Anthropology Of Science (Science Technology And Society)

By the early 1980s, many life scientists had begun to maintain small collections of cryopreserved
tissues for their own specific research purposes. It became apparent that these materials could be
successfully reused as new techniques and research questions emerged. This realization led several
American leaders in the field of systematic taxonomy (the science of biological classification) and
conservation genetics to argue for the need to take stock of and coordinate these heterogeneous
collections. Their strategy, which they called ‘planned hindsight,’ was meant to organize the
present in a way that appeared to anticipate the needs of future scientists. In this paper I examine
how the seemingly paradoxical strategy of ‘planned hindsight’ has functioned as a strategy for
choreographing life, time, and value at two centralized biospecimen collections: The Frozen Zoo in
Escondido, CA, USA, and the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City. I conclude that, in practice, ‘planned hindsight’ not only contributes to the
endurance of frozen tissues but also preserves widely divergent speculative visions of the many
different individuals involved with their creation, maintenance, and re-use.

Through an ethnography of the C4 Rice Project's sorghum experiment in the Philippines, this article analyzes particular practices in experimental rice fields and how rice researchers understand their work through specific material practices and engagements with the plants. Returning to the critiques of disembodied science, the author looks at the particular, situated, and subjective labor that researchers do in the fields to argue that these relationships offer different and richer ways to understand scientific knowledge production and practices. Drawing out a distinction between working on plants (the human as producer and plant as passive raw material) and working with plants (a process of humans and plants working together in a situated and particular relationship), the article offers an different approach to Marx's concept of labor by incorporating nonhumans as active and relational actors in the labor process. Labor, then, can be seen as a creative relationship between humans and nonhumans situated in particular times and places.

Las transformaciones impulsadas por el capitalismo contemporáneo siguen siendo objeto de debate y de cuestionamiento para un nutrido número de autores. Entre ellos destaca la escuela francesa y, particularmente, la obra de Bernard Stiegler. En este trabajo nos proponemos recomponer los principales elementos de su crítica a las sociedades contemporáneas a través de tres esferas en las que se sostiene su pensamiento: la noción de tecnicidad originaria, la mirada sobre las mutaciones del capitalismo hiperindustrial y las apreciaciones sobre la puesta en jaque de la esfera cultural. A partir de allí nos detendremos brevemente en sus análisis de las sociedades automáticas comprendiendo el ímpetu de fenómenos como la economía de las plataformas, la proletarización generalizada (del saber hacer, del saber vivir y del saber teórico), la nueva ecología de la atención y la potencia de la gubernamentalidad algorítmica. Sobre este último punto señalaremos sus deudas con el pensamiento deleuzoguattariano y simondoniano. Por último, observaremos algunas  propuestas stieglerianas para cambiar el curso de las sociedades contemporáneas.

What happened, in the years leading up to Valentine's Day 2014, that made a canister of nuclear waste burst open and spew out fire underground at a US facility for the long-term disposal of radioactive military waste? According to one widely publicized scenario, a simple run-of-the-mill typo led to organic kitty litter mistakenly being used to soak up liquid in the drum instead of another kind of absorbent material. This ultimately led to a reaction that made heat and pressure build up in the drum, causing it to erupt. But was that "simple" clerical error symptomatic of a much deeper, system-wide problem-- involving a US Energy Department plan to rush the pace of nuclear waste disposal? What were the political, social, and financial elements involved in making Los Alamos' waste drum #68660 erupt that February night? What can be done to prevent similar accidents – which can have price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars or more – from happening again in the future? A cultural anthropologist spent 10 weeks onsite after the event, logging 43 interviews and trying to answer these questions. Here is what he found.

In February 2014 at the WIPP transuranic waste repository in New Mexico, a drum erupted in fire. It exposed 22 people to radiation, shut down the underground facility for 35 months and cost the United States over a billion dollars. Heat and pressure had built up in the drum due to chemical reactions with an organic kitty litter, Swheat Scoop, which had been mistakenly added to it at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. This article disrupts two prominent narratives: (a) that the accident was induced by a typographical error made after a waste packaging operations supervisor misheard 'inorganic kitty litter' as 'an organic kitty litter' during a meeting, and (b) that it was induced primarily by 'mismanagement' at WIPP, Los Alamos and the DOE's New Mexico field offices. It does so by exploring how a series of overambitious political initiatives, fraught labor relationships, financialized subcontracting arrangements and US Department of Energy (DOE) performance incentives set the stage for Los Alamos's notorious error by accelerating US waste packaging, shipping and repository emplacement rates beyond systemic capacity. Attention to operational temporalities shows how an often-overlooked nexus of schedule pressures, political-economic imperatives and regulatory breakdowns converged to modulate nuclear waste management workflows and, ultimately, trigger a radiological accident.

