Yin Paradies is a Wakaya anarchist radical scholar spreading decolonial love from, and as part of, unceded Wurundjeri land. Yin is also a climate and ecological activist committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies who seeks meaningful mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being, and doing that are grounded in wisdom, humility, respect, and generosity.
I first heard Yin Paradies speak at the QuillWood Academy on April 23, 2024 where he gave a paper called ‘How did humans live before modern societies?’, which you can view on Yin’s YouTube channel.
During our conversation I asked Yin what he thought might be most useful for artists and cultural workers to know about ‘how humans lived before modern societies’?
His responses took my breath away and literally slowed me down as our conversation unfolded, I was mesmerized, as if the silences were a third guest in the Zoom recording space. I felt like I was embodying Yin’s thoughts in real time.
In a nutshell, Yin’s research contrasts primal societies, which were egalitarian and kinship-based, with modern societies that emerged 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, bringing mostly patriarchy and hierarchy.
His thesis that modernity, despite its technological advancements, is linked to trauma and self-destructive behaviors whereas primal cultures, which view time cyclically and integrate art into daily life, enhance community ties and creativity.
I agree.
I also asked Yin about deep listening:
Near the end of our exchange we spoke about the role of art in times of crisis and how art has the potential to awaken new perspectives and foster community engagement, which is the theme of my next season of this podcast, starting in 2025, so I am thankful for his insights:
Yin invites us to reimagine ourselves and reconsecrate our world through kinship, reciprocity and care.
You can also see this conversation on the conscient podcast YouTube channel : e193 yin paradies - interweaving everything with everything else.
Yin recommended reading is Darren Allen’s works on primal and modern cultures.
Transcription of e193 yin paradies
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
Yin Paradies
Shall we start with an acknowledgment of country? For me, I'm here on the lands, very much the waters on a rainy day and the skies of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. I want to pay my respect and my admiration for care and connection with what we call country or land, air, and waters, skies and waters. People have been living here for tens of thousands of years, and it's a beautiful thing to be so closely connected with country. So thank you for that care and for that inspiration to the rest of us.
Claude Schryer
Well, I'm in the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe nation, also known colonially as Ottawa in Canada. And this region was a meeting point. There are a number of Indigenous names that are used for rivers, bridges and spaces but people don't know the history very well. And I do what I can to be aware of who is here, who was here, and how we can better live together in this land of the Algonquin. I’m very grateful to be here. Yin, I had the privilege of hearing you speak on April 23rd at a Quillwood Academy, presentation you gave. I didn't know your work before, but I'm very happy that we have time to talk today. And luckily, that presentation is on your YouTube channel. I put the link in the in the episode notes so people can access it. I really encourage them to listen and see that presentation because it's very rich. I wanted to start just you've done already a partial introduction, but you could, maybe tell us a little bit more about your background, who you are. And then we'll jump into some of the topics in around deep listening and around the role of art and see where that goes. But let's start at the beginning with your origins.
Yin Paradies
So, I'm an Australian. If we're going to talk nation states, which are interesting things to talk about. So I was born on this smallest continent in the world towards the north. So mostly lived born and lived in the north of Australia, which is, of course, quite warm and subtropical, if not tropical in some parts. And my background in terms of sort of ancestry is quite mixed. My dad's from the Philippines. My mom is Aboriginal and, also, you know, Anglo Australian, as it's called. Lots of English heritage as well. And, my grandmother was born on, our Aboriginal country where we trace our lineage, which is up also north, northern parts of Australia. And, my grandmother was part of what we call here the stolen generations. There's many, of course, similarities in other countries of authorities engaged in assimilation, stealing children, and, taking them away, raising them with white families. So she was part of that, story. And, of course, that's one of the great traumas of, modernity for indigenous peoples. Eradication was probably more of a problem at the start, and then we got the assimilation stuff. It's all added up to be quite a large intergenerational trauma, complex that we're working with. So, I started always wanted to be an academic of various kinds and ended up working in indigenous health and moving down to the southern parts, the colder parts of Australia some years ago and, you know, moving from indigenous health to an interest in racism and health and then anti racism and then decolonization indigenous knowledges over the years. And so that was that's what brings me to my current academic, interests and something I'm passionate about sharing, with others.
