Universal And Local Knowledge

For those of us who have struggled to have non-Western knowledge systems recognized as a legitimate topic in Science and Technology Studies, Turnbull’s Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers is a exciting demonstration for the viability of these interdisciplinary hybrids. But the text is far more than just vindication for indigenous technoscience: his reason for juxtaposing these more traditional anthropological case studies with their complimentary Western STS examples is to map out a path to Enrique Dussel’s new category, the ‘transmodern’. In Turnbull’s account, modernist and postmodernist frameworks both have failings which render them inadequate to the task of guiding us to a ‘technoscience that does not dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean people but enhances their lives’ (p. 3). Moreover he finds these failings are complimentary; we simultaneously need the advantages of both— ‘the joint preservation of the liberatory elements of the enlightenment project and a wide diversity of other knowledge traditions’ (p. 14). Turnbull’s path to the transmodern is similarly complimentary in structure. He has two primary goals: to show that putative local knowledge is more mobile than we commonly assume, and to show that putative universal knowledge is more local than we commonly assume. The main method for both demonstrations is the ‘assemblage’—a term he equates with ‘Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s paradigms, Callon, Law and Latour’s actor-networks, Hacking selfvindicating constellations, Fujimora and Star’s ... boundary objects and Knorr-Cetina’s reconfigurations’ (p. 44). Though a bit all-encompassing for someone who champions the partial and in

Aesthetics · Computer security · Diversity (politics · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Hacker · Indigenous · Social science · Sociology · Technoscience · Anthropology · Computer Science · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Ecology

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