Asian Studies Conference on Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Nomadic wisdom

Knowledge has indigenous/aboriginal roots. Acknowledgment of the contributions of Tharus (Nepal), Santhals (India), and Māori (New Zealand) to Himba (Namibia) makes humanities scholarship richer, humbler, and epistemologically sincere. For instance, imagine the humanities research that is open for the engagement of ways the tantric culture of goddess art conceptualizes wisdom and compassion in the site of sexuality; or how the Magahi art in Southern Nepal communicates ecological awareness; and the power of songs that troubadours of Bangladesh sing cutting across anthropomorphic world views. Knowledge travels, decentering the spatiotemporal boundaries and questioning the origin and authority of knowledge. The prehistoric humans were neither bloodthirsty apes nor Hobbes’s brutish beasts or Rousseau’s noble savages.