Claude Schryer
Well, the presentation you gave was called how did humans live before modern societies, which is really something I haven't thought a lot about but, I had a really good feeling of when you were distinguishing between primal and modern societies and there's lots to talk about there, but maybe you can just give us an overview of why you distinguish the 2. I think I know, but, some of the key characteristics between those two very different worlds.
Yin Paradies
So, really, drawing from history, obviously, before written history or anthropology, archaeology sort of, studies, there's this sense that human societies used to be what we call primal. All of them used to be primal, And, then something happened about 10 to 12000 years ago, and as far as we know, quite new things appeared. So human history as a species is at least 330,000 years old, so we've been going for a while. But in the last 10 to 12000 years, we developed these kinds of things like, strong forms of patriarchy, dense more densely populated cities or towns, agriculture, a sense of a stronger sense of hierarchy that goes along with that that patriarchy and things like kings and queens developed and that became, hereditary, which was also quite a strange thing for primal societies. Money, literacy or writing, lots of things that we take for granted in modern societies, but a lot of primal societies. And also, let's talk about indigenous, peoples living, even in the last few 100 years. And today, of course, a lot of modernity has encroached on indigenous cultures, but, you know, a lot of indigenous cultures also lack these things that we've discussed and have other things instead, which make them indigenous or primal. Things like, strong sense of egalitarianism, strong sense of relational autonomy, lots of interest and engagement in things like kinship, reciprocity, societies with distributed authority and very different approaches to decision making, child rearing these sorts of things. And obviously, societies that are smaller in the sense that there's less people and peep and people live more, in a more distributed way in in in smaller groups, and technology levels is another one. That's a big difference, that a lot of technology has developed over the last several 1000 years. So I think it's fair fairly easy for people to see that there's big differences from, what we might call indigenous societies and modern societies. But some of the reasons for that, the values, the life ways, maybe are not quite as obvious to people.
Claude Schryer
Right. And I've studied with Vanessa Andreotti and her colleagues and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective work and, you know, the idea of de-modernisation and decolonisation is becoming understood now as we see that modernity is quite self-destructive, even though it has attributes. Right? There are good things. The fact that we're speaking today through technology is an outcome of modernity, but it is highly problematic. And I appreciated that the way that you walked us through the history and from your point of view, and but also giving a fair shake to modernity in the sense that it there were some good things. There are some good things, but ultimately it has been traumatic for many, many people around the world and continues to be. And we're going into a period of I don't know what word to use. Transformation. And you didn't talk directly about art, but I felt that when you were speaking, you talk about art all the time, stories and metaphor, and, you know, the language that you used, cyclic, rhythmic, inside grounded outside presence and other side horizontal time where the future can't be remembered. Past is yet to come and now is a spatial slushy rippled texture every when. Beautiful words. And I'd like you to talk a bit about, art and how it fits into your research and your own thoughts on the place of art in primal cultures.
Yin Paradies
Yes. Yeah. It's a good question. That quote is about, time and temporalities, and primal peoples and cultures have very different conceptions of time to modern societies. Modern societies are more about linear clock time. So that's an interesting, angle to discuss. But art itself, I think is something that's also done very differently, that's lived very differently between primal and modern societies. So in primal cultures, there's a tendency to interweave everything with everything else, including art. So people are very creative and expressive in everyday life, through ceremony and ritual, dance and art and carving and weaving and various aspects of life that are just considered quite normal for primal peoples. But part of primal cultures is a strong engagement with and resonance with eccentricity and uniqueness. So people do things, even hunting, you know, is an is an art form that people do in different ways. And that's those broad that broad kind of church in a sense of acceptance of those unique ways is unusual in modernity where we tend to think about ourselves as individualistic, but there's a lot of, a lot of conformity that's involved really in modern societies. People are expected to conform to fairly narrow ways of being. So art is not a separate domain in primal cultures, as it seems to be mostly in in modernity. And some people have said, when talking about primal cultures that there wasn't art. They also say there wasn't science and, that even language was something that although from the people's head, they didn't use as much as we do. They didn't talk as much. So it's semantics in a way. If you don't name something separately as art, is there art? And doesn't really matter how you answer that question. But certainly what people did, as I said, was very creative and expressive, and there were many ways of doing that through, everyday life and sociality, with each other. And really that I I think that one of the big differences about primal cultures that we underestimate is, how much we can grow and expand and increase our our kind of, range of skills and abilities through having such close kingship with so many people. You know, when you're in a tribe of 100 of people, really close, compared to a nuclear family of, you know, half a dozen people, usually at most. It just has some really great effects on kick starting the human brain, I guess, in a in a broader sense, not just the brain on in your on top of your neck. And that is art. You know that that that expression, that that creativity comes through, that learning and growing and relating with so many people and also, of course, animals and plants that are part of the kinship system too.