Questioning The Localization and Circula

QUESTIONING THE LOCALIZATION AND CIRCULATION OF
KNOWLEDGE IN AFRICA
Pascale Moity-Maïzi
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2011/3 - Vol. 5, n° 3
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LOCALIZATION AND CIRCULATION
OF KNOWLEDGE IN AFRICA
QUESTIONING THE LOCALIZATION

AND CIRCULATION OF KNOWLEDGE
IN AFRICA
PASCALE MOITY-MAÏZI
INTRODUCTION
Analyzing the concepts of circulation and localization of knowledge took form at
the conference “Localisation et circulation des savoirs en Afrique”, which was
organized at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-
Provence in March 2009. This conference allowed participants to confront and
formalize their research experiences from all over Africa from this perspective.
By describing or suggesting at the very least the processes, interactions and flux
that cannot be reduced to mere transmission, both these concepts effectively
summarize many of the current approaches, particularly those adopted by

certain development operators, with the aim of bringing recognition, defending
and protecting knowledge and know-how believed to be linked to an origin.
This dossier in the Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances extends this train of
thought by publishing a selection of articles taken from the presentations made
at the conference1, to which have been added texts received by the journal
following a call for papers.
The SYSAV research project was the starting point for a process of reflection,
writing and publishing, and the conference could not have taken place without
it. It is thus relevant to give a brief overview of this project, which was funded
1 Funded jointly by the Université de Provence (BQR), Montpellier Supagro (UMR Innovation),
CEMAf (UMR 8171) and the ANR/SYSAV, the project team organized the conference “Localisation
et circulation des savoirs en Afrique” at the MMSH in Aix-en-Provence on 19 and 20 March 2009. The
conference was organized in particular by Bruno Martinelli and Pascale Moity-Maïzi, and brought
together papers from 20 researchers (8 from the SYSAV team and 12 researchers from a variety
of institutions: European and African universities, IRD, INRA).
Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3 a

b Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
by the ANR2, and coordinated by Pascale Moity-Maïzi and Bruno Martinelli. The
project had two ambitions: first, to promote current work by anthropologists
specializing in Africa and who describe the processes and networks organized
for the production, transmission and selection of knowledge and know-how
linked to a wide range of practices. Second, to provide an interpretation of the
interactions that characterize them in terms of learning3.
Clarifying what lies behind these processes and networks appears strategic
in a context of growing references to knowledge as the basis for society and the
economy (Meyer, 2006), and at a time when policies to promote or patrimonialize
“local knowledge” are multiplying, sometimes masking the complex realities
and points of anchor to which all knowledge necessarily refers. The research
collective involved in this project thus suggests understanding localization and
circulation dynamics as two aspects in the production of knowledge. It favors
the concept of circulation, which covers those of transmission, transfer or
exchange, as a means of emphasizing the diversity of the processes, networks
and filters through which knowledge “passes”. Knowledge is necessarily
selected, appropriated, sometimes reformulated, before being promoted,
recognized and instrumentalized according to procedures, commitments
and practices that need to be better understood. In addition, this research
collective prefers to refer to the localization of knowledge rather than localized
or local knowledge, once again as a means of emphasizing the active, voluntary
aspect of human activity, which makes it possible to generate knowledge that
can be qualified as local.
This position is, nevertheless, sometimes difficult given the extent to
which the expression “local knowledge” seems inevitable in certain contexts.
For this reason, we, too, have resorted to this solution, fully aware on the
one hand that the term “local knowledge” is to a certain extent validated
by anthropology given that Clifford Geertz (1986) makes it the subject of
epistemological reflection that is essential for the discipline, and, on the other,

that our work in this research program sheds light on the content and motives
for this use, in a variety of situations. This approach, which is implicitly similar
to the thick description as defended by Clifford Geertz (1986)4, takes on its full
meaning when the aim is to rethink the categories that scientific or political
institutions have appropriated for themselves in the name of a supposed advent
of a knowledge-based society. The question is therefore not to approach
knowledge as the product of cognition, even if it is situated, nor to oppose the
key players and their knowledge, and even less to assimilate the profane with
the local. Ultimately, the aim is to approach the flux and sites interconnected
by globalization in an empirical manner (Abélès, 2008), as well as their effects
2 Project funded as part of the themed program, “Apprentissage, connaissance et société”, ANR
- 06-APR-OO9-02; http://www.sysav.fr/.
3 For further information, see also Moity-Maïzi, 2011.
4 For C. Geertz, thick description is “what cultural analysis must tend toward, that is, an updated
plurality of “layers of meaning” without going through an observable behaviorist (“raw fact”)”
(Costey, 2003).
Introduction c
on ways of thinking or acting, on organizations and forms of recognition in

