Introduction

Western anthropologists have long been keen to explore the boundaries between everyday and specialized knowledge: between cultural knowledge that is broadly distributed among members of a population, and that knowledge that is more exclusively the domain of specialists who, by whatever means, have come to see and think differently about some aspect of the world. When anthropology’s focus was more squarely trained on non-Western cultures, this line of exploration often delved into the study of shamans and diviners, and on the means, purposes, and functions of esoteric knowledge and ritual practice in socioreligious contexts (Benedict 1922; Boas 1902; Lévi-Strauss 1963). As the discipline’s lens has tumed increasingly on Western society and knowledge, the same impulse has led to explorations on the margins between everyday “common sense” notions of the world and those derived from the specialized pursuit of scientific knowledge (Kempton 1987; McCloskey 1983).