How do people feel, think and behave?

I have so many reactions to all the things we did on Friday at the indigenous mental health workshop. Norm's talk was fascinating, stimulating and surprising. It makes me ask again, "What is my own history? Why don't I know?" And it makes sense of why certain people don't want either white or black Australians to remember the past. But knowledge is power -- I mean power in the sense of "capacity to do something" not "power over". Forgetting is loss of power, so to move forward into the future in a good way must be to remember the past, and to preserve that memory in written and spoken words, in images, in song, in any way possible.

My reaction to Grant's program was also fascination and being intellectually stimulated, realizing how little I know about pre-colonial Australia (or North -America), and wanting to know more. But my primary reaction to Grant's program was to be moved, deeply moved. After describing and having us go through the powerful re-enactment of colonisation (in a big rush, compared to how he usually does this, but it was still effective), that he could still say what he said at the beginning and the end -- it moved me. That we have to mature as a culture and move forward to make a good life in this land based on sharing, caring and respect, for land, for people, for the environment. That if the colonists had said in 1770, "Hey, we'd like to live here. Is that OK?" that the answer would have been, "Welcome, welcome. Let's talk about it and work together to find a way to live together well." What a missed opportunity. But maybe we can still do it.

And of course, I can think of a dozen things I'd like to do in the future for our students and for next year's workshop:
-write a grant with Michael and ATSIS to fund the workshop
-make sure the workshop happens every year
-add an exercise on rules of interpersonal, cross-cultural communication
-find a way to add more training in indigenous issues into our psychology courses that professional psychologists will take
-possibly find a way to put together a postgrad program on indigenous mental health
-make sure our dept has a section of its web page devoted to resource materials on indigenous issues

Exile and the Kingdom

After watching "Exile and the Kingdom" in class, we got into a discussion of why Injibandi and other Aboriginal peoples turn to Christian churches. In the film, one woman is talking about having been down and out, lost in despair and alcohol, when she walked by a church and heard people singing. She thought to herself, "They've got something I don't have," and so she went to the church and became a member. Ann expressed anger and frustration with this fact. I feel the same. Nathan pointed out that the difference between the professed values of Christianity (love, compassion) and the actual behaviour of Christians (genocide, prejudice) in Australia were directly contradictory. He used almost the exact same words that Vine Deloria uses in God is Red, which makes sense – I guess it's how Christianity must look to indigenous people. (I must remember to ask him if he's ever read that, and give him the reference if he hasn't.) I forget the name of the young woman who said that she also felt uncomfortable with it, but that she also thought to herself that if joining the church was a way that the woman could deal with her despair and alcoholism, then maybe for her, Christianity worked. Michael said he felt frustrated that Aboriginal people would turn to Christianity, and not to their own cultures and traditions for that kind of strength. Of course, many do, but what of those who turn to Christian churches?

I am puzzled and frustrated by why anyone would turn to Christianity, and although its not my place to do so, I also find myself wishing that all, not just some, indigenous people would turn to their own cultures and traditions for strength and resilience instead of Christianity. I don't mean rigid cultures and traditions that don't adapt and change, I mean a living, evolving culture with connections deep into the past. Why do I have such a strong preference about what another group of people do? I guess I feel like my culture, white modern industrial American culture, is the end product, after generations, of what happens when a group of people do not hold onto their own culture and traditions, when a culture does not adapt and change, but simply disappears. My culture is what happens when grandparents and parents do not pass on anything from the deep past to the next generation. I wish my ancestors had passed something on to me – then I might know what those traditions were for them. I have no stories, no teachings, no language, no ceremonies, no songs, not even any recipes from my Gaelic and Celtic and Finnish and Saxon ancestors. Instead, I'm a cultural amnesic. And I don't like the culture I come from. I don't find that it nourishes me, or meets my basic human needs, for community, for connection. I wouldn't wish that kind of culture on anyone.

