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The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the "politics and poetics" of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos--and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected. Anthropos Today represents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap. Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools--"modern equipment"--to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change. Anthropos Today crystallizes Rabinow's previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries. Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a "contingent practice" must be developed that focuses on "events of problematization." Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.
In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining cutting-edge practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. Taking up topics that include bioethics, anger and competition among molecular biologists, the lessons of the Drosophila genome, the nature of ethnographic observation in radically new settings, and the moral landscape shared by scientists and anthropologists, Rabinow shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates. By turning abstract philosophical problems into real-world explorations and offering original insights, Marking Time is a landmark contribution to the continuing re-invention of anthropology and the human sciences.
Interactive art organizes itself as an open system: it preserves its coherence by exchanging matter, energy, and information with the environment. In that manner, interactive art is art whose state of rest must be disturbed before it can become art at all. Yet, it is precisely this instability makes it ever more complex. Feelings are Always Local is published on the occasion of DEAF04, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, which focuses on interactivity as open system and interactivity in open systems. It features projects with a social and political slant, as well as projects that have a technological or biological character. Also included are essays, interviews and projects by DEAF04 international theorists and artists.
In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.
UNESCO aims to tackle Africa’s under-representation on its World Heritage List by inscribing instances of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern architecture and urban planning there. But, what is one to make of the utopias of progress and development for which these buildings and sites stand? After all, concern for ‘modern heritage’ invariably—and paradoxically it seems—has to reckon with those utopias as problematic futures of the past, a circumstance complicating intentions to preserve a recent ‘culture’ of modernization on the African continent. This book, a new title in Routledge’s Studies in Culture and Development series, introduces the concept of ‘global heritage assemblages’ to analyse that problem. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, it describes how various governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo. Rausch argues that the global heritage assemblages emerging from those examples produce problematizations of the modern’, which ultimately indicate a contemporary need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing, epochal, and spatial culture.
This book contributes to broadening the interdisciplinary knowledge basis for the description, analysis and assessment of land use practices. It presents conceptual advances grounded in empirical case studies on four main themes: distal drivers, competing demands on different scales, changing food regimes and land-water competition. Competition over land ownership and use is one of the key contexts in which the effects of global change on social-ecological systems unfold. As such, understanding these rapidly changing dynamics is one of the most pressing challenges of global change research in the 21st century. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of the manifold interactions between land systems, the economics of resource production, distribution and use, as well as the logics of local livelihoods and cultural contexts. It addresses a broad readership in the geosciences, land and environmental sciences, offering them an essential reference guide to land use competition.
Since the concept of ‘multi-sited’ approaches in ethnography developed over fifteen years ago, it has attracted a growing number of researchers across the social sciences. This volume examines the evolution of the concept as well as the problems and possibilities multi-sited approaches have presented to researchers.
In Uncertainty by Design Limor Samimian-Darash presents cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analyzing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority in Israel, the World Health Organization's Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council. Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or prepare for and guard against undesirable eventualities. Scenario—or scenario planning—emerged in recent decades to become a widespread means through which states, large corporations, and local organizations imagine and prepare for the future. The scenario technology cases examined in Uncertainty by Design provide a useful lens through which to view contemporary efforts to engage in an overall journey of discovering the future, along with the modality of governing involved in these endeavors to face future uncertainties. Collectively, they enable us to understand in depth how scenarios express a new governing modality.
Human Rights and African Airwaves focuses on Nkhani Zam'maboma, a popular Chichewa news bulletin broadcast on Malawi's public radio. The program often takes authorities to task and questions much of the human rights rhetoric that comes from international organizations. Highlighting obligation and mutual dependence, the program expresses, in popular idioms and local narrative forms, grievances and injustices that are closest to Malawi's impoverished public. Harri Englund reveals broadcasters' everyday struggles with state-sponsored biases and a listening public with strong views and a critical ear. This fresh look at African-language media shows how Africans effectively confront inequality, exploitation, and poverty.
Image Brokers" is an in-depth ethnography of the labor and infrastructure behind news images and how they are circulated. Zeynep Gursel presents an intimate look at the ways image brokers - the people who manage the distribution or restriction of images - construct and culturally mediate the images they circulate. Through this framework, news images become visual commodities that impact how politics and culture are visualized in the world. Set against the backdrop of the War on Terror and the industry-wide transition from analog to digital technologies, Image Brokers is a multi-sited ethnography based on fieldwork conducted at the industry's centers of power in New York and Paris. It also explores how new digital and social media platforms continue to change photojournalism and create ever-widening distribution networks. The book is a powerful investigation of the processes of decision making amid the changing infrastructures of representation.