Australian Indigenous Knowledge and the Globalising Social Sciences

The knowledge practices of ndigenous people may provide valuable insights and strategies in our struggle to understand the processes and effects of globalisation on the socials ciences and humanities. This paper begins with a close look at two ceremonial concepts belonging to the Yolŋu Australian Aboriginal people which have been offered as conceptual devices for understanding a social knowledge practice which is pragmatic and local. Understanding these concepts as metaphysical underpinnings to a particular performative epistemology provides analytical framings whereby alternatives can be discerned to the globalising social sciences and humanities. Using a case study of work about human rights, the paper concludes with a renewed definition of social science in postcolonial knowledge work.