Making Knowledge: explorations of the indissoluble relation between mind, body and environment. Special Issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Abstract

This special issue features the works of leading scholars who promote bold, innovative approaches to understanding the nature and social constitution of human knowing. The ethnography, theory and methods presented expose possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration and lay solid foundations for further investigations into embodied cognition and conceptual thinking. Knowledge is explored both in its various modes of articulation (i.e. motor, sensory and propositional) and in its range of social, cultural and material manifestations. Determinately, knowledge and practice are not fixed; nor are they hostage to unconscious reproduction. Rather what the essays demonstrate is that human knowledge, like physical bodies, is constantly reconfigured in the activities and negotiations of everyday work and life.