Cultivating values: Knower-building in the humanities

Abstract

This paper explores ‘knower-building’ practices in the humanities from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics and the sociological framework of Legitimation Code Theory. Focusing on a key text from the field of ethnopoetics, it shows how a field can build its specialised ways of seeing the world by developing highly uncommon-sense value systems. It comes at this by stepping through how this text builds nuanced networks of meaning known as axiological constellations that position a range of meanings as relevant to an ever-expanding range of phenomena. It does this through a small set of rhetorical strategies that recur through the text: the positioning of meanings as from a particular perspective; the opposing of such meanings to others; the likening of meanings that at first glance may seem disparate; the charging of these with values; and, finally, the accretion of examples that illustrate the wide ranging scope of the text’s world view. These rhetorical strategies suggest that, for a linguistics that aims to contribute to educational programs, how these ways of knowing are learnt by students is a crucial question.