Adapting to Difference

Adapting To Difference Announced: Central Australian Book Explores the Language Barrier between Westerners and Traditional Aboriginal People.

This cross-cultural book promotes mutual understanding between traditional Aboriginals and Westerners by showing the difference in language.

(BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA) – Author Margaret S. Bain today announced the release of “Adapting to Difference”, an indepth study of communication and language between Aboriginals and Westerners, aiming to explain the crossculture divide and misunderstanding that commonly occurs.

Insightful and based on careful research, the book is an educational read for anyone working with Aboriginal people for whom English is not their first language, to improve their material circumstances and reduce social disadvantage.

Previously titled „White Men are Liars?, this new edition uncovers an underlying factor through which many problems can be explained; that for cultural reasons, Aboriginals and Westerners use significantly different abstractions: (a) Aboriginal abstractions always retain a direct link with reality; abstractions used by Westerners often break the link with the real. (b) The two resultant systems are shown by a study of language, worldview, and social relationships. (c) The metaphor “gears” is used as a term covering a procedure through which, the author suggests the two systems can operate successfully side-by-side.

Driven to understand the reasons for incidents of miscommunication that occurred between Westerners and the traditional Aboriginal people, Margaret Bain pursued her study.

In a passage of the book, she elaborates on the language barrier: “On one occasion a Western co-worker knew that I might be going to Alice Springs. He said to an Aboriginal person “You might get a ride with her. If she takes you …”. Not long afterward the Aboriginal man approached me saying “John says you will take me to Alice Springs?.

Margaret S. Bain has worked over 20 years in the field, developing a deep understanding of Pitjantjatjara. Her research findings are controversial and challenge many current assumptions about Aboriginal and Western cultures, their effects on education and governance systems and analysis of why things have gone wrong.

Today in her 80s, Margaret lives in Alice Springs and still works with Pitjantjatjara people. She spent 21 years working as a community adviser alongside Aboriginal people in remote communities and also completed a postgraduate degree in Anthropology at Monash University. She was awarded an OBE for her work with Aboriginal people. Adapting to Difference is her second book.