about, it's a sort of cultural appropriation. There's also a degree of compliance in it.
Aunty Beryl Carmichael, Ngiyaampaa elder.
But we talked with ABC and she puts on this aboriginal patois and I say, “Why do you do that?” And she said, “They take me more seriously.” So that ability to use language to almost reverse power can be quite important.
And of course…
And I think there’s an extent to which we’ve benefited from it in this really kind of mixed up way, we’ve almost become our oppressor in a sense, in that Wales is an Indigenous brand-dwelling race of people, as Dave mentioned, kind of assimilates the English and sides with them and then have gone on to continue that oppression onto other groups of people. So there’s a point, I think, by which as an identity Welsh people in that sense can feel a little bit conflicted. So the power dynamic that’s going on there isn’t one-directional.
That’s true. Speaking of direction, I just have to jump in there for Aunty Beryl. I think that river’s flowing back the other way, Dave. Because she used to camp with me at my house all the time, so I’ve heard her talking in her sleep, and how you talk in your sleep, that’s your proper accent. So… And the patois, that’s how she talks. For sure, but she can code switch with the best of us.
I think where we start to come into economics is when we look at… When we start to look at cultural appropriation and I think there’s something of an economic imperative to that, it’s not just a Halloween costume or a novelty. I think it’s basically the cultural front line of extraction and the economies and the systems that drive extraction. Yeah. Merv, any ideas there?
When we start to look at cultural appropriation … I think it's basically the cultural front line of extraction and the economies and the systems that drive extraction
Yeah. I just wanted to add to yours and I think Dave’s and Beth’s commentary earlier about power.
Yeah.
Just before we get onto economics.
Oh, no. That’ll go right through. Power’s going right through the economics there too.
Well, so just in terms of power… And my context is Papua and Papua New Guinea. Again, my colleague Dulciana would have been able to add more, hopefully she can at another time. But in terms of power, we have cultural, shall we say artifacts? We have Chieftains and they wear certain things and then we have women who are also in matriarchal areas, also women Chieftains as well. And they hold power by wearing certain things and also by carrying a certain spear or a shield. And Dulciana’s famous dad was Chief Michael Somare. Michael Somare held a lot of power, and that linked into the building the economic structures of the nation.
And they hold power by wearing certain things and also by carrying a certain spear or a shield.
He wasn’t just Prime Minister but he was also a Chief from his village, so he brought that power and that influence. So I just wanted to mention that. But also in the way I was growing up, in terms of power, I was part of a caste in between a lot of us, the mixed races, so-called, or the visible mixtures in society. And in terms of law, behaviours, work, leisure, certain people had more power and more freedom than others within a constrained set of boundaries or… They didn’t call it apartheid, but it was an apartheid administration. So that was, again, an exercise of power and the influence on one’s freedom and identity. I’ll just leave it there for now, I’m not sure about that.
Yeah. Well, look, until Queensland was forced to give Papua back, and that line was drawn through the sea, I think there was a bigger power overlay there and a very big system of extraction there. So both of those cultural items, which you can still see in any second-hand shop, in any city in Australia, which you can still see in any street markets or anything like that, I could probably buy a chieftain’s mask or something if I felt like it, you’ve got that extraction there. It’s hard to go to a settler’s house anywhere from Central Queensland or even south of there, without seeing Papuan spears on the wall or something like that — being used to sort of… Salad mixes or something like this.
But then there’s also the copper, which is… And then there’s the Cape York facility, which was a satellite dish built at the top of Australia and that was specifically to spy on your mobs, to intercept terrorist activities coming from your people who might have been trying to reclaim their homelands, that fits our interaction.
Indeed.
There’s a link here between power appropriation and economics. So one thing you see at the moment, and I remember the first time we saw it was in, actually in Broken Hill, but we had somebody who was six foot two inches tall, blonde and fair-haired and blue-eyed, using a Native American talking stick and claiming she was a shawoman. And it was kind of like, it’s appropriation of wisdom, and we see the same thing with artifacts but also with… It’s like the sort of Peloponnesian navigation and other things, these are things which have come out of generations of work and they’re used to ascribe power to somebody who hasn’t been through the same process and that has economic advantage.
And I think it’s almost like, if I can say I got my talking stick from Chief, whatever it is, when I spent eight days in a spiritual retreat in the Navajo Desert, I have power over other people. It’s the appropriation of culture to power for economic things, I think we’re also seeing, it’s easy to see an artifact, it’s less easy to see an idea.
Yeah. And I’d just like to raise another thing, and I don’t know if it’s art or power or both or economics, but I’ll just show you something here, I spend my days… COVID days, Tyson as you said. My COVID days when I get bored… Can you see this?
… they're (artifacts) like Post-it notes 'cause you... You're having thoughts and you keep that knowledge in those things.
Mm-hmm.
I put what’s in my head from my Papuan background, and I’ve got lots of them, it’s not tangible, but it’s invisible, and then it becomes visible and that’s the sort of stuff that I used to have in my growing up. So they’re all around here and people wonder what’s wrong with me, but it’s coming out of my head. And I feel powerful, Dave, in expressing it, and Beth. So I don’t know, I’ll throw that in the ring.
Yeah, I do those too, they’re like Post-it notes ’cause you… You’re having thoughts and you keep that knowledge in those things.
Yes.
Go on, Beth.
How can we actually share the positive or export in ways that are culturally respectful, because I’m pretty sure that people outside of our cultures look in and think, I’d love to have a bit of that, it seems to resonate with me somewhat. And I can recognise that in myself during my time living in Australia, that seeing the way Aboriginal people did certain things actually awoke part of me as a Welsh person who’s probably had quite similar experiences. So how can we actually give some of the gifts of these things and share them with the world and any of this great power to be had and plenty of people can benefit from it?
So how can we actually give some of the gifts of these things and share them with the world …Without it losing respect for that culture and without it becoming appropriation?
Yeah, good question.
Without it losing respect for that culture and without it becoming appropriation. Is there any kind of way where you can see that happening?
I think it’s when you go on the same journey, I think if you learn and go on a journey, that’s respect, if you just take and use, that’s appropriation. I think that’s the issue. So cultures advance by people spending time with other cultures, being in with them. It takes… Classic case on this is a London taxi driver. It takes two to three years for their brain to physically change for them to have the knowledge, and you can argue, most cultural knowledge is embodied, it’s not just embodied and enacted, it’s not just cognitive. So I think it’s a willingness to go through that process to be part of the journey, which makes it learning, not appropriation.
I think if you learn and go on a journey, that's respect, if you just take and use, that's appropriation.
