Lesley Green

Anthropologies of knowledge and South Africa's Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy

Following a visit to the South African Medical Research Councils Indigenous Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Delft, Cape Town, this paper explores the possibilities for anthropological responses to South Africas Indigenous Knowledge Systems Policy of 2004. While the Policy is admirable in that it focuses attention on the integration of science and traditional knowledge in South Africa, its dualisms of indigenous knowledge and science, and its assumptions about identity, power, and about acceptable epistemology call for critique. The question arises: on what theoretical grounds ought anthropological dialogue about knowledge diversity be based? This paper offers a critique of possibilities for engaging with the IKS Policy via three different approaches in contemporary social anthropology: social constructionism, phenomenological anthropology, and research on Amerindian perspectivsm.

Designing interactive storytelling: a virtual environment for personal experience narratives

We describe an ongoing collaboration with the District Six Museum, in Cape Town, aimed at designing a storytelling prototype for preserving personal experience narratives. We detail the design of an interactive virtual environment (VE) which was inspired by a three month ethnography of real-life oral storytelling. The VE places the user as an audience member in a virtual group listening to two storytelling agents capable of two forms of interactivity: (1) User Questions: users can input (via typing) questions to the agent; and (2) Exchange Structures: the agent poses questions for users to answer. Preliminary results suggest an overall positive user experience, especially for exchange structures. User questions, however, appear to require improvement.

“Ba pi ai?”—Rethinking the relationship between secularism and professionalism in anthropological fieldwork

Epistemological commitments shape notions of what constitutes an ethical presence in the field. The article examines the assumption of secularism, linked to objectivity, implicit in codes of ethics. It argues that in fieldwork, the secular position neither guarantees ethical behaviour nor improves data collection. Reflecting on research encounters among Palikur-speakers in Brazil, the article examines the ways in which objectivity unexpectedly forecloses some avenues of research. Drawing on the Palikur idiom of ‘minahwa’ (to draw ones canoe alongside), the paper posits a change in the relationship between the anthropologist and the subject of research to an I-Thou relationship of mutual presence in which the anthropological self is hospitable to the other. An ethics of facing is posited.

Archaeologies of Intellectual Heritage

Focusing on the place known in the Palikur language as “Ivegepket” or “Lookout Point” in Amapa, Brazil, this paper considers the ethics of the choice not to excavate on a cosmologically significant sambaqui, during a public archaeology project in the Uaca Indigenous Area in 2000–2001. It argues that the ethical choice not to excavate at that time offered the opportunity to develop a different kind of archaeology: not the kind that maps objects in space and time, but one that engages the ways in which different intellectual heritages counter the ontological assumptions of modernity that the world can be known by mapping objects in space and time. The article traces the ways in which calling the shells waramwi-giyubi (the sacred anaconda’s garbage) or a sambaqui (shell mound), speak to different concerns, and different rationales for having knowledge of the world. The chapter proposes that the challenge is to move beyond matching perspectives, theirs to ours, in relation to the material record, and instead points to the value of the challenge to engage multiple ways of accounting for “the real”. Such a project involves not only an archaeology of nature (materials) nor of cultural anthropology as such (with its focus on the world of mythology and ideas), but an archaeology of the ecologies of knowledge and knowing; an archaeology of intellectual heritages, their interactions, and their value in grasping multiple ways of seeing and knowing the material record.

Space and the body: rethinking the division between biological and sociocultural anthropology

(2004). Space and the body: rethinking the division between biological and sociocultural anthropology. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 27, No. 1-2, pp. 1-2.