knowledge production

Ethnography in Late Industrialism

Kim Fortun

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