UNIVERSAL AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

摘要

For those of us who have struggled to have non-Western knowledge systems recognized as a legitimate topic in Science and Technology Studies, Turnbull's Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers is a exciting demonstration for the viability of these interdisciplinary hybrids. But the text is far more than just vindication for indigenous techno-science: his reason for juxtaposing these more traditional anthropological case studies with their complimentary Western STS examples is to map out a path to Enrique Dussel's new category, the 'transmodern'. In Turnbull's account, modernist and postmodernist frameworks both have failings which render them inadequate to the task of guiding us to a 'technoscience that does not dominate nature but is compatible with it, that does not exploit and demean people but enhances their lives' (p. 3). Moreover he finds these failings are complimentary; we simultaneously need the advantages of both―'the joint preservation of the liberatory elements of the enlightenment project and a wide diversity of other knowledge traditions' (p. 14).