Generally speaking, technology may be considered a cornerstone of twentieth century life, especially in the Western World. However, because there seems to be a need for a healthy and wide appreciation of industrial and socio-cultural issues that relate to technology in general and audiovisual archives in particular, this article basically proposes to give some thought to this. Some of the issues include education and university-industry partnerships, problems of manufacturers and users, standardisation, and obsolescence of products.

DESCRIPTION What are the origins, purposes, and limits of science and technology? Science and technology have shaped modern society such that we live at a time unprecedented in its potential for human flourishing and its vulnerability to violence and suffering. Today, human society harnesses atomic and solar energy, edits the human genome, engineers new species, impacts the global climate, and reflexively shapes itself through social media. As Martin Luther King, Jr. witnessed the rapid acceleration of society's scientific and technological capacities half a century ago he observed that moral and social progress were not keeping pace: "We have guided missiles and misguided men." The interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology, & Society emerged in response to such challenges for the sake of present and future generations. This course familiarizes students with historical challenges, influential interdisciplinary studies, and complex ethical considerations that inform the field of Science, Technology, & Society. Throughout, we will examine cases from diverse STEM fields in order to develop ethically-informed approaches to scientific research and cross-disciplinary applied projects. Readings, discussions, and assignments will invite students to broaden their understandings of vocation and professional responsibilities beyond the merely descriptive and technical to normative and theoretical domains encompassing multiple disciplinary perspectives, diverse values, and a range of views about what makes for a good and just society.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a “techno-cultural frame.” This frame includes the construction of a developer’s identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or “indies,” rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple’s WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple’s relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple’s coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple’s policies.

TECHNOSCIENCE & SOCIETY BOOK SERIES

Series Editor: Kean Birch

Objectives

Our futures are highly uncertain in large part because of the changing relationship between technoscience and society: artificial intelligence holds enormous technoscientific promise, yet raises significant social and ethical questions with its development; personal data is supposed to be the ‘oil’ of the future, yet it’s exploitation threatens our privacy and identity; genomics, proteomics, and other omic sciences could contribute massively to improving healthcare, but their benefit depends on how they are deployed; and low-carbon technologies like electric cars are essential to solving climate change, although they also threaten to embed us further into problematic socio-technical systems. All these and much more underpin this new book series with its aims to do the following:

• Disseminate scholarly research on the relationship between technoscience and society;
• Focus on contemporary challenges arising from the changing relationship between technoscience and society;
• Attract new and emerging scholars using interdisciplinary approaches at the cutting edge of social scientific and humanistic studies of science, technology, and innovation;
• Reach new audiences for scholarly research on technoscience and society by producing accessible, though still rigorous, scholarly books.

Blog entry for Anthropological theory commons
Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy of weird fiction evokes a creeping relation between the weird territory called Area X and vertigo, a set of visceral, bodily affects involving dizziness, nausea, and a sense of hovering at the edge of the abyss, just about to take the final step. But vertigo also has a complementary conceptual dimension. It can be understood as embodying an experimental disposition (Jensen 2019) to make one available to ‘ontological openings’ (Taguchi with de la Cadena, 2017). At least that is the speculative proposition we explore in this short visit to Bangkok

This essay is concerned with processes of transformation of ‘citizenship’ towards its acquisition due to a biological condition, rather than due to nationality. First, I will explore Nguyen’s notion of ‘therapeutic citizenship’ in relation to ‘biological citizenship’ (Petryna 2005, 2010; Rose and Novas 2005), ‘pharmaceutical citizenship’ (Ecks 2005). Second, I will discuss science and biomedical technology as entangled in economic, socio-political processes and in modes of knowledge production. Ethnographic examples will be provided by the works of: Nguyen on AIDS industry in Burkina Faso, Petryna on Chernobyl- exposed population, Ecks on antidepressant market in India.

