Recursos externos

Chapitre

Negotiating Local Knowledge: An Introduction.

The volume’s focus on how knowledge for development is negotiated through processes of translation demands that we reflect on the nature of what is loosely called ‘local knowledge’. To enable appropriate reflection on how local knowledge is constructed, the volume contains some contributions that are not about development per se. This is par- ticularly true of the early chapters by Marchand (Chapter 2) and Kaur (Chapter 3), where the emphasis is on demonstrating ethnographically that researchers need to be aware of the fact that ‘local knowledge’ may have properties that lie beyond language (Marchand) and even beyond the strictly local (Kaur). The latter are ‘allowed in’ (and transformed) through the mediation of established cultural parameters. Developers need to take heed of these important corrections to the common assumption that all manifestations of ‘local knowledge’ are strictly local and always accessible through verbal communication.