Well, there is a process that turns an object into a commodity. In order to take something and turn it into a product, there is a cultural process, which is also an economic process there and it involves removing that thing from its context, it involves sanitising it, repackaging it, branding it and giving it a different purpose, value-adding in that way. So you’re somehow taking… That whole idea of how you create value anyway is that you take nature and then you increase its value by applying labour to it and then, badaboom, you got a commodity, you have something that has value, something that’s limitable and excludable and therefore can have a price. Did I miss any bits?
No, I think one of the worst examples I’ve seen which is relevant is the appropriate… Is the anthropological appropriation of other people’s stories, so it’s where the ethnographer gathers people’s stories, codifies them, puts them in a library and makes them a historical artifact, so they stop becoming a living source of meaning within the community. So fossilising that culture, yeah?
Yeah.
And I think that’s also very, very common.
I’ll give you a personal example, another one that’s linked to all my shields. I live at the moment, I’m locked down in a hotel, a hotel in Canberra. I’ve made about 20 of these shields. I also make prow boards in between my work and because, and this may trigger something, because the people here largely are Pacifica, they manage this place, this hotel. A couple of them saw this. Guess what? A lot of these are now displayed in the foyer, some people want to buy them. I’ve said, I don’t want any money. The proceeds are going to the homeless outside this posh hotel. So that’s just a little story for you to unpack.
Yeah, it’s interesting, just the everyday cultural objects that can get value added in that way and become a commodity. I tell you, if I walk into one more lobby of a fancy hotel or a really big lawyer’s building or something like that, if I walk into one more lobby where I see a whole heap of aboriginal log coffins sort of arranged in a lovely installation, it’s like… I always find it really disturbing, and it’s like the people there have gone, “Oh, they want the coffins, alright, we’ll make them a bunch of coffins, aren’t they beautiful?” I don’t know, makes my belly hurt.
…there is a process that turns an object into a commodity…and it involves removing that thing from its context, it involves sanitising it, repackaging it, branding it and giving it a different purpose…
So that might be your answer to your question, or one of your answers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Beth, you are being attenuated, your language is being interfered with by the internet.
Am I back now?
You’re back.
You’re back, so you need to start again.
Yeah, the issue of mining and coal…
Oh, God.
And one that touches all of us, I’m pretty sure, and particularly the Welsh, how we’ve been encouraged and thought of, it’s a really wonderful thing to kind of rape and pillage our own land and that for natural resource. And when you actually look back, a lot of the propaganda and the English narrative around that is how wonderful it was for us to be empowered to have this incredible… To be the gods of the underworld, if you go dig up the coal… And to actually, yeah, totally lose the connection with what was above the surface of the land to the point where…
we've been encouraged and thought of, it's a really wonderful thing to kind of rape and pillage our own land and that for natural resource.
And the loss and the tragedy which goes with it. Anybody in my generation knows exactly where they were when they hear the news of Aberfan, which is when the soil tips from the mines, which everybody knew was gonna collapse sometime and there was too much corruption, basically took out a whole school with its children, I could still remember exactly where I was in our house, in Cardiff, looking at the television. I think it’s part of the landscape, this world, now is the soil pits, the debris of that industrial period. And I think one of the big questions, the valleys for example, and the same is true in North Wales, because where I grew up, it was slate and not coal, and the slate mines were there, but the soil tips from mining activities, are now part of the landscape, they’re an integral part of the landscape, they can’t be separated from them. And we’ve got to find ways, I think, to accommodate that. I’m not for sure what the hell we’d do with open cast mining in Australia, that’s a whole different thing.
Another thing on Aberfan is it’s 55 years this week, 144 children, it wasn’t just the school that was crushed, it was an entire generation that doesn’t exist in that village. And these are people, you know, Dave was there, this is living history, this isn’t kind of way back when. And this is the part of Wales where I was living and where I’m from, and it’s still an issue, there are still coal tips that are unstable and threatening people’s houses and lives underneath, and yet somehow it’s okay to spend, was it, 11 Billion on refurbishing the House of the Parliament?
It’s interesting, though, ’cause when we looked at the Grenfell disaster, which is when that tower block in London, the cladding just went up in flames and similar numbers died, right? I remember talking with people that were doing a narrative project on that, and it turned out somebody had already been in, they’d taken the stories from the survivors and then they appropriated the stories to justify the politics of the way the thing had been built, so people’s own material were being used against them, and I think that that’s the other issue you see. And it is an identity issue because it makes Indigenous groups into permanent victims or people, this is the point I made earlier, you are put in a category where the imperial power needs to look after you because you’re not quite good enough, for their respect. I think that’s the sort of thing you see coming through and that’s what creates really bitter resentment in the way that people designate. And really the Irish have had this from the English for as long as we’ve had it, in some ways worked. Though they haven’t said that, they tell Irish jokes about Kerrymen, so it goes across areas.
I think one of the worst examples I've seen which is relevant is the appropriate... Is the anthropological appropriation of other people's stories, so it's where the ethnographer gathers people's stories, codifies them, puts them in a library and makes them a historical artifact, so they stop becoming a living source of meaning within the community
So just within the context, agreed, Dave, within the context of Papua New Guinea. And we all know what happened with Bougainville and Bougainville copper, and there was a big war, that war began as a result… But I was there in the early days when we taught social science to high school kids and in the curriculum… And I’m talking out of school, but this is the truth. In the curriculum, it was about how great Bougainville copper was going to be for the nation.
I think it's part of the landscape, this world, now is the (coal mining) soil pits, the debris of that industrial period….they can't be separated from them. And we've got to find ways, I think, to accommodate that.
And there were those of us who were social science critical, reflective teachers who changed that curriculum. It was a demonstration school, I’ll say it, Gordon High School in Port Moresby, so it was where diplomats and everyone from around the world came, so there was power there, but we changed it so that a year… 9-year, 10-year kids were able to critically reflect in circles rather than being told that the copper was going to be okay for the water, the fish were not going to be poisoned, the forest were going to be fine, etcetera, etcetera. And they were quite critically reflective, very smart kids, this is way back. And so we know the history there, eventually there was a war, and they still in a sense politically are hurt by it, and that was an external organization coming in, mining the copper and the gold and whatever else, and telling everyone it’s going to be alright, so just jumping off Dave’s commentary there.
Amazing innovators, though, because they made those like crossbows that weren’t crossbows. You know when they get the rubber off the mining equipment and just made like these little guns which shoot deadly arrows so hard that they go through a car door, just absolutely… Like amazing innovation. Yes, so the tech is pretty good in Bougainville.
Fascinating though.
We've all got mining in our histories, right? And that is a common Indigenous issue. So yeah, your land becomes valuable because it contains something that somebody wants to rip out of it.
Yeah.
