2001

Hakken, David

KNOWLEDGE, CYBERSPACE, AND ANTHROPOLOGY

http://www.knowledgenet.org/papers/01aaapaper01.pdf

Among the most important transformations in the discipline of anthropology over the last hundred years are changes in our conception of what constitutes anthropological knowledge. In the wake of the adoption early in the Twentieth Century of ethnographic fieldwork as something of a methodological standard in social and cultural anthropology came an implicit recognition of the cultural relativity of knowledge, that what counts as “known” varies from cultural to culture. Over the century, this recognition co-existed more or less uneasily with the Malinowskian and both earlier and later forms of commitment to a “science” program in the discipline.