Enactments of Expertise

Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what people do rather than what people posses, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annual review of anthropology 2010-10, Vol.39 (1), p.17-32
Main Author: Carr, E. Summerson
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropologists
Apprenticeships
Consumers
Cultural anthropology
Discourse
Epistemology
Ethnography
Ethnology
Experts
Familiarity
Ideology
Learning
Linguistic anthropology
Participation
Semiotic anthropology
Semiotics
Social anthropology
Social interaction
Socialization
Society
Sources and methods
Specific concepts
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Summary:Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what people do rather than what people posses, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized as the latter. Across its many domains, expertise is both inherently interactional, involving the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge, and inescapably ideological, implicated in the evolving hierarchies of value that legitimate particular ways of knowing as "expert." This review focuses on the semiotics of expertise, highlighting four constitutive processes: socialization practices through which people establish intimacy with classes of cultural objects and learn to communicate that familiarity; evaluation, or the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects; institutionalization, wherein ways of knowing are organized and authorized; and naturalization, or the essentialization of expert enactments as bodies of knowledge.
ISSN:0084-6570
1545-4290
DOI:10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948