Powerful Knowledge: Information Theory, Classification
and Knowledge
in Pakistan and the Cook Islands
Michael D. Fischer
M.D.Fischer@ukc.ac.uk
One way or another anthropological theory and analyses
return to rules: either proposing and evaluating rules together with the
exceptions to the rules, or arguing that the exceptions are indicative of
the inappropriateness of using rules as a basis of cultural processing in
the first place. The fundamental difference between these positions is whether
we look at the resources that underlay action and relate these to situations,
or focus on the situations themselves - the results of interaction between
a host of agents and their underlying choices. I examine a framework in which
we utilise both. I relate a number of cultural resources to the projections
(enactments) of these resources within cultural activities in Pakistan and
the Cook Islands, using computer simulation as a tool for relating underlying
symbolic resources to the range of possible outcomes of projecting these
resources over an interacting population. There is a good deal of under-specification
in this linkage, with many more outcomes than underlying cultural resources,
and far fewer 'meaningful' outcomes than the total number of possible interactions
of the underlying cultural resources. Using different measurements of information
and redundancy derived from
Information Theory, I examine how 'interpretation' and 'meaning' interact
in balancing outcomes between the extremes of variability represented by
cultural resources, their interactions and the range of outcomes. I then
present a framework within which we can investigate the relationship between
an individual's knowledge, shared knowledge and the culturally and socially
recreated contexts that give this knowledge
'power', in particular the conditions that must exist for meaning and 'powerful'
knowledge to exist.