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This page offers a directory of diverse resources and references on many topics related to Indigenous realities. These resources and references may prove useful for those who wish to expand their knowledge of the essential elements surrounding Aboriginal realities in Quebec and elsewhere.

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Article scientifique

An Anthropology of Knowledge.

Fredrik Barth

Barth, F. (2002). An anthropology of knowledge. Current Anthropology, 43(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1086/324131

Whereas previous Sidney Mintz lectures have celebrated Mintz’s work on inequality, racism, and ethnicity, I have chosen to speak to the broadest scope of his research and teaching in anthropology. A comparative perspective on human knowledge allows us to unravel a number of aspects of the cultural worlds which people construct. I argue that knowledge always has three faces: a substantive corpus of assertions, a range of media of representation, and a social organization. Using ethnographic materials from New Guinea and Bali and also from our own universities, I try to show how in different traditions of knowledge these faces will interrelate in particular ways and generate tradition-specific criteria of validity for knowledge about the world. Thus the trajectory of a tradition of knowledge will be to a large extent endogenously determined. This implies not a diffuse relativism of “anything goes” but a relativism in which we can demonstrate how already established thoughts, representations, and social relations to a considerable extent configure and filter our individual human experience of the world around us and thereby generate culturally diverse worldviews. View document
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