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- Convenors:
-
Jochen Bonz
(University of Hildesheim)
Gheorghita Geana (Academia Romana)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- Royal Fort Drawing
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2006 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Culture and knowledge are strongly related concepts. If we understand culture no longer as a holistic system of knowledge but as a dynamic and multiple network, for example, how should we conceptualise knowledge and its subjects? The workshop deals with empirical data from diverse cultural fields.
Long Abstract:
In the 1920s and 1930s philosophers and sociologists started to conceptualise and examine knowledge as a sociological fact. Since that time sociological research into forms of knowledge has grown continuously and has undergone several shifts in paradigms. Remember, for example, Berger/Luckman's turn towards a perspective on society as implicit knowledge; or the constructionist turn towards practices that result from implicit systems of knowledge (see Bourdieu's concept of habit, for example). What has remained the same is the assumption that there is knowledge. But how can we be so sure about this? This question is meant as a provocation, of course. To assume that there is knowledge means to assume that there is a subject of knowledge. This assumption corresponds to a definition of culture as a symbolic order, a holistic totality. Nowadays this idea of culture is replaced by more dynamic and open concepts. Concerning knowledge, this shift at the level of the conceptualisation of culture resulted in the idea of knowledge as something very dynamic, too (see Latour's idea of variable ontologies, for example). Sociology has not, until now, asked about the subject of these dynamics. Do they implicate a subject in permanent change of habit? Does the assumption of knowledge as highly dynamic imply the assumption of a subject in permanent change of habit? Does the assumption of culture as translation (Bhabha) or as mediation or negotiation (Latour) imply a conceptualisation of subjectivity as translator or mediator? And if so, what does this mean?
In this workshop we will have presentations of empirical work from different fields: scenes of popular culture or esoteric lifestyles, academic disciplines, political institutions or the economy. All presentations should deal with such questions as: Is 'system of knowledge' any longer an adequate term to describe implicit forms of knowledge? Do the subjects of (a particular) knowledge feel comfortable with or unsure about their knowledge? Are there different kinds of implicit knowledge or different relations towards knowledge which could be understood as different subject positions?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Gheorghita Geana (Academia Romana)
Paper short abstract:
In the Plato-Kant-Russell line, the philosophy of science advanced in the cult of the formal disciplines: logic and mathematics. Consequently, an inferior status was attributed to the socio-human disciplines. The ethnographies of knowledge challenged this absolutist view and revealed cultural relativism as a criterion for the rationality of science.
Paper long abstract:
Long Abstract:
In the long line Plato-Kant-Frege-Russell, philosophy of science advanced having as background the cult of the formal disciplines - logic and mathematics -, the principles of which were extended to the whole scientific knowledge. In so far as the socio-human disciplines encountered difficulties in adopting a prescribed formalized language, they were considered inferior to the natural sciences and even as not being constituted yet. The ethnographies of knowledge challenged this absolutist view. An analysis of some less traditional conceptions (Thomas Kuhn's and Stephen Toulmin's especially, as undertaken in the present paper) shows that, in its endeavour to define the essence and rationality of the scientific knowledge, the epistemology of the last decades has borrowed some of its basic concepts and orientations from the socio-human sciences, particularly from anthropology. This entails the placement of the rationality of science under the mark of the cultural relativism as this was imposed by the ethnographic variability of knowledge.
Marine Carrin (Université de Toulouse Jean Jaures)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring traditional knowledge among Santals tribals and Tulu castes, I show how it is produced and sustained in the context of social situations. These transactions in knowledge allow remodeling of the corpus of knowledge, its coherence determined by cultural criteria for validity.
Paper long abstract:
A comparative perspective on human knowledge allows us to study a number of cultural worlds which people construct. Following F. Barth (2000) I will take as my point of departure that 'knowledge always has three faces: a substantive corpus of assertions, a range of media of representations and a social organization'.
