ABSTRACT
As Sir Edmund Leach once complained about the field of anthropology in general, the anthropology of knowledge has succeeded in collecting many ‘butterflies’, whose comparative analyses have hardly gone beyond the development of typologies, such as ‘local’ (indigenous) versus ‘global’ (exogenous) knowledge; ‘traditional’ (native, primitive) versus ‘civilized’ (imported, modern) knowledge; ‘secular’ (practical) versus ‘ritual’ (specialized) knowledge, etc. While such dichotomies may have been useful as a preliminary grid to classification, they now appear to have fossilized into distinctive categories which, it is believed, could be readily identified. One major consequence of this dichotomization is the difficulty it poses for analysing certain forms of knowledge that are, in essence, neither local nor global, neither old nor new, neither practical nor specialized but both and all at the same time. Yet until such forms are critically analysed, the anthropology of knowledge will remain deficient in accounting for the generative capacity of knowledge producers and the processes of change, especially in those diverse areas of experience characterized by the beliefs, rituals and practices commonly labelled as religion.
