In this workshop, we will examine and compare how anthropologists treat knowledge and rationality in 1) the classical culture paradigm; and 2) contemporary works that challenge the epistemological closure and anthropocentrism of cultural accounts of knowledge. 

Anthropology is, by definition, the science of the human. Yet in a moment of environmental crises from climate change to pandemic disease, defining knowledge within a human reference (for instance, “cultural context”) intensifies a modernist gap between humanity and the nonhuman world. Drawing on the semiotics of C. S. Peirce and Science and Technology Studies (STS), the workshop will explore how nonhumans can be incorporated into anthropological accounts of knowledge. We will pay particular attention to specific methodological tools that can be used to expand cultural translation beyond the human world.

• Activity 1: Experiment in cultural translation
• Activity 2: Semiotic ethnography of human-nonhuman worlds 

Readings for discussion: 

• E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Abridged) (Oxford University Press, 1976): Chapters 1-4: 1-89. Also please see Appendix 1. “A list of terms employed in describing customs and beliefs.”: 226-230.
• Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013).  (please focus on Intro, Ch. 1 and Ch. 2: 1-100)

Recommended to see also:

• Lily Hope Chumley and Nicholas Harkness, “Introduction: QUALIA.” Anthropological Theory 12 (1/2) (2013): 3-11.  
• Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton, 2015): Part 1, What’s Left?: pp. 11-54; Ch. 16 and Ch. 17, 217-239.