We’ve all got mining in our histories, right? And that is a common Indigenous issue. So yeah, your land becomes valuable because it contains something that somebody wants to rip out of it. And mining is almost by definition, yeah, the concept of a non-renewable.
Yeah, it’s extractive, it doesn’t renew, it leaves wastes, it leaves poison, it leaves everything else. Now, we’re not saying we don’t have to do mining but it’s… It becomes part of the identity of the people, you have to accept the pollution and everything else which goes with it, because that’s what makes your land valuable. And yeah, there’s something in that, and I think it’s also in this wider issue of how do we… This issue about ownership, right? So when people… Land in Wales was fairly similar, it was owned by families, it wasn’t owned by individuals, and we didn’t have Primogeniture. So basically, that made us weak against the English, because one person never inherited, it was always divided as it went. Yeah, so… But the concept, the land was closer, I think, to where you’re coming from on this, Tyson. But then it becomes… The concept of mineral rights is an exploitative concept in its own right. So you can have the surface but we own what lies underneath it, yeah. And I think that the economics about that are fascinating because the communities from whom which the material is exploited have actually never benefited economically from it. Yeah, we went from a rural culture to an impoverished urban culture.
…mining... It becomes part of the identity of the people, you have to accept the pollution and everything else which goes with it, because that's what makes your land valuable.
Yes, indeed indeed.
Well look, local grotto mining is sustainable, you can have local mining for thousands of years, we’ve had that here, particularly with the ochre mines, greenstone quarries, everything you want… Anything you can imagine, except for uranium and such, where we doing… You know, local grotto mining for the purposes of the community, that’s some sustainable stuff.
Yeah, big thing in Wales, and it is now a part of an identity, is the English take water from us.
Yeah.
The whole valleys have been drowned by acts of parliament from Westminster against the opposition of the local inhabitants to create water for Liverpool and Birmingham, and I think that’s the next level, you’re gonna see that… We’re talking with First Nation people in Canada on the next one.
It seems that the water is like, in the commons, while it's in the air, if it's airborne, it's anybody's, but the moment it touches the surface, it belongs to the government.
Yeah, water is now a huge issue in Australia.
Introducing in Canada it’s really massive.
Well, the Queensland legislation is interesting around water, it’s… I’m trying to figure it out. It seems that the water is like, in the commons, while it’s in the air, if it’s airborne, it’s anybody’s, but the moment it touches the surface, it belongs to the government.
The Murray Darling Basin is it’s own story, in it’s own right.
Oh my goodness, let’s not even… Let’s not even go there, cause…
Water was running in Broken Hill when I was there.
Yeah, so from water also to trees, I mean in Papua, New Guinea for example, lots of trees being cut down, lots of forests, and I’m sure the same in Queensland there, Tyson.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s it. Well, so where is the value here? Is it just that, I don’t know, the systems of accounting that exist for this global economic system at the moment, is it just that they can only measure things that are nouns? You know, they can’t measure actions and relations, is it just that they can only measure things? Is this the problem? I wouldn’t mind having a bit of a deep dive in on the economic side now as well, I’d be interested to know about pre-medieval Welsh economies also.
…systems of accounting that exist for this global economic system at the moment, is it just that they can only measure things that are nouns? You know, they can't measure actions and relations, is it just that they can only measure things?
That’s fascinating.
Sorry, go on, Beth. You go first.
Dave discussing the idea of Wales becoming a… of South Wales becoming an urban economy. I can’t even agree with that, I think it’s become a dependence economy.
Yeah, I’ll buy that.
That so much dependence was built upon the promise and the hope that the mines bought, that people were told that this is your opportunity, you’re fuelling the world. There was so much Lordship and heroism kind of given to the miners in the local communities. And when that is pulled from under your feet very, very quickly, and to recognise the amount of sacrifice that went into that, the loss of whole communities, working age men, regular mine collapses. They’ve invested a lot into that identity and it’s become people. And once that’s pulled away, then people become dependent upon funding from what was back then the English states. And there’s so much dependence…
They've invested a lot into that identity and it's become people. And once that's pulled away, then people become dependent upon funding…
Life expectancy was in the mid 30s in the mines, if you actually looked at it. And one of the terrifying things if you ever go to Wales is one deep mine left open as a tourist attraction, so I went down with my kids, and I’m claustrophobic, so it took a lot for me to do it. But they actually put the kids by a door and then they switched all the lights off. And they say, “At your age, this would have been your first day of work for a 12 hour shift, standing by this door in the pitch dark with only noises and moving the doors” and that’s within living memory. It’s interesting, when I was taught management economics, mines are valued in terms of what comes out of them, there’s no valuation of what’s left, I think this comes back to your point, Tyson. It’s the thing which is valued. So once the thing is taken from the land, the land has no value by implication and therefore it can become a soil tip and everything else. And I think asset valuation is one of the big issues here, ’cause we don’t value the asset as a whole, we value the thing we dig out of the asset.
Yes. So I’ll just add something there. I agree with you guys. First of all, I don’t speak for any government of Papua New Guinea, I speak for myself as an observer. But this power link in there, especially when we involve governments, and a lot of governments, national governments, including this one here and a lot around the world are involved with that mining, that somehow wanting to get what the value is in the trees or the metal or the the water or whatever, but still, they leave a path of devastation behind them, whether it’s unintentional or otherwise. But there’s always the notion of corruption that underpins a lot of that, in my view, throughout all nations, not any one in particular. And it’s about that power and influence, and again it’s about money, whether it be brown paper bags or otherwise.
And I think asset valuation is one of the big issues here, 'cause we don't value the asset as a whole, we value the thing we dig out of the asset.
There’s an interesting question coming through chat, Lizzie has asked about Doughnut Economics, which is Kate Rawson, right? Now, I have this hugely ambiguous concern about Doughnut Economics, because it actually adopts the assumptions of neoclassical economics to get people to accept it.
Yeah.
But it doesn’t really shift into complexity based economics. And the big question for me, and it’s on all of these sort of things is, is this a way of effectively candy coating something which then won’t change, or is it a stepping stone to change? And I think that’s the big issue. Because we say in complexity, you start journeying with a sense of direction. So you have to find the next right thing to do and then look again and then the next right thing. So it’s all a journey between stepping stones. The trouble is, if the stepping stone becomes too deep and attractive, you may never escape it, it may be used to justify what came before. And I think, to my mind, the jury’s out on Doughnut Economics. It was hugely progressive, yeah, but does it allow, for example, somebody to say that they’re doing something because they can create neoclassical measures while not actually really changing or gaming the system. And I don’t know, I don’t dispute the intentions of it, but I think Carla’s work (or Chiara’s work), yeah, it’s possibly more interesting.
