Les lieux de savoir is an ambitious, interdisciplinary research project proposing to examine, across time and space, the ways in which societies have produced, safeguarded and transmitted knowledge by transgressing the usual frontiers separating the sciences from the humanities or societies that have writing from those that do not. The article brings out various aspects of this collective effort to develop a « laboratory-book », which, without being either a summary or an encyclopaedia, proposes to examine general problems starting from concrete situations and to question, in particular, the meaning and stakes of the anthropology of knowledge it provides.