different social and professional situations in Africa.
CURRENT EVENTS ANCHORED

IN AN ANCIENT HISTORY OF EXCHANGES
Africa is well-known for its many, centuries-old, commercial and religious
relations with the West. These relations have transformed areas into networks
where goods and knowledge of all types, enhanced by regular contacts between
populations, are exchanged. The often idealized epoch of cross-border and
explorers’ caravans came after that of migrations of all sorts, in which the
migrant (often a merchant) was a go-between, a courtier – a political and
cultural mediator whose knowledge came from learning and intercultural
experiences, to the point where he could master several languages and several
codes specific to the societies he encountered. Historians have underlined the
fact that the knowledge exchanged during these periods so far-removed from
our own current events – in which migrants are an object of management –
often made it possible to acquire a new status or to make money5. But there
are few works that have described in detail the dynamics and processes that
allowed a large amount of knowledge (geographical, agricultural, geological,
economic, etc.) passing from one network or world to another to impose itself
as a resource for economic and political mediation. A few historians specialized
in Africa (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1965 for example) and certain anthropologists
such as Jean-Loup Amselle (1976)6 clearly showed the rupture imposed by
colonization: it imposed unequal relationships to knowledge by institutionalizing
the extraversion processes for materials and works that are still a feature

of our society today and against which various reaction movements have
been formed. Just after the Independence movements, for example, African
intellectuals exhorted UNESCO to preserve the knowledge they perceived as
being in danger of disappearing: campaigns to inventory languages combined
with films and objects with the support of this international organization to
produce a new history of Africa. Expectations for a certain form of recognition
were at the heart of these periods and interactions. Yet, and at the same
period, the UN Conference (1963) promoted endogenous development that
was to be built on a progressive appropriation of knowledge and techniques
proposed by European expertise. This general policy was the origin of a long
period of technology and scientific transfer, providing validation for several
more decades for an unequal relationship with knowledge, the result of which
5 This at least is what came out of certain papers presented at the conference “La fabrique des
savoirs”, University Paris-Diderot, 13-15 May 2009.
6 With him, of course, we refer to all Africanist anthropology policy, the list of whose authors
is long, and, more generally to all works included in post-colonial studies.
d Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
was the emergence of a new category in the field of development organizations

and policies: local.
THE EMERGENCE OF A CONCEPT THAT

ARTICULATES THE WORLD: “LOCAL”
The term “local” is primarily associated with imagining an indigenous tradition
composed of routine and inertia, liable for this reason to be described; in brief,
to be enclosed in inventories or fairytales, which would justify a narrative or
fictional vocation for ethnology (Geertz, 1986). This concept received little
criticism, yet is regularly used in a range of anthropological productions with a
descriptive aim to mean – without questioning the position that this affectation
presupposes – distant otherness or even the cultural or cognitive particularisms
of certain societies.
In development organizations and policies, “local” has been associated with
“development” to form a paradigmatic figure that justifies new practices and
methods of expertise. Local development thus refers in turn to a community,
pacifist vision of African societies, so-called participative approaches where
knowledge is mediatized by various experts and forms of support justifying
in passing the reorientation of international aid, which no longer transits via
the State but instead through the new key players – NGOs and producer
organizations. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1995) denounced the ideological
populism of this logic of action, opposing it to methodological populism,
an approach that takes into account the contexts in which statements
and conceptions are formulated and which restores the point of view and
categories of the key players questioned. In turn, Arun Agrawal questions

these projects that specialize in promoting practices and knowledge judged
to be singular but above all useful and liable, for this reason, to be protected
or transmitted to a large public. The “sciencization” of the procedures to
which the experts in these projects resort satisfies “a particular relationship
between utility, truth and power” (Agrawal, 2002/3:329). They do not take
into account the complexity of the situations, dispositions and operations that
are the basis for any production, transmission and knowledge appropriation
dynamic.
The political aspect of knowledge in Africa

In the African scientific field, Paulin Hountondji (1994) is the author of one of
the first works devoted to the question of knowledge in Africa, defined by him
as a corpus of non-scientific knowledge, at least in reference to the categories
in the post-colonial West. Whilst using Western categories, Hountondji
Introduction e
insists on the political and relational aspects of knowledge, encouraging new

