The Competing Origin Narratives of Science and Indigenous.

This book arose out of research being conducted for a Doctoral Dissertation concerning the relationship between scientific understandings of human origins, expressed through archaeological writings, and the mythological understandings of indigenous people in the places the archaeological data came from, expressed through religious practices. In the course of my research I discovered that the competing discourses I was investigating were most easily understood as different stories about the same places. This difference is anchored in competing world views, as is the authority that gives credence to the competing narratives. To understand this better, in the enclosed pages I step through the ways in which these different stories about the same places come into existence and some of the inter-subjective ways in which they relate to each other. This book will appeal to people who have an interest in different ways of understanding the world we all live in.

Dr Brendan Corrigan is a consultant anthropologist who works on indigenous land claims and heritage protection projects in remote parts of northern Australia. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Western Australia in 2007.