Knowledge in Motion

Constellations of Learning Across Time and Place

Andrew P. Roddick, Ann B. Stahl

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780816540877, 9780816532605
• eBook ISBN: 9780816533749
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Spirit mediums of East Africa. Healers and fishermen of the Amazon River Basin. Potters of the American Southwest. People contending with climate change long ago. All share "knowledge in motion," a process of drawing on experiences past and present while engaging in daily practice in relation to contexts of time, place, and power.

In the last twenty-five years, scholars from a number of disciplines have explored "situated learning," specifically investigating how learning relates to social reproduction and daily life. In Knowledge in Motion, contributors focus on learning through time and at a variety of scales, particularly as they relate to power and politics, with implications for emergent communities and constellations of practice.

This volume brings together archaeologists, historians, and cultural anthropologists to examine communities engaged in a range of learning practices around the globe, from Africa to the Americas. Contributors draw on the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on situated learning to explore those processes in relation to power and broader forces that shape knowledge during times of turbulent change.

Enriching the diversity of regions and disciplines, Knowledge in Motion focuses on how learning, knowledge transmission, and the emergent qualities of communities and constellations of practice are shaped by changing spheres of interaction or other unstable events and influences. The contributions forge productive theories and methodologies for exploring situated learning and its broad-ranging outcomes.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Knowledge in Motion
• 1. The World Is Like a Beanstalk: Historicizing Potting Practice and Social Relations in the Niger River Area
• 2. Secrecy, Production Rights, and Practice Within Communities of Potters in the Prehispanic American Southwest
• 3. Glass Beads and Constellations of Practice
• 4. Scalar Relations: A Juxtaposition of Craft Learning in the Lake Titicaca Basin
• 5. Finding Connections Along the River in the Lower Amazon, Brazil
• 6. Crafting Life in Turbulent Times: Communities of Practice in the Western Volta Basin from the 13th to the 17th Century A.D.
• 7. Pythons Worked: Constellating Communities of Practice with Conceptual Metaphor in Northern Lake Victoria, ca. A.D. 800 to 1200
• 8. Communities of Consumption: Cuisines as Constellated Networks of Situated Practice
• 9. A Constellation of Practice in the Experience of Sea-Level Rise
• Contributors
• Index