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. The western world, the modern world has separated art from nature and other relations that we have, and some of it's great. You know, there's magnificent works of art, but they kind of sit in a in relative isolation from the rest of human activity. And I I think that's problematic. But I'm also grateful that so many works of art have been part of my culture. You know, I'm connected to it, but I also feel the disconnect of it to the rest of the world. So, I appreciate your insights. And the other thing I want to talk to you about is is deep listening. Because when the slides went by, I'm one of those who asked a question at that session. And I was really happy to see the language that you used tuning into the cadence, rhyme, and timbre of silence and stillness, rather than the speed, stimulation, and satisfaction of modernity. And many of the people I talk to work in the field of acoustic ecology talk about listening and slowing down. And I think the world is understanding that it's something that's necessary for modernity to kind of stop being so aggressive and eventually transform is that notion of slowing down. So what are your thoughts on listening and then and then the notion of deep listening as you described it in your presentation?
Yin Paradies
Yeah. I'd also like to hear from you about your take on listening and being, which you mentioned was a bit different from the way that I, outlined it. But, yeah, I'm happy to start. And I'm interested in, yeah, listening and deep listening, you know, and it's not really that much difference between them. I think all listening should probably be deep and, and attentive and really, inhabit what I call soft fascination or gentle curiosity with the world, and it's, as you said, it's kind of a pulling back from that aggressive sense of of acquisition and and instrumentality of modernity where thing everything is you know, well, the world is signified in the sense that we treat each other as and objects in the world as things that are not really worthy of our attention. Deep listening is more about having that humility that we have everything to learn or something to learn from any aspect of the cosmos that we are in relationship with or entangled with. And so that, yeah, that sense of slowing down is about cultivating a different, way of being aware. It's not so much just about speed. It's about a sort of state of consciousness in a way. And primal people certainly inhabited states of consciousness that we, really don't even know much about in modernity, More trans like states, very few of us reach those in modernity because we've stopped doing activities that cultivate them. So the stillness and silence is, in a way, it's really just about, it's another phrase that will people might find challenging. Really, it's about conspiring with the cosmos. So the word conspiring actually means to breathe with. So it's about breathing with the cosmos. Whatever speed and rhyme and timbre that is. It's not an absence. It's not a kind of blank slate, but it's a tuning in. Yeah. Or sometimes I talk about a murmuration. You know, when birds all move together as a flock in the sky, starlings are a classic. That's murmuration. And humans can do that too. We can murmurate with the cosmos. So deep listening is really about that. Yeah. I was just saying that, you always get where I am anyway, little noises popping up and during podcasts of, everyday life. It reminds me that what I mentioned before about the sort of blank canvas of some traditions aiming for a kind of meditation of nothingness and silence is the same in that sense that, for me, there's always a kind of, susurating undulation or undulating of life. So there's never there's never complete stillness or complete silence, and I think that that's really important for us to to connect with that notion that there's always something happening. It's always on the cosmos is always on the move and vibrating with sound, and, it's good to try and learn more about and connect with that other than sort of trying to achieve a a blank a blank silence. And, reminds me of the artist actually, John Cage, who famously did that piece of, which was a musical piece of silence, in 4 parts. And each part was, marked by the closing of the of the piano, which made a noise. And his invitation was for people to understand that there's no such thing as silence, And that's a kind of important point that I just wanted to mention.
Claude Schryer
Well, in this episode, I'll insert part of another episode where somebody tells the story. That piece is called 4 minutes 33 seconds, a cage. And there was a professor at a university who was doing the piece in the class. And then they said, well, there's too much there was a protest about the, an encampment about the war in Gaza. And the person said, well, can't do the peace now because there's too much sound outside. Yeah. And the irony of a university professor of music thinking that that wouldn't be part of the piece. It's illustrative of how people have both improved their listening because they talk about cages work a lot more, and yet they don't some people still don't get it. it's all about listening to everything around you and everything is interconnected and there is no such thing as silence. And if we pay attention to the sounds around us, we'll be enriched as opposed to just narrowly trying to experience and work of art, you know, and excluding everything else.