In this paper I will attend to two kinds of “Pokémon lore”, “virtual urbanism” and “virtual naturalism”, meaning by this ways in which players of augmented reality games like Pokémon GO propose local 2.5D mappings of real world space to virtual space. In the first half of the chapter, under the rubric of “virtual urbanism” I will collect together metonymic entanglements of the real and the virtual worlds in which aspects of the urban environment is “gamified”, that is, translated into categories and affordances of game play.  In the second half of the chapter I will attend to the way players attempt to resolve the apparent discontinuity between the real urban paces in which the game is played and the largely imagined world of pristine nature in which the Pokémon live by proposing a metaphoric mapping of urban second natures onto the imaginary first nature of the wild Pokémon animals, a “virtual naturalism” that explores potential resemblances between real urban landscapes and the natural ones of the game world (see Santry this volume). AR game play in Pokémon GO (but not in Ingress) emerges as a weird hybrid of urbanist exploration and naturalist butterfly collecting, “botanizing on the asphalt”.  “Indoorsy” and “Outdoorsy” Virtual Worlds.

(this is the prepublication draft please write to me to ask for the published draft)

This paper uses a series of serious games-a form of participatory modelling designed and played in Kandal, Cambodia-as an entry point for reexamining relations between development projects, participatory formats, landscape transformations, and sustainable futures. Critics of development and participation have shown that participatory formats simplify real-world complexities by rendering them technical. This is also the case for serious games. But contrary to what is often assumed, 'depoliticization' is not the unavoidable outcome. Instead, participatory outcomes depend on specific sociotechnical patterns of more or less generous constraints. To support collective exploration requires tinkering with these patterns of constraints to keep the boundaries between virtual and real worlds, insiders and outsiders, and the present and future relatively permeable. Generous constraints and permeable boundaries do not keep power out of participation but facilitate glimpses of different possibilities. In Kandal, they made it possible to shift from narrow technical discussions on the rehabilitation of specific preks (water channels) towards a collective exploration of sustainable futures for the full mosaic landscape. In general, we argue, serious games hold potentials as experimental systems, which are serious to the extent that they work like technologies of humility. In this capacity, they can support efforts to do difference together, and explore more-than-human worlds and divergent practical ontologies. Learning from this multiplicity matters for moving towards sustainable forms of living in Kandal and elsewhere.

Esta dissertação tem como objeto debates recentes realizados por psiquiatras e psicólogos em torno do tema da religião e da espiritualidade. O foco empírico é a criação, em 1994, de duas categorias diagnósticas no principal guia de diagnósticos psiquiátricos nos Estados Unidos, o Manual Diagnóstico e Estatístico de Transtornos Mentais (DSM): “problema religioso ou espiritual” e “transtorno de transe dissociativo”. A análise desenvolvida se centra sobre os modos como os propositores desses dois diagnósticos articulam uma série de categorias psicológicas e antropológicas para conceitualizar as experiências religiosas e espirituais como fenômenos normais ou como psicopatologias, situando suas produções na psicologia transpessoal e nos estudos sobre dissociação psicológica. A partir da leitura de artigos científicos, obras acadêmicas e entrevistas, busca-se compreender como são produzidos novos e distintos entendimentos psicológicos sobre fenômenos como o transe religioso, a possessão espiritual e a experiência transcendental.

Based on fieldwork conducted while a Fulbright-Nehru scholar in 2012-13, this book uses ethnographic data to investigate the presence of religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering. Geraci shows 1) how the integration of religion, science and technology undergirds pre- and post-independence Indian nationalism, 2) that traditional icons and rituals remain relevant in elite scientific communities, and 3) that transhumanist ideas now percolate within Indian visions of science and technology. This work identifies the intersection of religion, science, and technology as a worldwide phenomenon and suggests that the study of such interactions should be enriched through attention to the real experiences of people across the globe.

This paper draws upon perspectives on legal personhood, expert knowledge-practices, and social relations influential in STS and Anthropology to revisit the legal-procedural framing of the United States’ now-defunct high-level nuclear waste repository project at Yucca Mountain. Specifically, it examines how this project reinvented both (a) conventional figures of legal personhood as what is called a ‘reasonably maximally exposed individual’ and (b) legal adjudication’s familiar ‘rule-facts-judge’ template as a frame for establishing the repository licensing regime’s delegation of roles, responsibilities, and duties in response to its unique regulatory horizons that extended millennia into the future. Unpacking the implications of these familiar legal figures being brought to bear on historically unprecedented ‘deep’ timescales, this paper concludes by offering alternative lines of inquiry for interdisciplinary analysis of nuclear energy and its associated waste products that were revealed in developing this case study of the Yucca Mountain Project.