Exploring medical and religious traditions of knowledge among the Santals, a 'tribal society' of Central India, and among a variety of Tulu-speaking castes of Karnatala, I shall show how these bodies of knowledge are produced in the vontext of the social situations they sustain. I shall argue that some of these social situations, such as therapeutic rituals, or religious and literary movements, stress the pattern of action that unfolds. These transactions in knowledge allow the remodeling of the corpus of knowledge through the agency of the priests and medicine-men whose performance is always negotiated. In these two regions, the coherence of medical and religious knowledge is determined by a variety of circumstances that generate the criteria for validity that govern knowledge. But knowledge is also affected by the constraints that arise from the agency in which knowledge is being cast, the medicine-man, the priest or the medium who are in a position of power. In these local traditions, the agents who convey the criteria of validity that govern knowledge are also criticized, as the systems of knowledge allow new forms of agency to emerge through cultural contacts and change.
We shall see, however, that while the Santals allow change in knowledge they stress conyinuity as a central value, essentializing Tradition, while the Tulus allow knowledge to benefit from hybrid contacts without curbing unexpected innovations. This difference might be related to the ritual framework which, in Tulunadu, is the main factor defining truth. From these two examples, I shall point to factors which make some forms of knowledge more 'catching' than others, as Sperber (1996) puts it.
Gabriele Brandhuber
Paper short abstract:
Ethno-botanical and ethno-pharmacological research often aimed at (re)constructing native 'knowledge' systems. I will show how Austrians build up eclectic, pragmatic personal 'knowing' by validating, through bodily experience, pieces taken from a pool of available oral and written knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
During research in an Austrian Alpine region, I asked people about their herbal knowledge, how they learned what they knew, and about the sources of their knowledge.
Apparently, my informants are little interested in systematizing. Their approach to herbal knowledge is eclectic and pragmatic: from a pool of available information (trans-local, mainly transmitted through media), they take what best helps them to cure illness and alleviate pain.
As Robert Borofsky suggests (1994), it would be advantageous to "conceive of a continuum between knowledge (i.e. understanding that is definite and delineated), and knowing (i.e. understanding that is more fluid and flexible in character)", between a more declarative and a more procedural knowledge.
Borofsky's approach helps us to understand why actors do not need to change their habit when incorporating pieces of "foreign" knowledge into their knowing, in my case by validating it through personal experience, by testing it on their own bodies.
Nikola Leufer (University of Bremen)
Paper short abstract:
Scientific knowledge is often related with the concept of culture. This paper deals with the case of mathematics, showing that emphasising sociocultural constituents results in a change of conception: mathematics then is characterised by intuition and aesthetics, fallibility and contradictions.
Paper long abstract:
The presentation deals with the comprehension of the concept of "culture" when mathematicians (didacts, sociologists, philosophers) establish a "culture of mathematics" and the idea of the scientific discipline they are creating by doing so.
To analyse and handle barriers of communication between learners and teachers with regard to mathematics education, didacts are establishing a concept of a scientific culture of mathematics. Seeing mathematics as an autonomous culture conflicting with the students' "everyday life"-culture, problems of learning math can be approached by applying theories of intercultural conflicts. Since this has already proven to be beneficial, the concept of "culture" is highly accepted within the Community of Mathematics Education. For the most part it is used with the intention to eliminate borders that are separating mathematics from the "outside world".
The presentation will examine the theoretic foundations of a cultural and sociological analysis of mathematics and sciences. It will show how the concept of "culture" is understood in different discourses and how it is applied to mathematics. It becomes apparent, that a "culture of mathematics" is opposed to what is generally thought of mathematics: From connecting mathematics and culture evolves a "new" idea of mathematics, which is characterised by intuition and aesthetics, coincidences and contradictions and which is furthermore deeply linked to culture and social conditions.
Arnaud Halloy (University of Nice Sophia Antipolis)
Paper short abstract:
How is Xangô, a cult of Yoruba origin in Recife (north-eastern Brazil), learned? I propose an empirical inquiry on the nature of religious knowledge and on the many ways and contexts of acquiring it.
