Notes on The Network Inside Out (2000)

In the case of [Walbiri Iconography]: Munn (1973): an observer might imagine “maps” and “designs” as disparate concepts or levels of interpretation to be brought into a relationship through analysis. Munn notes that “the use of one graphic element to represent different meaning items simply reflects the premise that items are ‘the same thing’” (Munn, 1973: 171).
This book: “an experiment in the ethnographic observation, description, and reflection on analytical phenomena for which we lack tools of description” (Riles, 2000: 1).
The character and aesthetics of information, the manner in which information is elucidated and appreciated, its uses, and its effects (Riles, 2000: 2) -> in networks and organizations
Network: “a set of institutions, knowledge practices, and artifacts thereof that internally generate the effects of their own reality by reflecting on themselves” (Riles, 2000: 3).
- Scott Lash: “reflexive modernity” and modernity’s “doubles” (1994: 11)
- George Marcus: no imagined “outside”
- Lyotard: “incredulity toward the metanarrative” (1984)
The ethnographic apprehension that we’re already “inside” helps us develop tools for assessing what we already “know” (Riles, 2000: 4)

The ‘ontological turn’ and the anthropology of data

One World/Many Worldviews -> Many Worlds (Naturecultures? How can we relate different worlds?)
Pigs and animals see themselves as humans. Humans are spirits to them. -> In Amazonian cultures, all creatures have a view. Subjects (common to everything) form culture. The body is different among everyone. (Viveiros de Castro)

All subjects see things in the same way, but what they see (‘the object’) is different

The key of the ontological turn
Anthropology: the application of theory -> the empirical materials should challenge the categories we’re using -> the ethnography should shape our theory
The ontological turn as a methodology
Challenging anthropological categories and theories - constant reinvention or conceptual innovations
Indigenous perspectivism is a theory of the equivocation, that is, of the referential alterity between homonymic concepts. Equivocation appears here as the mode of communication par excellence between different perspectival positions—and therefore as both condition of possibility and limit of the anthropological enterprise. (Viveiros de Castro, 2004:5)

Amazonian ontologies sees relations based on differences rather than similarities.
“Controlled equivocation”: gap, ambiguity
Misunderstanding is the very thing that keeps anthropology going

Does digital data have an ontology?
Naively: What even is digital data if I don’t assume I already know what it is? What is knowledge? Is it material, infrastructural, abstract, concrete? What does it do? How does it work?
How can I take seriously what people are telling me?
How can these ethnographic engagements with ‘digital data’ shape the theories I’m using?

Where is the radical alterity and incommensurable difference? “They” even use the word ‘ontology’!
Can you do this sort of study critically?

What do you do when your informants do the same things you do, even to the point of reflexively analyzing themselves - stealing the ethnographer’s thunder?
Annelise Riles
- Often they are not doing the same as the anthropologist
- Makes an ethnographic object out of this relation of ‘familiarity’
- Re-installing a different sort of difference through this
- The field is both ‘within and without itself’
- Shift from analyzing content to the form and aesthetics
- This is not an objective rendering; it is a recursive and transformational description.
- Neither object nor subject are the same before the process as after.

How are we to take Big Data seriously? How can we engage in it ethnographically when it seems epitomize the opposite anthropology studies?
Metaphors for Big Data: Oceans, Resources, Floods
Formalism
Hyperative kinship
Threat to anthropology?
Can an ethnography of Big Data be used to reshape ethnography itself?
Can it be used to re-think the notion of difference?

Performativity of Knowledge - how do databases make/enact/perform/co-construct worlds?
Databases as “world-making”
‘Agency’ of technology - socio-technical
Databases as ontologies - particularly ‘set’ ontologies according to Badiou
Databases as ways of “doing the multiple” - the relation between wholes and parts (like society and individual)
access and relationality (relation to the introduction of digital anthropology)

Work out the relations between their definitions and our definitions
Constant creation of concepts (Viveiros de Castro) -> nature/culture, neologisms
Where’s politics? (Viveiros de Castro had his own political interest in trying to help the indigenous people.)
Bruno Latour - how do you compose a world full of differences?
- Cosmopolitics - Isabelle Stengers
Ghassan Hage - fundamentalism, universal truth
The structure they’re moving away from is nested hierarchy
It’s a method, not a definition of what’s out there.