What is the anthropology of knowledge, and what can it contribute to a history of knowledge and its resources? In this public talk, I will trace a genealogy of anthropological debates on the nature of knowledge, including its relationships to magic, science, religion, and rationality, from nineteenth-century evolutionary studies to contemporary laboratory ethnographies. At the center of these debates is the problem of the “translation of cultures,” that is, how radically different ways of knowing can be understood as forms of knowledge. Drawing on my own research into the scientific search for the origins of pandemics such as COVID-19, the talk will show how recent anthropological research has grappled with incorporating historicity and temporality into the project of cultural translation. As anthropologists confront what Laura Bear calls the heterogeneity of the contemporary, new horizons of collaboration between anthropology and history of knowledge are appearing.

Lyle Fearnley teaches anthropology at Singapore University of Technology and Design, where he is Associate Head of the Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds a Joint PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. Dr. Fearnley’s research examines how science and technology are entangled with health in areas beyond the medical clinic, such as disease pandemics, food and agriculture, or waste management. He has authored numerous works including Virulent Zones: Animal Disease and Global Health at China’s Pandemic Epicenter (Duke University Press), an honorable mention for the 2021 Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize. In 2021, Dr. Fearnley was a finalist for the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year (Social Sciences and Humanities). He is also co-editor, with Anthony Stavrianakis and Gaymon Bennett, of Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (Fordham University Press, 2015).