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This paper considers recent studies of global environmental change and their impact on the deltas, social and ecological patches that epitomize an Anthropocene environmental dynamism. Looking into ...

In the first place, it is a difficult question if one can distinguish invasion and solidarity in a concrete situation.Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Nihon no Ajia-shugi” (“Japanese Asianism”) In “Provincializi...

This paper elucidates the development of the drainage basin model, one particular frame for capturing the relative motion between water and land, by highlighting the parallel developments between scientific notion and water management infrastructures. Facilitating a continuous movement back and forth between science and infrastructure, the drainage basin allows for the revelation of unexpected forms of relatedness and has played an important role in the emergence of a form of relational morality. To make this argument, this paper focuses on the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand. While located in the periphery of the centers of modern science, the delta holds significance as a place where colonial hydrological technoscience and indigenous development intersected. The encounter between the two has resulted in a new vision of the city as a waterscape, a sort of drainage basin that connects natural, social and economic processes through numerous, complex water flows.

Infrastructures have conventionally been viewed as material substrates underlying social action. On this basis, cultural anthropology has engaged infrastructure as vehicles through which political values and symbols are made manifest. In contrast, this introduction, and the contributions that follow, specifies an orientation to infrastructures as ontological experiments. At issue is a view of infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a multiplicity of disjunctive elements and spin out new relations between them. The result is the creation and transformation of different forms of practical, materialized ontologies, which give shape to culture, society, and politics. Given that these transformations are often slow and incremental, they often unfold under the radar of anthropological analysis. However, we argue that it is important for the anthropology of infrastructure to find ways of bringing their world-changing capacities into view. The paper ends with a brief introduction to the con...

This paper aims to elucidate the central role floating rice has played in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain overlooked by the actors that rely on them. However at certain moments, such as breakdowns, infrastructures make visible usually hidden connections between humans and non-humans. In recent years, the infrastructural role of floating rice has become a matter of concern for many actors in and around the Chao Phraya delta. This paper examines the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructure, farmers and rice in the delta. In particular, the paper traces moments of infrastructural inversion that shed light on rice's involutions as part of a multispecies infrastructure. Attention to these involutions, the paper argues, facilitates a reconsideration of infrastructure's relationship with nature.

The historic flooding that occurred in 2011 in central Thailand revealed fierce struggles over flood protection, which were made particularly complex because of the unruly nature of water itself. T...

Preface and acknowledgments Keiichi Omura 1. Introduction Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita PART I: Entangled worldings 2. Earth-beings: Andean religion, but not only Marisol de la Cadena 3. Vertiginous worlds and emetic anthropologies Casper Brun Jensen 4. Doing and undoing caribou/atiku: Diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations Mario Blaser 5. Maps in action: Quotidian politics through boundary translational matrix for world multiple in contemporary Inuit everyday life Keiichi Omura 6. Climate change and local knowledge in Eastern Arctic Inuit society: Perceptions, responses, and practice Shunwa Honda (Henry Stewart) PART II: Space-time multiplicities 7. Landscapes, by comparison: Practices of enacting salmon in Hokkaido, Japan Heather Anne Swanson 8. Spectral forces, time, and excess in Southern Chile Cristobal Bonelli 9. Temporalities in translation: The making and unmaking of "folk" Ayurveda and bio-cultural diversity Moe Nakazora 10. Healing in the Anthropocene Stacey Langwick PART III: Exploring quotidian politics 11. Out of nothing: (Re)worlding "theory" through Chinese medical entrepreneurship Mei Zhan 12. Traveling and indwelling knowledge: Learning and technological exchange among Vezo fishermen in Madagascar Taku Iida 13. Worlds apart? Reflexive equivocations in the Alto Rio Negro Antonia Walford 14. Translation in the world multiple Shiho Satsuka 15. A multispecies ontological turn? Anna Tsing Afterword Atsuro Morita

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

Salmond's paper speaks to two significant but rather underexplored aspects of the turn to ontology: travel and equivocation. In current debates, the ontological turn is often taken as a (re)turn to the radical alterity of non-Western modes of conceptualizing and composing worlds. The radical alterity of non-Western ontologies can be fruitfully understood in light of histories of travel that have brought about the encounter between Western and non-Western ontologies. Focusing on travel obliges our arguments to begin from the middle-ground where different parties encounter, exchange, and diverge. In these encounters equivocation plays a significant role.

