Afterword: Expertise in Our Time

Abstract

What do we talk about when we talk about exper tise? What does it mean to be an expert? Who
decides what counts as expertise and what does not?
Today, at a time when we are awash in digital informa
tion, often to the point of information overload, these
questions reflect a kind of expertise anxiety that may
well be a hallmark of the contemporary, so-called digital
age. This anxiety is exacerbated (especially, I would
argue, among academics), by what I think of as exper
tise inflation: we live in a time when it seems like almost
anyone with Internet access, a well-curated blog, clever
branding and enough interest, can be a self-proclaimed
expert on almost any topic. It is no accident that, after
reading the collected articles in this issue, I was inspired
to think about contested perspectives on expertise as a
sign of our times—both the epochal time of the digital
age and the turbulent times, as Annelise Riles (2013)
called them in her keynote address to the Canadian
Anthropological Society—post-2008 market meltdown.
The key contribution the authors in this thematic section
make to the anthropology of knowledge is not only their
close attention to the production and circulation of
various modes of expertise; rather, what makes these
articles so compelling and, indeed, so timely is their
insistence that expert knowledge is always bound up
with temporality. Expert knowledge, as Alexandra
Widmer points out in her introduction, becomes expert
knowledge precisely by "mobilizing and naturalizing ex
periences of time" and by compelling people "to orient
themselves in time in particular ways."