ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on both the historical and the contemporary senses, intimately bound up with the concept of local knowledge and its relationship with globalisation. The anthropological perspective is necessary to understand the impact of globalisation on local cultures and systems of education. The concept of 'local knowledge' has its basis in the indigenous, in the traditional and the established. In archaeology, for instance, a tradition is a set of cultural elements or traits that are both inter-related and which persist over a relatively long time-span. The term local knowledge has sometimes been used as a synonym for cultur. This has been the case particularly in the discipline of ethnology, where the study of 'traditional everyday culture' or folk culture has been a dominant concern. However, modern anthropology has tended not to place so much emphasis on the centrality of tradition in analyzing or understanding contemporary communities.