approaches that leave behind the painstaking works inventorying know-how,
replacing it with reflection more committed to the status of knowledge that
he qualifies as non-scientific. The political dimension of autochtonal knowledge
and its evident link with power are in fact in his work a central element for
renewing the approach to knowledge ignored or excluded from the scientific field
and the Western world.
“Local knowledge” for Hountondji is similar to, if not synonymous with,
“autochtonal knowledge”. It is effectively difficult to ignore the latter category,
whose social and political dimension is the most evident. It covers either the
knowledge held and generally the possession of one particular group in relation
to another, or knowledge and know-how so designated by the anthropologist
when he sets himself up as the spokesman for those who have them, as a means
of defending the resources they have to protect and promote. In both cases,
it is generally on the international battlefield that these various spokespeople
have their say. In addition, the category of “autochtonal knowledge” has become
all the more inevitable as the people concerned, by being regularly defined as
the future beneficiaries of policies designed to preserve this same knowledge
(Agrawal, 2002), have appropriated these categories to defend their own
vision of knowledge and this manner of claiming a place in its own right on
the international political chessboard. This now obvious political aspect of
knowledge nevertheless raises a recurrent question, which is also a major
thread running through the articles brought together in this dossier: who,
ultimately, has the authority to declare or, on the contrary, push into oblivion
a certain piece of knowledge? This question reveals several others, touching
on the conditions and effects of this affectation, as well as on the modalities
and authorities liable to first select, and then transmit and diffuse knowledge
whose origins are affirmed and decreed. It is thus easy to understand that
the advantage of the notion of localization in these debates is that it indicates

both the process, the movements, the negotiations and relationships with
the authorities through which certain knowledge is distributed, instituted
and validated (Pestre, 2008) within a professional group or, more broadly
speaking, in scientific communities, organizations or sectors linked to various
markets.
The territorial aspect of knowledge

The political history of local knowledge gained media importance at the Rio
Conference (1992), which generalized the perspective of an increasingly
localized management of Nature, opened up to include new key players. The
profanes from a given site, bearing a vision and specific knowledge because
of their attachment to a given geographical territory, are now considered as
determining agents for activating new conceptions and coordination in the
Society/Nature relationship.
f Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
Local knowledge was thus clearly included in the finalized French-language

research7. As an occasionally de-politicized category, the local makes it possible
to designate not identities (indigenous or native), but all the entities that are
linked to a geographical place, a geographical and cultural origin. Products
and foodstuffs that are “de terroir” for example, refer to historically localized
production, closely linked to a society and Nature, and recognized as such by
the consumers (Bérard and Marchenay, 2004).
The local question became more crucial yet in a world in which borders
are swept away by the mobility of capital and means of production, where
globalization, a plural concept that designates the “compression of the world”,
is a source of erosion of localities (Dufy and Weber 2007). For Africa, and
in the food sector in particular, the failure of projects oriented toward the
development of food industrialization, as well as the subsequent increase in the
cost of basic foodstuffs since 2007 and the hunger riots in 2008, have accelerated
the questioning of international and national agricultural political orientations.
The development envisaged from a revalorization of local resources is more
than ever on the agenda of all the programs, and reactivates the question of
the meaning of local, particularly that of its origin in relation to a geographical
place. The concept of local food production, for example, which has been
used in social sciences since the early 1990s, refers in particular to efforts
to reactualize, re-localize resources (and thus know-how) and re-articulate
production and consumption (Marsden et al. 2000) at a variety of scales. In
France, many scientific works closely linked to development in Africa are
also devoted to analyzing so-called local resources and coordination liable to
encourage their mercantile promotion and public recognition in the context of
savings in quality (Arvanitis et al., 2008). Some scientific works show the fragility
of a binary vision opposing local and global, however, as well as the historical
importance, undoubtedly accelerated by migrations or other exchanges
between continents, and delocalization phenomena for African products “de

terroir” (Bricas, 2006) or the diversity of loans, blends or hybridizations that
concern the transformation processes and techniques as much as dietary habits
(Cheyns, 2006)8.
TOWARD THE REIFICATION

OF KNOWLEDGE: THE ADVENT
OF THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
The concept of a “knowledge society” appeared in the 1960s when the industrial
society revealed new risks and uncertainties (Beck, 2001) but also transformed
7 Funded by these UNESCO programs, in France by the Mission du Patrimoine.

8 See also Moity-Maïzi, Muchnik 2005.
Introduction g
itself gradually into first a monetary, then a symbolic economy (Stehr, 2000)9. The
notion of post-industrial society rapidly developed into that of knowledge society,
“based on the penetration of scientific knowledge into every sphere of life” (Stehr,
2000: 158). To the extent where, effectively, scientific knowledge is mediatized
more and more through various channels until it is no longer considered to be the
privilege solely of Western nations, it has become a “power of action”. By extension,
all knowledge – other than scientific – can be conceived as a resource, an essential
support for innovation at the same time as being a heritage to be protected.
The idea that we are living in a knowledge society, an economy of knowledge10
or even a form of capitalism that is “more cognitive, more informational and
which tries to make itself the master of the precious information that traditional
knowledge can contain” (Arvanitis et al. 2008) now seems to be widely accepted
and a highly mobilizing force in the field of development, understood as a universal
perspective and no longer bipolar (Meyer, 2006). In a logic that aims to make
knowledge a motor for growth and development, the reports of the World Bank
since 1999, the initiatives of UNESCO, or other organized political and scientific
groups11 suggest thinking about and giving legitimacy to all categories of knowledge
(traditional, scientific, local and global), in their articulations and effects. In a broad
and rapid extension of its uses, the local level today makes it possible, in addition
to qualifying certain types of knowledge by opposing them to other categories12,
to break free of the traditional opposition between countries in the North and
South, given that development policies that involve promotion of local knowledge
are directed now at everyone as a means of dealing with particular situations: local
knowledge, for example, is the knowledge that resists the knowledge broadcast
by a globalized world. It is also the knowledge owned and asserted by a group
specialized in a technique or production. Or it is the knowledge that has not
been formalized in writing (Lewandowski, 200713), a synonym for know-how and
orality. Finally, it is the knowledge that is anchored to a place, almost the property
of a group that produced it, in opposition to global knowledge of unknown origin