My brother and I are the first in many, many generations in our family to stand up and say, "Jesus, Christianity, all that stuff, has nothing to do with me." These people in the Middle East weren't my ancestors, their stories are not my stories. Those might be important stories to some people, but they have nothing to do with me. I wish my ancestors had not given up passing on their past. Of course, during the Inquisition, the people in Europe who didn't convert to Christianity were tortured, murdered, burned at the stake. The word the Church used was "witches," but that just meant anyone whose continued existence and practices were inconvenient for the Church: people who held land the Church wanted, women who were unmarried, people who knew about herbs and healing, people who practiced non-Christian spirituality. So I suppose I can hardly blame my ancestors for keeping quiet about their past traditions. Except … hmmm, the Finns converted to Christianity later than any other European country, so that would have been post-Inquisition, for them. I don't know, because no such knowledge was handed down to me, what kinds of threats they faced when that conversion happened. Even without the inquisition, my Finnish ancestors could have felt the threat of violence if they carried on older traditions. What was my ancestor's experience with converting to Christianity? Why don't I have those stories? Part of knowledge = connection to the past. I'll have to reflect more on that in another entry.

Getting back to the film, there is still the question of why this Injibandi woman would have joined a church to help her get through the problems she was facing rather than turning to her own traditions and ceremonies. Perhaps this is a practical question, in the sense that one small change in social arrangements could change that outcome. Maybe the reason is as simple as the fact that the church was more visible. It was out in the community in Roebourne, it was something that she could walk past. Injibandi traditions and ceremonies were not something she could walk past in Roebourn. Instead, they were something that took place on country, on their traditional land. Roebourne is, in a sense, a "forced community," not one that was created by and for the local peoples. So by taking people off country, the Australian government was creating a physical setup in which Christian activities were more accessible than her traditional cultural practices. "Assimilation" – that's the name of the game. What was impressive, in the face of that, was how many people still did hold onto their traditional knowledge and ceremonies. More and more boys were initiated every year, the film narrator said. In spite of the physical arrangements for people in Roebourne, in spite of the removal from country, they were finding their way back to their own cultural practices. That makes me hopeful.

Anger and sadness

Since I am doing more than just the readings for this class, I will also write some reflections on other things I'm reading, and hearing about in my discussions with Michael in planning the indigenous mental health workshop. In fact, today’s reflective writing is probably going to be more of a personal venting of feelings and reactions to the trauma and injustice suffered by Aboriginal people. I've read a good bit of a report on Aboriginal suicide by Colin Tatz, read a little of Us Mob by Mudrooroo, watched the films in class, and listened to what Michael has to say about his own experience. To understand what Aboriginal people face in their everyday lives and have experienced over history means that anyone with any compassion just has to weep. What can I really say to Michael when he tells me how many deaths he has had to grieve in the past two weeks? How does one respond to the Injibandi or Urwunjin people or any Aboriginal people being forced to stay out of their country? How does one respond to all the many injustices over the time since Europeans arrived? The word "stress" just doesn't seem strong enough to capture it. "Trauma" seems more appropriate." Michael is right when he says that the trauma just doesn't stop. And how do people manage such a level of trauma without a chance for recovery? We don't have models in psychology to understand that process. Post-traumatic stress disorder without a chance ever to really be "post-." I feel terrible that anyone should have to manage that level of trauma. Of course some people will turn to substances. Others get lost in despair. It makes me deeply sad. And those who don't get lost in despair or numbness? What are their sources of resilience? Hope must always be a part of that, I would guess, hope that things can get better.

Of course, that might mean taking the long view. I remember hearing Winona Laduke, a Native American activist, interviewed on the radio. She was talking about how land rights cases between Native Americans and the U.S. government should be settled in international court because they were treaties between nations, rather than being settled in the courts of the conquerors. And she said with absolute certainty, "We'll get our land back. We had it for tens of thousands of years. You've had it for a couple of hundred. We'll get our land back." And I believed her. I still do, because modern industrial culture in America is not humanly sustainable. But I'm taking the long view - all empires wither in time.

Listening to that interview turned my worldview upside down and put me on a path that has lead me to where I am today. I have been reading about indigenous issues for years, and the stories are very similar the world over. I have heard Native American activists talk about their past and current issues, read about the struggles of South American indigenous tribes and donated money to help them demarcate and thus hold onto their tribal lands, listened to what elders from the Amazon say in films when they express their dismay that their young people do not want to learn the old ways because it's not "cool," read about the Kung's struggles in the Kalahari to hold onto their traditional land, knowledge (including their intellectual property rights), and culture, and read about the Inuit and Dunne-Za and Nisga'a and Okanagan people's struggles in Canada and Alaska to maintain their culture in the face of great physical and psychological violence. And always the response of the dominant culture is the same: "Forget the past (except for those parts we want to have on view for tourists), just focus on the present." Assimilate. It makes me so angry! Not to mention that being part of this culture hasn't worked and isn't working for white folks either. (See most of my other blog entries for 2005.)

