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Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention
myself and my Aboriginal teachers was already occupied in the first
instance by Captain Cook. A history of conquest, white rule, dispos-
session, and cruel decades of colonization stood between indigenous
people and any outsider, particularly a white person, in the first in-
stance. That was the situatedness of our encounter. Other possibili-
ties were open to us, and Aboriginal people’s efforts to assert the exis-
tence of, and to specify, moral others (in Burridge’s 1960 sense of the
term) offered generous paths toward alternative grounds of encoun-
ter. But such developments depended on the process of the relation-
ships through time, as we revealed ourselves to each other through our
actions. Other contexts, in Australia and elsewhere, have their own
unique situatedness. Situated dialogue is never abstract.
The concept of openness may sound obvious, but it is equally chal-
lenging. Openness is risky because you do not know where you are
going to get to. You cannot have a mission statement, a set of goals,
targets, charters, and performance indicators. You would have to be
clever in your proposal writing if you hoped for funding. To be open
is to hold one’s self available to others: you take risks and make your-
self vulnerable. But this is also a fertile stance: your own ground, in-
deed your own self, can become destabilized. In open dialogue, one
holds one’s self available to be surprised, to be challenged, and to be
changed. This ground of openness to change is the place where knowl-
edge arises; it is an essential basis to a recursive epistemology. It seems
important, therefore, also to assert that openness depends on an un-
derlying faith in pattern, connection, and communication. That is,
while the outcome is not determined in advance, one works with an
expectation that random or chaotic outcomes will be the exceptions
rather than the rule.
From an anthropological perspective, this theory of dialogue is a
position of situated availability. One is situated in one’s own history,
training, desires, and self and is available to be called into change
through the teachings of others. One holds one’s self open to recur-
sive epistemology both by knowing and learning one’s own situated-
ness and by being available to become enmeshed in the teachings one
has struggled to encounter.
Situated availability poses a further challenge. One of my favorite
