ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is, first of all, to provide the philosophical audience with some exotic ethnographic data from the Ende people of the island Flores, eastern Indonesia. I hope the paper will contribute to the on-going discussion about ethnoepistemology, not merely because the data come from an exotic place, but also because they have been collected through anthropological fieldwork and are analyzed using the idea of “total social fact.” The only way to acquire knowledge in Ende is to buy it. To make sense of this custom, I argue that we have to know, first, how the Ende people think about knowledge, and, secondly, how they conceptualise “buying”. My contention is (1) the first problem, the pragmatics of knowledge, is solved via the kind of data acquired only through long-term fieldwork, based on the rapports with the people, and (2) the second problem is to be solved using the idea of “total social fact” by having recourse to the other aspects of the social life, such as, in this case, kinship and exchange systems.