I remember seeing a rich American tourist on some TV show saying how lovely Indian art was and how quaint it was when the Indians did their traditional dances, with no clue what the historical and political context was in which those "lovely" and "quaint" cultural expressions were taking place! How about "courageous and beautiful and heroic," instead of "lovely and quaint." How about "necessary for psychological survival in the face of all they have endured"? More anger.

Before I came to Australia, I was chatting to some noodleheaded New Age woman in Colorado and mentioned I was moving to Australia. "Oh," she said, "will you get to meet some Aborigines? You know, they're leaving this Earth. They've just decided that it's over for them here, and they've chosen to leave this Earth and move on." I heatedly told her that I thought the many Aboriginal people still living in Australia would have a very different view. I was angry and she backed down. It made me especially angry for a rich New Ager in America to speak about the threats facing Aboriginal people as if they were faits accomplis, the inevitable destiny of indigenous people, and almost sanctifying that imagined fate by saying, "Oh, they chose that." The hell they did! European colonists forced horrors on them, and they're still not giving in to her imagined oh-they'll-just-die-out fate. (This is what drives me absolutely bonkers about New Agers – they can't deal with anything negative without saying the person chose that. Why is it so hard to accept that bad things happen, and that some people victimize others?) I wonder if I really succeeded in educating that woman, though. Suppose instead of anger, I'd given her a puzzled look, and said, "Where on earth did you get that idea? What are you basing that on?" Then maybe we could have talked about it, and I could have drawn her out and figured out where these ideas come from and told her she could read some of the things I had read.

Anger and sorrow. That's the continued response to injustice. Anger, sorrow, and a desire to contribute to making the world a little better. When I was in my second year at university, I took a class on comparative religion. It was a small discussion class, centered on comparing religions through their understanding of suffering. We read Judeo-Christian books, also parts of the Bible, and books on Buddhism. And we read Black Elk Speaks. I kept struggling in the class, because it was pretty obvious what all the religions except that of the Oglala Sioux thought about suffering. Much of the Jewish and Christian philosophy seemed to center on making sense of suffering. Buddhism sidesteps the question of making sense of it, says it just is, and then talks about how to alleviate suffering through the practice of meditation – a very practical approach. Over and over again, I kept asking for clarification on what we were supposed to get out of the story of the Sioux in the context of the class. I never got an answer. I don't think the two professors had one. I would say, "OK, it seems that there are types of suffering in life that are unavoidable, like sickness and death. But then there are types of suffering that should be avoidable, those that result from one group of people subjugating another, perpetrating injustice. People could choose not to do that. It's not an inevitable type of suffering. All the Judeo-Christian and Buddhist writings are about the inevitable type of suffering that comes from being alive in a body. Black Elk was not talking about that kind of suffering. The Sioux didn't experience only inevitable suffering. How do we think about injustice?" I never got an answer from them, I never worked one out for myself in that class, and none of the other students had an answer either.

I still don't. All one can do, it seems, is try to find some little way to make a difference. And at least make a commitment to be someone who does things differently.

Some years ago, I committed my life to building bridges between indigenous knowledge and science as one way that I, as a scientist, can make a difference. That’s what brings me to this course. But I had forgotten that part of building that bridge would be to deeply understand the suffering that indigenous people now experience. So here I am, with compassion and sorrow in my heart, saying, I think I'm starting to understand a little. Let's build that bridge, and I won't look away from anything that is a part of its foundation.


Some related writings:
Black Elk & Neihardt, J. (1979). Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Mudrooroo (1995). Us Mob. History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson/Harper Collins.

Stone, V.E. (2005). Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? http://valinoz.blogspot.com

Tatz, C. (1999). Aboriginal Suicide Is Different: Aboriginal Youth Suicide in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and New Zealand: Towards a Model of Explanation and Alleviation. A Report to the Criminology Research Council on CRC Project 25/96–7

Films:
Pearson, N., Calley, K., Griffiths, L. (1996). Dhuway. Great grandfather my son: An Australian diaspora and homecoming. Story editor & presenter, Noel Pearson ; Director, Lew Griffiths ; Script, Karin Calley ; Producers, Noel Pearson & Lew Griffiths. Publisher: Manuka, ACT : Oziris Australia,

Solomon, R. & Rijavec, F. (1992). Exile and the Kingdom. Written by Frank Rijavec & Roger Solomon. Publisher: Lindfield, N.S.W. : Ngurin Aboriginal Corporation & Film Australia, 1992.

