By telling stories about a reviled 'bad expert,' professionals help create new cultures of expertise. Two cases illustrate this: feminist therapists working on domestic violence and the revival of psychedelic medicine. In both, practitioners used antithesis performances—narratives about a dangerous or discredited scientific Other—to generate turning points that allowed new forms of expertise to emerge. The analysis links the sociology of professions' jurisdictional model with science and technology studies' network model, showing how cultural factors like scientific narratives and embodied performances connect expert domains and create new boundaries around expert practice.
The twentieth-century ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes encountered an enigma in Amazonia: indigenous people could distinguish local varieties of the vine used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, while he could not. This puzzle reveals a fundamental clash between modern scientific ways of knowing and Amazonian knowledge systems. Schultes's own non-ordinary states of consciousness from ayahuasca and his writings on Victorian botanist Richard Spruce further illustrate an epistemological gulf. The enigma traces the limits of ethnobotany as a discipline, showing how scientific naturalists struggle to impose categories like 'nature' and 'culture' when learning about plants through people.