Lieux de savoir: Places and Spaces in the History of Knowledge

Abstract

I have training in classics , Greek and Roman cultures, which is the main ground of my empirical work. But there are other dimensions in my research: the first is comparison. For me, comparison relies on a basic assumption: looking at my own field, at my own discipline and research topics, from a remote vantage point is the best way to shed a new light on them, to look at them from a different perspective, to raise new questions, even on the most familiar issues. Comparison is an intellectual practice because it provokes disorientation: familiar points of reference vanish and certainties may be questioned. So comparison is the first major dimension in my work. The second dimension is an interest in fundamental and theoretical issues: What is knowledge? How is it produced? How can a person, a statement, an artifact or a written text, a room or a building, an institution be a repository of knowledge? And how could this knowledge circulate within a society, through geographical space, through time, and sometimes through cultures and languages?