2002/02/01 by Fredrik Barth · 4 citations
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies #Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/324131
openalex publication_date 2002/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
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.