Ciertamente la división sexagesimal del minuto no fue una invención propia del siglo XVIII, pero para el grueso de la población europea y americana los segundos aún resultaban tan extraños como los hombres que lograron percibirlos y dotarlos de alguna utilidad. Las razones por las que un grupo particular de la sociedad requirió de una escala cronométrica más precisa y las consecuencias de este fenómeno, se estudian en este artículo mediante el caso de los ejercicios de astronomía que adelantaron los ilustrados del virreinato de la Nueva Granada. Este puñado de jóvenes entusiastas, conocedores de los últimos avances de la cronometría y ávidos por adquirir los relojes más fiables de la época, conquistaron por medio de sus prácticas científicas la capacidad de captar en intervalos más contiguos los movimientos de ciertos cuerpos a la par que descubrieron la fugacidad de esta ínfima fracción temporal –indicios de una relación acelerada y tormentosa con el tiempo–.

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) – and no doubt other fields – have increasingly drawn on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to theorize a variety of new 'bio-concepts'. While there might be some theoretical value in such exercises, many of these bio-concepts have simply replaced more rigorous – and therefore time-consuming – analytical work. This article provides a (sympathetic) critique of these various bio-concepts, especially as they are applied to the emerging 'bio-economy'. In so doing, the article seeks to show that the analysis of the bio-economy could be better framed as a political economy of nothing. This has several implications for science education, which are raised in the article.

In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. After casual observations of how patients managed this painful blood disorder, the researchers in question postulated that the Senegalese type was less severe. The Enculturated Gene traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell "mild" in a social setting where public health priorities and economic austerity programs have forced people to improvise informal strategies of care.

Duana Fullwiley shows how geneticists, who were fixated on population differences, never investigated the various modalities of self-care that people developed in this context of biomedical scarcity, and how local doctors, confronted with dire cuts in Senegal's health sector, wittingly accepted the genetic prognosis of better-than-expected health outcomes. Unlike most genetic determinisms that highlight the absoluteness of disease, DNA haplotypes for sickle cell in Senegal did the opposite. As Fullwiley demonstrates, they allowed the condition to remain officially invisible, never to materialize as a health priority. At the same time, scientists' attribution of a less severe form of Senegalese sickle cell to isolated DNA sequences closed off other explanations of this population's measured biological success.

The Enculturated Gene reveals how the notion of an advantageous form of sickle cell in this part of West Africa has defined--and obscured--the nature of this illness in Senegal today.

We, Other Utopians… Recombinant DNA, Genome Editing, and Artificial Life is analyzing the topics of genome editing/ recombinant DNA on the basis of ethnographic research in the post-communist context. The book focuses on the topics of human DNA editing and genome repair on two levels. First, inspired by texts exploring the concept of life and the body in general, it conceptually and analytically works with various approaches to engineered life and embodiments from the perspective of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. Second, it presents an analysis of artificial life, and biotechnological embodiments on concrete technologies – genome editing, and recombinant DNA. The book explores the theme of genome editing based on ethnographic research conducted at a biochemical laboratory in the Czech Republic. The fieldwork was carried out from 2017 to 2019, mainly in a lab focusing on DNA damages and genomic risk of complex diseases or genetic vulnerabilities like breast cancer, infertility, ageing. Recombinant DNA is understood here as the exchange of DNA strands to produce and design new nucleotide sequence arrangements to heal or enhance human bodies and health in the future. Healing, prolonging, and enhancing future life are very often the aim of these manipulations and experiments. The book will examine the following issues: 1) analysis of body and biotechnological embodiments/materialities in the laboratory (conceptual work); and 2) biopolitical strategies using visions of future life and various ideas of utopia. The main analytical line of the book is based on original work on DNA repair and covers fieldwork analysis, including huge data sets, field notes, documents, text analysis, ethnographic talks, and in-depth interviews.
https://www.routledge.com/We-Other-Utopians-Recombinant-DNA-Genome-Editing-and-Artificial-Life/Slesingerova/p/book/9780367608019

This essay outlines the emergence of a contemporary synthesis regarding racial thinking in genetic science and in society more broadly. A departure from what Julian Huxley in 1942 termed the “modern synthesis,” the contemporary version does not purport to leave race thinking behind in favor of evolution, population genetics, and population-based accounts of natural selection and human diversity. Specifically, the contemporary synthesis blends old concepts (such as that of pure human “types,” located within continental land masses) with new attitudes (democratic inclusion, multicultural diversity, and antiracism).

