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Experts, Expertise, and Expert Knowledge

Submitted by Betsey Brada on Fri, 2009-06-05 10:37

Myriad factors—including but hardly limited to Laura Nader’s landmark 1969 essay “Up the Anthropologist” and the emergence of science studies as a robust field of inquiry--contribute to contemporary anthropologists’ interest in experts, expertise and expert communities.  A growing interest in how regimes of legal, medical and other forms of professional knowledge and practice were deployed and contested in both colonial and post-colonial settings also turned anthropologists’ attention to experts and expertise.  Not only has Cultural Anthropology supported the turn to expertise and expert knowledge as objects of anthropological investigation; one can also trace a thread of criticism directed at the discipline itself.  As anthropologists have increasingly given attention to the practice of writing, a number of scholars have moved from investigations of others' expert knowledge to interrogating the conditions of possibility under which anthropological knowledge is produced or, as Allen Chun put it, how anthropology “makes its subject” (Chun 2000; also Marcus 2008; Maurer 2005).  As anthropologists find themselves and their own claims to knowledge drawn into other regimes of knowledge production and professional practice (e.g., the courtroom, the clinic, the art gallery, the cultural center, the refugee camp) (Adams 2001; Briggs 1996, 2007; Campbell and Shaw 2008; Erikson 1999; Fassin 2008; Landsman and Ciborski 1992; Malkki 1996; Myers 1991; Mullin 1992; Pigg 2001), the questions of how anthropological knowledge is produced, who may lay claim to it, and what anthropological knowledge is ultimately for have become particularly salient, prompting authors to interrogate not only the discipline’s past (Scott 1992; Starn 1991) and its internal differences (Mayer 1991; Ramos 1990), but its future as well (Axel 2006; Kelty et al. 2008).

Producing Expertise and Expert Communities

Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers
Gabriella Coleman
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2009, Vol. 24, No. 3:420-454.

Four Genealogies for a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology
Michael M.J. Fischer
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 4: 539-615.

Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems
Michael M. J. Fischer
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 1: 1-65.
Supplemental material

Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques
Hirokazu Miyazaki
Cultural Anthropology May 2006, Vol. 21, No. 2: 147-172.

Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks

Karen Ho

Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 1: 68-96

Supplemental Material

 

Making the Monkey: How the Togean Macaque Went from "New Form" to "Endemic Species" in Indonesians' Conservation Biology
Celia Lowe
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 4: 491-516.

Editor's Note: On Anthropology and/in/of Science
Daniel A. Segal
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 451-452.

Does It Take a Miracle? Negotiating Knowledges, Identities, and Communities of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Mei Zhan
Cultural Anthropology Nov 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 453-480.

After Culture: Reflections on the Apparition of Anthropology in Artificial Life, a Science of Simulation
Stefan Helmreich
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 612-627.

Reporting from Jerusalem
Ulf Hannerz
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1998, Vol. 13, No. 4: 548-574.

Training Tales: U. S. Medical Autobiography
Donald Pollock
Cultural Anthropology Aug 1996, Vol. 11, No. 3: 339-361.

The Credible and the Credulous: The Question of "Villagers' Beliefs" in Nepal
Stacy Leigh Pigg
Cultural Anthropology May 1996, Vol. 11, No. 2: 160-201.

Discourse and Discipline at the National Research Council: A Bureaucratic Bildungsroman
Donald Brenneis
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 1: 23-36.

Voices around the Text: The Ethnography of Reading at Mesivta Tifereth Jerusalem
Jonathan Boyarin
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1989, Vol. 4, No. 4: 399-421.

PATCO Lives! Stigma, Heroism, and Symbolic Transformations
Katherine S. Newman
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1987, Vol. 2, No. 3: 319-346.

Transformations of Disciplines through Their Texts: An Edited Transcription of a Talk to the Seminar on the Diversity of Language and the Structure of Power and an Ensuing Discussion at the University of Pennsylvania
Dan Rose
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1986, Vol. 1, No. 3: 317-327.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The Discourse of Training in Family Therapy
Martha G. Tyler and Stephen A. Tyler
Cultural Anthropology May 1986, Vol. 1, No. 2, The Dialectic of Oral and Literary Hermeneutics: 238-256.

 

Expertise and Politics / Expertise as Politics

The Emergence of Identity: Public Intellectuals and an Indigenous Space in Southwest China
Michael Hathaway
Cultural Anthropology May 2010, Vol. 25, No. 2:301.333.