but which spreads as quickly as any mass-produced industrial product.
Instruments of development, like heritage resources that guarantee future
societies, and knowledge regardless of what it is or what its origins are,
9 Ulrich Beck also talks of “detraditionalization”, a process by which several categories and
values of the industrial society were dissolved, thus explaining the high level of individual and
collective uncertainty (Beck, 1998).
10 The economy of knowledge as a model of organization destined to promote economic
growth is based on producing and diffusing knowledge as the ingredients essential for technological,
organizational or social innovation. The expression “Economy of knowledge” was on everyone’s
lips with the diffusion of the World Bank Report 1999: Knowledge for Development.
11 This refers to the Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO 2003)
or the IAASTD Report (2008).
12 It is without doubt in the opposition between local knowledge and “other knowledge” that
are found the wide variety of versions and assimilations possible of what is local and which can be
seen in certain works: local knowledge as indigenous, native, traditional, profane knowledge, etc.
13 The works of S. Lewandowski (IRD) are in part the extension, in Senegal, of those of E. Gérard
(1997) on the confrontation between academic knowledge and “local” knowledge in Mali.
h Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
justify all sorts of operation. These operations can range from inventories to
reconstructing training syllabi14, in a general movement of reification which
is barely interested in questioning the modes of production of knowledge
but focuses instead on the capitalization and diffusion of new resources for
actions and innovations (Stehr, 2000; Laperche, 2008) from a sustainable
development point of view. The approaches for promoting and recognizing
local knowledge, supported by a wide range of different key players (from
international organizations to native associations, via NGO), have in turn
developed. They nevertheless leave little room for analyzing the modalities
by which knowledge is produced and selected before being exchanged,
transmitted or transferred. In brief, they omit its social aspect, its eminently
dynamic nature, and the criticism formulated by Agrawal (2002/3) denouncing
the sciencization of autochtonal knowledge, its formalization and archiving
in databases or good practices guides, is in line with this. Local knowledge
nevertheless opens up a new field of research for contemporary Africa and all
sectors of activity are concerned: agricultural and food industry productions,
health and education practices are all fields in which knowledge is the subject
of a renewal of interest directly linked to the paradigmatic imperative of
Sustainable Development.
AXES EMERGING
FROM A COMPARATIVE READING
From local to localization
The authors of this dossier adopt this way of thinking wholeheartedly. As

they all position themselves in the same field that questions the modalities
and significations of the localization and circulation of knowledge, and its
recognition, they touch on a range of confrontations and negotiations as well
as learning processes and cooperation, in different professional situations in
Africa, still linked to the rest of the world by the development operators and
multiple international exchanges. They propose a new vision of the complex
processes that operate at different scales, around the production, diffusion,
mastery or control, or even recognition of knowledge15.
14 This, for example, refers to the program between the DGER (general directorate for studies
and research) and Montpellier Supagro, “Les savoirs écologiques paysans pour l’agriculture durable de
demain” (The ecological knowledge of the farming community for tomorrow’s sustainable farming),
which aims to provide impetus within agricultural teaching for reflections on the role that can
be given to observing, collecting and transmitting certain types of knowledge developed by rural
communities on the subject of nature.
15 It is interesting to note that the Africanist works were conducted at the same time as other
research, particularly in Southern Asia, giving rise to a work by Marie-Claude Mahias (2011) bringing
together all the studies.
Introduction i
Here, it is a question both of evaluating the effects (social, economic and

