Knowing scale: intelle©tual property rights, knowledge spaces and the production of the global

In this article, I am concerned with the importance of knowledge spaces to the construction and politics of scale. I draw together literatures on re-scaling with feminist critiques of knowledge to show how struggles over the scale at which knowledge claims are represented and legitimized are an important, and under-recognized, element of rescaling. I draw from Neil Smith's (1984) concept of scale-jumping to see the construction of the global space of knowledge as a scale-jump in which one particular situated knowledge, Western folk belief, is redefined as global and universal. What distinguishes it from other forms of local/anecdotal/unrecognizable knowledges is its relation to power and its capacity to achieve a scale-jump in which it is defined as global knowledge. I contrast the social, economic and power relations associated with knowledge in the village of Puno in the Philippines with those of technoscientific knowledge, as manifested by regimes of intellectual property, to show that knowledges are not a natural way of understanding a separate, pre-existing world but inform how that world is experienced. I build upon David Turnbull's (1997) concept of knowledge spaces to reveal all knowledges as not only arising from a particular context but also as creating that context