Code is Speech: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software Developers
Gabriella Coleman
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2009, Vol. 24, No. 3:420-454.

"Survival is Your Business": Engineering Ruins and Affect in in Nuclear America
Joseph Masco
Cultural Anthropology May 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2:361-398.
Supplemental material

Governmentality, Language Ideology, and the Production of Needs in Malagasy Conservation and Development
Paul W. Hanson
Cultural Anthropology May 2007, Vol. 22, No. 2: 244-284.

Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of Politically Engaged Anthropology
Charles R. Hale
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 1: 96-120.

Due Diligence and "Reasonable Man," Offshore
Bill Maurer
Cultural Anthropology, Nov. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 4: 474-505.

Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis
Peter Redfield
Cultural Anthropology Aug 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3, Ethnographies of the Biopolitical: 328-361.
Supplemental material

"Lipstick Girls" and "Fallen Women": AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in Papua, Indonesia
Leslie Butt
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3: 412-442.

Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post–Cold War New Mexico
Joseph Masco
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 4: 517-550.

Election Day: The Construction of Democracy through Technique
Kimberley A. Coles
Cultural Anthropology Nov 2004, Vol. 19, No. 4: 551-580.

"Empty Cradles" and the Quiet Revolution: Demographic Discourse and Cultural Struggles of Gender, Race, and Class in Italy
Elizabeth L. Krause
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 576-611.

Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination
Hugh Gusterson
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1999, Vol. 14, No. 1: 111-143.

Colonial Moral Economy and the Discipline of Development: The Gezira Scheme and "Modern" Sudan
Victoria Bernal
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4: 447-479.

The UN Security Council, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda
Michael N. Barnett
Cultural Anthropology Nov 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4: 551-578.

Risk in Culture: The American Conflict over Nuclear Power
Gary L. Downey
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1986, Vol. 1, No. 4: 388-412.

 

Expert Knowledge Regimes in Medical and Humanitarian Settings

Incitements to Discourse: Illicit Drugs, Harm Reduction, and the Production of Ethnographic Subjects
Nancy D. Campbell and Susan J. Shaw
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 4: 688-717.

The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared
Andrew Lakoff
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 3: 399-428.

The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict
Didier Fassin
Cultural Anthropology August 2008, Vol. 23, No. 3: 531-558.
Supplemental material

Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States
Heather Paxson
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 1: 15-47.

Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence
Charles L. Briggs
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 3: 315-356.

Bioethnic Conscription: Genes, Race, and Mexicana/o Ethnicity in Diabetes Research
Michael J. Montoya
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 1: 94-128.
Supplemental material

Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis
Peter Redfield
Cultural Anthropology Aug 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3, Ethnographies of the Biopolitical: 328-361.
Supplemental material

"Lipstick Girls" and "Fallen Women": AIDS and Conspiratorial Thinking in Papua, Indonesia
Leslie Butt
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2005, Vol. 20, No. 3: 412-442.

The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity
Serguei Alex. Oushakine
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 3: 392-428.

Languages of Sex and AIDS in Nepal: Notes on the Social Production of Commensurability
Stacy Leigh Pigg
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 481-541.

The Sacred in the Scientific: Ambiguous Practices of Science in Tibetan Medicine
Vincanne Adams
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2001, Vol. 16, No. 4, Anthropology and/in/of Science: 542-575.

Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization
Liisa H. Malkki
Cultural Anthropology Aug 1996, Vol. 11, No. 3: 377-404.

Culture as Cure
Vilma Santiago-Irizarry
Cultural Anthropology Feb 1996, Vol. 11, No. 1: 3-24.

Ayurvedic Interiors: Person, Space, and Episteme in Three Medical Practices
Jean Langford
Cultural Anthropology Aug 1995, Vol. 10, No. 3: 330-366.

Eating Chinese Medicine
Judith Farquhar
Cultural Anthropology Nov 1994, Vol. 9, No. 4: 471-497.

Medical Magic and Medicinal Cure: Manipulating Meanings with Ease of Disease
Laurence Marshall Carucci
Cultural Anthropology May 1993, Vol. 8, No. 2: 157-168.

 

Expert Knowledge, Commodification, Mediation and Identity

The Emergence of Identity: Public Intellectuals and an Indigenous Space in Southwest China
Michael Hathaway
Cultural Anthropology May 2010, Vol. 25, No. 2:301.333.

