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GSilky t1_jc4quzf wrote

What would it look like to integrate the two traditions for a better story of humanity?

Sometimes I think the issue is trying to shoehorn concepts. Maybe the indigenous Australians didn't think it important to study history. Many societies don't have strong history traditions. It's easier to name the few that do, like China, Greece, the Jews, to an extent the Romans -which is the only reason western society has it's historical tradition today. Most of our knowledge of past events comes from sources in these civilizations. So maybe the Australians never took history seriously, and because of this the concept just isn't there, and we don't need to meld the approaches, because they aren't approaching the same thing?

I'm also open to history being a wider idea than that held by western society, maybe history is more than what Herodotus said it was.

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B0ssc0 OP t1_jc5eegb wrote

> Maybe the indigenous Australians didn't think it important to study history.

There is more than one Australian Aboriginal culture here. They all though have their particular view of ‘history’. These people don’t use abstractions as we do.

> Land, water, and sky all connect as one space, and the stories of ancestral figures and the creation of features on the land, in the water, and in the sky are all connected.

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GSilky t1_jce5uok wrote

That sounds closer to legend or even myth, rather than history. We have many other examples of this thinking in other cultures and wouldn't, we don't, consider it history. Is Heracles putting up Gibraltar history?

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