Enactments of Expertise (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts
Anthropology In Action, 2008
This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and impasses of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in socialcultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography of experts and cultures of expertise remains underdeveloped in some crucial respects. The body of the article defines expertise as a relation of epistemic jurisdiction and explores the sociological and epistemological dilemmas emerging from research, that poises one expert (the anthropologist) in the situation of trying to absorb another regime of expertise into his/her own. With due appreciation for what the anthropology of experts has achieved thus far, I close with a manifesto designed to prompt a reassessment of where this research enterprise should go from here. I urge that we treat experts not solely as rational(ist) creatures of expertise but rather as desiring, relating, doubting, anxious, contentious, affective-in other words as human-subjects.
Short abstract: The closely interrelated themes of affordance and agency in medias res are brought together in a case study of the development of expertise in archaeology by focusing on learning to identify (type) pottery, and on learning to excavate. In learning to type pottery, a novice is inculcated into the language-games of pottery. The formulation of typologies, meanwhile, shows how such language-games form, and how these language-games afford a semantic field that supports archaeologically mundane communications between archaeologists. The event of an excavation is used to focus on social dynamics seen from a perspective of agency in medias res and to demonstrate how wider social, economic and political influences intervene within archaeological discourse and practice to alter the agency of archaeologists in terms of their cognitive authority, and that of archaeology as discipline.
Beyond Anthropological Expert Witnessing: Toward an Integrated Definition of Cultural Expertise
Cultural Expertise and Socio-Legal Studies
This paper explores expert witnessing in anthropology and the raison d'être of cultural expertise as an integrated socio-legal concept that accounts for the contribution of social sciences to the resolution of disputes and the protection of human rights. The first section of this paper provides a short historical outline of the occurrence and reception of anthropological expertise as expert witnessing. The second section surveys the theoretical reflections on anthropologists' engagement with law. The third section explores the potential for anthropological expertise as a broader socio-legal notion in the common law and civil law legal systems. The paper concludes with the opportunity and raison d'être of cultural expertise grounded on a sceptical approach to culture. It suggests that expert witnessing has been viewed mainly from a technical perspective of applied social sciences, which was necessary to set the legal framework of cultural experts' engagement with law, but had the consequence of entrenching the impossibility of a comprehensive study of anthropological expert witnessing. While this paper implies a sceptical approach to culture, it also argues the advantages of an interdisciplinary approach that leads to an integrated definition of cultural expertise.
The Interlocutor Slot: Citing, Crediting, Cotheorizing, and the Problem of Ethnographic Expertise
American Anthropologist, 2021
In this reflexive commentary, I consider the forms of writing that we (anthropologists) use to differentiate expert knowledge or theory from "data". I'm interesting in linking the politics of (interlocutor) acknowledgment to the politics of anthropological citation, and how we might refuse to reproduce extractive disciplinary models of knowledge production.
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 of Anthropological Forum, titled 'Recognising and Translating Knowledge' (Vol. 22, Iss. 3), 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’.
Anthropologists as Experts: Cultural Expertise, Colonialism, and Positionality
2021
This article addresses the positionality of anthropologists and the impact of anthropological theories in cultural expertise with the help of three case studies that highlight the engagement of anthropologists with law and governance during colonialism and in the wake of it: a well-known case of witchcraft in Kenya, Volkekunde theories in Africa, and the Rwandan genocide. The article starts with a short genesis of the concept of cultural expertise and its cognate concepts of culturally motivated crimes and cultural defense, to introduce the main question of this article: What can we learn from the use of cultural expertise in the colonial past? Today, as much as in the colonial past, anthropologists have been torn between action and abstention. The article's three case studies show that neither action nor abstention is free from ethical responsibility. This article argues that the concept of procedural neutrality and its reformulation in the form of critical affirmation help anthropologists to carve out an independent role for themselves in the legal process. Procedural neutrality and its reformulation as critical affirmation make it possible to comply with the ethics and deontologies of the disciplines across which anthropologists operate when providing cultural expertise.
Review of: Expert Knowledge: First World Peoples, Consultancy and Anthropology
2007
The volume's contributors set out to examine what constitutes applied anthropology, its aptitudes, challenges, and parameters, and how anthropological knowledge is applied "where there is the expectation of considerable cultural, social, and political consequence for human populations" (1). They address various positions occupied by ethnographers and others in the knowledge economy within which professional knowledge and practice circulate and create effects. Some of the guiding concerns of the chapters include anthropology as instrument of structural change; indigenous NGOs and the role of civil society in promoting indigenous peoples' interests; the role of law in structuring relationships; the impact of funding on practice and knowledge production; epistemology and its shaping through consultancy and legal process; and an implicit taxonomy of varieties of practical work: applied, advocacy, consultancy, partisanship, pragmatism.
Engendering the sociology of expertise
This paper delineates areas of research for the emergent sociology of expertise. We review how expertise has been studied in the sociology of professions, sociology of work, and sociology of science and technology, and we show the contribution that intersectionality can make in understanding processes of gendering expertise.