The Politics of Evidence in an Uncertain World: Experience, Knowledge, Social Facts and Factual Truth
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2021.002Keywords:
Evidence, Experience, Knowledge, Social Facts, Factual Truth, Recession, Austerity, Political MobilizationAbstract
Knowledge is never self-evident and is always a struggle about evidence: what counts and what does not count. Knowledge is part of the politics of evidence. We need to unravel the processes that create truth values in a field of power. Here I wish to address the tension between experience, vernacular knowledge, and evidence as they constitute the foundations of political mobilization during the economic recession in Spain. How is experience valued, and what kind of knowledge about society does it produce? How might we engage with this knowledge as anthropologists trying to understand what social facts are, and the value they have as evidence in political argument and struggle?
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