By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of speculative realism for more-than-human ethnography. Particularly relevant is Graham Harman’s notion of ‘vicarious causation’, which denotes how things located outside thought can be accessed vicariously and partially, for example, through allusion. My contention is that this concept may be productively adapted for ethnographic inquiry if repurposed to fit with an open-ended and relational understanding of the outside.
{"title":"Water in Atmospheric Suspension","authors":"Chakad Ojani","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660204","url":null,"abstract":"By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of speculative realism for more-than-human ethnography. Particularly relevant is Graham Harman’s notion of ‘vicarious causation’, which denotes how things located outside thought can be accessed vicariously and partially, for example, through allusion. My contention is that this concept may be productively adapted for ethnographic inquiry if repurposed to fit with an open-ended and relational understanding of the outside.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73569314","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}
What is it to be alien? This article considers the debate concerning alienation/de-alienation launched by Hegel and revisited a half-century ago by Jacques Derrida. It examines the systemic reduction of legal rights of presence that migrants in contemporary Europe regularly encounter. Such experiences lead people to undergo a ‘loss of presence’ in the sense that they question their relationship with the world and the people around them. As Ernesto de Martino proposed, these occurrences constitute a ‘subjective alienation’ brought about by ‘objective alienation’. In this way, they impact one’s personal ontogeny, producing what I call a ‘habitus of migrancy’. As a contribution toward ethnographic theory, the article engages the role of long-term self-reflection in anthropological analysis.
外星人是什么感觉?本文考察了由黑格尔发起并在半个世纪前被雅克·德里达重新审视的关于异化/去异化的争论。它研究了当代欧洲移民经常遇到的合法存在权的系统性减少。这样的经历导致人们经历一种“存在感的丧失”，即他们质疑自己与世界和周围人的关系。正如Ernesto de Martino所提出的，这些事件构成了由“客观异化”带来的“主观异化”。通过这种方式，它们影响了一个人的个体发育，产生了我所说的“迁移习惯”。作为对民族志理论的贡献，本文在人类学分析中发挥了长期自我反思的作用。
{"title":"I Alien","authors":"J. Pina-Cabral","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660205","url":null,"abstract":"What is it to be alien? This article considers the debate concerning alienation/de-alienation launched by Hegel and revisited a half-century ago by Jacques Derrida. It examines the systemic reduction of legal rights of presence that migrants in contemporary Europe regularly encounter. Such experiences lead people to undergo a ‘loss of presence’ in the sense that they question their relationship with the world and the people around them. As Ernesto de Martino proposed, these occurrences constitute a ‘subjective alienation’ brought about by ‘objective alienation’. In this way, they impact one’s personal ontogeny, producing what I call a ‘habitus of migrancy’. As a contribution toward ethnographic theory, the article engages the role of long-term self-reflection in anthropological analysis.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85348899","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}
Among the Luo of Kenya, blood carries potencies that make life. The common saying ‘blood follows blood’ embodies this flow of potencies between different entities (human and non-human) that creates life and changes life-courses. The materiality of blood is agentive here, in the sense that it produces diverse human conditions. Examples are given specifically from life-cycle rituals, prayers, and healing practices of a Luo community in western Kenya. Ultimately, the sentient agency of blood defines the essence and dimensions of life in this case. Our focus on the conditions and processes that make life is contrasted with culturalist approaches, which misrecognize life plurality.
{"title":"‘Blood Follows Blood’","authors":"K. Opande, W. Onyango-Ouma, W. Subbo","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660203","url":null,"abstract":"Among the Luo of Kenya, blood carries potencies that make life. The common saying ‘blood follows blood’ embodies this flow of potencies between different entities (human and non-human) that creates life and changes life-courses. The materiality of blood is agentive here, in the sense that it produces diverse human conditions. Examples are given specifically from life-cycle rituals, prayers, and healing practices of a Luo community in western Kenya. Ultimately, the sentient agency of blood defines the essence and dimensions of life in this case. Our focus on the conditions and processes that make life is contrasted with culturalist approaches, which misrecognize life plurality.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87221052","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}
Inspired by recent discussions of ‘traps’ among STS and anthropology scholars, this article explores how Japanese scientists capture iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells to take advantage of their potentialities. Since iPS cells are tiny, unstable, and permeable, humans cannot intervene directly to transform their morphology and nature. Making a proper environment for their thriving—in other words, creating a trap—is the only way for humans to successfully harness and direct the cells’ potentiality. Based on long-term fieldwork in one laboratory, I suggest that the technologies, institutions, and laws that mediate between humans and cells can be understood as a series of ‘ecological traps’. Ultimately, iPS cells resist unilateral standardization and commercialization, forcing humans to adapt their own behaviors and governing systems to accommodate cells.
