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Cited by 469

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 37 of the 37 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

An Anthropology of Knowledge

Open access
Barth, Fredrik·2002·Current Anthropology

Abstract

Whereas previous Sidney Mintz lectures have celebrated Mintzs 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 traditionspecific 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.

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Metadata

Authors
Barth, F.
Venue
Current Anthropology
Published
2002-02
Volume
43
Issue
1
Pages
1-18
ISSN
  • 0011-3204 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5382
OpenAlex
W1946154389
Cited by
469
References
37
FWCI
50.49
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An Anthropology of Knowledge. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/324131
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Barth, F. (2002). An Anthropology of Knowledge. Current Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1086/324131

Data sources

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.