Search

Despite the vast literature that questions the separation between indigenous and scientific knowledge, rural Third World women continue to be indigenised and their knowledge upheld as the new path to sustainable development and biodiversity. By drawing on ethnographic examples from Kumaon Himalayas in India, this paper examines the construction of women's knowledge and asks how, in practice, women's knowledge is produced, circulated, and shared. It draws attention to the politics of knowledge and argues that women's knowledge is a product of everyday practices of labour and livelihood which are shaped by culturally contingent relations of power and authority. By describing everyday conversations, meetings, and explanations, the paper shows that there is a great deal of informal exchange between women and men which mutually shapes their knowledge and confronts the idea that women's knowledge is distinct. Moreover, women's knowledge, it is argued, is not a neatly packaged information box but a set of relations shaped in contexts of social inequalities, local histories of conflict, and colonial and postcolonial interventions. While the attention to women's knowledge is welcome, the paper cautions against looking at women as embodiments of special knowledge and makes a call for examining the cultural politics of power and authority that marginalises women and their knowledge.

'Indigenous knowledge (IK)' and 'citizen science' represent parallel discourses which have emerged respectively in 'southern' and 'northern' settings. This paper explores commonalities and differences in how these traditions of work have represented knowledge systems and the engagement of `other' perspectives with modern science. At the extreme, IK debates emphasise conceptual and moral dissonance and disengagement between knowledge systems, while work on citizen science emphasises its emergence in direct engagement and contest with the science of 'expert' institutions. Both discourses are undermined by arguments that all knowledge is socially produced, dissolving divides between indigenous/scientific, lay/expert knowledge into a plethora of partial perspectives and situated practices among diverse social actors. Nevertheless, this dissolution should not mask real differences in the manners in which knowledge systems are contested: differences reflecting social relations and practices of science and the institutional histories through which they have developed. The paper explores such differences in two cases concerning hunters and national parks in the Caribbean (Trinidad) and West Africa (Guinea), showing how categories such as 'indigenous' and 'citizen' are themselves produced through these same social and historical relations.

In this paper I argue that McDowell's brand of disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge is ill-motivated. First, I present a reconstruction of one main motivation for disjunctivism, in the form of an argument that theories that posit a 'highest common factor' between veridical and non-veridical experiences must be wrong. Then I show that the argument owes its plausibility to a failure to distinguish between justification and warrant (where 'warrant' is understood as whatever has to be added to true belief to yield knowledge).

Recent literature on 'local knowledge' has left the term 'local' largely unexamined. In this paper, I bring into view theoretical and ethnographic material that points to the relationality of the local and consider what this might mean for an understanding of local knowledge. What does a relational local knowledge look like? In response to the distance of this reconfigured concept from conventional notions of locality and in an attempt to resist localisation, I suggest that much might be gained by rethinking local knowledge and its production as a form of intimacy.

Edited by Lynne Lighthall and Ken Haycock. International Association of School Librarianship, 1997. 378pp, $35.00. 1-890861-21-9. According to the title page, this weighty, in both length and writing style, volume [...]