Recognising and Translating Knowledge: Navigating the Political, Epistemological, Legal and Ontological

Abstract

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 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’.

Keywords:

• Knowledge
• Translation
• Knowledge Economy
• Myth
• Intellectual Property

Notes

[1] We have many people to thank for bringing together the authors in this volume. The Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia in the guise of Susan Takao and Audrey Barton organised the original workshop, an event that was much enhanced by the contributions of Ross Chadwick, Katie Glaskin, Sean Martin-Iverson, Barbara Matters and Ana Vrdoljak. In addition, Katie Glaskin has gone far beyond the call of duty as Journal Editor in her generous engagement with the editing process. Catie Gressier similarly deserves thanks for her consistent and important efforts. Three of the original paper givers (Jane Anderson, John Stanton and Richard Davis) do not appear here, yet their contributions were vital to developing this introduction collection. We thank them sincerely.

[2] See for example Turnbull and Chambers (2011).

[3] Including the current anthropological drive to expand the definition of knowledge.

[4] The editors gratefully acknowledge Hayden's discussant contribution to the original workshop in shaping this introduction.

[5] See Anderson (2011).

[6] This argument is elaborated at some length at the end of that book (see Leach and Nombo 2010, 149–71),

[7] See Leach and deLahunta (in preparation).