Yin Paradies
This is not a good time to do art or this is not a good time to engage in deep listening because there's too much going on. It's let's do it another time. It's a
Claude Schryer
When I was a child, I I studied music, and at one point, somebody said, what do you like about music? And I said, well, I to be honest, I like I like the hallway, the sounds of people in the hallway, and I like the birds outside of the window. And I like, I like the silence at the end of the performance before people clap. Sometimes it's a few seconds. Sometimes it's quite long, and I it's one of the most beautiful resonant times and because we're all in harmony. Even though the performance was beautiful, I so I'm a context, listener. Right? And people always thought it was very strange because when when do you listen to the music? And so, yeah, I listen to the music, but everything around it's pretty cool too.
Yin Paradies
Yeah. That's a great example. Yeah.
Claude Schryer
Well, from my point of view, I worked with a composer named R. Murray Schafer, who interestingly wrote a book called The Tuning of the World, but it wasn't the tuning of the cosmos, but I think it was a similar intention, but much more rational approach in the sense of analytical. And, you know, we have noise issues. Therefore, we will understand the environment and change it. And but I think intuitively, Marie and many of my colleagues have similar listening approaches to the ones you just spoke about. We just won't use the same words. But as fellow humans, we do connect through listening, and it does bring us into meditative relationships with all kinds of things. We just do it, without the maybe the space. Like, we or we're so obsessed, with control and trying to shape things. We don't allow them to unfold as much as we could or should. And but I I do see that's why I was really struck by the language because it resonates with me and what I do. I'm a qigong practitioner, and I I do different things to, listen to the body, not just through the ears and certainly not just with the mind because the mind is a sort of ongoing chatterbox of thoughts. And, you know, there's other forms of intelligence, which, you know, call them primal or indigenous communities understood through time. It's just always been there that So with the notion of deep listening, there's a composer, an American composer, Pauline Oliveros, who developed a whole school of around deep listening. Right? And she did a lot of research, and she was very informed about Buddhism, many types of world cultures And so I think there are much we have much more in common than we do in differences. But, it's so refreshing to see language and to hear you speak about deciphering as it connects to other ways, to deeper ways of being. Right? Listening is, in a way, a metaphor for being present, if if that makes sense.
Yin Paradies
Yes. Yes. It does. And I think there's connections with the notion of art as well and art as a kind of, not so much something to consume in a in a capitalist, culture, but as a kind of so not something that necessarily moves you at speed and stimulating. But as something like deep listening, something that steals you, art, a good you know, art as something that steals, and challenges and kind of transforms and metamorphosizes you into something else. And I think deep listening is like that too. It's a kind of a a pause or a series of pauses that can become ruptures of the mundane and take us into different worlds, different realms that we can learn to inhabit. And then we get into those states of consciousness that are are different from the left brain, linear, logical, literal, rational. That's important, but it's just out of balance, in non-societies, I would say.
Claude Schryer
Yeah. And Vanessa Andreotti's work and others have made that very clear, the things that we need to do to unlearn and decolonize and, lighten our burden of modernity and just live in a much more simple way, but a much more connected way to what we do, you know, like the notion of shit, which, you know, the composting shit is something she speaks about very openly. You know? It's there. It's coming out of us, and it needs to be composted. I just love that. That directness, right, of this is life, you know, and these are the ways that we have lost our way and suggesting. And that in fact, that's my next question for you, Yin. You're very generous in in your presentations. You make them available and you give tips and suggestions, invitations, and as well as challenges to people who are curious to know more. What is your sense in sharing? How does that what is your intention or your purpose in sharing the knowledge your knowledge in the way that you do?