The colonial fate of Australia & the US

I had never thought, before Norm pointed it out in class, about the link between the American revolution and the British colonial program in other parts of the world. Having lost the wealth and resources from the American colonies, Britain turned elsewhere. Australia was colonized right at the time that the white colonists in the U.S. were throwing off the yoke of British rule. There is a direct causal link between U.S. independence from Britain and the colonization of Australia. Our two nations are bound together with karmic ties.

"Formations" of knowledge

I'm noticing that I tend to focus on "things that indigenous people know that Western people don't." But this course is not just about a checklist of things that one group does or doesn't know. It's about approaches to knowledge. It's about management of knowledge. How is knowledge approached, shared? As Norm said, how does one position oneself with respect to knowledge? One aspect of this he talked about was different knowledge formations. One formation is a circle of people discussing and sharing what they know, gradually reaching a mutual understanding. Another formation is clever guy/gal standing up in front of a room talking as the authority, and then getting challenging questions at the end, in which members of the audience essentially say, "But aren't you wrong, because of this, that and the other?" Academia clearly accords one kind of knowledge sharing more status and respect than the other. Academia seems to value knowledge sharing as status display and contest more than knowledge sharing as creative process. You know, I'm really good at that display and contest thing, so I have to admit I kind of like it. I'm opinionated and argumentative, so I like a chance to use those traits. Which is different from saying that I get the best results I could by using those traits. Maybe things would be different if I weren't so quick to say, "But wait, that's wrong because of X, Y and Z." On the other hand, that's not all I enjoy. I equally enjoy knowledge sharing as creative process. One of the things I love about talking to women scientists is exactly that quality of conversation. It's a more cooperative type of conversation, and I daresay I learn more from these.

I think, though, that I am just beginning to get the vaguest hints of what knowledge sharing and management are in Aboriginal cultures. So I'll have to reflect further on this.

Respect and contempt in scholarly discourse

Two voices in my head, two voices. Our guest lecturer shows us rocks that look like carved human faces and says that they are not carved. One voice says, "That can't possibly be true." Another voice says (to quote Shakespeare), "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I said during class that I had the voice saying, "That's ridiculous! Of course it must be carved! It's impossible that it isn't carved." I said I wasn't buying into that voice, but that it was there. And it's interesting that was the first voice I expressed out loud. I didn't express the other voice in my head, the one that said, "That's interesting. Wonder how the stones got to be that way?"

What I noticed, in reflecting on it afterwards, is that my reaction was just that – a reaction against, a dismissal of, a rejection of. Why did my response have to be preceded with "That's ridiculous?" Ridiculous = deserving of ridicule, and I most certainly don't think that the statement "These are not carved" is deserving of ridicule. It is, instead, deserving of curiosity. But … a lot of my training in Western scientific ways of speaking, and of academic discourse in general, was to use contempt as a tool in arguments. I watched my father (a professor) use this again and again in arguments, and I certainly observed some of my mentors at my postgraduate university do it. So I picked it up as an unconscious habit. It's what you do in an argument when your most important goal is to win rather than discuss, and when you don't want to have to do the hard intellectual work of really engaging with the other person's idea. I've recognized that this is an unhealthy tendency for years. Using contempt is abusive, and just because I observed powerful people doing it doesn't mean I have to do it. I have spent years trying to un-learn these habits of speech and attitude, but they crop up still. And it's exactly the attitude taken in "scientism" towards anything not already explained by current theories. It's exactly the colonial attitude towards other systems of knowledge that I object to and hope to change. And here I am, enacting exactly that attitude.

My reaction to the lecturer's statement was not phrased as the response of someone curious about finding out more or interested in engaging with the topic. I could have asked a question (How did it get to be that way, then? What does it mean to say it's not carved?), or just made a statement of fact (My understanding is that things don't take that shape without humans carving them) that might start a dialogue. Well, since I don't think I really do hold a dismissive attitude, I can try to be more expressive of curiosity.