I kinda see it as part of that sort of raft of ideas that surround our capitalism 2.0, you know the stakeholder capitalism. I kind of… I don’t know. Yeah, there’s that possibility of it just becoming a rebranding, a rebranding of capital rather than anything else. It’s funny, we only mentioned Doughnut Economics once when we were preparing for this, it’s when we were talking about the Island of Nauru, which is kind of in the shape of a doughnut now, after the mining happened. I wonder if under Doughnut Economics that would or would not be a doughnut. Beth, where are you gonna take us now?
Oh, I think that there’s definitely something to be further explored around attitudes towards money and economy, cultural attitude. I think that from a Welsh perspective, we don’t like to see wealthy people, even of our own, that we’ve got a very strong sense of self regulating, if I’m poor, we’re all gonna be poor in this together. We love a bit of collective struggle. And again, a lot of that will come from the mining and our heavily unionised history.
…from a Welsh perspective, we don't like to see wealthy people, even of our own, that we've got a very strong sense of self regulating, if I'm poor, we're all gonna be poor in this together. We love a bit of collective struggle.
The history, yeah.
And I was curious, is that an Indigenous thing all in all, because we don’t value money or we value ourselves more than the money?
Oh, yes. Well, my mom says…
Wukal nganth waya
So to translate that as, “Money nothing for us. Money bad for us.”
…when you move into highly atomistic individual societies, shame goes away, because actually what you can get away with is legitimate. Whereas in a collective community, exploitation is shameful, therefore you're less likely to do it.
Something happened in South Wales, which is quite important. So the women used to line up at the mine on a Friday, and the men would hand over their wage packets, and their wives would give them beer money back, right? And then the wives would look after the needs of that community. And I think there was that strong matriarchal tradition there in terms of it’s dependency and it was shameful not to do that. And I think the role of shame is something, but when you move into highly atomistic individual societies, shame goes away, because actually what you can get away with is legitimate. Whereas in a collective community, exploitation is shameful, therefore you’re less likely to do it. Or if so, the community will exclude you. And that’s the thing we started to talk about last time, which is the idea about a gift. And when I was working in Kakadu, a gift wasn’t an exchange, it was a membership fee. And it wasn’t…
It’s very important, yeah. Yeah.
And I think really there’s a ritual about a gift, which means the community accepts you, and the community can exclude you, it’s not a universal, alright. It’s kinda like, if you’re not part of that. And I think we’ve lost that concept, and I think this is one of the things Beth was talking about. It’s in here. And it’s worked actually in Denmark. Sorry, being as Beth’s in Denmark, they called tall… It’s called the Law of Jante, which means tall poppy syndrome. So if you try and stand above the crowd, somebody will come along with a scythe. It’s actually quite interesting. If you go into Wales, the aristocracy are English, there isn’t really a middle class, there’s a sort of upper working class and a lower middle class, but there isn’t that middle class in that sense.
And I think really there's a ritual about a gift, which means the community accepts you, and the community can exclude you, it's not a universal, alright.
Yeah. Well, our species is not fond of hierarchies arguably. I know that there’s been a few studies on that that will argue both sides.
It’s role based authority, so it’s kinda like you might be leading the hunt, but that doesn’t mean you’re in charge of the tribe, in that sense. But it’s that ability to accommodate. I think this is what crews do in the military environment, by the way, which take off from that, is they distribute authority in context.
Dynamic subordination.
It’s context-based authority, not a hierarchical-based authority.
Yeah.
Yeah. Even though they say it’s hierarchical, it’s quite… It’s much more polyarchical.
It’s hierarchical until they get off the boat. While they’re on the boat, hierarchy, then they get off the boat, they land in the shit, it’s distributed.
I’ve seen a sergeant tear a two-star general apart in public for interfering with the weapon system, and the two-star general took it on the chin and walked off and apologised. And you wouldn’t see that in England.
See, that’s why he didn’t have three stars though, Dave.
But in a sense… But seriously, in a sense that’s the next… For me, that’s the next trend of leaders or the quality of leadership, if that can be done, you know. If they say, “No, you can’t go… ” Oh, it did happen to my dad on the Kokoda Track, he spoke out… He was sergeant major, he spoke out to a general… Against a brigadier, and so he never got his officer stripes as a result but he did save, you know, a couple of dozen people, Australian soldiers, by the General listening to him. But he…
I did a project on a small group band in Washington, and at one point, a four-star general said, “Would you mind taking my sergeant out into the corridor so he can tell you what I need to know, so you can come tell me as a consultant?” And it was quite interesting. And what I found is that if you talk to American three, four-star Generals, they take criticism, British ones generally won’t.
Yeah.
And if your identity is in the network of relationships which you have, then it doesn't mean you're non-exploitative, but exploitation is far less likely than if you see the community as something which is there, which is a bargain you make.
And I think it began with this active warfare issue. Because the Americans are constantly bloody fighting people like the English did before, they’ve got that sort of winner in effect in it, but I think I want to come back to the identity issue, because I think that’s fundamental. One of the big distinctions in political science and philosophy is between social atomism and communitarianism. So is your primary identity, you as an individual, is your primary identity the tribe of which you are a part? And it’s a fundamental divide, it’s Catholic and Protestants and all sorts of things, alright. And if your identity is in the network of relationships which you have, then it doesn’t mean you’re non-exploitative, but exploitation is far less likely than if you see the community as something which is there, which is a bargain you make. It’s this concept of a social contract, which I think is fundamentally flawed. Is it’s my choice whether I am part of this community and the community owes me something. That’s very different from the sort of linking the communitarianism-type concept.
It's very, very difficult to extract from an extended family, from a community, from a clan. It's very hard to do that, but it's very easy to extract from an individual or sort of a loose cluster of individuals who share just a group identity that's a name
Well, I think that’s what the project of, I mean, what they call Neo-liberalism, you know, most of that’s been about, over the last 30 or 40 years, social fragmentation and I think it’s… And that’s just to facilitate extraction. It’s very, very difficult to extract from an extended family, from a community, from a clan. It’s very hard to do that, but it’s very easy to extract from an individual or sort of a loose cluster of individuals who share just a group identity that’s a name like, “This is the name of our tribe and I am one of them. That’s me, I’m in that tribe.” But really, it’s just an individualised identity. I find that with most of the group identity brandings that we have now, they’re not really group identities in that there’s a fluid self-other boundary between yourself and the group. You don’t really belong to the group, that’s just part of your demographic profile. And I find that that kind of social fragmentation… I know you mentioned clubs earlier, Dave, and you see all those clubs breaking up, they don’t have a lot of clubs anymore. Just that data set’s an interesting thing to look at. But yeah, I think that’s made people vulnerable as individuals to extraction.
