Pub Date : 2023-05-26DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175986
Simon Theobald
Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.
{"title":"The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran","authors":"Simon Theobald","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175986","url":null,"abstract":"Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"133 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48087517","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-14DOI: 10.1177/0308275x231173567
Sangmi Lee
Based on ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic village in Laos, this article examines how global tourism reconfigured racial and ethnic relations between foreign tourists and locals, as well as among villagers of different ethnicities. While tourists of various nationalities were homogeneously racialized by the locals as farang (white foreigners) who are fundamentally different, they were generally in a dominant socioeconomic position. However, such global hierarchies could be upended when they became long-term stayers employed by local tourist businesses and were incorporated into the power structure. Likewise, ethnic hierarchies among local villagers that used to privilege majority youth on the job market were temporarily reconstituted as minority youth became more desirable employees in the tourism industry because of their superior English-language abilities acquired from an NGO-supported, informal class in the village. Nonetheless, recent changes in global tourism indicate that structural ethnic hierarchies persist and continue to subject ethnic minorities to employment uncertainty.
{"title":"Global tourism and local ethnicity: Reconfiguring racial and ethnic relations in central Laos","authors":"Sangmi Lee","doi":"10.1177/0308275x231173567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x231173567","url":null,"abstract":"Based on ethnographic research in a multi-ethnic village in Laos, this article examines how global tourism reconfigured racial and ethnic relations between foreign tourists and locals, as well as among villagers of different ethnicities. While tourists of various nationalities were homogeneously racialized by the locals as farang (white foreigners) who are fundamentally different, they were generally in a dominant socioeconomic position. However, such global hierarchies could be upended when they became long-term stayers employed by local tourist businesses and were incorporated into the power structure. Likewise, ethnic hierarchies among local villagers that used to privilege majority youth on the job market were temporarily reconstituted as minority youth became more desirable employees in the tourism industry because of their superior English-language abilities acquired from an NGO-supported, informal class in the village. Nonetheless, recent changes in global tourism indicate that structural ethnic hierarchies persist and continue to subject ethnic minorities to employment uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41288367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-13DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175995
Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar
Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this scholarship by drawing on fieldwork with the members of an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative who looked to create alternative economic systems that were said to be based on trust. The central aim of this article is to redirect analytical attention from the emergence of the experience of (mis-)trust in particular contexts, toward an analysis of how trust and mistrust are mobilized to make particular iterations of an ‘alternative economy’ emerge out of competing grassroots economic conceptualizations. By analysing how trust and mistrust are constituted within a relational field involving the state and a broader landscape of cooperative movements, this article shows that socio-economic formations are continually formed through embodied, affectively charged practices instead of being solely ‘based’ on trust or mistrust.
{"title":"“The economy of trust”? Competing grassroots economics and the mobilization of (mis-)trust in a Catalonian cooperative","authors":"Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175995","url":null,"abstract":"Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this scholarship by drawing on fieldwork with the members of an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative who looked to create alternative economic systems that were said to be based on trust. The central aim of this article is to redirect analytical attention from the emergence of the experience of (mis-)trust in particular contexts, toward an analysis of how trust and mistrust are mobilized to make particular iterations of an ‘alternative economy’ emerge out of competing grassroots economic conceptualizations. By analysing how trust and mistrust are constituted within a relational field involving the state and a broader landscape of cooperative movements, this article shows that socio-economic formations are continually formed through embodied, affectively charged practices instead of being solely ‘based’ on trust or mistrust.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"149 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48888211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-12DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175982
Guilherme Fians
Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.