Paper long abstract:
How is a Xangô, a cult of Yoruba origin in Recife (northeastern Brazil), learned? After describing the various contexts of learning as well as the religious and relational principles that shape the transmission of knowledge related to this form of worship, attention is drawn to the strong correlations between three categories of data having to do with this learning process: 1) the type of knowledge activated (exegetic knowledge, liturgical know-how, ritual attitudes, etc.); 2) the way that this knowledge is actually conveyed
(through books, observation, involvement); and 3) the individuals position in the cult (initiate, adept, client...). This empirical inquiry on the nature of
religious knowledge and on the many ways and contexts of acquiring it ends with comments on this cultual relations with its own history and with competing forms of worship present in the vast field of Afro-Brazilian religions.
Camilla Kvist (Århus University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the construction of evidence and the production of judicial knowledge; focusing in particular on the reasoning of the detectives working the case. Issues of how knowledge can be conceptualised and studied anthropologically are addressed.
Paper long abstract:
'Reasoning' as a mode of detective work has mainly been investigated as the working of the mind - as rationalities or methodologies - brought to use to make sense of the social world, in order to translate it into a legal rationality and bureaucratic objectivity. The icon of this detective method and thinking, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, embodies this perspective of the individual minds logical workings, and the victory of logical inferences in the detection of the culprit of the crime and the reconstructive disclosure of the event as it 'really happened'. This paper, taking point of departure in this Cartesian idea of investigation, tries to dismantle the idea of the individual logical minds prominence with reference to ethnography of 'real' detective work performed by detectives within the Danish Police. It is argued, that by comparing the investigation and fact-finding of investigators, with animistic hunters, exemplified in Smith's presentation of Athapaskan hunters and Chipewyan ontology, we find a prism for better interpreting the activities and knowledge processes of the community assembled during a criminal investigation. This analytical move is not made to make ethnographic comparison or establish detectives in terms of more 'primitive' modes of producing knowledge; but to be able to point to some of the very subtle, implicit and experience-based processes of bureaucratic knowledge; and to underline the social character of 'mind' when discussing 'knowledge' production - even in the modern western tradition - with its preference for the 'rational disembodied and individualistic' mind, over the subjective faculties of the body and senses.
Calin Cotoi (University of Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
The secular nature of social knowledge becomes problematic in understanding populations whose lives are experienced as interactions with forms of the divine. Can these lives be meaningfully translated in a scientific idiom, whose historical pedigree is constructed on excluding those very lives?
Paper long abstract:
The possibility of something called "culture", or "society" and its place in the fundamental patterning of human experience and organisation of collective life was once the founding problem of the social sciences. But the various disciplinary branches came, eventually, to take this object for granted as an underlying principle of intelligibility, and turned to study different micro-sociologies or micro-anthropologies, understood as manifestations of the underlying whole - functioning as an ontological and epistemological principle in the same time.
In many fields of study, however, the concept of the cultural has been reexamined. Anthropology, in its experiential (As in V. Turner's works), postmodern, interpretative and historical turn has been on the cutting edge of social theory in this respect.
This paper wishes to examine - using the tools of the sociology of knowledge (Bourdieau, Latour, Lepenies etc) but also historiography (Koselleck, Pocock etc.) - the effects of the commitment to the secular nature of social knowledge. I wish to stress the problems this position entails for a comprehensivist sociology of knowledge in understanding populations whose lives are experienced as interactions with the divine or other forms of supra-human agency. The idea of variable ontologies is being used in an attempt to deal with the problem of how to meaningfully represent, or translate, this kind of implicit knowledge in a scientific idiom, whose historical pedigree is constructed on excluding various forms of that very knowledge. Can we use "social" or "cultural" outside the historical formation of the scientific discourse of the social sciences?
Various discourses can construct various subjectivities, the hybridization of knowledge happening at the border between scientific and non-secular is giving birth to ambiguous and apparently fragile identities having tough a high capacity of reinvention and being a privileged area for an ethnography of conflicting "systems of knowledge".