Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object

It is not surprising that anthropologists, being academics, should value knowledge. After all, an academic life is a vocation to generate data, to act as a critic in order to detect and eradicate error, and to transmit the state of the art to the next generation. This pursuit of knowledge entails an ethics: knowledge is the value that justifies all aspects of academic activity, whether it is desired as a means of promoting other goods (health, happiness, wealth, well-being) or as an end in itself. The argument that underlies this volume is that anthropologists have too easily attributed to the people they study the same unambiguous desire for knowledge, and the same aversion to ignorance, that motivates their own work, with the result that situations in which ignorance is viewed neutrally—or even positively—have been misunderstood and overlooked.

As the principal organization representing the breadth of anthropology, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) starts from the position that generating and appropriately utilizing knowledge (i.e., publishing, teaching, developing programs, and informing policy) of the peoples of the world, past and present, is a worthy goal.

—American Anthropological Association n.d.