Enactments of Expertise

Zotero / D&S Group / Top-Level Items 2022-02-18

Type Journal Article Author E. Summerson Carr URL https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948 Volume 39 Issue 1 Pages 17-32 Publication Annual Review of Anthropology Date 2010 Extra _eprint: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948 DOI 10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948 Accessed 2022-02-18 23:46:52 Library Catalog Annual Reviews Abstract 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 possess, 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.