The Yolngu concept of inside-outside knowledge

Thoughts on the concept of "inside-outside" knowledge. Morphy writes about some Aboriginal knowledge being "inside knowledge" and other knowledge being "outside knowledge." Certain things are known to certain people at certain times and places. Such restricted knowledge is "inside knowledge." Knowledge that is more available to a variety of people and a variety of times and places is "outside knowledge." But of course, that dichotomy does not hold up. What is inside to some people will be outside to other people. It's easy to hear the phrases "inside knowledge, outside knowledge," and to think that this represents a dichotomy and an inequality. In the corporate world, inside knowledge is privileged knowledge that people in power have. "Insider trading" is when someone uses inside knowledge inappropriately to make a profit (and gets caught at it). In that world, some people are inside, and are privileged, and some people are outside, and are not privileged. But of course, that understanding of inside-outside doesn't seem to be what it means at all in an indigenous context. Two people having access to different kinds of knowledge does not necessarily mean that they have unequal power; it might just mean that they have different levels of expertise, or belong to different types of social groups.

Some knowledge is only available to people who have gone through a certain level of development, training, or initiation. Before they go through that level, they are outsiders to that knowledge. Once they have gone through that level then they are inside of that knowledge. But there will be still other aspects of knowledge that they remain outside of. Another level of training or initiation is necessary before they can be inside of that next set of knowledge. That's not elitist, that's just common sense. You need to make sure someone understands something properly before you introduce him or her to a concept that depends on understanding that thing. "Properly" can mean thorough understanding or it can mean having a proper ethical understanding. Or that's how I'm thinking about it. I can try to make sense of this by thinking of examples from my own experience. In academia, we believe that students in physics need to understand the basics of Newton’s theory of mechanics before they can properly understand how and when Einstein's theory of relativity applies. Once they're introduced to relativity, their professors say, "OK, now we know that Newton's theory wasn't true. Or it's mostly true, but it's incomplete." Students are outside of an understanding of Einstein's theory until they have mastered an understanding of Newton's theory. There are also situations in which academics want to make sure that a proper ethical understanding is in place before a student proceeds in a research program. In psychology, we want to make sure that our students and faculty members have some training in the ethical use of human participants in research before we allow them to conduct research. These are kind of clunky examples from my world. It seems that in the Aboriginal world, who should and should not have access to different kinds of knowledge is given by Law, and Law is given by elders, country, ceremony, ancestors, and other sources that I probably don't know how to imagine.

With social groups, some knowledge will always be "inside knowledge." Some knowledge will be concealed or secret because it's not appropriate to tell to other people. In my culture, we generally don't think that it's proper to tell about one's family's "dirty laundry" in public (unless, of course, you're on a reality TV show, or Dr. Phil). Uncle Joe's cheating on his wife gets discussed within the family, not to outsiders. So the idea of social boundaries around knowledge is common in many cultures; the specifics of those boundaries vary widely. They also vary over time. It's common to have things that one keeps to oneself until one knows another person better. So Aboriginal people keep things to themselves until they know a white person better. In addition, what white people think constitutes important information in "getting to know" someone is very different from what Aboriginal people think is important. White people in Australia and America don't talk about country or ancestors or kin. They talk about what they do for a living. So it makes sense that Aboriginal people might hold certain things back for a long time, simply from not feeling as if they know the person well enough to reveal something. (I'm obviously not talking about cases in which knowledge should never be revealed to an outsider.) Because many white Australians feel entitled to everything that Aboriginal people have, the idea of Aboriginal people holding something back is confronting to the colonial program.

In contrast, there are white people who feel fine about withholding information from aboriginal people. Morphy raises an interesting point about some knowledge being inside knowledge to one group when it is deceptively concealed from other groups. He gives the example of some white folks showing up on an Aboriginal reserve in the Northern Territory, and trying to convince them of all the wonderful benefits they would have if they allowed a road to be built through their country. The Aboriginal people kept saying no, because they could see clearly that the white guys had their own inside reasons why they wanted the road built, reasons that would benefit them rather than the Aborigines. Building a road through country is a serious business, and until the white guys were ready to come to the table and talk about their inside reasons for wanting the road, the Aboriginal people couldn't get down to serious business with them. The other thing that example made clear to me was the inherent racism in the white guys' approach. They thought that the Aborigines they were dealing with were simple, "primitive" people, who could easily be deceived by some lies about the benefits the road would bring. It does not seem to have occurred to them that they were dealing with clever people, who could see through an obvious sales pitch or deception. "Oh, Aboriginal people, most of them can't even read or write. It should be easy to pull the wool over their eyes." This underestimating of Aboriginal people seems to be a constant in Australian history.

