Paper short abstract:

This paper examines time as 'situated knowledge' in Australian Indigenous cosmologies and epigenetics. In a postcolonial context, the enfolding of time and trauma across generations has implications for current states of health and disease, and political strategies to redress such violence.

Paper long abstract:

Some Indigenous Australians have embraced epigenetic discourses as a political strategy to highlight the negative impacts of intergenerational trauma and slow violence in a postcolonial context. Despite fundamentally different evidentiary regimes, Indigenous scholars are drawing analogies between Indigenous concepts of time and some fields of epigenetics. Indigenous concepts of time are influenced by a cosmological system in which events of the past have an immediacy that makes them part of the present. Epigenetics offers multiple understandings of temporality, from transmission of embodied trauma across generations through linear and biographical time, to the telescoping of past, present and future times in molecular processes and cellular memories. Drawing on the theoretical work of scholars such as Muecke, Verran and Latour, this paper does not attempt to scale differing knowledges into a universal space. Rather, I interrogate these situated entanglements of cosmological time and epigenetic time, and the possibilities of bringing different embodiments and onto-epistemologies of knowledge and evidence-making together, both ethnographically and in legal situations.