(Cresswell, 1996; Pile and Keith, 1997; Scott,
1985). However, the epistemological status of
such claims remains unclear and continues to be
vulnerable to sustained critique (Sharp, 2000).
It may be pertinent to attempt a first and tenta-
tive summary at this point in our discussion.
Such an endeavour would posit ‘culture’ as a key
concept in the attempts to address epistemologi-
cal issues that have emerged in the nineteenth
century. The recognition of ‘representation’ and
‘discourse’ in particular within theories of
knowledge has been instrumental in the move
towards experience, everyday life and other,
local forms of knowledge. These latter in turn
fostered an environment conducive to an interest
in matters cultural. What remains unresolved,
however, is the status of ‘culture’ as a concept:
does it function according to the logic of estab-
lished scientific discourse or does it operate in a
different manner? Perhaps the avoidance of the
term ‘culture’ by those interested in genuinely
novel ways of creating insights is indicative in
this respect. One could also argue with some
degree of justification that the conceptual history
of the term ‘culture’, with its associated uses
especially during colonialism and the construc-
tion of nation-states, renders it ill suited to
advance knowledge theoretically. Be that as it
may, this author is quite at ease in allowing the
perceptions created by the entanglements of
culture and the spaces of knowledge to speak for
themselves.CULTURE AND REPRESENTATIONThis chapter would be intellectually dishonest if
it were to deny that (epistemologically speaking)
the headlong flight into matters cultural was but
one of many escape routes from the ‘crisis of
representation’ (Dear, 1988) diagnosed during
the last two decades of the twentieth century. As
often, the roads not travelled are every bit as
interesting as the paradigms actually developed.
The resilience, for instance, of many in the
human sciences towards the ideas initially
proposed by Karl Popper (1962) – accepting
‘falsification’ as a means of establishing the tem-
porary status of competing forms of representa-
tion – still surprises. Equally astonishing is
perhaps the lack of any culturally inspired
responses to the challenges born of ‘the crisis of
representation’ that were developed in a pragma-
tist mode (Habermas, 1972; 1988). In particular,
the lack of any sustained engagement between
cultural theory and structurationism comes as
a surprise given their mutual interest in theavoidance of dualist patterns of thinking
(Giddens, 1984; but see Shilling, 1993). A simi-
larly unfortunate neglect characterizes the possi-
bility of exchange between critical realism and
cultural theory (Bhaskar, 1986; Hannah, 1999;
Sayer, 1992).
There is, however, another form of critique
that has proven to be equally important in the rise
of culture to the status it currently enjoys. Here I
am thinking of the critique of the partiality of
many accepted forms of knowledge. The most
pertinent of these critiques was and continues to
be that launched under the heading of ‘femi-
nism’. At its best, this appraisal has avoided
replacing one set of partial viewpoints with
another and established genuinely novel forms of
cultural analyses (Bordo, 1993; 1998). Take, for
instance, the reappraisal of the importance of
ocular metaphors in the realm of science (Levin,
1993; also Jay, 1993). Once thought to be inno-
cent expressions of a universally shared desire to
know, the very notion of enlighteningcultural
and other phenomena is now increasingly seen as
part and parcel of an objectified worldview
(Rose, 1993; but see Gould, 1999) and thus –
crucially – of an embodied way of knowing (Pile
and Thrift, 1995). This is also as good an exam-
ple as any of the taken-for-granted nature of the
construction of knowledge in western societies:
the privileging of the ‘eye’ over and against other
forms of connecting to the world not only comes
naturally to most, it clearly is also an expression
of a certain kind of culture that helps to ferment
that culture through the delegitimation of alter-
native ‘ways of seeing’ (Rose, 2000; Ryan, 1997).
Not coincidentally, it is the eye with its
propensity to declare things to be either present
or absent that has become the Leitmotif of
modern science: it nicely complements other
strategies that modern science has utilized to its
advantage. The sheer diversity of cultural
expressions and the rather obvious deficiencies
offered by an exclusively visual approach have
made this critique appear perhaps to be less
radical than it is, for the target of this and many
other culturally minded approaches to knowl-
edge has often been a concept at the heart of the
modern scientific enterprise: the notion of iden-
tity (Cohen, 1999; Friese, 2001). Implied in
much of what has been discussed in this chapter,
it is perhaps fitting finally to arrive at some sem-
blance of a centre. ‘Identity’ is of course one of
the key concepts of philosophy writ large. It is
also the term customarily deployed to signify
those irreducible, non-circular elements that
form the basis for structures in general. Amongst
a developing set of concepts denoting ‘identity’ –
including political concepts such as ‘the nation’,THE CULTURE OF EPISTEMOLOGY 5273029-ch28.qxd 03-10-02 11:07 AM Page 527