Abstract: This paper offers anthropological insight into a certain fashion of Euro-American intellectual practice, namely, the operations through which knowledge comes-unto-itself as a descriptive register (of other practices). Alberto is interested in the cultural epistemology that enables knowledge to become an enabler itself: what the growth of knowledge – or its rise as an expression of enablement – looks like. What does knowledge need to grow ‘out of’ for such an escalation to become meaningful or, simply, visible?

Alberto Corsín Jiménez is Senior Scientist at Spain’s National Research Council. Previously he was Dean at Spain’s School for Industrial Organisation (EOI) and University Lecturer in the Anthropology of Organisations at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The height, length and width of social theory (forthcoming) and editor of Culture and Well-being: Anthropological Approaches to Freedom and Political Ethics (Pluto 2008) and The Anthropology of Organisations (Ashgate 2007). His areas of interest lie in the history and anthropological theory of knowledge practices, and in particular their contemporary expression in science/management/public encounters.