political) of knowledge transmitted or transferred by experts, and recalling the
advantages of empirically following the historical, social and cognitive route
taken by knowledge in the various professional networks or specialist areas.
We can thus understand on the one hand that neither the transfer nor the
transmission of knowledge16 are part of a simple relationship of the “emitter-
receiver” type and, on the other, that they are not a mechanical support for
technical or organizational innovations as politicians so gladly have us believe.
Finally, they are above all organized into confrontations and specific (re)
configurations. New processes emerge from the latter, often unexpected by
the political frameworks that promoted them: selection and hybridization of
knowledge, construction of new networks, debates on, or displacement of,
professional statuses and positions, patrimonialization, political demands, and
the search for recognition.
The localization of knowledge has not been conceived here as a movement
opposed to that of globalization. It is rather a question of understanding the
proactive and singular processes that aim simultaneously to produce and anchor
certain types of knowledge – which cannot be dissociated from objects (Moity-
Maïzi, 2010), and to circulate them in networks that are themselves in movement.
In this way, this knowledge appears as a mediator between different worlds, for
exchanges that we know are part of the trade of civilizations as first described
by Fernand Braudel. For each empirical situation observed it is thus a question
of understanding on the one hand who are the key players confronting each
other, engaged in these operations anchoring or affecting certain knowledge
to a local level, and in which arenas they negotiate to which networks they
refer. On the other hand, how the knowledge - that some of these key players
have or carry - is transported and instrumented (Vinck, 2009) so as to be able
to circulate in new, global configurations, and be recognized and mobilized for
commercial, professional or political purposes.

The field test for giving meaning to knowledge
Most of the articles in this dossier were obtained from Africanist anthropologists,
some of whom adhere to a specific trend in the discipline, that of cultural
technology17. The specificity of this field of research, introduced in the works
of André Leroi-Gourhan, is to seize the dynamics of societies by analyzing
the articulations between material activities and intellectual activities, the
transformation of the material world and social and cultural dimensions (Mahias,
2011). By focusing on empirical and comparative approaches, cultural technology
is also devoted to the diversity to be found in the technical modalities and
16 Transfer and transmission are two terms often affected to knowledge and “good practices” in
texts and development projects in Africa.
17 Term proposed by Robert Cresswell with the creation of the journal Techniques et Cultures in
1981.
j Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
nuances that can be identified in human actions, always emphasizing the scope
and complexity of the learning processes in societies, be it to acquire a status
associated with a recognized skill or to distinguish oneself from others through
innovation. Associated with this anthropology trend focusing on the techniques
and knowledge that provide meaning and form, there are now other theoretical
frameworks from sociology and anthropology, open to pragmatic analysis of the
processes of construction, cross-breeding or hybridization, the monopolizing
phenomena, displacements and conflicts which affect the techniques, cultures
and values they carry, or more broadly tangible and intangible, commercial and
non-commercial resources.
Implicitly, and through this joint adherence, these articles perhaps all have
the same ambition as their starting point, that of understanding in their primary
analysis knowledge in Africa as a heritage and a strategic resource for the
situations of change that their reference societies encounter. This theoretical
ideal – with its evident political accents – is effaced in part when tested in the
field.
A quick comparative glance reveals that an empirical approach articulated
around a constructivist approach to society18 limits the temptation for a generic
or instrumental use of local knowledge, easily opposed in this case to global
knowledge19. Within this anthropological framework, it becomes possible to
touch on knowledge in its improbable universal properties or characteristics,
or to attain empirically the knowledge of others without describing objects or
practices, but also (and above all) networks, areas and unavoidable temporalities
of which this knowledge is a constituent. In addition, all knowledge or know-
how is constructed, conceived, judged or evaluated in a necessary relationship
to others, in various interactions giving meaning to things – materials, tools,
acts, with transmission or communication forming particular arrangements to
circumscribe and modify these relationships, “as soon as it is a question of
judging and deciding, it is necessary to mobilize objects” (Dodier and Baszanger,

1997). To understand the knowledge of others, it is thus necessarily essential to
observe and describe situations of action and interaction – discursive, historical
or contemporary – always focusing on a diversity of entities with meaning. It
is then possible to easily identify that all interaction – a scene of transmission
between a teacher and an apprentice, for example – puts into circulation both
technical objects and equipment (Vinck, 2009) that are real or symbolic, that
incorporate knowledge or know-how, meaning, rules and forms of judgment.
Certain interactions are preferred in the articles in this dossier. These
interactions are those that are encounters between development agents and
producers or craftsmen. It is precisely these situations of confrontation between
18 Which dominates all the articles.

19 Opposition which for many years marked social sciences in their definition of society through
the prism of two scales: the micro level of the members of a collective that is identified and
bordered on one side; the macro level of the society taken as a whole on the other (Geertz, 1986;
Strum and Latour, 2006).
Introduction k
different worlds and conceptions in which each protagonist defends a normative

