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Ways of Knowing

Ways of Knowing

Mark Harris

(2007)

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Abstract

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.


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).


“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

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Ways of Knowing iii
Copyright iv
Contents vii
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Part I. Paradigms and Polemics 25
Chapter 1. Of Dialectical Germans and Dialectical Ethnographers 27
Chapter 2. Practising an Anthropology of Philosophy 42
Chapter 3. Is Religion a Way of Knowing? 64
Chapter 4. Deskilling, 'Dumbing Down' and the Auditing of Knowledge in the Practical Mastery of Artisans and Academics 91
Part II. Time and the Disruption of Knowing 111
Chapter 5. Knowing Silence and Merging Horizons 113
Chapter 6. The Construction of Ethnographic Knowledge in a Colonial Context 139
Chapter 7. Embodying Knowledge 158
Part III. Rethinking Embodiment 179
Chapter 8. Crafting Knowledge 181
Chapter 9. Communities of Practice and Forms of Life 203
Chapter 10. Seeing with a 'Sideways Glance' 222
Part IV. Learning and Repositionings 243
Chapter 11. Figures Twice Seen 245
Chapter 12. 'A Weight of Meaninglessness about which There is Nothing Insignificant' 266
Chapter 13. The 4 A's (Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture) 287
Chapter 14. A Discussion Concerning Ways of Knowing 306
Notes on Contributors 331
Index 336