The following questions guide this investigation: 'Reclaiming 'Turtles All the Way Down'' pursues research into turtle stories by combining Indigenous studies and histories of science, technology, and medicine to make historical and comparative understandings of turtle stories over time and around the world.

By focusing on multiple cultural contexts where turtle stories and knowledge have had lasting significance across different time periods, our comparative historical approach takes a step toward reclaiming “turtles all the way down.” The fractal stack of tortoises that extends from this description reflects two lines of historical questioning concerning language and material cultures, which together open up interrelated inquiries into anxieties concerning the location of authority about scientific knowledge or wisdom in human societies.

Our project collaborators historically examine the normalized imagery of the stacked turtles metaphor by inquiring into the roles of animal cosmologies in diverse cultures and how they have mattered to or for Indigenous knowledge and science. As a flexibly interpreted phrase, it can be used as either a neutral explanation or a dismissal of different knowledge systems. Today, “TAWD” is an idiomatic expression especially used to explain infinite regression. Since the seventeenth century, the expression “turtles all the way down” (TAWD) has gained salience in English language contexts, having been made increasingly distant from the authority of the turtle cosmologies from which they have been drawn. Scientific knowledge of Chelonians (turtles and tortoises) and other animals in fields as wide ranging as geology or conservation science have also benefited from plural knowledge systems that have repeatedly faced erasure. The origin stories and cultural narratives of diverse peoples around the world are deeply entwined with principles that guide specific ways of knowing and acting in the universe. Among these, various turtle stories of peoples ranging from the Indo-Pacific Worlds to the Indigenous Americas have continued to provide images and information about the structure and order of the world. For some societies, relationships with turtles also form the foundation of knowledge systems that suggest important protocols and values of how to interact with other living beings, inanimate things, and ecosystems.

Turtles on the way down