I think it’s also contextual. So on this Saturday I’m gonna be wearing a red Wales shirt and I’m gonna be in the Millennium Stadium, I refuse to call it the Principality Stadium. We’re not a bloody principality.
I don’t get that.
Oh, sorry. They’ve renamed our national rugby stadium the Principality Stadium. And if you want to upset the Welsh, call us a principality, because we’re not, we’re a country. That’s actually really important, this issue.
Of course.
And if you just focus on the, everything is me, me, me, you're quite right, that was the Neo-liberal mythology.
I’ll be wearing a red shirt in the hope we might beat the All Blacks in my lifetime, because the last time was the year before I was born. The previous weekend I was wearing my blue and black shirt while we stuffed bloody Newport. So at that point, we’ve got this conflict, it’s two tribes but then we’re one tribe in a different context. And I think it’s that ability to shift between identities based on context, and it’s like the clan, to the tribe, to the hoard. It’s that sort of ability to manage those fluid identity structures. And if you just focus on the, everything is me, me, me, you’re quite right, that was the Neo-liberal mythology. But if we focus everything on the individual, magically we will sort it out, which actually means people didn’t read Adam Smith. Everybody reads Adam Smith because you find Liberal Economics. Nobody reads his bloody books on ethics, which were actually more important.
So we do change identity, don’t we, whether we’re at the footy or wherever. I feel very strongly, and I take your point, Tyson, I feel very strongly from Milne Bay, the Modejua tribal identity. But you’re right, it is a demographic type of identity, even though in me and in my kids and my family, we’re very strongly Modejua and we tie in with the one-talk system, this is with your economics, Beth, your question originally there, economic relations, we tie in with one-talks, meaning when I see someone… And you guys do as well, Tyson, your mom. When you see someone, they’re your brother, cousin, sister, aunt, so there’s that one-talk system. There is a sort of a hierarchy in my society, the women are the final arbiters, the decision makers. There’s not many in Papua, mostly it’s a patriarchal society.
When you see someone, they're your brother, cousin, sister, aunt, so there's that one-talk system. There is a sort of a hierarchy in my society, the women are the final arbiters, the decision makers.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s called the Welsh mam where I come from, that’s where the authority lies.
Okay, there you go. So there’s the women… Look, I can remember an Auntie Florentina who wasn’t really related, but she was the boss of us all. And she wasn’t blood-related but she was part of the tribe. And the women would let the men and my dad and others, my dad was white Australian, but he was accepted in the fraternity, and they’d talk about it, all about the activities or the road map, as we’d call it, but the women would have the final strategic decision. They have to go back to the women. And so there was power there. The economics, I suppose, was the cultivation of the garden or whatever, or the building of the canoes or the killing of the pigs for the feast or whatever it was. But the power line ran through the aunties and the mums. I don’t know where that stands, but we valued shells, we bartered a lot, the land was valued, the relationships, the tribal feast, the canoes, the pigs, family was valued. I didn’t see any dollars until, as we say, the Europeans came and then the money or the, whatever you call it, became more important. But they had these shells, and if you see (type of shells)…
Dollar tokens?
Yeah, but they were very valuable. They made people feel, they were the rich…
They were stores of value. And was it because of scarcity of those shells?
Yeah, it was scarce, but for example, from Dulciana’s area of Port Moresby, they would come down and they’d barter beetle nut and then we’d give them potatoes, yams and taros, and then there’d be a two-way thing and then they’d make it up with shells as well or pigs. And that was not very long ago, that was 40, 50 years ago. And now it’s all money, of course.
Well, the word I used, the language word I used before for money, that’s a loan word, we actually borrowed that from your mob.
Oh
Yeah, that’s where we got that. And also I make dugout canoe as well. And a lot of your dugout canoe shape and techniques, that’s influenced our dugout canoes as well.
Yeah, yeah.
So there’s that kind of cultural exchange happening there. What’s the difference between that and appropriation in our economic systems? What is it about our economic systems, traditionally, that prevents things from being theft and actually makes it some kind of exchange? What is it?
Yeah.
It's like, if the women are in the kitchen, you sit down and you shut up and you will be fed and watered
There are really interesting social practices. I remember when I first took my wife home to Cardiff, and she’s French [omitted text] so she doesn’t come from the same culture. And for some reason her relatives resent the fact she married a Catholic, for some reason burning most of them alive is considered something we shouldn’t have done. But we took her home and the family had a problem with the divorce. So the women all assembled in the kitchen to cook a meal and dumped the men in front of the television to actually do the rugby. And we weren’t allowed to go into the kitchen, even though I did the cooking. And the assumption was, all the women would cook a full meal while actually deciding whether somebody in the family could be divorced or not. And that council actually had to do. And I still remember, that’s the way I grew up. It’s like, if the women are in the kitchen, you sit down and you shut up and you will be fed and watered.
The beer will flow and the food will arrive, and if you haven’t eaten the Welsh cakes that your grandma made, you are in real trouble because you’ll be held up for the next 10 years for failing to do that. What you’ve got is these social contexts which allow decisions to be made, and I think we’ve over-formalised decision-making in distributed communities. And I think this is part of the problem with a sort of one person, one vote concept of democracy, which is a very Anglo-Saxon concept, if you actually look in the terms of the way it works. And I think one of the big things, as we come back to the power word, is actually looking at how it gets distributed both formally and informally, it’s like the work we’re doing to build informal networks…
That’s very true.
That the informal networks are tested and healthy and we don’t have the informal power structures anymore because we’ve lost the social cohesion.
Hey, Beth, what do you think about that, particularly… And I want you to think about the DAO nerds, the Distributor Autonomous Organization, you know, all the crypto nerds and everything else and all that side of things. What are they missing from this big tech solution drive towards decentralisation? What are they missing in their leadership and economic models and everything else that they could learn from Indigenous Wales and Papua and Australia?
I have to confess to having a foot in both camps here.
Go on then.
I’m all for sharing the goods, but there has to be something to it more than just a technological distribution. Because if people… We’ve seen it, kind of everybody simping after Elon Musk, whatever Elon Musk does everybody else copies, follows. If you give people absolute freedom and there’s already an inherent power differential there, the gradient in that system is always gonna be geared towards that already existing established power. So actually, how can you almost either work around that power in a more autonomous way? Because the thing is it’s not autonomous if it’s automatically geared towards [unintelligible].
I'm all for sharing the goods, but there has to be something to it more than just a technological distribution…If you give people absolute freedom and there's already an inherent power differential there, the gradient in that system is always gonna be geared towards that already existing established power.
