Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potential of applying or adapting the concept of metacognition as developed by psychologists in order to understand ethnographic cases of cultures of ignorance, such as those discussed by other members of this panel.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of 'cultures of ignorance' depends on a recognition of the importance of people's reflection about their own relationship to bodies of knowledge, and the fact that there can be traditions, or cultures, of such reflection. For a long time, anthropologists and other social scientists attributed to culture a primacy that meant that cultural symbols and structures of categorisation have usually been taken to provide the wherewithal for reflection, rather than being objects of it. Where reflexivity was recognised, it was seen as a distinctive feature of modern societies or practices that have somehow transcended culture, as in the work of Bourdieu and Giddens. The focus on reflexivity about relations to cultural knowledge—including, as in the context of this panel, reflexivity about ignorance—is therefore something of a departure for anthropology. In psychology, by contrast, a large body of work has developed in the wake of developmental psychologist John Flavell's work on the subject of 'metacognition', that is, a subject's knowledge of his or her own thought, and the efforts the subject takes to evaluate, monitor and regulate that thought. This paper explores the potential and limitations of putting the psychological concept of metacognition to work in order to understand 'cultures of ignorance' of the kind presented in recent ethnographic work on the topic, including work presented in this panel.