ABSTRACT
The tension in the world anthropologies project is one between “epistemological tolerance,” with its paradoxical liberal, modernist taint, and an epistemological program that has a definite grounding in emancipatory political projects. This chapter explores three probably incompatible discourses that represent, nonetheless, serious attempts to go beyond the easy disqualification of particular nonhegemonic forms of knowledge as “epistemological nativism.” The first is the discourse of singularity and autonomous consciousness. The second is the discourse of participation in a local political project as part of the production of knowledge and the third is the discourse of ethnographic realism. By engaging with these three methodological perspectives, the chapter discusses some issues about how a world anthropologies network could provide a real communicative space for fostering growth in anthropological knowledge. It presents the history of the awareness of a particular form of anthropological knowledge in Spain.