Well, we have actually had a comment, a question about that and a request in the chat there. Somebody referencing that Aunty Mary Graham is a Kombu-merri
Elder and academic knowledge keeper here from Australia that I’ve done a fair bit of work with. Now, she talks about the difference between power and authority, that the power… Power is always distributed within the community, but authority is held by different, quite exclusive groups with restricted knowledge and that there is a difference between power and authority. So I’d be interested to see if… What all your different cultural takes are on the difference between those two things.
I’d wanna start and not go straight into the issue of power and authority, but actually to look at ability to articulate and collective understanding and collective imagination. And I think that this comes into the Wales thing in particular, and as I’ve mentioned last time, the loss of the Welsh language and the prevalence with it, it’s very, very difficult to share a common history if I’ve lost my ability to speak in that language. So it breaks down the potential for collectivism among Welsh people. I’m unable to articulate half of my feelings until I hear somebody who’s a native Welsh speaker say something and it feels like the missing piece to the jigsaw. So lots of people say when they hear Cynefin, it’s like, “Aah… ” I’ve felt this all my life and I’ve never had the word to express it. And an aggregate power across the network comes in senses of coherence and common, like the Venn Diagram whereby we can all actually unite around something. And for us, particularly linguistically, that has been decimated. We’ve become very, very fragmented in that sense. And so when you say that individual people have power, yes, they might, but it’s not the same as having a collective power, which is something that’s been trampled on quite a bit in a Welsh context.
I'm unable to articulate half of my feelings until I hear somebody who's a native Welsh speaker say something and it feels like the missing piece to the jigsaw.
Well, then there’s a difference with authority once again. Maybe English is just this standardised protocol that’s there and allowing us to have this yarn in the first place.
Yeah, but you have to remember the English… All of the English public schools were brought up on Roman history. Roman history fundamentally informs English and that fundamentally informed Americans. So if you look at those three empires, they all have the same points and the same back points. I think the key is authority is earned over time, power can be taken or exploited. I think that’s the key issue, you can’t have authority unless you’ve done things and acted and done things over the time.
Well, in Latin, “power” the noun, is power the infinitive, which really just means “to be able” or “to be able to.”
It’s affordance as well. One of the reasons… You said that, we haven’t mentioned it. I think one of the reasons is you spend too much time with sociologists, they’re so obsessed with power, you try and avoid the word as much as possible, even though you know it has application, right? And we have talked about assemblage and affordance. What does the environment, social and cultural, give to you? Which allows you to do things and doesn’t allow you to do other things? What are these structures which inform the way you see it? And I think critically, what agency is as important. So what has agency in the system, which can incorporate both power and authority. And that type of agency and changing agency, I think is one of the ways you do things. One we’re playing with, for example, is the concept of entangled trios. So you put three people from different backgrounds together, if they make a decision, it stands. And that’s a transparency issue, so you have to have a diversity in transparency, but you don’t force it into… You force that dialogue between difference in order to make a decision. And I think it’s things like that we need to start to think about as we start to flatten organizations, and as the boundaries between organizations and society break down because they’re gonna have to break down over the next few decades.
And we have talked about assemblage and affordance. What does the environment, social and cultural, give to you? Which allows you to do things and doesn't allow you to do other things?
Yeah. And those are the historical and social movements of management from what I would call oligarchy to polyarchy in organizations, that sort of thing. And somehow, the power and authority is mixed in with, you know, oligarchs and then distributed to the people at the grassroots and so on and so forth. So the power and authority is… And people are empowered or enabled or agented or whatever the words are, so they become agents of change, but at the same time, there’s authority or some cultural or symbolic authority with the… The Queen’s picture in the classroom of a teacher in Papua New Guinea, believe it or not, the Queen is still…
I mean, even when I worked for IBM, which was a terribly hierarchical organization, in fact, it had five intersecting hierarchies, so you never know who you were working for anyway. But power came in, if you made a sale to a British client, you had power, because nobody would challenge that because that was keeping the organization alive. There are always… Organizations always evolve mechanisms and codes that allow the system to be broken in some way, sometimes… And I think it’s quite fascinating to study that.
So the power and authority is... And people are empowered or enabled or agented or whatever the words are, so they become agents of change, but at the same time, there's authority or some cultural or symbolic authority…
So economic power.
Yeah. Well, it’s because it’s a commercial organization, its economic power. Yeah. There are other forms of power which can each be… I’ve seen facilitators exploit the power of not having an argument.
Yeah, they become manipulators.
Yeah. So I will intervene, people are having a genuine argument, which is useful, I will now intervene, and I will be the person in power because I will stop now, having an argument, I’ll use this language. And it’s that there’s language and I’ll use this language. Beth made the point earlier, language is exploitative in some forms, yeah, in terms of creating boundaries that people can’t cross.
Yeah. So one of the one of the ways I use facilitative power, and it could be seen as manipulative and I hadn’t thought of it that way, but at the beginning of some difficult conversations where we have to be challenged, I usually set up what I would ask them to do, I’d say, “What would be the detracting behaviours in this meeting and what would be the enhancing behaviours?” And we’d put them all up. So in a sense I’m using my power to channel them.
…the facilitator mustn't get involved in the content, because the content is people's content. They’re not allowed to influence it.
We developed facilitation. When I was in IBM, I developed facilitation methods in Denmark. So we give the instructions in English but then we’d speak in Danish. So what we basically said, the facilitator mustn’t get involved in the content, because the content is people’s content. They’re not allowed to influence it.
Just the process, yeah.
And I think that Beth should talk to this point on epistemic justice and cognitive sovereignty, because what actually happens is the power to interpret the meeting takes away people’s sovereignty and that’s some of the wider stuff.
I think that Beth should talk to this point on epistemic justice and cognitive sovereignty, because what actually happens is the power to interpret the meeting takes away people's sovereignty…
Good to hear that, Dave.
So Beth, yeah, I’d like to hear about those sovereignties with the ways of knowing and ways of thinking going on there.
Yeah, yeah, I know Dave’s probably referenced me on this one quite a few times, but I always kinda start the thinking around this as, why is it that old wives tales are called “old wives tales” when old mens tales are called history and philosophy? That there is an inherent privileging or over privileging of certain types of information, ways of knowing and it’s usually based upon historical structures. So it can be incredibly difficult to break away from an already entrenched, dominant narrative. And especially when that’s the white Western narrative. So ubiquitous and so everywhere, all of our historical literature, all of our historical academic literature, which we like to think of as the gold standard is built upon that positivists white man’s conception of what is knowledge, what is valuable. And it’s all of the stuff that devalues emotion, human existence into relationality and reduces the system to the things that are in the system, as opposed to the relationship between those things. And so actually I think a lot of the Indigenous cultures recognise the flows and the in-between space, whereas our dominant narrative, the hegemonic narrative is all about substance as opposed to the relationship.
