Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers

This highly original study puts forward the notion that every culture has its own ways of assembling local knowledge, thereby creating space through the linking of people, practices and places.

Autorentext

David Turnbull

Zusammenfassung
In an eclectic and highly original study, Turnbull brings together traditions as diverse as cathedral building, Micronesian navigation, cartography and turbulence research. He argues that all our differing ways of producing knowledge - including science - are messy, spatial and local. Every culture has its own ways of assembling local knowledge, thereby creating space thrugh the linking of people, practices and places. The spaces we inhabit and assemblages we work with are not as homogenous and coherent as our modernist perspectives have led us to believe - rather they are complex and heterogeneous motleys.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: From Rationality to Messiness: Rethinking Technoscientific Knowledge 2. On With the Motley: The Contingent Assemblage of Knowledge Spaces 3. Talk, Templates and Tradition: How the Masons Built Chartres Cathedral Without Plans 4. Tricksters and Cartographers: Maps, Science and the State in the Making of a Modern Scientific Knowledge Space 5. Pacific Navigation: An Alternative Scientific Tradition 6. Making Malaria Curable: Extending a Knowledge Space to Create a Vaccine 7. Messiness and Order in Turbulence Research 8. Conclusion: Rationality, Relativism and the Politics of Knowledge