Paper short abstract:

Drawing on current research, the paper considers how different understandings of anthropology are negotiated in the undergraduate classroom. Theories on the contemporary nature and production of knowledge are discussed by exploring the ways the discipline is engaged with in this learning context.

Paper long abstract:

Applying Moore's notion of 'concept-metaphor' (2006) to the case of anthropology, I use the example of the anthropology undergraduate classroom to think about the ways in which the contemporary production of anthropological knowledge can be understood as 'public'. The undergraduate classroom provides a route into exploring how different understandings and perspectives of anthropology meet and transform. Can this transformation of knowledge be understood as making anthropology 'public'? Do current conceptualisations of students as 'consumers' and the learning of 'skills' as knowledge 'outcomes' redefine the position of anthropology as 'public' in this location?

The paper suggests that anthropological contexts of teaching and learning complicate the new models of knowledge production as conceptualised by Gibbons et al (1994), Nowotny (1999), Nowotny et al (2001). Anthropology as 'concept-metaphor' highlights the shifting understandings which are attributed to the discipline from different locations. For 'concept-metaphors' refer to common terms which take on distinct uses and meanings in different domains. This analytical category can therefore account for an interpretation of anthropology as 'public' from within the discipline. For at the same time that anthropological theory and methodology allows anthropologists to understand their knowledge as intrinsically public, dependent as it is on the ethnographic enterprise and on knowledge produced with particular 'publics', from locations of non-disciplinary contexts, or other domains, this understanding of the nature of anthropological knowledge is not shared. Is it then only from 'within' the discipline that the public nature of anthropology can be realised? Does the nature of anthropological knowledge maintain this difference between domain understandings and what does this mean for the possibilities of a 'public' anthropological knowledge?