ABSTRACT

What I try to suggest in this chapter is that much of the material’ that gets woven by the anthropologist (or other observer) into a satisfyingly complete, freestanding ‘indigenous agricultural knowledge system’ is often nothing of the sort, but rather the product of a set of improvisational capacities called forth by the needs of the moment. It is hard for observers to appreciate what is often obvious (and therefore hardly worth stating) to performers. This leads academic bystanders into a fallacy of misplaced abstraction: the making of intellectual mysteries out of situations and activities whose practical import is obvious to all but the observer.