TYSON YUNKAPORTA on Unbranding Our Mind /235
High contrast photo of a gleaming spider’s web that is beginning to dismantle –by Karim Ghantous.
Struggling to change actual conditions, many have settled for changing the perceptions of the world around us. On this week’s episode, guest Tyson Yunkaporta begins by sharing the connections between perception, the branding of our identities, and the many forms of capital that become available and valuable in a perception-obsessed society. As we welcome the call to change our conditions and participate in the great “thousand-year clean-up”, we explore hybridized insight, the ramifications of clinging to dichotomous identities, and how genuine diversity is tangible preparedness and emotional resilience in motion. With this in mind, it becomes our task to figure out how we can sustain genuine diversity in our lives so we may work alongside folks with different capacities, worldviews, solutions, and thought processes in devotion to dismantling a system that necessitates abuse.
Oscillating between the differences between conditions and perceptions, Tyson calls us to unbrand our minds and deeply interrogate where we are sourcing our thoughts from, the ramifications of becoming a trauma-obsessed society, and how to identify environments for emergence.
“Beneath that net of shadow identities, we are something else—much more vibrant, beautiful, glorious things we are.”
Photo of Tyson Yunkaporta by James Henry
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.
♫ The music featured in this episode is “Wanderlust” by 40 Million Feet, “Battlefields” by Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra, and “Path You’ve Never Seen” by Violet Bell.
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