Paper short abstract:

I will use scientists’ responses to a recent anthropological paper on the ‘unknowing’ of inequality in the conduct of transnational medical research in Africa to reflect about the relationship between scientific knowledge about the world, scientists’ being in that world, and anthropologists’ commentary upon both (while inhabiting the same world).

Paper long abstract:

Not-knowing - be it as simple ignorance or nihilist ignoration, calculated concealment or public secret, scientific suspension of knowledge or blind stupidity - interests anthropologists not only as absence of their main object, knowledge, but increasingly also in its own right, as productive of sociality. What is not known can make or undo associations, and direct and orient action. And the relationship between known and unknown is charged with power. Knowledge can legitimise authority and be monopolised by it; even greater is the power of the one who can make unknown, against evidence and experience to the contrary. While such 'unknowing' can undo the transformative effects of knowledge of the world, this process can not necessarily be inverted: countering (known) unknowns with knowledge - 'speaking truth to power' - will not simply reverse power relations or change worlds. Effective critique would have to do something other than saying things as they are.

This paper will reflect about unknowing and the possibility and purpose critique based on some observations of how the experience of inequality and injustice are (known and) unknown in the knowledge-seeking order of a major transnational medical research site in Africa. Sharing impetus and experiences of other anthropologists on this panel (which was conceived out of such shared concerns), I focus less on the intentional control of knowledge and its publication by powerful institutions or individuals, guided by particular interests (which remains an important issue), but wonder why and how certain dimensions of being in the world are excluded from scientists' effective knowledge.