{"title":"Making an Ecological Trap","authors":"Wakana Suzuki","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.660202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.660202","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by recent discussions of ‘traps’ among STS and anthropology scholars, this article explores how Japanese scientists capture iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells to take advantage of their potentialities. Since iPS cells are tiny, unstable, and permeable, humans cannot intervene directly to transform their morphology and nature. Making a proper environment for their thriving—in other words, creating a trap—is the only way for humans to successfully harness and direct the cells’ potentiality. Based on long-term fieldwork in one laboratory, I suggest that the technologies, institutions, and laws that mediate between humans and cells can be understood as a series of ‘ecological traps’. Ultimately, iPS cells resist unilateral standardization and commercialization, forcing humans to adapt their own behaviors and governing systems to accommodate cells.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85185557","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}
Struggles between current tenants and the heirs of former owners over property rights in post-socialist housing restitution in Romania often unfold through kinship measurements. I use the notion of ‘boundary kin’—relatives who in different situations may be considered as either near or distant—to capture the role that kinship measurements play in these conflicts. Expanding ties to the past, a large number of persons are seeking restitution. In this ‘inheritance bubble’, the importance of the material basis of measurements in documenting and certifying kinship increases. In an effort to limit restitution, tenants question the genealogical, geographical, and temporal proximity between potential heirs and original owners, embedding kinship measurements instead in care, past suffering, and material engagements with, and knowledge of, the restitution object.
{"title":"The Measurements of Boundary Kin in an Inheritance Bubble in Romania","authors":"Liviu Chelcea","doi":"10.3167/sa.2021.650407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650407","url":null,"abstract":"Struggles between current tenants and the heirs of former owners over property rights in post-socialist housing restitution in Romania often unfold through kinship measurements. I use the notion of ‘boundary kin’—relatives who in different situations may be considered as either near or distant—to capture the role that kinship measurements play in these conflicts. Expanding ties to the past, a large number of persons are seeking restitution. In this ‘inheritance bubble’, the importance of the material basis of measurements in documenting and certifying kinship increases. In an effort to limit restitution, tenants question the genealogical, geographical, and temporal proximity between potential heirs and original owners, embedding kinship measurements instead in care, past suffering, and material engagements with, and knowledge of, the restitution object.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85203581","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}
From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through common human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices of measuring and classification reveals how the genomic archive is implicated in the history of apartheid and its racialized subjectivities. Similarly, individual interpretations of genetic ancestry show that race is constantly brought forth in this archival process. The genomic archive interweaves measuring practices in the sciences with the politics of social and biographical experience—a relationship that is at the heart of genetic genealogies.
{"title":"Race, Genealogy, and the Genomic Archive in Post-apartheid South Africa","authors":"K. Schramm","doi":"10.3167/sa.2021.650403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650403","url":null,"abstract":"From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through common human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices of measuring and classification reveals how the genomic archive is implicated in the history of apartheid and its racialized subjectivities. Similarly, individual interpretations of genetic ancestry show that race is constantly brought forth in this archival process. The genomic archive interweaves measuring practices in the sciences with the politics of social and biographical experience—a relationship that is at the heart of genetic genealogies.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77555713","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}
In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based prejudices—allowed them to paint a portrait of a nation that was bifurcated by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strains of the population and threatened by the presence of ‘degenerate families’. This article examines the theoretical and methodological strategies and the technologies of display and ‘scientific’ legitimization that brought into being the category of ‘degenerate families’ and provided the justification for social policies that controlled marriage, limited immigration, and sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.
