The games people play: using the game of Taboo to develop indigenous concepts

Developing indigenous concepts presents a challenge due to lack of comparable and transferable terms between indigenous cultures and dominant Western paradigms. Benjamin Whorf’s work suggests that language shapes thought and perception, and that people from different cultures think and see differently. Approaching indigenous concepts from a Western perspective, thus, involves seeing holistic, high-context indigenous concepts through lenses developed in dualistic, reductionist and low-context cultures. Consequently, there is a risk of succumbing to simplifications that may require jettisoning what is unique and enriching about indigenous concepts. A possible solution lies in stalling comparisons with existing concepts and, instead, building a shared conceptual space in which old and new concepts could be situated in relation to each other before comparing and contrasting with existing concepts. To facilitate this, I draw on the idea of serious games aimed at vocabulary development and propose a framework for developing indigenous concepts based on the popular game of semantic Taboo.