Performative Philology: Crafting Knowledge in Action

The knowledge of doing things is perpetuated through individual and collective performances, encompassing the cognitive and bodily acts that underpin artisanal and scientific practices. The language of doing things permeates these practices, interweaving their textual, oral, and physical dimensions to sustain knowledge across human activities and cultures. This working group seeks to offer new perspectives on the sustainability of knowledge practices by focusing on their performative languages. We explore strategies for analysing and representing the performativity of knowledge in academic research and publishing, addressing key issues such as the paradox of citationality in knowledge-sharing and the challenges of representing oral history and bodily practices through established and innovative formats of texts and multimedia.

From its inception, Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA) has focused on capturing the sustainability of knowledge across scholarly networks, oral traditions, and trade routes. Building on this mission, our group develops new methods to account for the performativity of knowledge in sustainable development. We contribute to ASTRA’s thematic domains by examining the modalities of performativity in how knowledge transforms as it encounters new cultural contexts and navigates tensions between translation and transcreation. We also seek to open new pathways for integrated analyses and representations of linguistic structures, cognitive frameworks, artistic expressions, and technical skills—key elements in sharing knowledge through texts, practices, and objects across languages, geographies, and cultures.