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Accepted Paper:
Meta knowledge about areas
Ton Dietz (ASC Leiden)
Paper short abstract:
Keywords: meta-knowledge, knowledge history, area studies, decolonization of the minds, Pokot, Kenya and Uganda
Paper long abstract:
Area studies have a long history, and so have academic centres dealing with specific areas (like the African Studies Centres) or the specific journals dealing with certain areas (like the Journal of Southern African History). However, very few area studies specialists use an approach to study the historical development of knowledge about a specific area, as a kind of meta knowledge study. In this paper I will try to show what the knowledge development history is about the area of the Pokot in Kenya and Uganda: what is the 'harvest' of specific knowledge about that area? Who did influence who? Where did the people come from who studied that area, and how did that change through a 120-year long period of written sources? And what does it tell us about the 'knowledge hypes', the major topics studied in particular periods. With the assistance of google scholar and other search machines it is possible to reconstruct the networks of references used in academic (and other) studies, next to doing a detailed analysis of the references used in scholarly work about an area. One of the interesting aspects in this paper will be the study of the types of sources used: academic/non-academic, languages used, disciplines used or neglected. As a hypothesis we can already formulate the statement that the specific topic studied about an area often tells more about the (scientific/societal) questions relevant to the countries where scholars come from, than about the questions that are relevant for the situation in the particular area that is being studied. And also: for peripheral areas like the Pokot areas, 'formal' knowledge development has hardly been done by people from the area itself. Most knowledge has an external gaze. Local people mainly play a role as research subjects and as research assistants or language interpreters. Meta knowledge studies show the need to decolonize minds and to become far more inclusive in integrating local researchers.
Country/region-specific knowledge development histories in Africa [initiated/coordinated by ASCL]
Session 1