STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

Call for Papers

American Anthropological Association annual meetings
November 16-20, 2011
Montreal, QC, Canada

Anthropology of Expertise

What makes expertise and experts? And how are they made
recognizable---to those within expert communities and the non-experts they interact with, but also to us as anthropologists? This session brings together several different sub-disciplines of anthropology, including (but not limited to) studies of science, medicine, education and professions, to explore how expertise is embodied and performed. We are interested in the processes that create and sustain concepts and communities of expert knowledge; contestations and overlaps between competing expert communities: the intersection of science and religion,
indigenous groups and corporations, lay-public and professions; and the methodological and theoretical challenges that researchers face in exploring these topics: how and why one "studies up".

To be an expert is to act like one (Carr 2010). But if this is the case,
is there anything inherently new about expertise as an anthropological category of inquiry? With the growing interest in this question at this time, we also ask: Why is it that the discussion of expertise has come to the fore at this moment within anthropology. Why is expertise being marked now---by both ourselves as anthropologists and by our informants? In puzzling over distinctions between "experts" and "lay / public", between competing forms of expertise that fall within or narrowly sidestep such labels as "traditional", "indigenous", "scientific", and
"Western": are we simply rehashing anthropology's attempts to draw boundaries between science and magic, between rationality and "other knowledges" (Zhan 2001)?

Please send 250-word paper abstracts by March 13, 2011 to:
bbbrada@uchicago.edu.

Carr, E. S. (2010) "Enactments of Expertise." /Annual Review of
Anthropology/ 39:17-32.

Zhan, Mei (2001) "Does It Take a Miracle? Negotiating Knowledges,
Indentities, and Communities of Traditional Chinese Medicine." /Cultural Anthropology/ 16(4) Anthropology and/in/of Science: 453-480.