That there are multiple ways of knowing the world has become a truism. What meaning is left in the sheer familiarity of the phrase? The essays here consider how humans come to know themselves and their worlds. Should anthropologists should seek complexity or simplicity in their analyses of other societies? By going beyond the notion that a way of knowing is a perspective on the world, this book explores paths to understanding, as people travel along them, craft their knowledge and shape experience. The topics examined here range from illness to ignorance, teaching undergraduates in Scotland to learning a Brazilian martial arts dance, Hegels concept of the dialectic to the poetry of a Swahili philosopher. A central concern is how anthropologists can know and write about the silent, theconcealed and theembodied.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: ‘Ways of Knowing'
Mark Harris
PART I: PARADIGMS AND POLEMICS
Chapter 1. Of Dialectical Germans and Dialectical Ethnographers: Notes from an Engagement with Philosophy
Dominic Boyer
Chapter 2. Practising an Anthropology of Philosophy: General Reflections and the Swahili Context
Kai Kresse
Chapter 3. Is Religion a Way of Knowing?
Otávio Velho
Chapter 4. Deskilling, ‘Dumbing Down’ and the Auditing of Knowledge in the Practical Mastery of Artisans and Academics: An Ethnographer’s Response to a Global Problem
Michael Herzfeld
PART II: TIME AND THE DISRUPTION OF KNOWING
Chapter 5. Knowing Silence and Merging Horizons: The Case of the Great Potosí Cover-Up
Tristan Platt with Pablo Quisbert
Chapter 6. The Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge in a Colonial Context: The Case of Henri Gaden (1867–1939)
Roy Dilley
Chapter 7. Embodying Knowledge: Finding a Path in the Village of the Sick
Paul Stoller
PART III: RETHINKING EMBODIMENT
Chapter 8. Crafting Knowledge: The Role of ‘Parsing and Production’ in the Communication of Skill-Based Knowledge among Masons
Trevor Marchand
Chapter 9. Communities of Practice and Forms of Life: Towards a Rehabilitation of Vision?
Cristina Grasseni
Chapter 10. Seeing with a ‘Sideways Glance’: Visuomotor ‘Knowing’ and the Plasticity of Perception
Greg Downey
PART IV: LEARNING AND REPOSITIONINGS
Chapter 11. Figures Twice Seen: Riles, the Modern Knower and Forms of Knowledge
Tony Crook
Chapter 12. ‘A Weight of Meaninglessness about which there Is Nothing Insignificant’: Abjection and Knowing in an Art School and on a Housing Estate
Amanda Ravetz
Chapter 13. The 4 A’s (Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture): Reflections on a Teaching and Learning Experience
Tim Ingold with Ray Lucas
Chapter 14. A Discussion Concerning Ways of Knowing
Nigel Rapport and Mark Harris
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Mark Harris teaches Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon and archival research on a massive rebellion there in the 1830s. His publications include Life on the Amazon (2000), Some other Amazonians (ed. with Stephen Nugent, 2004), The Child in the City (ed. with Anna Grimshaw, 2000).
Review :
“This book is an important stimulus to ongoing debate, and showcases some of the best of recent approaches and challenges to the ways we know what we know.” · Ethos