… why is it that old wives tales are called "old wives tales" when old mens tales are called history and philosophy?
So in Papua, we call that the Nauwa tide, N-A-U-W-A, and it’s the water between the canoes, the canoes are carrying the objects of the subject. But it’s the tide and the water in between that also is really critically important. I think that’s what I’ve interpreted from your comment there Beth.
We did an Indigenous project in Australia once and there was a story which illustrates this well, alright. So we had a massive fight with the academics, I won’t say which university, because they wanted to send in their PhD students to actually get Aboriginals to tell their stories, they would then sit down and codify them and interpret them. And we were gonna put in the SenseMaker, which meant the Indigenous people could interpret their own stories into a quantitative framework and they were just totally opposed to this. And we had this ferocious battle going on for about three hours. And eventually I realised he wasn’t listening to me. He was basically a professor and I was some bloody consultant. And I obviously, because I had money and how power, I had to be treated with respect, I’d have been thrown out if I was the undergraduate student. And I thought, I’ve gotta get him to think about this and I said, “Well look, I’ll tell you what, we’ll do both. So we’ll gather the narrative and we’ll give it to your PhD students and I’ll pay myself for the Indigenous people to interpret their own stories.” Actually, it wasn’t gonna cost me anything but I thought he needed to see that and then…
Then we’re both happy and you could see you, he suddenly starts to think. And then he said that, “Then you’ll compare the way we interpret it with the way they interpret it.” I said, “Well, yeah we might do that.” And then he said, “And then you’ll write a paper on how culturally biased we are.” And I said, “Well, that’s quite probable.” And it was interesting until he was faced with that, he just hadn’t seen what could happen. Because he was so used to controlling the interpretation by his own cadre.
So in Papua, we call that the Nauwa tide, N-A-U-W-A, and it's the water between the canoes, the canoes are carrying the objects of the subject. But it's the tide and the water in between that also is really critically important.
Yes.
And I think this is the issue, I think, is how do you give communities, not only cognitive sovereignty but physical sovereignty, that’s the land issue? Because it’s been… The cognitive sovereignty has been appropriated as well as everything else into the dominant culture.
It is difficult. I mean, we were talking about Bougainville before and those amazing weapons that those genius people made and took their land back and kicked out the mining company and everything else, but it was there.
It was.
That sort of damage had been done, the adjustments had been made about what is value, what is relation, what is action, what is price, what is being And unfortunately, the experiment that followed didn’t go very well. I understand there was a fair bit of interference and sabotage from outside, but you know, but for a while, people were hand-pressing coconut oil to run the diesel engines on the cars, and the…
… the issue, I think, is how do you give communities, not only cognitive sovereignty but physical sovereignty, that's the land issue?
Yeah.
All kinds of things and setting up amazing like just Jerry rigging up all these little electrical systems and things like that. But in the end, that infrastructure starts to fail and then people begin to squabble over these gas items that are left, and it didn’t end up well, more from the reports that I’ve heard, but I don’t really believe them until I get there.
Yeah, it didn’t and it’s still happening. I can’t speak on it, but this is still happening, yeah. But what I wanted to link up with was the way change happens, sure Bougainville was a reaction to the desecration of their waters and their land and so on, and so they reacted, but I interpreted what you said was… Tyson about it was there, inside each Bougainvillian or Papuan, in our case, with some of the mines in Milne Bay where I’m from, there is always… There’s a pride, I don’t know if I’m making this up, whether it’s a demographic model or it’s sort of something that’s innate, but there’s a pride and attitude, it’s about history. It’s about passion, heart, blood and it’s like, you can’t put me down, I’m gonna stand up and it’s like you guys, your mob.
Nobody boss bla me
Yeah, and you guys have been doing it for 250 years and you still jump, bounce up, dust yourself off, no one can put you down. And you can be as literate and numerate as anyone else. So it’s that sort of… Well, I don’t know how to describe it but… And I’m sure with the Welsh as well you guys, the English or anyone else can’t put you down, so it’s that attitude.
But there’s that, once you live in and you inhabit resistance frames for long enough, then that’s all you know and the moment that relaxes and it’s like, “Alright, well, go on, do your own thing, self-determine, there’s your sovereignty, there’s your land go, go go. What are you gonna do?” It’s like, “Hang on, give me a minute, I’ve just been… I just been decolonising for so long. I forgot how to do it.” Yeah.
It’s worth remembering that the elimination, the attempts to eliminate Welsh Indigenous language, North American language, they all took place in about the same 34-year period. There were sort of accidental stuff building up to it. But the deliberate use of the educational system like the Welsh Not to eliminate language, that’s got… That actually parallels very closely, and it’s like a decade or so apart from the Rabbit Proof Fence of concept and everything else. So it’s always like that period from the late 1900s to about 1990s there was an academic attempt to eliminate native cultures, and that included writing as well as the other things and Irish, Welsh’s actually survived better than Irish or Scottish.
You know it’s funny, we got an apology, we had a national apology from the government for the stolen generations as an historic thing, as a historic thing that happened before but…
When did it start? 1917 or something?
…in the end the symbolism means more than the reality, so as long as we get the symbols right, as long as we get the discourse right, as long as it looks good, as long as the optics are okay, and it looks and feels fair and just, then it's fine.
Yeah, but there are more children right now, Aboriginal children being removed from their families by the government than at the height of the period of stolen generations.
Yeah.
So we have this lovely apology, we had this symbolic thing going on and it’s like, “Oh, that’s good. That’s acknowledged it, there’s been truth, there’s been truth and reconciliation.” This is the thing that annoys me about the kinda group identity stuff that goes on, because in the end the symbolism means more than the reality, so as long as we get the symbols right, as long as we get the discourse right, as long as it looks good, as long as the optics are okay, and it looks and feels fair and just, then it’s fine. It’s this illusion because the structure is still there that is doing all the damage.
Yes, yes, yes.
We’re not looking at the structures, we’re not looking at the systems, we’re looking at the words that come out of people’s mouths and the little metaphors we use.
The iterations, the procedures, the processes that have been historically embedded in people’s brains and their structures, yeah.
Yeah.
All of this people's confession is becoming a game but without penance.
All of this people’s confession is becoming a game but without penance. For instance, I apologise for something, but confession goes with penance, if you haven’t got penance, it’s not a confession. It’s the equivalent to say, “Look, I stole in your house and your land and you’re living in a hat in a box and it’s my fault and I’m really sorry for this, now would you bring me a cup of tea?” Because nothing actually changes. Alright? And it’s a sort of getting rid of guilt without actually accepting the consequences.
