Epistemological Conversion? Introducing Anthropology to Positivistic Minds

Abstract (English)

The issue of epistemic injustice is certainly an important one, given the long and varied histories of the devaluation of “other” ways of knowing and learning; it highlights how knowing and what are knowable are themselves mediated through power relations. The panel calls for applying this critical lens to rethinking how we teach anthropology in schools and the university. But what will it mean to take the knowledge systems of our students seriously when we are trying to introduce our students to anthropology, not just as a discipline, but also as a perspective on the world and our relations to it? How do we characterize the tensions between respecting the knowledge frameworks which they bring to the classroom and our hopes for a transformative experience, perhaps captured in what some anthropologists have described as “anthropological thinking”? The proposed paper is an exploratory response to these questions, drawing on my experiences with teaching students in Singapore who have come with almost complete faith in positivistic epistemology. They often grapple hard with knowledge claims that seem to them to be merely subjective.