2003a), ‘Clashing cosmologies: Contrasting knowledges in the Greenlandic fishery

• Main Author: Andreas Roepstorff
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Aarhus University Press
• Subjects: greenlandic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.330.1128; http://www.pet.au.dk/~andreas/pages/Files/Clashing cosmologies.pdf

Current worldwide discussions about management regimes for natural resources are increasingly focusing on forms of knowledge: for example on the discussion on scientific knowledge versus ‘other ’ forms of knowledge (Inglis 1993; Scott 1996; Kalland this issue), be it ‘local’, ‘indigenous’, aboriginal, or users ’ knowledge. Many of these discussions have been highly politicised interactions between scientific specialists, administrators and locals. Knowledge has, in other words, become located at the ‘inter-face ’ between the different actors (‘faces’) in the discourse (Roepstorff 2000). When ‘knowledge ’ becomes more of a battleground than a field of mutual exchange, the pieces of knowledge exchanged may appear as politicised free-floating signifiers (see e.g.Agrawal 1995).This veils the fact that the pieces of knowledge discussed are normally derived from another interface: the interface between certain persons and groups and their environment, and therefore that there are important differences in what counts as knowledge and how this is constructed. I have previously suggested (Roepstorff 2000) that a study of the ‘who, what and how ’ of knowledge may be a first step in understanding how conflicts over knowledge