{"title":"The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough","authors":"Guilherme Fians","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175982","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175982","url":null,"abstract":"Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"167 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42628450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-09DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231175972
Casper Jacobsen
For decades, indigenist anthropology has been considered indefensible in Mexico. Its conception of Indigeneity persists, however, as a resource for national heritage and identity construction. This article analyses works on Indigenous peoples by prominent Mexican scholars and traces their links to contemporary heritage narratives and practices. It discusses how a national anthropological historiography, embedded in a secularizing ideology and state project, has generated a popular, transhistorical view of Indigenous peoples as embedded in a world of religious belief. I contend that this gaze has a dematerializing discursive effect, dissociating Indigenous peoples, past and present, from material agendas and practices. This is a dispossessive narrative tradition that is being regenerated through the framework of intangible heritage.
{"title":"Does being Indigenous imply being religious? Anthropology, heritage, and historiography in Mexico","authors":"Casper Jacobsen","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231175972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231175972","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, indigenist anthropology has been considered indefensible in Mexico. Its conception of Indigeneity persists, however, as a resource for national heritage and identity construction. This article analyses works on Indigenous peoples by prominent Mexican scholars and traces their links to contemporary heritage narratives and practices. It discusses how a national anthropological historiography, embedded in a secularizing ideology and state project, has generated a popular, transhistorical view of Indigenous peoples as embedded in a world of religious belief. I contend that this gaze has a dematerializing discursive effect, dissociating Indigenous peoples, past and present, from material agendas and practices. This is a dispossessive narrative tradition that is being regenerated through the framework of intangible heritage.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"185 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48982739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157552
Miguel Pérez, C. Palma
Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Since 2018, Venezuelans have been the largest immigrant group, making up 30% of all international migrants living in Chile. This article explores how Venezuelan migrants become citizen-subjects through their residential practices, that is, through actions that symbolically construct their inhabited spaces (neighborhood and housing). Understanding citizenship as a process that implies the ethical formation of the self as a construction of new forms of belonging and political membership, we show how the daily life of these migrants is traversed by tensions surrounding their identity: while in public space they openly affirm their identity as diasporic Venezuelans, in the domestic sphere they hide said identity to accommodate an ideal of citizenship inspired by notions of civility, compliance, and moderation.
{"title":"Migrants as subject-citizens: Identity affirmation and domestic concealment among Venezuelans living in Santiago, Chile","authors":"Miguel Pérez, C. Palma","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157552","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, Chile has become an important destination for Latin American and Caribbean migrants. In 2022, more than 8% of the population residing in the country were of foreign origin. Since 2018, Venezuelans have been the largest immigrant group, making up 30% of all international migrants living in Chile. This article explores how Venezuelan migrants become citizen-subjects through their residential practices, that is, through actions that symbolically construct their inhabited spaces (neighborhood and housing). Understanding citizenship as a process that implies the ethical formation of the self as a construction of new forms of belonging and political membership, we show how the daily life of these migrants is traversed by tensions surrounding their identity: while in public space they openly affirm their identity as diasporic Venezuelans, in the domestic sphere they hide said identity to accommodate an ideal of citizenship inspired by notions of civility, compliance, and moderation.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"44 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46793870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157544
J. Pina-Cabral
Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.
{"title":"‘of evident invisibles’: Ethnography as intermediation","authors":"J. Pina-Cabral","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157544","url":null,"abstract":"Evident invisibles emerge in the ethnographic encounter which change the whence and the whither of the ethnographic gesture. Long ago, Margaret Mead critiqued anthropologists for ignoring ‘the world in between’ that makes their fieldwork possible – this article takes the argument a step further, proposing that all ethnographic encounters are fundamentally ‘amidst’. Thus, it calls for a shift from translation to intermediation as the guiding trope of ethnography. Although the practice of ethnography requires the objectification of a ‘field’, metaphysical pluralism remains the fundamental condition of ethnographic intermediation. In light of that, the article critiques (a) the practice of describing our main methodological disposition as ‘participant observation’, arguing instead for the older term ‘intensive ethnographic research’; and (b) the implicit use of the trope of ethnography-as-translation. Ethnographic examples are taken from the author’s own fieldwork in the coastal mangroves of southern Bahia (northeast Brazil) in the late 2000s.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"106 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43994791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156718
Rachael Root
Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions.