Yeah. Look, it’s interesting. Someone, we’ve got a Nora Bateson fan here who keeps like giving us Nora Bateson quotes. It’s really interesting because Nora… I was doing a thing with her once, it was a panel and I was pretty much bullying the whole panel. I must have done at least 75% of all this…
You?
True God. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I can do this. It was like, so it’s three settler or, you know, what people call white or whatever panelists, and I was, just bullied the hell out of them, and they hardly got a chance to speak. And then someone comes in the comments section, “Oh look at these three white people oppressing Indigenous person. They should just hear him, why don’t they centre his voice?” Centre? I wasn’t centre, I was the whole thing. But it’s amazing just what that person saw with those filters.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then… And then weirdly, Nora gets cancelled a couple of weeks later from the other side, I think they more call it being Dixie Chicked on that side of politics, but she said something about the complexity communities… No, it was the integrity theory, no the integral theory mob and meta modernism. She said they were all like colonists or something like that. It’s all just colonial white male stuff. And everybody just mobbed her, poor thing, she’s getting it from both sides. Anyway, shout out to Nora.
There are two interesting things on that. One is, somebody sent me a note after the last section and said you find these you’ve finally found someone who talks more than you do, and that was a… So compliment on that one. But we’re doing some work with Nora at the moment, alright, so I was part of that attack on step on the integral.
Oh, sweet.
Alright. Yeah, so it was kind of both of us hit it simultaneously is privileging because the whole point about step change is theories of change.
Yeah.
Is it privileged as they considers themselves at the top of the hierarchy? It’s a classic controlling…
You can just take the great chain of being and roll it into a spiral and go, “Look… ” It’s not a hierarchy anymore.”
But the other big thing Nora and I are about to do a webinar on is to attack the concept of digital democracy.
Right.
Because both of us are concerned about it because it’s an algorithm seeking to be a human being. And a lot of the newer democracy are actually really scary on that. It’s like a lot of the blockchain stuff because it’s reducing human beings to a machine based transaction…
Yeah.
Which lacks that integration. I think that’s one of the concerns we’ve got, so there’s a webinar coming up on that shortly.
It's like a lot of the blockchain stuff because it's reducing human beings to a machine based transaction...
Well, your good mates with Jim Rutt? He reckons liquid democracy is the answer to that to solve that one.
Nothing wrong with that.
And Ben Goertzel was behind that one too.
I like that one.
You have a wonderful pack.
Beth.
That you got on to Santa-Fe Institute, who said that… Who condemned me and Prejean in the same sentence as not understanding complexity. So I thought if I’m in the same bracket as Prejean, I’m doing something right, but that was the Jim Rutt show. He’d do it.
I love that space. I’m like the Forrest Gump in there. No, Borat. I walk around, everyone’s very polite, but they’re kinda like, “Mmm, Beth.” So all this he-conomics, what about some her-conomics to finish this up? We got like eight minutes.
I can do… I can do a poem. I’m Welsh, as well.
Ah, please, please give us a poem.
It might be a wonderful little outrun. So in the beginning, the Lord God almighty turned to angel Gabriel and said…
Not this one.
“Today, I’m going to create a beautiful part of the earth and I will call it Wales. I will make it a country of breathtaking blue lakes, rich green forests, and dark beautiful mountains, from which time to time there will be snow covered. I will give it clear swift rivers that will overflow with salmon and trout. The land shall be lush and fertile on which people can raise cattle and grow their food, as well as being rich with precious metals and stones that will be sought after all over the world. Underneath the land, I shall lay rich seams of coal for the inhabitants to mine. Around the coast I will make some of the most beautiful areas in the world. White sandy beaches and cliffs that will attract all manner of wildlife and lots of islands that will be paradise for all of those who visit them. In the waters around the shores, there will be an abundance of sea life. The people who will live there will be called the Welsh and they will be the friendliest people on the earth. They will have all the magic in their blood and songs in their souls. Their voices when raised in song shall be challenging to even choirs of angels.” “Excuse me sir?”, interrupted archangel Gabriel, “Don’t you think that you’re being a little bit too generous to these Welsh?” The Lord God smiled and replied, “You’ve not seen the neighbours that I’m going to give them.”
Very good.
Never heard that one.
Yeah.
Let’s just put the whole thing down to bad neighbours. There, that’s geopolitics sorted.
Speaking of bad neighbours… Speaking of bad neighbours, I can’t really be as poetic as you… Your Welsh poem, Beth. So I salute you. But there was a song that was made up by an Australian in Papua New Guinea during the World War, Second World War, about bad neighbours. In this case, the Japanese and the Australians fighting in Papua New Guinea. And it goes something like this, very briefly. “In Papua, we hunted heads. The white and yellow men came and they looked around. Spears and skulls went underground. From Buna beach to Milne Bay and to the Kokoda Trail, we drove the enemies far away.” I’ll leave it at that.
Goodness, me.
So there you go. Not as poetic as the Welsh but a contemporary song at the time.
No, it’s interesting. What we do at our rugby matches is we sing hymns. It’s a particular Welsh and it comes out to the Welsh chapels. And the fact that people would play rugby on the Saturday and they’d go to the chapel on the Sunday and they’d learn hymns there. And my favourite t-shirt, which Beth is envious of because she hasn’t got one, so the famous Welsh hymn is Bread of Heaven, which is sung at all our churches and I’ve got… Which is B-R-E-A-D. Yeah. I’ve got a t-shirt with B-R-E-D in Heaven, which is a play on words, right? That call, I mean… But it’s interesting we then get parodied as a land of song, which could be positive.
Yeah, the call to action. Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you are a Welsh man, you have a real problem, because people expect you to sing spontaneously overseas and you’re not gonna do… Be that cruel to them, right?
I don’t know if people realise that that singing national anthems before football and rugby matches wasn’t a thing.
No, we started it, we started it in Wales.
New Zealand started with the Haka and the Welsh team spontaneously came out with the Welsh national anthem.
The Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. But that national anthems at rugby matches started with the Welsh meeting New Zealand in when… By the way, we beat them by three points in that match. We know that. We remember these things.
Well, I think we’ve reached a resolution. I think we’ve solved our… We’ve been through all this big thought experiment and I think we’ve come out the other end with a resolution around the question of, who can use another culture’s culture for the Halloween costume and why does that sometimes go one way and not the other? And well, my takeaway would be, it depends on what kind of a neighbour you’ve been.
Yeah. Yeah. I’d like to remove that, the discourse around power reductionism, and let’s call it good neighbours bad neighbours.
… I'd like to remove that, the discourse around power reductionism, and let’s call it good neighbours bad neighbours.
Good neighbours. Well…
And all of us … will resonate with the concept of neighbours because they inflicted it on us for years.
Sorry about that.
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