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In this article, the authors relate brief stories of episodes spanning a period of 10 years when they worked with Australian Aboriginal groups and individuals as they incorporated digital technologies into their cultural practices. Their story telling is leavened with a dissonant working imaginary designed to interrupt both itself and the stories. As their stories of their digital lives proceed, however, the carefully contrived, resourceful dissonance unexpectedly recedes as the new and surprising digital lives that form part of their collectives evade the grasp of their interrupting tool.

Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia’s water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.

In this paper I juxtapose the work of the 2003–2006 Australian Research Council Project ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Resource Management in Northern Australia’ (IKRMNA) and the British imperial expedition of HMS Investigator (1800–1803) to scientifically reconnoitre what would become Australia. The first project explored the use of digital technologies in indigenous knowledge management, the second sought to add to the imperial archive. I argue that the culture and knowledge work of both projects is usefully revealed through the analytic concept of assemblage. In turn their juxtaposition usefully articulates the analytic leverage gained in the concept's use.

This contribution to the special issue ofASRon Jane Guyer'sMarginal Gains(2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use ofMarginal Gainsto interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

In the foreword to Gayatri Spivak's In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics Colin McCabe suggests that Spivak's remarkable contribution to postcolonial critique lies in recognising how identit...