Article scientifique
Fredrik Barth
Barth, F. (2002). An anthropology of knowledge. Current Anthropology, 43(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1086/324131
Whereas previous Sidney Mintz lectures have celebrated Mintz’s work on inequality, racism, and ethnicity, I have chosen to speak to the broadest scope of his research and teaching in anthropology. A comparative perspective on human knowledge allows us to unravel a number of aspects of the cultural worlds which people construct. I argue that knowledge always has three faces: a substantive corpus of assertions, a range of media of representation, and a social organization. Using ethnographic materials from New Guinea and Bali and also from our own universities, I try to show how in different traditions of knowledge these faces will interrelate in particular ways and generate tradition-specific criteria of validity for knowledge about the world. Thus the trajectory of a tradition of knowledge will be to a large extent endogenously determined. This implies not a diffuse relativism of “anything goes” but a relativism in which we can demonstrate how already established thoughts, representations, and social relations to a considerable extent configure and filter our individual human experience of the world around us and thereby generate culturally diverse worldviews.
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