Why is it so hard for some white folks to assume that people they're squashing with physical force might be clever? Thousands of slave owners in Haiti were poisoned by their house slaves within a few weeks because it never occurred to them that their slaves were clever enough to organize such a large-scale conspiracy in private. Knowledge of poisons and how to have a communication network among the slaves was inside knowledge for Haiti's African residents, and white slave owners were outside of that knowledge. In that case, it wasn't being an outsider that was fatal to the whites, it was the arrogance of assuming that they were too smart to be outsiders.

References:
Insider/outsider knowledge in Aboriginal cultures:
Morphy, H. (1991). Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge, Chapter 5, Inside and Outside: The Yolngu System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Slave revolution in Haiti:
Davis, W. (1985). The Serpent and Rainbow, Chapter 11, Tell My Horse. New York: Warner Books, Inc.

Epistemological curiosity & respecting other worldviews

My particular interest in taking this class this semester is to understand something about approaches to knowledge that are very different from Western approaches, from scientific approaches. I may be a bit odd as a scientist, because my first year at uni I spent more time studying the nature of scientific knowledge than I spent studying the content area of my field of study, physics.. I'm very grateful to Professor Layzer for giving me a solid grounding in epistemology of science before I embarked on the content of science. I'm also grateful to my brother, who was studying the philosophy of science, for giving me things to read and talking about ideas with me. I'm grateful to my parents, for encouraging my curiosity about how the world works. My interest in epistemology continues.

Both scientists and non-scientists may revere the scientific view. The non-scientists who do so, in my experience, are often self-proclaimed "skeptics" seeking to deny the (admittedly absurd) ontological claims of Western churches, and replacing Western theism with what they see as the pure rational claims of logic and deduction. Let's call these people skeptics, and their worldview "scientism". Neither scientists nor skeptics very often reflect on the tenets of scientism. This world view seems to hold that only things that are currently understood, studied and explained by scientific theories are real. Thus personal experiences that are not currently explainable in science are dismissed as "unreal," or "delusions," or "lies." However, this view is in fact quite unscientific.

Science, operating at its ideal, means keeping an open mind and considering what the evidence has to say. It means comparing different theoretical views in light of all the available evidence and making a decision as to which one is most consonant with the data. It means letting nature instruct you: the data are always right, rather than some theory. Theories, in fact, are of necessity in flux. Kuhn described eloquently the process of "scientific revolutions," by which one theory gives way to another. A revolution occurs once sufficient evidence incommensurate with the old theory accumulates and there is a new theory that is more commensurate with available evidence. It is a necessary fact about science that theories will always be incomplete, that is, not completely true. All things will not be explainable in current scientific theories. Knowledge, like life, evolves.

With the actual epistemology of science in mind, scientism makes little sense. When someone’s reported experience seems incommensurate with current scientific theories, it may be as likely that the current scientific theory is incomplete as that their report of their experience is inaccurate. Of course, looking more closely at how current theories fit with the incommensurate experience is the first step one should take. Certainly there are some experiences that at first seem incommensurate with current scientific theories that, on closer examination, prove to be explainable in current scientific terms. Some UFO sightings, for example, turn out merely to be examples of "mis-identified flying objects": rare electromagnetic weather phenomena that produce something that looks like a lighted object hovering above the ground. Other experiences of people's being kidnapped by aliens turn out to be explainable in terms of theories of memory reconstruction. Memory may not always be a veridical representation of the past, but a reconstruction, and some people’s memories of "alien abduction" are incommensurate with other memories they hold at the same time that are inter-subjectively verifiable. Science generally believes in the most "parsimonious" explanation, that is to say, the one that requires the least additions to current theories. I am happy to grant that distorted memory reconstruction may be a more parsimonious explanation than that 10% of the US population is regularly being kidnapped and examined by aliens. (Part of this is my belief - it seems implausible to me that aliens would be that interested, or that there exists a scientific funding agency anywhere in the galaxy who would fund research on such a scale.) The more singular and individual an experience is, the more parsimonious it seems to try to fit it into current scientific theories.

There are, however, many experiences reported by people in non-Western cultures that seem incommensurate with current scientific theories. (And by some Westerners too.) So, does one dismiss the experience of an entire people, or does one assume that our theories may be incomplete? The latter seems far more parsimonious to me. It does not seem parsimonious to assume that an entire people must be deluded or must mean something different than they are saying. A more scientific attitude, to me, would be to assume, "Hmm, there’s something interesting going on here. We may need to expand our understanding."