Through various examples (of ancestry testing, forensics, and science education), the essay shows how this new synthesis combines ideas about human biological difference that draw on measures of physical characteristics and human genetic material that are both race and population based, yet conflated. This specific amalgam allows old notions of racial types to thrive through conceptual framings that comprise ideas that were once imagined to have the potential to liberate society from racial thinking—and that today remain attached to ideas of progress. As an emergent dynamic, the contemporary synthesis holds the possibility of reinvigorating racism, while simultaneously possessing the potential to promote antiracist science education, disease awareness, and social justice efforts.

Theory on Demand #39
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India
Edited by Sandeep Mertia
Foreword by Ravi Sundaram

Authors: Sandeep Mertia, Karl Mendonca, Sivakumar Arumugam, Ranjit Singh, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Lilly Irani, Anumeha Yadav, Preeti Mudliar, Prerna Mukharya and Mahima Taneja, Guneet Narula, Gaurav Godhwani, Noopur Raval, Aakash Solanki, and Anirudh Raghavan.

This publication is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerrivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

<https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/lives-of-data-essays-on-computational-cultures-from-india/>

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Reviews:
Chintan Girish Modi, Business Standard, 29 January 2021. “Data and the Indian State: A set of essays examines the interaction between the expansion of the digital economy and India’s socio-political framework.” https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/data-and-the-indian-state-121012901948_1.html

Nafis Hasan, The Wire, 06 February 2021. “Book Review: The Many Lives of Data in India: The book 'Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India', edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.” https://thewire.in/books/book-review-the-many-lives-of-data-in-india

Vikas Pathe, “Book Review: Lives of Data (ed.) Sandeep Mertia.” Mainstream, Vol. LIX, No. 30, 10 July 2021, http://mainstreamweekly.net/article11184.html
Vikas Kumar, Book Review, “The Transition to Big Data in India.” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 56, No. 47, 20 November 2021, https://www.epw.in/journal/2021/47/book-reviews/transition-big-data-india.html

Nimmi Rangaswamy, “Book review: Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India.” Online Information Review, Vol. 46 No. 3, 639-641. June 2022. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2022-622

Kim Fernandes, “Review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India by Sandeep Mertia.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 74-75, 1 April-June 2022, doi: 10.1109/MAHC.2022.3169868.

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Book talks and podcasts:

‘Lives of Data’ Book Launch and Discussion Panel with Jahnavi Phalkey, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Stefania Milan, Chaired by Ravi Sundaram, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, 19 February 2021.

Technology / Society in Action, Alumni Lecture Series, DA-IICT Gandhinagar, 13 March 2021.

‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Sarah Sharma, Tong Lam and Marian Valverde, Chaired by Francis Cody, Asian Institute, University of Toronto, 09 April 2021.

‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Natasha Schüll, Ramesh Srinivasan and Sareeta Amrute, Chaired by Arjun Appadurai, New York University, 23 April 2021.

‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Panel with Jasmine Folz and Pradip N. Thomas, Chaired by Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research Institute, Goa, 30 June 2021.

‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Aakash Solanki, hosted by Noopur Raval, New Books Network – Science & Technology Studies, 05 July 2021. https://newbooksnetwork.com/lives-of-data

‘Lives of Data’ Book Discussion Podcast with Kathik Nachiappan, Lekh Review, 11 December 2021. https://lekhreview.com/2021/12/11/sandeep-mertia-lives-of-data/

In March 2015, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released a consultation paper inviting responses and comments from the public to recommendations that private telecom operators be allowed to charge extra for third-party internet-based applications and services. This was in response to certain telecom companies deciding to charge internet-based voice calls at the rate of voice calls, paving the way for differentiating between kinds of content transferred via the internet using mobile phones. In response, an unprecedented online movement inundated the TRAI website, seeking to overturn the recommendations, and laying the groundwork for what has come to be seen as robust net neutrality laws.

The movement was magnified online by a group of artists, journalists, technologists, lawyers, and policy experts who came together under the Save The Internet campaign and encouraged internet users in India to take part in the consultation process. TRAI received over a million responses. It was this public outcry that defeated some of the most powerful players in the digital realm – from telecom companies to Facebook, leading to the net neutrality laws that now exist in India.