point of view, refers to what is fair or good from his point of view and sometimes
hinders the transfer of knowledge, that thus reveal that, just like localization,
the circulation of knowledge is certainly indicative of proactive action, but also
agreements, coordination and cooperation. Agreeing to evaluate a craft skill, not
through the style of a gesture but instead through the commercial properties
of a product, or to decide the efficacy of a medical treatment in reference to a
corpus of knowledge obtained from distinct normative systems, is what makes
up the situations that indicate new forms or figures of commitment20 on the
part of those interacting.
The articles in this dossier present case studies from varied sectors of
activity in African economies: medicine and public health, agricultural and
food production, urban companies. They deal with the manner in which
groups or individuals, regardless of their social and professional position in
the sector in question, transmit, borrow, negotiate, conserve and appropriate
the knowledge and know-how associated with objects and practices. From
cooks to traditional healers, from craftsmen to experts, these texts reveal a
diversity of situations in which knowledge and the materials or products that
circulate are the subject of negotiations, re-interpretations, and conflicts of
interest not confined merely to well-defined areas or well-identified groups.
The social area or territory, points of anchor or the starting point for scientific
observations or development interventions, are effaced here for the benefit of
social and technical networks with multiple ramifications and scales. The roles
they play are decisive for being able to circulate, as well as control, stabilize
and then transpose a corpus of knowledge into innovative actions and new
social relationships. It is in this possible circulation, through a variety of media,
that certain types of knowledge – incorporated into objects from the natural
world, techniques, food or medical products – are indeed defined by those that
support them or their sponsors as cognitive and political resources that are a

strategy for (re)conquering territorial identities or markets, to attain political
or statutory recognition, or even to defend a skill.
EXCHANGING AND TRANSMITTING IN

ORDER TO (RE)LOCALIZE
Localization and circulation are two processes not in opposition to each other
but intertwined. They bring tension to a range of identities and know-how in
an action, they are also marked by tests of legitimacy because they represent
the articulations and connections, dynamic interdependence between groups,
scales of action and societies in our globalized current events. Sébastien Boulay
20 This refers to the figures of engagement proposed by L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot, 1991.
l Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
for example presents a situation that is almost emblematic of current events in

Africa today: here, the globalization of exchanges is a blend of the dissolution
and reconstruction of borders. In response to the universalism of the long
stipulated standards in order to homogenize fishing and processing practices
for yellow mullet off the Mauritanian coast, today there are differentiation
strategies which “manufacture” heritage by localizing know-how and products,
attributing distinctive signs to objects in commercial circulation for example,
without the main parties concerned always being truly involved in these
intertwined processes.
Localization truly appears to be a proactive process, but always singular and
situated21 in the analyses proposed by Magalie Saussey, Maya Leclercq or Eric
Penot and Patrice Garin. Localizing agricultural-food industry production, a plant
resource or an agricultural technique consists in attributing, via negotiations
and conventions, the signs and equipment that make it possible to give it a
name, and then to admit it into the world of material and cultural referentials
associated with a place. In other words, the aim is to objectivize it in a way
other than by those typically found in the culture and habits of a single group.
The situations described by these authors show that a localization process
is a long-term project. It is a project that operates and opens up through
interactions organized by the key players implicated. It is also marked by
inevitable conflicts of interest or power, in relation to a place, the right to
material resources, the standards for practicing a profession, or commercial
arrangements. Mobilization or collective actions to undertake this process are
rarely consensual phenomena. This is what is stressed in particular in the texts
by Magalie Saussey, Sébastien Boulay or Maya Leclercq.
Circulation suggests movement; it is first and foremost a primary, obvious
form of human interaction (information is transmitted, we communicate,
we cooperate). Then, it extends and takes on greater relief without doubt
through many exchanges (economic, migratory) with other groups and

continents. But these authors show us that the circulation of knowledge
is also, like localization, organized through commitments and oriented, or
mobilized, networks to face up to new challenges collectively: the access to
new markets or new areas for craftswomen is based on their agreement to
formalize and diffuse their know-how to other women outside their usual
work networks. The access to a national or international recognition of a
group goes through multiple essential exchanges and negotiations between
various actors, in order to built a common corpus of knowledge referenced
to a profession, a place and a history. Improving economical or technical
performances relies on individual or collective commitment to new forms
of learning organized through specific training courses. Forming new alliance
networks, strengthening social or political links, and enhancing a reputation
are some of the innovations that then emerge from these commitments to
transmit, learn and diffuse.
21 By analogy, we refer to it as “anchoring”.

Introduction m
The circulation of knowledge “for” development and in accordance with a

North-South logic in particular is a dominant axis in the contributions to this
dossier. Political injunction as a means of accelerating the diffusion of scientific
and technical information concerns every field of action and consecrates
the link between knowledge and development (Meyer, 2006): responding to
public health issues (I. Gobatto and A. Tijou Traoré), conquering new markets
(M. Leclercq22and S. Boulay), improving the hygiene of products (M. Saussey),
formalizing and improving technical agricultural skills (E. Penot and P. Garin),
or industrial or scientific skills (I. Medah), are all development fields that justify
reactualization of transfer arrangements. But unlike in the 1970s, today these
arrangements are also based on the justification of heritage: the transfer of new
techniques, of “good practices” and new scientific standards guarantees the
preservation of a profession, a resource and its production area, or validates
the quality and typicality of a product.
These case studies focus not only on the effects of these transfers, but also
on their modalities, that is, the interactions that make them effects as well as
any tension between the key players and the meaning revealed. An in-depth
analysis of these tensions makes it possible to show that ideal cooperation
rarely occurs. First, because the logic of domination remains inherent to all
transfers, and secondly because bitter confrontations and negotiations between
players define new positions for each person in the arena, be it professional or
political23.
Following these tensions turns out to be relevant24 for highlighting by which
arrangements and interactions the corpus of knowledge constitutes local
knowledge. This is what Isabelle Gobatto and Annick Tijou Traoré focus on,
for example, with the notion of situated rather than local knowledge as a means
of underlining the importance of exploring conflicts of interpretation, searches
for meaning and role plays between patients and doctors on the subject of
the different ways of circumscribing or treating diabetes. All these interactions

