Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge

206 Pages·2004·2.94 MB·English

by  Marilyn Strathern (edt)

Shifting Contexts
One way in which different orders of knowledge are brought together is through
the transformation of context. This book is concerned with contexts of a
particular kind. Claims to know ‘more’ or see ‘further’ or to be able to
encompass local facts by a global perspective take on a special meaning in the
world-view of societies, such as those of the west, that imagine they are part
of a life that is itself global in scale.
Shifting Contexts offers an original critique of current western thinking: it does
not take it for granted that ‘global’ and ‘local’ indicate orders of magnitude or
scales of importance. Rather, it addresses the techniques by which people shift the
contexts of their knowledge and thus endow phenomena with local or global
significance. This is an unusual and original collection of essays by seven leading
social anthropologists, in the company of two specialists in research policy.
This book examines a range of contexts in which people (including
anthropologists) make different orders of knowledge for themselves as a prelude
to questioning assumptions about the ‘size’ of knowledge implied in the contrast
between global and local perspectives.
Shifting Contexts will appeal to anthropologists and all those working in areas
such as the philosophy of social science, cultural studies and comparative sociology.
Marilyn Strathern is Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University.
ASA Decennial Conference Series
The Uses of Knowledge: Global and Local Relations
Series editor: Marilyn Strathern
Other titles in this series include:
Worlds Apart
Edited by Daniel Miller
The Pursuit of Certainty
Edited by Wendy James
Counterworks
Edited by Richard Fardon
What is Social Knowledge For?
Edited by Henrietta Moore
Shifting Contexts
Transformations in Anthropological
Knowledge
Edited by Marilyn Strathern
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1995 Association of Social Anthropologists, selection and editorial
matter; individual chapters, the contributors
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-45090-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-45670-X (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-10794-6 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10795-4 (pbk)
Anthropologists have been criticised for their preoccupation
with ‘very small and remote cultures’
(comment quoted in James 1988:151).
If they were ‘very big and near’, what difference would
that make?

Contents

List of figures viii
Notes on contributors ix
Series editor’s preface xi

Foreword Shifting contexts 1
1 Forgotten knowledge 13
Mary Douglas
2 Exhibiting knowledge: the trees of Dubois, Haeckel, Jesse and
Rivers at the Pithecanthropus centennial exhibition 31
Mary Bouquet
3 Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make
themselves at home in the world 57
Tim Ingold
4 Transformations of identity in Sepik warfare 81
Simon Harrison
5 Human rights and moral knowledge: arguments of accountability
in Zimbabwe 99
Richard Werbner
6 Globalisation and the new technologies of knowing:
anthropological calculus or chaos? 117
Angela P.Cheater
7 Cultures in collision: the emergence of a new localism in academic
research 131
Stephen Hill and Tim Turpin
8 The nice thing about culture is that everyone has it 153
Marilyn Strathern

Afterword Relocations 177
Name index 186
Subject index 190
Figures
2.1 Plan of The Forest, Room 5 of the Pithecanthropus centennial
exhibition (Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum, Leiden) 38
2.2 Dubois’s family tree of Pithecanthropus erectus 46
2.3 Haeckel’s Systematischer Stammbaum des Menschen 48
2.4 Geslacht Boom van den Heere Mr Gerard Schaap 49
2.5 Geslacht Boom van Adam tot Christus 50
2.6 The Tree of Jesse, from Adam to Noah: first in a series of seven by
J.C.Bendorp 52
3.1a Ground plan of beaver lodge 61
3.1b Floor plan and cross-section of Eskimo house, Mackenzie region 61
3.2 Fox, owl and oak tree 64
3.3 Ant, bark-boring beetle and oak tree 65
3.4 The Mbuti Pygmy camp of Apa Lelo 68
3.5 Building plans of three periods from the ancient Mesopotamian site
of Tell es-Sawwan 69
3.6 The first hut 72
3.7 The ‘stone circle’ from Bed I of Olduvai Gorge 74
Contributors
Mary Bouquet gained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of
Cambridge. She has subsequently held research and teaching posts at the
universities of Exeter, Lisbon and Amsterdam. She has also been involved in the
making of two exhibitions: one at the Portuguese National Museum of Ethnology
(Melanesian Artefacts, Postmodernist Reflections, and the other at the Dutch
National Museum of Natural History (Man-ape, Ape-man).
Angela P.Cheater is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the
University of Waikato, New Zealand, having formerly held a personal chair at
the University of Zimbabwe. She is the author of several books on rural
development and industrial anthropology in Zimbabwe, and of Social
Anthropology: An Alternative Introduction. Her widely varied interests include
cultural management and cultural policy.
Mary Douglas, formerly of University College London, is now retired. An
anthropologist with Africanist experience and interests, she is particularly
interested in methodology in the social sciences, how to avoid an ethnocentric
basis for social thought, the politicisation of nature, rival representations of
danger, and rival theories of psyche and justice. Current research concerns
pollution ideas, with special reference to the priestly books of the Bible. A
lifetime of major publications includes Purity and Danger (1966), Natural
Symbols (1970), How Institutions Think (1986), Risk and Blame (1992) and
In the Wilderness: the Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (1993).
Simon Harrison is reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Ulster.
He gained his PhD degree at the Australian National University, and has carried
out ethnographic fieldwork in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. His
publications include Stealing People’s Names: History and Politics in a Sepik
River Cosmology (1990) and The Mask of War: Violence, Ritual and the Self
in Melanesia (1993).
Stephen Hill is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research Policy,
University of Wollongong, a ‘Special Centre’ funded by the Australian Research
Council. Previously Professor of Sociology at the same university, Stephen Hill
is trained also in physical chemistry and business administration. His continuing