"Survival is Your Business": Engineering Ruins and Affect in in Nuclear America
Joseph Masco
Cultural Anthropology May 2008, Vol. 23, No. 2:361-398.
Supplemental material

Bioethnic Conscription: Genes, Race, and Mexicana/o Ethnicity in Diabetes Research
Michael J. Montoya
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 1: 94-128.
Supplemental material

Bovine Abominations: Genetic Culture and Politics in the Netherlands
Karen-Sue Taussig
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2004, Vol. 19, No. 3: 305-336.

Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
Christopher Kelty
Cultural Anthropology May 2005, Vol. 20, No. 2: 185-214.
Supplemental Material

‘Very Bombay ’: Contending with the Global in an Indian Advertising Agency
William Mazzarella
Cultural Anthropology Feb 2003, Vol. 18, No. 1: 33-71.

On the Sedimentation and Accreditation of Social Knowledges of Difference: Mass Media, Journalism, and the Reproduction of East/West Alterities in Unified Germany
Dominic C. Boyer
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2000, Vol. 15, No. 4, 459-491.

A-Whaling We Will Go: Encounters of Knowledge and Memory at the Makah Cultural and Research Center
Patricia Pierce Erikson
Cultural Anthropology November 1999, Vol. 14, No. 4: 556-583.

Culture Sells: Cezanne and Corporate Identity
Amy Ninetto
Cultural Anthropology May 1998, Vol. 13, No. 2: 256-282.

The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the "Invention of Tradition"
Charles L. Briggs
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1996, Vol. 11, No. 4, Resisting Identities: 435-469.

Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification
Robert Brightman
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1995, Vol. 10, No. 4: 509-546.

Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limitations of Ethnography
Elizabeth Enslin
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1994, Vol. 9, No. 4: 537-568.

The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art "Art, Not Ethnology"
Molly H. Mullin
Cultural Anthropology November 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4: 395-424.

Representation and Politics: Contesting Histories of the Iroquois
Gail Landsman and Sara Ciborski
Cultural Anthropology Nov 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4: 425-447.

Royal Words and Their Unroyal Consequences
Christine E. Gray
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 4: 448-463.

Representing Culture: The Production of Discourse(s) for Aboriginal Acrylic Paintings
Fred Myers
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 1: 26-62.

Ethnic Protest and Social Planning: A Look at Basque Language Revival
Jacqueline Urla
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1988, Vol. 3, No. 4: 379-394.

From Ethnography to Metaphor: Recent Films from David and Judith MacDougall
Fred R. Myers
Cultural Anthropology May 1988, Vol. 3, No. 2: 205-220.

 

Producing and Contesting Anthropological Experise

Incitements to Discourse: Illicit Drugs, Harm Reduction, and the Production of Ethnographic Subjects
Nancy D. Campbell and Susan J. Shaw
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 4: 688-717.

Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies
Kelty et al.
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 3: 559–588.

The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition
George E. Marcus
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 2008, Vol. 23, No. 1: 1-14.

Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence
Charles L. Briggs
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2007, Vol. 22, No. 3: 315-356.

Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication
Brian Keith Axel
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 354-384.

From Text to Context: How Anthropology Makes Its Subject
Allen Chun
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 2000, Vol. 15, No. 4: 570-595.

Modernist Discourse, Psychic Forms, and Agency: Aesthetic Subjectivities at IRCAM
Georgina Born
Cultural Anthropology Nov, 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4: 480-501.

Students, Natives, Colleagues: Encounters in Academia and in the Field
Alexandra Bakalaki
Cultural Anthropology Nov 1997, Vol. 12, No. 4: 502-526.

Protestant Theories and Anthropological Knowledge: Convergent Models in the Ecuadorian Sierra
Kent Maynard
Cultural Anthropology May 1993, Vol. 8, No. 2: 246-267.

Anthropology and Colonial Discourse: Aspects of the Demonological Construction of Sinhala Cultural Practice
David Scott
Cultural Anthropology Aug. 1992, Vol. 7, No. 3: 301-326.

Peru in Deep Trouble: Mario Vargas Llosa's "Inquest in the Andes" Reexamined
Enrique Mayer
Cultural Anthropology Nov. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 4: 466-504.

Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists and the War in Peru
Orin Starn
Cultural Anthropology Feb. 1991, Vol. 6, No. 1: 63-91.

Ethnology Brazilian Style
Alcida Rita Ramos
Cultural Anthropology Nov 1990, Vol. 5, No. 4: 452-472.

"Then What Have I to Do with Thee?": On Identity, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Knowledge
Suzanne R. Kirschner
Cultural Anthropology May 1987, Vol. 2, No. 2: 211-234.

 

 

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