Yin Paradies
Well, I think that knowledge is, something that is, a collaborative emergence rather than a product. So it's a process that people do together, and it's something that is very much connected to co liberation. So knowledge when I mean say knowledge, I mean something that comes from the sort of etymology of the word, which is a gnosis, a kind of a word that means to touch. And so knowledge is very much for me about the tangible, the tactile, the haptic, the kinesthetic, these sort of, aspects of life, really. And so knowledge, art, deep listening is all connected and related. And so, yeah, sharing is natural in that sense. Obviously, there are levels of sharing, and Primark's culture certainly had and continue to have a kind of a graduated approach to sharing knowledge, introductory to advanced, and mostly just for the sake of, the people safety of people learning stuff and safety of country. You’ve got to get good at knife throwing before you practice, with live targets, that sort of thing, as a metaphor. So, yeah. So knowledge. Yeah. I'm really, as I said, passionate about sharing and a bit like the group that, Vanessa's, works with, gesturing towards decolonial futures. They're very generous with their knowledge as well, and it's about giving people some tools and some tips, as you say, to learn more if they're interested in indigenous ways of knowing, being doing of decolonization. Because as you alluded to earlier, we are in this, very much the pointy end of, I would say, late stage modernity, and giving people some sense that there's other ways of living is is very important at this at this juncture, because the way of life that maternity has kind of fostered is unsustainable, and and people are really feeling that in various ways around the world.
Claude Schryer
Well, my last question will be the beginning in a way of my next season of my podcast because I'm going to be exploring art in times crisis and how art plays a role, not just in healing, but when people are in, under strain and stress, what that what art can do, what it has done, what it is doing, and what it can do in the future, knowing what's what we're about to face. So what what are your thoughts on that?
Yin Paradies
Well, art is very important in a time of crisis that we find ourselves in. You know, just to emphasize that art is something that we can all do. It's not that that elitist sense of that I find a lot of people in modernity struggle with. Even the most basic stuff like, like singing and dancing. Oh, I'm not very good at singing or I'm not very good at dancing, so I'm not going to do it. I'll leave it to the experts. And I think art is a very much a collaborative or co liberative, activity that we can all do. And it's also something that, in a time of crisis is a is gives us a sense of that rupture that I talked about, that that ability to kind of summon, sensorial portals that give us a glimpse of other ways, other life ways. And art isn't that is a a kind of a wake up call in a lot of a lot of ways and a and a an opportunity to reflect back on ourselves, have a good look at ourselves, and have a an expansion of our imagination to go beyond how we imagine ourselves to be to something else. There's so much more, and art is tapping into that or embodying that sense of so much more, sometimes called the otherwise, you know, the wiseness of otherwise. So it's a glimpsing, of vaster entities, really, spiritual or otherwise. And, I think art can very much lead the way in terms of giving us that those capacities to compost their own shit and to reimagine ourselves and our world. And importantly, probably most importantly, to reenchant and reconsecrate our world because to be enchanted by the world is to grow in kinship and care and reverence and reciprocity with the world.
Claude Schryer
Well, I come back to the very beginning of our conversation when we did land acknowledgments and gestures of gratitude. And I'm feeling the light, go down here in this side of the world and connected to you on the other side of the world, literally. It's really interesting. We share the same light and the same air. And I think as I learn to feel more than think, I start noticing things like how the light is leaving us and has accompanied me through my day and given me all these wonderful sights, you know, and just to have to live in a more simple, grateful, grateful way, I think is something that many people are trying to do. And they're finding it within themselves when they take away some of those layers of obsession and compulsion and whatever it is that drives them, then there's something beautiful under there that's always been there. Right?
Yin Paradies
Yes. Yes. It has always been there. And I think we just lose sight of it or come out of contact, felt contact with that immense beauty. And, yeah, wonder of life.
Claude Schryer
Well, I always ask my guests at the end what they're reading or listening to these days, what you would be interested in sharing to our listeners in terms of things that you recommend?
Yin Paradies
Yeah. Good question. I reckon people should make their way to some works of, Darren Allen. He's somebody who talks a lot about primal cultures and modern cultures, and you can find his work if you look up the term expressive egg. Expressive egg. And, there's blogs and, well, there's not there's no podcast. There's blogs and books, and any of them are a great place to start.
Claude Schryer
And, of course, your own writings, I'll put your website and your YouTube channel because that's in fact, we could probably put this recording on your YouTube channel if you if you wish as well because why not? Right. They could see the light decreasing. The light increasing in Australia. Decreasing.
Yin Paradies
The sun. The same sun shining across.
Claude Schryer
Well, thank you so much for your time, Yin. I really appreciate it.
Yin Paradies
Thank you. Oh, good to talk.