the 1970s (Bennett et al., 1981; Storey, 1993).
From our current perspective it is vital to note
that the importance of culture as an explanatory
concept was fostered by the acute disappointment
felt by many when applying the standard model of
knowledge to the realm of human activities
(Strohmayer, 1997). In other words, it was
precisely the paradoxical relationship between
reflexive origin and objectified status of know-
ledge unearthed in the preceding pages that has
brought forth the most violent of critiques – spaces
of knowledge of sorts – and was instrumental in
the rise of culturally sensitive knowledges.
We can summarize these critiques as falling
into two broad groups: the phenomenological
and the social constructionst reappraisal of
knowledge. Both share a view of classical
‘representationism’ (as developed above) as being
idealist; they part company in the alternatives
they offer for the scientifically interested practi-
tioner. The former, phenomenology, radicalized
an insight that was already familiar to empiricists
during the eighteenth century: it reinstated the
importance of experience by insisting that
knowledge was always knowledge of something
that someone had intentionally made the centre
of her or his attention. Rather than establishing a
neutral relationship between subject and object,
the very existence of intentionality was thus
indicative of an irreducibly personal aspect to the
construction of knowledge.
The ‘tain’ of the mirror of representation – to
use the earlier metaphor – could not but be
shaped by likes and dislikes, biographies and
individual constraints (Pickles, 1985; Spiegelberg,
1994). My own interest in epistemological ques-
tions, to give but one example, has been shaped
by an earlier series of communication break-
downs in the process of ‘doing research’, by a
host of personal moves between different
countries and by the odd chance encounter.
‘Objectively’, this should not matter: whatever
research I would produce would be evaluated
independently from its context. Realistically,
however, traces remain and idiosyncrasies proli-
ferate: being white and male, any possible con-
tribution to knowledge about, for example, slavery
would undoubtedly remain tainted by this per-
sonal context. A similar conclusion was advanced
by social constructionism. Broadly conceived,
this includes any claim that the construction of
knowledge needs to be understood within its
proper historical, social and cultural context.
Rather than offering timeless insights produced
from a single, ‘original’ vantage point into the
workings of societies, a relativized, scaled-down
and locally sensitized form of knowledge was
seen to be more appropriate.Although vastly dissimilar in scale, if not in
ambition, both critiques – and the notion of
culture they sought to resurrect – had one point
of convergence in common: both acknowledged
the ‘situated’ nature of knowledge (Haraway,
1988). In other words, they derived a logically
compelling place for the role of ‘culture’ in the
production of knowledge. Methodologically, this
acknowledgement often implied a turn to ‘local’
forms of knowledge. The introduction of this
term into the realm of cultural and geographic
knowledges was in essence a spatialization of
what had become known as tacit knowledge
amongst epistemologists (Geertz, 1983). ‘Tacit’
here circumscribes the implicit character of the
many forms of knowledge that allow us as
human beings to exist: from the biologically
determined and largely instinctive (breathing) to
the selectively acquired and trained (driving),
we rely on internalized forms of knowing to live
our lives.
Circumscribing the boundedness of knowl-
edge within local traditions, ‘local knowledge’
furthermore highlighted the fact that knowledge
is not just the outcome of academic or scientific
ways of analysing the world, it also constituted a
social practice (Thrift, 1983). In practice, this
effectively enlarged the spectrum of possible
knowledges through the designation of a spec-
trum stretching from ‘knowing’ one’s way about
within the confines of a familiar spatial context
(say a kitchen) to the artificially created spaces of
a laboratory. In the realm of science studies, this
enlargement has by now, largely through the
input made by feminist scholars, produced the
most important results (Duden, 1993; Harding,
1992; Keller, 1985; Latour, 1987). Of particular
interest for our given topic is the term ‘epistemic
cultures’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; but see Hacking,
1999), which critiques the notion of a unified,
progressive science that was so central to modern-
ity as a whole.
Such a reappraisal of the cultures of science is
all the more pertinent in the context of the pre-
sent rush into as yet unstructured knowledge and
expert societies. At the same time, however, the
scale of individual objects of analysis was often
drastically diminished: the centrality accorded to
‘the body’ (Butler, 1990; Nast and Pile, 1998;
Shilling, 1993; Stratton, 2001) and/or to ‘perfor-
mance’ (Crang, 1994; Hetherington, 1998; Lewis
and Pile, 1996; McDowell, 1995) in the human
sciences recently is indicative, amongst other
things, of the reduction in scale that has marked
the most recent developments in many human
sciences. Knowledge throughthe body and in
performance strives to be mobile and mimeti-
cally approximates the object of its curiosity:524 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch28.qxd 03-10-02 11:07 AM Page 524