人类的聪明才智通过技术的复杂性和累积行为的变化来应对不断变化的环境和资源。当人类学家回顾过去和全球化进程来描绘自然界的这些变化时，人们越来越意识到这些变化也发生在数字网络世界中。我认为考古学对物质性的关注为民族志电子游戏分析提供了有用的分析和方向。我使用了大型多人在线角色扮演游戏《魔兽世界:德拉诺之王》(World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor)的研究，在这款游戏中，玩家可以在自然世界和数字世界中管理社会和经济资源。在建立声誉和积累声望的过程中，玩家整合线上和线下资源，在追求成就的过程中跨越有形/数字鸿沟。考古学的观点和强化、遏制、系统、景观和本体论物质性的理论提供了将人种学电子游戏研究和辩论扩展到新方向的机会。
{"title":"Bridging anthropological theory: Accumulating and containing wealth in World of Warcraft landscapes","authors":"Rachael Root","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156718","url":null,"abstract":"Human ingenuity responds to changing environments and resources with technological sophistication and variations in accumulative behaviors. While anthropologists look to the past and to processes of globalization to sketch these shifts in the natural world, there is a growing awareness that these transformations also occur in digital online worlds. I argue that archaeology’s attention to materiality provides useful analysis and directions for ethnographic video game analysis. I use research from the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, where players marshal social and economic resources in both the natural and digital worlds. In constructing reputations and accumulating prestige, players integrate online and offline resources, traversing the tangible/digital divide in their pursuit of achievement. Archaeological perspectives and theories of aggrandizement, containment, systems, landscapes, and ontological materiality provide opportunities to expand ethnographic video game research and debates into new directions.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"66 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231156709
A. Faas
I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroically on an Other-Nature-Disaster without history. In China, the state is embodied by conventional faces of the state apparatus. By contrast, in New York, such leaders are notably absent. Instead, the focus is on “heroic” first responders that I argue constitute devolved encounters with the state—neither faceless nor portrayed by official leaders, but instead embodied by neighbors, friends, and everyday heroes. In both contexts, I find similar techniques of producing aesthetic assemblages within which, whether the proximal agent of suffering be human or no, any purportedly external perturbation creates a crisis of state integrity that is discursively cloaked in the language of the Nature of the Other and this is partially accomplished by enframing emergencies in carefully delimited timeframes.
{"title":"State aesthetics and the Other–Nature in disaster memorials","authors":"A. Faas","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231156709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231156709","url":null,"abstract":"I examine the aesthetic (re)production of the state in disaster museums and memorials in a comparative analysis of the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial in Beichuan, China, and the September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. I explore how particular national imaginaries and narratives of the past were projected to produce narratives that cloak the chaos of catastrophe and channel powerful public emotions into a robust state imaginary operating heroically on an Other-Nature-Disaster without history. In China, the state is embodied by conventional faces of the state apparatus. By contrast, in New York, such leaders are notably absent. Instead, the focus is on “heroic” first responders that I argue constitute devolved encounters with the state—neither faceless nor portrayed by official leaders, but instead embodied by neighbors, friends, and everyday heroes. In both contexts, I find similar techniques of producing aesthetic assemblages within which, whether the proximal agent of suffering be human or no, any purportedly external perturbation creates a crisis of state integrity that is discursively cloaked in the language of the Nature of the Other and this is partially accomplished by enframing emergencies in carefully delimited timeframes.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"3 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47353702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-23DOI: 10.1177/0308275X231157559
Michael Scroggins
Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio’s global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century.
{"title":"A feral science? Dangers and disruptions between DIYbio and the FBI","authors":"Michael Scroggins","doi":"10.1177/0308275X231157559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X231157559","url":null,"abstract":"Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio’s global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"84 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48715482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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