Foreword

Summary

There are many deeply evocative contributions in this collection of readings brought together by my colleagues Robert Morrell and Brenda Cooper. One that struck me intensely was Cooper’s reference to Haraway’s injunction that we have ‘to design classification systems that do not foreclose on rearrangements suggested by new forms of social and natural knowledge’ (quoted in Chapter 5, this volume). How we do this, given the grip that our epistemic orders have on our political, social and cultural imaginations, is a fundamentally ethical question. It is so for those of us who presume to have achieved, through our epistemes, the power to place, analyse and evaluate all that we have known, know now, and will need to know in the future. It is so for those of us who argue that we never have to explain the innermost articulations of how things work in the close confines of our own immediate universe. Reflected in the first instance is the conceit of method – of ‘powerful knowledge’ structured around procedures capable of the most sophisticated forms of deconstruction now known. Evident in the second instance is the conceit of ineffability – of communication of the sacred being reserved only for the chosen few.

What makes the challenge this book presents to us so intensely ethical is the fact of our co-existence and co-dependence. What we know, and how we give practical expression to it in the decisions we make, is no longer a question which affects just us – our people, however the idea of our people is constituted. The likelihood now is that most decisions we make, including those that we imagine concern only ourselves, will in one form or another and to one degree or another, have repercussions outside of the intimacy of our immediate selves.

The significance of this epistemic challenge is that we have to come to a sense of what the obligations of our knowledge are to each other. This is, at one level, a matter of sharing what we know, or the democratization of knowledge. But, at another level, and this is always going to be controversial, it is the development of an awareness of how much our stores of understanding are no longer being put out and received on their own ethno-, religio-, class-, or cultural-centric terms, anywhere.