mobilize and cross-reference various registers of standards and knowledge,
transposed into practices and relationships that organize in turn the production
and circulation of knowledge on this disease. I. Medah also focuses on conflicts
of interest and meaning: the positions and statuses of artifact designers in
Burkina Faso remind us that it is possible to analyze the effects of colonization
and the post-colonial period in West Africa in terms of epistemic submission
(Assayag, 2010). But working at the level of practices and their meanings, at the
level of the values and judgments made by these various designers in their rare
exchanges, I. Medah25 also updates the trajectories and subjectivities that come
22 See also Bienabe et al., 2009.

23 In this, a transfer is a truly particular case of “translation”, in the sense used by M. Callon and
B. Latour (2006).
24 The relevance of an analysis of conflicts in meaning and key players as a means of understanding
the logic of a social area has been emphasized through development anthropology: T. Bierschenk,
P.Y. Le Meur, E. Léonard and many others.
25 See also Medah, 2011.
n Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
face to face locally. These ultimately prevent us from idealizing the localized
nature of professional cultures, or of envisaging a peaceful coexistence between
scientists and Burkinabe craftsmen for example, which would justify the sharing
of a common cultural and political project.
Finally, the authors of this dossier adopt an exploratory orientation
which highlights in an empirical manner situated conceptions and practices,
giving meaning to both notions: localization and circulation, which are almost
metaphorical in French. The first evokes anchorage points whilst the other
suggests flux. Ultimately, the two concepts co-act: anchorage and transfer
characterize for example the situations and interactions around the techniques
for transforming shea butter in Burkina Faso, rooibos in South Africa, mullet in
Mauritania, or rice-growing techniques in Madagascar.
All these situated conceptions and practices are essentially transposed by
the tensions and tests of their legitimacy that the key players must traverse in
order to diffuse and obtain recognition for their knowledge. This can be seen
quite clearly in the case of the technical designers in Burkina Faso described by
Ignace Medah: being denied recognition here seems proportional to the skills
of this particular professional group, in relation to a dominating tendency to
continue the logic of North-South transfer that has been demolished for more
than twenty years. These conceptions and practices are also transposed by new
forms of commitment and demands, in order to construct knowledge of shared
goods (local products defined in specifications, for example), to co-construct
new rhetorical and active forms of participation in development (commitment
to fair trade, in forums, for example). Finally, they are transposed almost
everywhere by a redistribution of power that is intimately linked to having
recognized, formalized knowledge. Such displacement of legitimacy or positions
of power accompany new forms of the division of labor – often disadvantageous
for women, according to M. Saussey26 – or new forms of solidarity in the face
of markets, which encourage the discourse on a new national unity in South

Africa according to M. Leclercq. In all cases, however, these changes revive or
accentuate certain inequalities, against which the policies claim to be fighting
through the paradigm of a society of knowledge.
CONCLUSION
When we talk of local knowledge, is it a euphemism for the terms “native
knowledge” or “indigenous knowledge” which, since the Rio Convention, have
been used frequently in political or media texts, and concentrate research and
development budgets. On reading these articles, and the situations, accounts and
productions that they provide us with, we can see clearly that it is not a question
26 See also Saussey, 2011.

Introduction o
of replacing a reconstructed, idealized local with a defined terrain emblematic

of a certain ethnology, nor of claiming through this concept of disciplinary
privilege, that of exoticism in a radical otherness of the object (Abélès, 2002).
Finally, it is not a question of dealing with the circulation of knowledge in Africa
as a simple North-South transfer, the logic of which has been widely denounced
by post-colonial studies27, by enhancing them with a few new imperatives or
globalization slogans. The issues of research in anthropology have moved away
from the study of “pure” knowledge of all contacts, toward the analysis of the
links, multiple interactions, coordination or assemblies, still full of meaning, that
make it possible to produce, transpose and transmit knowledge.
The authors of this dossier have adopted in this analytical approach the
multiple and multi-situated articulations between “local” and “global”, with the
aim of understanding the situation, producing the historical and institutional
frameworks and then showing the complexity and apparent contradictions
they contain. By analyzing, for example, how different groups with specific
knowledge (farmers, craftsmen, industrialists, technologists, doctors, traditional
healers, etc.), attributed to highly differentiated positions in political spheres,
interpret, commit to, mobilize and transpose injunctions with a universal
vocation (conquering a new market, for example), the authors update a double
movement of adherence. The first consists in coming out of localities, the
second in defending them in arenas and networks with no real borders.
In other words, the focus point has moved, from works attached to the place
of knowledge inscribed in apparently homogenous micro-cultures impermeable
to each other, toward the analysis of the arenas or networks in which different
forms of knowledge come face to face and then possibly (re)combine through
negotiated learning, to (re)formulate, formalize and diffuse knowledge.
What is really new in these realities, however, is instead:
i. the efforts made by the various key players, in their position in these
arenas, to construct, inventory, formalize, and equip the knowledge,

