Debby | 16 Dec 2015

Steps towards Anthropology of Techniques and “Technology”

Steps towards Anthropology of Techniques and “Technology”

Outline of the lectures

  • “Technology”: Capitalism, Rationality
  • Study of techniques: modes of action
  • Techniques, Mind, and Cognition: Phenomenology
  • Chaine operatoire: graphic device, general model for archaeologists or particular occurrence
  • Determinisms and Causalities: different forms of determinisms: historical, social, biological, etc.
  • Magic, Rituals, and Techniques: the problem of rationality, indigenous modes of action, descriptive nature (suspending our thoughts of causality)
  • From SSK to SCOTs and STS: big social systems, technical innovation (social determinism to criticize technology’s rationality, neutrality)
  • The Love of “Technology”: Hybrids, Networks, and Other Assemblages: “black box”
  • Conclusion: Transecting Cosmologies

Tech & Tech

  • Techniques:
    • As Embodied Modes of Relations
      • Material Activities
      • Practices
      • Performances
      • Processes ~ Observing techniques without materials?~
  • “Technology”: (venacular category to the West)
    • “Meta” level: as a political trope
    • Studies, analyses, discourses on “Techniques”
    • Distinctions between emic and etic ~ Be careful about using "power", "agency," etc. You need to observe the techniques.~
    • Past civilizations don’t have technologies because they don’t seperate technologies from societies (i.e. technological systems)
    • Define what you mean by “technology”

A suggestion

>

                  “Society”

Techniques ⍆

              “Technology”

“Technology”

Some People

  • Historians
  • Curators
  • Archaeologists
  • Prehistorians
  • Sociologists
  • Anthropologists
  • Philosophers —
  • Scientists
  • Engineers
  • Technicians
  • Economists: Carl Polayni - battle between substanvists and constructivists
  • Civil Society
  • “People”…

Some Tools

Some Themes

Elements for an Anthropology of Technology

  • Entities:
    • Objects
    • Activities, Processes
    • Knowledge
    • Modes of organization
    • Sociotechnical Systems —

  • Ways of thinking:

    • Adapt to/Control of
    • Problem solving/creating
    • Extension of capacities (H/NH)
    • Mediation (Physical and cultural worlds)
    • Modes of Being and Knowing
    • Modes of Revealing and Enframing
    • Agent

  • Approaches:

    • Naturalism
    • Humanism: socially constructed
    • Posthumanism: Harraway
      • We are cyborgs. -> cybernetics: historically located theories (wrongly applied to Paleolithics, etc.)
      • Critique of informatics

  • Positions:

    • Optimism
    • Neutral
    • Pessimism

From Matthewman (2011)

Some Determism

Techniques and Bodies

  • Sense, Skills, and Subjectifications
  • A methodological starting point

Material determinists -> Artifacts (instruments) -> Arbitrariness (e.g. airplanes, bicycles); social negotiation comes into play -> interrelationships between H and NH entities -> infrastructures (LC: environmental issues are side effects, unintended consequences?)

Feed-back System

  • A model to think through: Time

Start -> Technical Process -> Result (temporal)
<- Recursivity <-

Non-linearity

  • Sensitivity to initial conditions. (If religion comes at a certain moment, its effect will remain later in the sequence.)
  • Unpredictability of the result
  • Re-interation over time -> unpredictable changes in behavior
  • Irreversibility
  • Chaos, Network, and New Holisms
  • Alternative to Newton’s Mechanistic Universe

Back to Mauss’s Formula

  • From the etic to the emic
    • Techniques = “Actions effective and traditional for the actor
  • Making the etic emic:
    • Make an ethnographic account of determinisms
    • According to the actors
  • The problem is that when it comes to material culture and particularly techniques (“technology”):
    • The Western emphasis on technical developments, innovations, inventions, and machines seem to have confirmed the validity of its own premises. (i.e. Rationality)
    • Machines and “technological devices” are materialized demonstrations of the superiority of Western mechanistic ontological regime over pre-/non-modern (indigenous) ones (i.e. Fundamentalism)
    • This recursive validation could be “colonizing” the project of anthropology itself: when etic explanatory models are so persuasive (i.e. Whitehead: misplaced concreteness)

Latour’s Model

  • techno-politics

Ingold’s model

  • flow of materials
  • What’s missing: not homogeneous

Our Methodological Perspective

  • Sequences and Rhythms: “Efficacious” & “Traditional” Actions (recorded via chaine operatoire)

Sampling Complexity: Transect

Tip: Use the vernacular categories of the informant
Condensation: potentialities of the yam

Concluding Remarks

Chaine Operatoires as Transects

  • Transacts are a ecological techniquue. Ecologists draw lines arbitrarily in the landscape and observe every species encountered.
  • Through vernacular collectives
    • Complex
    • Transient
    • Heterogeneous: the notion of logic doesn’t always apply. The actor can change regimes.
  • Temporality
    • Sequenciality
    • Velocity: There are moments people don’t work: breaks.
    • Rhythm: Technical activities create space and time, e.g. heart beat, music, symbols.
  • Each “event” (operation):
    • Particular relation (‘situated’)
    • “Efficacious”
      • Instantiate an “ontological statement” in a non-verbal form (self-evidence)
      • Cosmological dimension (~People have been planting yams for thousands of years~)
  • It doesn’t pretend to present a complete ethnography.
  • It shows the merging of different categories.
  • Spatio-temporal

Networks: relief, velocity, transcience

  • Devices: Fetishism 2.0 (Marx). The network disappeared.
    • Saying that it has agency is enough.
  • Metanymic association (taking the part as the whole) -> Marxist mode of production
  • “I can’t see networks, politics, kinship… I only see people doing things.”
  • Network is imminent.
  • Structural-functionalism
    • Kinship is not a preexisting entity. It is instantiated, appearing at a certain moment.
  • The network has potential, but it is actualized through actions.
    • Contingency
  • Transect

Reflexivity

  • I
  • Indigenous use of categories
    • The Network Inside Out
    • The mundane
    • Material activities

Analysing Transects: A Question of Scale?

  • Scale of Analysis, Scale of Phenomenon (~zooming in, zooming out~)
  • Micro-scale (“Event”?)
    • Cognition (~Flow: Ingold; phenomenology, affect~)
    • Flux (~If the flux is broken, the actor reflects upon the flow.~)
    • Ontologies (?)
  • Medium-scale (“Operation”?)
    • Logic, project, designers, desire (~System of relations~, topology of what an artifact is)
    • Only visible through its instantiation, various manifestation
  • Macro-scale (“System”?)
    • Socio-Technical
    • Politics
    • Thickness
  • Other chaine-operatoires?
  • Concepts (Adam Drazin)
  • Nonsense of Immateriality (There is material dimension of almost everything.)