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Paper short abstract:

This contribution aims to examine how Indigenous conceptualizations of knowledge and knowing are used by Aboriginal people as a mean to represent themselves and initiate, or rather, reverse, a form of asymmetrical reciprocity between them and the western figure of the expert.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this contribution is to report on the documentation process of the knowledge of the Bardi, an Australian Indigenous group from Northwestern Australia. This kind of project often involves assumptions about knowledge that differ greatly from Indigenous people’s own definitions and aspirations. I will compare these assumptions about, and view of, knowledge with Aboriginal people’s own conceptualizations of their knowledge. Based on my own experience of the process I had to go through in order to be authorized to access and report on this knowledge, I will then consider the way those Indigenous conceptualizations of knowledge and knowing are used by Aboriginal people as a mean to represent themselves and initiate, or rather, reverse, a form of asymmetrical reciprocity between them and the western figure of the expert. In order to document Indigenous practices, the ethnographer has to learn how to perform, understand and respect them first, which, more practically, means she has to place herself in the position of the novice. In this particular context, this also means accepting the fact that some things cannot be told and that some knowledge stay unlearned. That is, acknowledging the fact that documentation can be, and sometimes must stay, an incomplete practice.