{"title":"The American Eugenics Record Office","authors":"S. McKinnon","doi":"10.3167/sa.2021.650402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650402","url":null,"abstract":"In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based prejudices—allowed them to paint a portrait of a nation that was bifurcated by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strains of the population and threatened by the presence of ‘degenerate families’. This article examines the theoretical and methodological strategies and the technologies of display and ‘scientific’ legitimization that brought into being the category of ‘degenerate families’ and provided the justification for social policies that controlled marriage, limited immigration, and sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88704595","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}
Hanoi’s ‘collective housing quarters’ (KTTs) are a living legacy of its socialist past. Since the 2000s the state has set out radical redevelopment plans to transform KTTs into new buildings, but these have largely failed. What are the possible explanations for this failure? KTTs have gradually transformed in their material forms through self-built modifications initiated by residents. Such material property of KTTs bears on the pathway of redevelopment, but official discourses are silent about this. In this article I show how KTTs as things have the capacity to transform anthropological thinking. The material property of KTTs as a citywide phenomenon affords a particular scale of analysis, with which we can imagine humans as participants in the material world instead of viewing materialities as participants in society.
{"title":"Hanoi’s Built Materiality and the Scales of Anthropology","authors":"Takanari Fujita","doi":"10.3167/sa.2022.6601of3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2022.6601of3","url":null,"abstract":"Hanoi’s ‘collective housing quarters’ (KTTs) are a living legacy of its socialist past. Since the 2000s the state has set out radical redevelopment plans to transform KTTs into new buildings, but these have largely failed. What are the possible explanations for this failure? KTTs have gradually transformed in their material forms through self-built modifications initiated by residents. Such material property of KTTs bears on the pathway of redevelopment, but official discourses are silent about this. In this article I show how KTTs as things have the capacity to transform anthropological thinking. The material property of KTTs as a citywide phenomenon affords a particular scale of analysis, with which we can imagine humans as participants in the material world instead of viewing materialities as participants in society.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90542197","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}
Kinship among Khmu villagers of northern Laos is usually presented in anthropology as patrilineal. However, the ritual of a ‘small marriage’ can confirm a child’s belonging to the mothers’ house. The affirmation of the child’s maternal belonging is simultaneously about separation and exclusion from paternal ties and requires for its success careful measurements of kinship. During the ritual, quantities of food, gifts, and money become indicators of belonging. Human measurements are accompanied by spirit measurements that are unknowable but can have fatal consequences. Even though rituals are meant to achieve closure and establish belonging, ambiguities remain as a result of diverging measurements of kinship.
{"title":"Fatherless Children and Listening Spirits","authors":"Rosalie Stolz","doi":"10.3167/sa.2021.650408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650408","url":null,"abstract":"Kinship among Khmu villagers of northern Laos is usually presented in anthropology as patrilineal. However, the ritual of a ‘small marriage’ can confirm a child’s belonging to the mothers’ house. The affirmation of the child’s maternal belonging is simultaneously about separation and exclusion from paternal ties and requires for its success careful measurements of kinship. During the ritual, quantities of food, gifts, and money become indicators of belonging. Human measurements are accompanied by spirit measurements that are unknowable but can have fatal consequences. Even though rituals are meant to achieve closure and establish belonging, ambiguities remain as a result of diverging measurements of kinship.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79557980","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}
Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, a nationality law was passed that defined citizenship by membership to clearly defined and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the father’s line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to the new nation. Citizenship offices were tasked with checking names and assessing life histories. In so doing, they combined the logic of patrilineal names with estimations of lived closeness, creating a complex system of measuring kinship. Based on colonial legacies and methods acquired during the Sudanese civil war, kinship measurements produced new relations, but also fueled ethnic tensions and cemented social inequalities.
{"title":"Given Names and Lived Closeness","authors":"Ferenc Dávid Markó","doi":"10.3167/sa.2021.650404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2021.650404","url":null,"abstract":"Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, a nationality law was passed that defined citizenship by membership to clearly defined and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the father’s line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to the new nation. Citizenship offices were tasked with checking names and assessing life histories. In so doing, they combined the logic of patrilineal names with estimations of lived closeness, creating a complex system of measuring kinship. Based on colonial legacies and methods acquired during the Sudanese civil war, kinship measurements produced new relations, but also fueled ethnic tensions and cemented social inequalities.","PeriodicalId":51701,"journal":{"name":"Social Analysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80188727","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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