Public secrets in public health: Knowing not to know while making scientific knowledge

• DOI: 10.1111/amet.12002
• Publication Date: 2013-02-06T21:47:56Z
• Authors: P. W. GEISSLER
• Keywords: Ignorance; Silence

ABSTRACT Unknown knowns—or “public secrets”—may play an integral part in publicly funded medical science. In one large transnational field research site Africa, such unknowing pertains to vital material inequalities across the relations of scientific production. These are open experience but remain often unacknowledged public speech and texts. This silence is not usually achieved by suppressing knowledge through linguistic convention differentiation between places moments knowing ignorance. Switching known unknown according situation interlocutor important, largely implicit skill that maintains necessary conduct clinical research—linking bodies, lives, institutions, technologies differentials resources, expertise, power. Unknowing, then, facilitates research; it shapes resulting work perpetuates political economic contradictions pervade context endeavor itself. Unknowing thus poses a challenge for conventional anthropological modes critique engagement.