Paper short abstract:

In this provocation, I contend that essential for the formation of a 'creative public anthropology' is a scholarly reconfiguration of perceived relations between medium and knowledge with specific references to Australian Indigenous epistemologies of knowing through doing.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past half-century, the phenomenological writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) have challenged Anglophone scholars to think of human cultural expressions as products of our sensory entwinings with the world, and the meanings we ascribe to them as inseparable from our own existence within it. Within the academy, it is the medium of text through which our observations of lived experiences are primarily codified, disseminated and evidenced as veracious representations of our contributions to human knowledge. Yet in the wake of European colonisation in countries such as Australia, this mode of knowledge production has all but displaced preexisting Indigenous systems for recording, communicating and evidencing knowledge of the observable world. I contend that the intertwined songs, dances and designs through which Australian Indigenous knowledges are classically codified are no less capable of supporting fact than books, journals and spreadsheets, and show how contemporary Indigenous knowledge-holders can be engaged as equal partners in producing new knowledge by surpassing the academy's default relegation of such media into exceptionalising categories such as 'creative' and 'practical'. Just as Merleau-Ponty theorises that our construction of meaning is inseparably entwined with our sensory perceptions, I show how gnosis and praxis are similarly inseparable in Australian Indigenous modalities of thought, through which knowing is largely understood to be a necessary product of doing. Ultimately, I contend that a perceptional reconfiguration of this kind is essential for the formation of a 'creative public anthropology'.