so as to be able to designate it as local, specific, and inalienable yet
capable of being activated as an instrument of development. As this
effort comes from wildly different players, this raises the question
of the interests of each at stake and that of the rights of each to
mobilize this knowledge in action;
ii. the legal principle of recognition of knowledge thus designated as
local in terms of global resources to be protected and promoted.
This principle also questions the right of one or other to activate this
knowledge and produces notable displacement: there is effectively
a passage from a conception in which the learning and transmission
of knowledge form the admittedly natural dynamic for an entire
society, to a conception of circulation as the strategic principle for
27 This refers the reader to a summary article on post-colonial studies by J. Assayag (2010),
which underlines their input and breadth. This analysis furthermore forms a possible reading grill
for the articles in this dossier.
p Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances – 2011/3
a possibly “sustainable” transmission to future generations of their

own resources. This principle, and its displacement, explain the
current renewal of interest and abundance to be found in scientific
investigations, in different disciplinary fields28, on the one hand
on the forms and arrangements of learning, and on the other the
modalities for establishing tangible and intangible heritage;
iii. the cohabitation of modernizing and heritage logic that now seems
to be more than simply admitted: it has been given the status of
principle and systematic actions.
These actions are oriented on the one hand toward standardization
procedures and on the other toward the logic of differentiation. The former
make the circulation of knowledge into a founding condition for innovation:
standardization as a guarantee of efficacy – technique, commercial – and of
creativity, made possible by new learning postures29. The logic of differentiation
approaches the circulation and localization of knowledge and know-how as
the foundations for a more rational, more protected mastery of innovation,
by appropriation and mobilization of a wide range of equipment (signs,
specifications, contracts).
As a conclusion to this analysis, it is important to remember that the
localization and circulation of knowledge are two concepts whose content
remains void as long as they have not be understood empirically in always
particular configurations. Both concepts refer to complex, intertwined
processes, sometimes borne by the same key players. One and the other
definitively cover different ways of conceiving and transposing into actions the
right to universality at the same time as diversity.
They thus invite social sciences to reinforce their methodological vigilance
in order to i) identify and position the standardization, political or scientific
frameworks to which the production, circulation and localization processes
refer – in other words, to work on the political dimension of all these processes; ii)

to deconstruct empirically these categories of actions (production, circulation,
localization), both social and cognitive, as well as the logic or practices they
justify. This is the only approach for remaining attentive to singular enunciation
situations and the multiple theories, standards and values (on knowledge, work,
power, heritage, for example) that the key players produce to define statuses,
recognize skills, organize, select and transmit the knowledge associated with
meaningful objects. It is through this level of methodological rigor that it is
thus perhaps possible to rethink the study of exchanges between globalization
cultures.
28 From ethnology to management sciences via economics, law, etc.

29 This can be seen clearly in the cases studied by M. Saussey, M. Leclercq, S. Boulay, E. Penot
and P. Garin.
Introduction q
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Introduction s
Pascale MOITY-MAÏZI is associate professor in socio-anthropology

in Montpellier SupAgro. She is membre of the Innovation unit (INRA,
CIRAD, SupAgro). Her research in anthropology focuses on technology,
knowledge and development in food production in West-Africa and Latin
america. She published among other: Le style et l’efficacité techniques
mis en question, In Muchnik J. et de Sainte Marie C., (éd.), Le temps
des SYAL. Techniques, aliments et territoires, Paris, Quae, 2010, 47-66 ;
avec M. Saussey et J. Muchnik Nouvelles formes de reconnaissance des
femmes burkinabe dans la production collective de beurre de karité,
Cahiers Agriculture, 17(6), 2008, 582-586 ; avec J. Muchnik, Circulation
et construction de savoir-faire : questions pour une anthropologie des
systèmes agroalimentaires localisés, Industries alimentaires et agricoles,
sept. 2005, 16-26.
Address: Montpellier Supagro

Institut des régions chaudes
BP 5098. 1101 Av Agropolis
34093 Montpellier cedex 05(France)
E-mail maizi@supagro.inra.fr

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