Context holds a significant place mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography. This modality of knowledge has also become a significant part of science and technology studies since the rise of laboratory studies. However, conventional modes of contextualization that locate the object of study within a whole—such as within a society or culture—have become a target of suspicion and criticism since the 1980s. This led to the radical alteration of the contextualizing strategies of actor–network theory (ANT) and multisited ethnography. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern is also responding to this crisis by renovating the practice of ethnography in a way significantly different from both strategies. Since contextualization occupies a significant place in the formation of ethnography as a representation of a larger “out there” reality, her alternative contextualization requires a new characterization of ethnography other than representation. This article tries to expound the complicated, and often perplexing, ethnography of Strathern by making an analogy with objects familiar to most science, technology, and society scholars, namely, machines. By doing so, this article argues that Strathern is opening up a new way of dealing with context that is radically different both from ANT and from multisited ethnography.

Recent studies in STS and anthropology have elucidated that the travel of science has been entangled with various forms of travel, including indigenous modes. While the Western style of travel often entails comparative imaginations about the difference between places and people focusing on culture, some anthropologists argue that the indigenous conceptualization of difference and travel can be radically different from Western notions. This article explores the intricate relationship between travel of technology and imaginations about difference by focusing on two modes of comparisons found in engineering practices in two significantly different contexts in Thailand: in a technology-transfer project sponsored by the Japanese government and in small factories in the informal sector, which is the supposed target of the project. In both contexts, comparisons between engineering practices are almost inevitable as the Japanese engineers and Thai mechanics make sense of the relationships between the two countries as iterated in their practices. Embedded in the structure of the Japanese transfer project is an interest in the social contexts of technology; following that impulse, this article juxtaposes two largely different modes of travel and comparative imaginations and sheds light on the unnoticed presumptions of the modern comparative imagination.

This special issue aims to investigate some novel uses of the comparative method at the intersections of STS and anthropology through ethnographic accounts of technoscience in various Asian context...

The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku ( Anthropology as critique of reality ) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the “the ontological turn” in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in “ontological matters,” and it offers an entry point for understanding Japanese interpretations of, and responses to, this set of issues and concerns. The forum comprises an introductory piece by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, outlining the histories within Japanese anthropology that led to Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku , an interview conducted by Jensen with Professor Kasuga on his intellectual genealogy in the context of Japanese anthropology, and a translated and edited chapter from Anthropology as critique of reality , Miho Ishii’s “Acting with things: Self-poiesis, actuality, and contingency in the formation of divine worlds.” These pieces are followed by commentaries from Marilyn Strathern, whose work provides a key source of inspiration for the Japanese turn to ontology, and Annelise Riles, who has had long-standing relations with Japanese anthropology, including Professor Kasuga.

Dans cet article, nous portons l’attention sur certains liens importants entre les approches laterales et le tournant ontologique en anthropologie. Grâce a l’examen de certaines experiences ethnographiques recentes influencees par ces courants, nous tentons de mettre en evidence deux aspects de ces liens : (1) les mouvements transfrontieres entre les pratiques de connaissances ethnographiques et les pratiques de connaissances autochtones ; (2) le role de la materialite et de la spatialite dans le maintien en mouvement de ces pratiques qui se croisent. En portant l’attention sur ces enchevetrements emergents, nous faisons valoir qu’ils sont lies au probleme de la traduction : mouvement constant a travers les frontieres disciplinaires, nationales et ontologiques. Nous suggerons que les objets de la traduction ne sont ni sur le terrain ni dans nos bibliotheques. Ils sont entre les deux et en mouvement, et ce mouvement constant rend le travail anthropologique de plus en plus complexe et constitue un defi. Nous appelons ce trafic des concepts « mouvements de traduction ».

Ontology has recently gained renewed attention in science and technology studies and anthropology (e.g. Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Yet, it has a considerably longer pedigree than these recent debates might lead one to think. Experiments, of course, have long held the attention of sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Collins 1985; Gooding 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). And infrastructures have been the focus of sustained inquiry in the sociology and history of technology (Bowker 1994; Hughes 1983). Once these terms are put into conjunction, however, each gets a somewhat different inflection. The following note briefly explores the conceptual purchase of considering infrastructures as ontological experiments.

Recent scholarship on Indigenous politics has illuminated the complex entanglements of science, bureaucracy, social movements and cosmological practices that tend to occur wherever Indigenous practices meet modern environmental management. These studies have shown how the powerful operations of science and bureaucracy, instantiating Western ontology, have eliminated Indigenous ontologies from public arenas such as those of policy-making. The reductive power of a modern ontology that assumes a “one-world world,” to borrow John Law's (2011) word, is abundantly visible in these ethnographies of ontological encounters. Focusing on some nineteenth-century Thai episodes, occurring at the time when the modern one-world world was still being constructed in the form of new scientific infrastructures of observation, this article examines some of the ontological consequences of these encounters.