Recognising and Translating Knowledge: Navigating the Political, Epistemological, Legal and Ontological

• Published in: Anthropological forum Vol. 22; no. 3; pp. 209 - 223
• Main Authors: Leach, James, Davis, Richard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.11.2012; Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Subjects: Anthropology; Epistemology; Ethnography; Humanities and Social Sciences; Intellectual Property; Knowledge; Knowledge (Theory); Knowledge Economy; Myth; Social Anthropology and ethnology; Translation
• ISSN: 0066-4677; 1469-2902; 1469-2902; 0066-4677
• DOI: 10.1080/00664677.2012.724007

What does it mean to call something 'knowledge' today? What does this recognition or translation require? And what does it entrain? This introduction makes a novel synthesis of contributions to the Special Issue and advances observations regarding the 'mythic' qualities of intellectual property law, the precipitation of 'nature', and the importance of attending to what is lost when things and practices are also called 'knowledge'. The papers cohere around a timely set of observations and critiques: critiques of the way the knowledge economy makes demands and defines expectations about value; of how intellectual property law lies behind and shapes exclusions, inclusions, and inequalities; of the 'mythic' status of assumptions informing laws about ownership; and the implicit hierarchy contained within types of knowledge as understood through the categories of western epistemology. By taking up effect rather than veracity and certainty, contributors leave the definition of knowledge to ethnographic subjects. That is, they attend to where and how things come to be called knowledge, and for what reasons, noticing how equivalences across practices, made for the purpose of creating the possibility of exchange value (and thus of encouraging circulation) does its work at the expense of multiple aspects, values, and relations that are also discernable in social processes that produce 'knowledge'.