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What is context?

An ethnophilosophical account

Chinese University of Hong Kong, freemanhuen{at}cuhk.edu.hk

This essay is an attempt to explore the ontology of context by elucidating its uses in the production of new knowledges out of the old. It is argued that some of the master concepts in anthropological discourse, to wit nature, culture, society and the individual, serve an important function of knowledge production by virtue of the ways they are deployed and emplotted as contexts to gather together, connect and reconstitute domains of data or phenomena. Drawing on the works of Marilyn Strathern and Roy Wagner, among others, two symbolic-metaphysical configurations of knowledge practices tentatively delineated as `Euro-American' and `Melanesian' are juxtaposed in order to make explicit particular modalities of contextualization. Some unexpected consequences, or predicaments, of our investment in making (explicit) partial connections as a privileged relational facility are then revealed; among them are the relativizing effects of a self-consciously universalizing epistemological strategy.

Key Words: context • culture • ethnography • knowledge practice • making explicit • Marilyn Strathern

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2, 149-169 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1463499609105475


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