aesthetic concepts such as ‘landscape’ and
economic concepts like weights and measure-
ments – the (modern) subject occupied a privi-
leged position. Linked with visual metaphors
through the designation of clear and unequivocal
positions to the human gaze, identity is con-
stantly reaffirmed in an everyday context by just
about everyone.
The acknowledgement of culture, situatedness
and contextuality challenged the beautiful, if
restrictive, geometry of the associated produc-
tion of knowledge. Folded back upon its origin
and the cultural context that surrounded it, ‘iden-
tity’ revealed itself to have been a social con-
struction that masked often surprising forms of
difference. Once more, a key initial impulse
came from feminist cultural scholars who recog-
nized the importance of gender differences in the
construction of identities. Other differences soon
followed in the wake of this recognition, quickly
turning ‘difference’ into one of the key concepts
of cultural analyses. But the critique of identity
did not stop until it had coined a new category to
designate the evaporation of identity into its
opposite other, hybridity (Bhabha, 1994;
Whatmore, 1997). Used both as an epistemologi-
cal concept and as a strategic tool, the recogni-
tion of hybridity can thus been seen as the logical
answer to a fundamental paradox of identity
already acknowledged by Ludwig Wittgenstein:
‘Incidentally, to say of twothings that they are
identical is nonsense, and to say of onething that
it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all’
(1961: 5.5303). Verging between a highly suspi-
cious ‘as if’ and meaningless tautology, identity
as the touchstone of all knowledge becomes
infested with power; as a consequence, in the fit-
ting words of Gunnar Olsson, ‘knowledge can be
defined as the ability and the opportunity of
saying that a=band be believed when one does
it’ (1998: 147–8, see also Olsson, 2000). The
analysis of ‘culture’ is equally affected by this
insight but suffers less from it given its overall
structure and the reality of its existence as practice.
Of the many issues raised in conjunction with
the concept of ‘identity’, none is perhaps more
pertinent to the title of this section than the sheer
diversity of abstract and practical approaches
that different philosophical cultures the world
over have developed to focus on its existence
(Mbiti, 1990). Lacking the space and the exper-
tise properly to explore non-western traditions,
the present pages can merely allude to this most
fundamental of differences in the hope for a more
inclusive form of cultural knowledge. Identity
may well be central to all of them; addressing it,
however, does not always follow the same route,
nor does it yield structurally comparable results.The communitarian tradition that characterized
much of African thinking and culture and which
has left a mark on politics in Leopold Senghor’s
notion of négritude, for instance, does not in
general favour the individualized notions of
science and knowledge familiar to anyone in the
west (Birt, 2001; Gottlieb, 1992; Kwame, 1997;
Mudimbe, 1988; Senghor, 1964). The resulting
social role of cultural practices such as animism,
for instance, can arguably not be understood
within a framework derived from and ultimately
aimed at western forms of identity and subjects
(Rooney, 2001). A similar disposition to seek
knowledge at a scale larger than the individual has
been characteristic of the Latin American experi-
ence (Schutte, 1993; Wolf, 2001), while the preva-
lence of holistic, non-dualistic traditions has seen
Asian culture and thinking develop yet different
approaches to the understanding of humankind
and its cultures (Ames et al., 1994; Loy, 1988).
The resulting set of questions has become central
to the emergence of ‘postcolonial’ forms of geo-
graphic knowledges (Clayton, 2001; Sidaway,
2000) that are explored elsewhere in this volume.CONCLUSIONSAll of this allows us at long last to approach the
role of theory in the construction of knowledge. A
vast terrain itself, the realm of ‘theory’ is often
thought to be the antipode to empiricist notions of
knowledge. Historically speaking this is not quite
accurate given the existence of developed theoret-
ical systems supporting the primacy of empirical
approaches over and against other forms of
knowledge production. Otherwise, the fortunes of
‘theory’ within the knowledge of culture have
changed substantially since the days of Max
Weber. Once thought to provide a context for the
pursuit of knowledge, the invocation of ‘theory’
has a much looser meaning nowadays. We no
longer speak of observations being ‘in line with
theoretical assumptions’, opting instead for
watered-down ‘theoretically informed’ways of
approaching cultural phenomena. All of which is
perfectly in line with our discussion so far: the
very idea of ‘localized’ knowledge, of different
cultures or of a lack of stable identities implies a
different, a substantively reduced status and
applicability for the notion of transferable,
generalizable and abstract claims to knowledge.
Knowledge about culture will tend to be idio-
syncratic knowledge. It will tend to focus on the
concrete workings of particular cultural configura-
tions and leave claims about the bigger picture to
others. Instead of theory, what has emerged is528 SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE3029-ch28.qxd 03-10-02 11:07 AM Page 528