Date: 2020
Type: Article
When practices, places and materiality matter : a French trajectory in the history of knowledge
Journal for the history of knowledge, 2020, Vol. 1, No. 1, (Art 4), pp. 1-8
VAN DAMME, Stéphane, When practices, places and materiality matter : a French trajectory in the history of knowledge, Journal for the history of knowledge, 2020, Vol. 1, No. 1, (Art 4), pp. 1-8
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/68410
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
In recent years, issues raised by the new knowledge and information society have become a staple of both bookshop shelves and university research programs. History and the social sciences have taken up the challenge and now offer a vast range of approaches and problematizations that overflow the narrow confines of the history and sociology of science.1 The creation of the American journal KNOW in 2017 and the Journal for the History of Knowledge in the Netherlands in 2019 has added to a process of institutionalization that began nearly twenty years ago with the publication of two iconic books. The first, Ways of Knowing (2000) by the medical historian and professor at the University of Manchester John Pickstone, sought to build a transdisciplinary history in which the histories of science, technology, and medicine converge, while the second, A Social History of Knowledge by cultural historian Peter Burke, professor at the University of Cambridge, gave new impetus to the historical sociology of knowledge.2 France was not to be outdone: the launch in 2007 of the Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances edited by Dominique Vinck was followed by the publication in 2007 and 2011 of the two weighty multi-authored volumes of Lieux de savoir edited by Christian Jacob. These publications adopted an interdisciplinary approach that challenged the growing dominance of the cognitive sciences and neuroscience and their claim to offer an alternative to the constructivism of the social sciences.3 A focus on places of knowledge, social interaction, and cognitive practices located in near or distant contexts over the long term makes it possible to combat any naturalization in the analysis of the processes of knowledge production. This article seeks to revisit issues in the trajectory taken by the history of knowledge in France, showing the effects of imports from the English-speaking world and also particularities linked to the grounding of the history of social science in the two central concepts of practice and place. At once pragmatic and spatial, the history of knowledge in France is now set to enable historians to reappropriate the cognitivist turn of the early 2000s.
Additional information:
Published on 15 Jul 2020, CC BY 4.0
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/68410
Full-text via DOI: 10.5334/jhk.26
ISSN: 2632-282X
Publisher: Ubiquity Press
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