The Ethics of Knowledge Creation

Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns.

Anthropology lies at the heart of the human sciences, tackling questions having to do with the foundations, ethics, and deployment of the knowledge crucial to human lives. The Ethics of Knowledge Creation focuses on how knowledge is relationally created, how local knowledge can be transmuted into ‘universal knowledge’, and how the transaction and consumption of knowledge also monitors its subsequent production. This volume examines the ethical implications of various kinds of relations that are created in the process of ‘transacting knowledge’ and investigates how these transactions are also situated according to broader contradictions or synergies between ethical, epistemological, and political concerns.

List of Illustration

Introduction: The Ethics of Knowledge-Creation
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth and Lisette Josephides

PART I: NEGOTIATING AND TRANSACTING KNOWLEDGE IN THE FIELD

Chapter 1. Empathic Relations with Tamil Refugees: Challenging Morality and Calling for Ethics of Knowledge-Creation
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

Chapter 2. The Danger of Knowledge: Exercising Sameness, Bound to Differentiation
Giovanna Bacchiddu

Chapter 3. On the Shifting Ethics and Contexts of Knowledge Production
Tamara Kohn

PART II: THE ETHICS OF INDIRECT MEDIATED ETHNOGRAPHY

Chapter 4. Troubled Conjunctures: Ethnography, Psychotherapy and Transnational Social Fields
Laura Huttunen

Chapter 5. The Problems with Gossip: Reflections on the Ethics of Conducting Multi-sited Ethnographic Research
Tamsin Bradley

PART III: BIOETHICS, BIO-POLITICS, AND HUMANITY BEYOND THE LOCAL

Chapter 6. A Meditation on Knowledge Production by Personalized Genetic Testing
Kaja Finkler

Chapter 7. Biotechnology, Law and Some Problems of Knowing
Marit Melhuus

Chapter 8. Towards an Epistemology of Ethical Knowledge
Lisette Josephides

Afterword
Marilyn Strathern

Index