Epistemania! (On the Very Idea of “Knowledge Production”)

Abstract

This is an essay about the way that moderns—among them, anthropologists—live with the concept of knowledge. I ask if certain familiar critical conventions express the compulsions of epistemania, an enthrallment to knowledge as unseeing as the ignorance it would dispel. In particular, I raise questions about the ubiquitous yet underscrutinized language of “knowledge production.”