Preface

146
(1977) as an exemplary way of solving problems suggests
knowledge is less an abstract mental entity than culturally and
historically changing kinds of activity. The revolutionary and
dialogic metaphors suggest in different ways that there is a case
for considering knowledge as different kinds of practice which are
more contested, confused and fragmented than is implied in the
more authoritarian claims of knowledge to be an abstract
conceptual system.
Knowing as a practice or event?
What does it involve to talk of knowledge as a practice? 119
Negatively, it requires us to pause before assuming knowledge to
be a reified, ahistorical abstract entity, a tendency in anthropology
that includes depicting local, or indigenous, knowledges as
inherently systematic (Brokensha et al. 1980). Although doing so
may encourage us to take local knowledges seriously, it is to invite
in a Trojan Horse, because the effect is to impose alien categories
and to ignore the case for taking knowledges as historically
situated practices. Not just local knowledges, but also expert
knowledge, may be more about ‘knowing how’ than ‘knowing
that’. Even academic writing is in no small part a craft. Local
knowledge often exists as rival versions, which are not separable
from the social conditions of their being known (Cohen 1993). It
does not follow that such kinds of knowledge are irrational. They
are subject to testing and modification, and involve theory and
presuppositions (van der Ploeg 1993). Knowing, in this sense,
requires evaluation by some measure like appropriateness to
particular circumstances or adequacy, rather than by its being true
as such. Talk of truth is often meaningless, when what one is
dealing with may be more like a performance (as in agriculture,
Richards 1993), or is so local that it could not be authentically
codified as knowledge (Burghart 1993). To encrypt such a
pullulation of practices in the coffin of knowledge barely leaves a
skeleton.
119 As the contributors to Hobart 1993a have written at length about the relationship of
local and global knowledge, and tried to show ethnographically the case for treating
knowledge as practice, I shall not repeat the arguments here. I merely note a few points as
I assume them in what follows.