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Recent anthropological and other literature tends to assume that the uses of heritage in modern societies lead to the falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, and enclosure of the things and practices so designated. Yet two traditions of Japan's ancient capital Kyoto—the historic town houses (kyô-machiya) that have found a new appreciation since the 1990s and the Gion matsuri, one of the most famous festivals of the nation—contradict these assumptions. Their well-documented histories are not widely distorted; they are not forever fixed but allowed to evolve; they are valued not only for their traditionality but also for other, substantive qualities; and their appreciation is not dominated by a concern for social boundaries. This is influenced by the urban, relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan background of both traditions, as it is in parallel cases elsewhere. Greater attention to the perspectives of their carriers, however, will very likely show that the social uses of other traditions too are more complex than the standard assumptions lead one to believe. [ Japan, cultural heritage, invention of tradition, vernacular architecture, festivals, urban anthropology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I provide an ethnographic exploration of some of the terms for imagining knowledge in today's “knowledge society,” and I attempt to situate the kind of “sociology of knowledge” behind this imagination. In particular, I am interested in the sociological imagination of knowledge in terms of a relational economy, in which knowledge flows uninterruptedly to create and shape what Yochai Benkler has dubbed “the wealth of networks.” I pursue this interest through an ethnography of the production of research among humanities scholars at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). For CSIC's human scientists, books (and other bookish analogues, such as libraries or manuscript collections) occupy a place of prominence in the institutional production of research. This economy of scholarship (between books, between people and books, and between what books do and what institutions and researchers imagine them to do) finds itself at a “disproportionate” distance from the “network economy of information” encountered in the literature on the knowledge economy and promoted in certain circles within CSIC. I contrast the epistemological economies of CSIC scientists' relational and disproportional views on research and, ultimately, attempt to provide an anthropological description of a contemporary sociology of knowledge, including its analytical categories and models. [ knowledge, knowledge economy, relations, proportionality, labor, academia] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]