This paper will attempt to chart the evolution of net neutrality in India, focusing on how the net neutrality regulations came to be. In so doing, the paper hopes to understand how a leaderless citizen movement helped shape policy within a highly technical space, normally considered the domain of ‘experts.’ As more and more ‘users’ of the internet are transformed into ‘consumers’ of internet-related products, the lines demarcating ‘consumers,’ ‘citizens,’ ‘users,’ and ‘data subjects’ are becoming increasingly blurred. In moments such as the public debate on net neutrality, not only did the ‘citizen’ aspect of internet users come to the fore, it also allowed for the observation of participatory democracy in action.

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of the use of race in two interconnected laboratories of medical genetics. Specifically, it examines how researchers committed to reducing health disparities in Latinos with asthma advance hypotheses and structure research to show that relative frequencies of genetic markers characterize commonly understood groupings of race. They do this first by unapologetically advancing the idea that peoples whom they take to be of the `Old World', or `Africans', `Europeans', `East Asians', and `Native Americans', can serve as putatively pure reference populations against which genetic risk for common diseases such as asthma can be calculated for those in the `New World'. Technologically, they deploy a tool called ancestry informative markers (AIMs), which are a collection of genetic sequence variants said to differ in present-day West Africans, East Asians, Europeans, and (ideally Pre-Columbian) Native Americans. I argue that this technology, compelling as it may be to a range of actors who span the political spectrum, is, at base, designed to bring about a correspondence of familiar ideas of race and supposed socially neutral DNA. This correspondence happens, in part, as the scientists in question often bracket the environment while privileging racialized genetic variance as the primary source of health disparities for common disease, in this case between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with asthma. With their various collaborators, these scientists represent a growing movement within medical genetics to re-consider race and `racial admixture' as biogenetically valid points of departure. Furthermore, many actors at the center of this ethnography focus on race as a function of their personal identity politics as scientists of color. This to say, they are driven not by racist notions of human difference, but by a commitment to reduce health disparities and to include `their' communities in what they describe as the `genetic revolution'.

On an epistemological level, Aufenvenne, Egner and von Elverfeldt argue convincingly for an increasing role for second-order science in climate research. However, the authors partially underestimate the already increasing role of reflexive critique in climate discourse, and they do not yet fully take into account the radical changes in our conception of climate change through the deployment of a second-order approach. (in: Constructivist Foundations 10(1): 132–133).

Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de mettre en évidence les transformations majeures qui affectent l’Afrique aujourd’hui et comment ces transformations pourraient être interprétées, au plan intellectuel, en liaison avec les représentations centrées autour de la technologie et qui se manifestent dans le courant intellectuel, artistique, littéraire et philosophique appelé afrofuturisme. Notre argument est que l’afrofurturisme représente le versant idéologique de ces mutations en cours en Afrique, c’est-à-dire, non seulement la façon dont les Africains et les communautés diasporiques d’ascendance africaine se projettent dans le futur, mais aussi un millénarisme laïc et positif, un futur
imaginé qui influence les pratiques et les comportements et oriente le cours de l’histoire africaine. Nous nous efforcerons de montrer comment la croissance démographique, l’expansion des technologies de l’information et de la communication en Afrique et l’indigénisation de la maîtrise de la technologie au travers du développement des startups, engendrent des attentes de nature sotériologique liées à une vision du futur de l’Afrique bâtie autour de la technologie.

A noter que toutes que toutes les citations en anglais ont été traduites en français par l’auteur.

Mots-clés : Afrofuturisme ; Technologie ; Messianisme ; Futur ; Culture

MNA 830-Antropologia da Arte Carlos Fausto e Thiago Oliveira (Pós Doc PNPD)  - 1º Semestre de 2016 4a feira, 9:00 às 13:00hs

Neste curso visamos dar aos alunos um panorama das discussões contemporâneas em antropologia da arte, da cultura material e do ritual, reunindo textos teóricos e casos etnográficos, sobretudo (mas não só) ameríndios. O curso se focará sobre artefatos tangíveis (máscaras, troféus, relíquias, plumária, cestaria, cerâmica) e intangíveis (tais como sons, cantos e a fala). Partindo das discussões clássicas sobre as noções de pessoa e de coisa, bem como dos processos de objetificação e personificação, exploraremos o problema da materialidade, da presença e da representação, da agência dos objetos e da complexidade das formas de figuração.