Keep yarning

Another iteration of "After Religion" wrapped, though today's was the penultimate session: next week is devoted to a showcase of student work. I've ended lecture courses with student work showcases for years but for some reason I've been unusually insistent this time on the importance of my voice not being the last one heard. 

This built on evolving discussions about what story to tell about "after religion." When I asked them to tell such a story or stories, students resisted and refused. Everyone's experience is different, some said, and equally valid. History is narrated by the victors, said others. Linear stories are part of the colonial mindset, said yet others, unlike the cyclical time of indigenous traditions, not to mention stories older than humanity told by creator spirits. Still, I said, if you're going to use the word "after" some kind of story is implied, and better that you have a story and own it than defer or default to others'. Maybe your story is cyclical. Or polyvocal. Or perspectival. Or ancient.

What I was recommending was a spatial and relational approach to storytelling, which we'd encountered in Tyson Yunkaporta's practice of "yarning" in Sand Talk, as he engages various topics through reported conversations with others in particular times and places, part of a "structured cultural activity" grounded in “story, humour, gesture and mimicry for consensus-building, meaning making and innovation" with "protocols of active listening, mutual respect and building on what others have said" (131). The students' concerns about a master narrative are spot-on. But the way to decolonize it isn't to presume to be able to do without story, as if we could be but without being in any particular time or place or relationships.

All more easily said than done, especially in a college classroom in a settler colonial society, in which we routinely swoop from one time or place to another, as if rendered weightless in the purity of our intellectual inquiry. As in years past I brought together the title slides of the semester's lectures and said the intention wasn't linear, everything was still on the table, all the questions open, as if it's a map rather than a narrative. Keep yarning.

The video above was a bridge between last week's discussion of religious naturalism and this week's on technology, "boids" murmuring like starlings - incidentally also in Yunkaporta.