Listening as Intelligence: When Anthropology Called It Telepathy
In January 1937, an Australian anthropology journal attempted to describe something it could not quite name.
It recorded accounts of Aboriginal people who could “know things at a distance”, births, journeys, changes, without letters, telegraph lines, or visible communication.
The author called it psychic. Others proposed telepathy.
The language grasped for explanation, astonished by what seemed impossible within its own frame of knowledge.
Yet the astonishment belonged to the observer, not the observed.
For Aboriginal cultures, knowing at a distance was neither supernatural nor strange.
Knowledge travelled through Country, kinship, story, obligation, and attention. Relationship made knowing possible.
Listening, in this context, was not passive; it was a form of intelligence.
Western science could measure sight and sound, but not relationships.
It could track the signal, but not reciprocity. It could map territory, but not a Country.
And so it called the gap “telepathy.”
From the vantage point of the 1930s, this was the closest language available to describe a kind of knowing that refused to be contained by the scientific instruments of the time.
Signals had to be visible. Knowledge had to be provable. Communication had to be technological.
But many Indigenous knowledge systems, including those of Aboriginal peoples across Australia, do not separate mind from body, body from land, land from relation, or relation from responsibility.
In such systems, knowing is not extracted; it is shared. It moves through networks of kin and Country that Western frameworks struggle to perceive, let alone measure.
The anthropology of that era documented the phenomenon; the language misinterpreted it.
The Limits of Categories
Anthropology often rendered Indigenous knowledge into its nearest Western equivalent.
The extraordinary became “magic.” The relational became “psychic.”
The attentive became “supernatural.” The embodied became “mystical.”
These translations say less about Aboriginal people than about the limits of the categories used to observe them.
If you assume knowledge is an individual property, gained through control and stored in the mind, then relational knowledge appears paranormal.
If, however, you assume knowledge inheres in the web of connections between people, land, season, kin, and story, then such events become expressions of relationship.
Relational intelligence, when seen through the wrong lens, looks like telepathy.
Knowing Through Attention
To listen in this sense, to land, to kin, to weather, to season, is to participate in a larger ecology of sense-making.
It is slow knowledge. An embodied knowledge. A knowledge grounded in attentiveness rather than domination.
It does not impose control; it waits for the world to declare itself.
Indigenous scholars often describe Country as active, not inert, a presence that communicates, teaches, reveals, and insists.
Western thought treats landscape as background; Aboriginal frameworks frequently treat it as interlocutor.
In many such systems, knowledge is not accumulated; it is witnessed.
It arrives when the relationship is intact. It travels when the lines of attention are open.
Nothing about this is paranormal. It is simply a different ontology of knowing.
Bodies as Instruments of Perception
Modern culture tends to reduce the body to a machine, input, output, nutrient, or symptom, rather than as an instrument of perception.
Yet our most ancient forms of knowledge were sensory:
• skin tightening before the storm
• breath shifting with threat
• eyes adjusting to seasonal light
• appetite rising or falling with the climate
• sleep is becoming longer in winter
These changes are not aesthetic; they are ecological. The body has always been a site of knowing.
And if the body senses, then the skin, our largest organ, is not merely a surface to correct, but a site of intelligence.
Skin receives:
humidity, heat, cold, wind, dust, salt, stress, sleep, season, sunlight.
Skin responds:
tightness, oil, redness, dullness, calm, glow, breakouts, dryness.
We misread these changes as flaws or failures.
But what if they are signals? What if the skin is communicating rather than misbehaving?
Listening Before Intervention
In modern skincare, we tend to intervene before we understand.
We exfoliate before we hydrate. We strip before we nourish.
We force before we listen.
Control is the dominant model of beauty:
control the oil
control the pigment
control the pores
control the glow
control the age
control the body
But Indigenous frameworks remind us that sensing precedes acting, and that listening is a method, not a metaphor.
To care for the skin is not necessarily to perfect it; it is to learn what it is asking for.
Seasonal Intelligence
Human skin does not operate on a twelve-step routine; it operates on climate.
Australian winters demand barrier repair and oil. Australian summers demand cooling hydration and mineral replenishment.
Autumn often asks for nourishment and softness. Spring often asks for clearing and balance.
These shifts are not cosmetic; they are biological. Skin responds to humidity, temperature, UV, wind, and altitude long before it responds to serums.
This is what Nala means when we say: Your skin has a rhythm.
It is not a rigid skin type that determines what your skin needs, but the interplay of season, stress, sleep, climate, ancestry, and land.
What tightness means in July is not what tightness means in January.
What dullness means in spring is not what dullness means in autumn.
Seasonal skincare is simply seasonal intelligence applied to the body.
From Australia to the World
While Nala is anchored in Australian seasons, salt air, dry winds, winter heat, summer dehydration, the pattern is universal:
• winter tightens
• summer swells
• spring lifts congestion
• autumn draws downward
Every climate teaches a different vocabulary of care. Seasonal knowledge is local first, then universal.
Ritual as a Way of Knowing
Ritual is often misunderstood as repetition. But in its oldest sense, ritual is attentiveness.
It asks:
• What is present?
• What has changed?
• What is needed?
• What should be skipped?
• When is rest called for?
A good ritual listens before it acts. It intervenes only as required. It prioritises relationship over control.
In skincare, this means:
• adding oil when the night is dry
• skipping steps when the air is wet
• resting when the skin feels overstimulated
• reducing when the barrier feels thin
• increasing when the weather demands protection
More is not better. Better is better.
A Return to Listening
Perhaps what anthropology once called telepathy was simply attention, attention to Country, to kinship, to weather, to season, to relation.
Perhaps the body has always been an instrument for knowing the world, long before it was an object for beautifying.
And perhaps skincare, stripped of optimisation and perfectionism, can become a site of listening again.
This is Nala’s invitation: not to force, not to control, but to respond.
Begin with how your skin feels. Begin with where you live. Begin with what the season is asking. Begin with listening.
With care,
Nala Native
References
A.P. Elkin, “Notes on the Psychic Life of the Australian Aborigines,” Mankind: The Journal of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, Vol. 2, No. 3, January 1937.
