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This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical effects. I suggest that writing entails keeping the research imagination alive to two simultaneous processes of scaling—of the empirical within the text, and of diverse sets of literature in mutual relation—always with a specific focus and orientation. What emerges is an image of both ‘ethnographer’ and ‘data’ as hybrid and transformable companions. I illustrate with reference to two quite different texts about emerging Mekong realities. Both are elicited as experimental additions to worlds. In that capacity, they are capable of generating reality effects but those effects cannot be preordained. I conclude that ethnographic collaborations find no other grounds than dic cur hic—why, here, now—or as Isabelle Stengers has formulated it “say why you say it.”

This paper discusses the recent emergence of ontological approaches in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology and philosophy. Although it is common to hear of a turn, or the turn, to ontology, more than one line of intellectual development is at stake. In reality, we are witness to a plural set of partly overlapping, partly divergent, turns.

An experiment in ethnographic theory, this article aims to finds new ways of getting Japanese spirit worlds into view. In the attempt to find ways of repopulating spirit worlds with more than beliefs, socioeconomic realities, and politics, the broader “ontographic” issue is how to facilitate engagement with spirits in a way that is not overdetermined by the assumption that such entities do not really exist. After examining how Japanese folklore studies and so-called “monsterology” framed their questions around concerns with beliefs, we explore the thought of the maverick scientist Minakata Kumagusu. In his work we find an original, proto-ontological perspective, centering on “tactful” encounters and modes of attunement unfolding in cosmic webs of en .

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...

Practice has become a topic of increasing empirical and conceptual concern within sociology and neighbouring fields. ‘Practice’ can refer to a location or it can refer to action. It is possible to be ‘in practice’, to ‘have a practice’ or to be ‘constituted by practice’. Practice can be a cause, an effect or an explanation. Within science and technology studies (STS), the practice orientation is simultaneously analytical – in the form of various practice theories – and empirical, in that research objects are often defined as ‘practices’. Focusing on a range of examples, especially ethnomethodological, this paper examines some implications and problems that follow when practice slides unnoticed between empirical and conceptual registers. Arguing that a reconsideration of practice thinking is important in order to retain its vigour, we outline a view of practice as a ‘factish’, at once conceptual and empirical, which facilitates analyses of practical ontologies and their transformations. This informs a final discussion of the politics and promises of practice.

In recent years, anthropology has taken a renewed interest in alterity and otherness. Rather than using ethnography to determine the ways in which, cultural differences aside, we all share a common humanity, this body of work uses ethnography to figure out how humanity and sociality are produced in radically divergent ways, giving rise to different forms of “the social” and different forms of cosmology. We have thus left behind the realm of many (cultural) perspectives on one common (natural) world, and entered a realm of different ontologies. This brings the ethnographer face to face with the question of the outside . But which meaning(s) might be given to the outside? Is it located on the far side of language or cognition? Of intersubjectivity? Or does it designate what is external to sociality and humanity as such? In the interest of finding resources for grappling with these questions, this inquiry explores the works of quasi-ethnographer Carlos Castaneda and literary theorist and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Doing so, it elicits and articulates two radically distinct forms of the outside. In conjunction these forms of the outside provide novel perspectives on ongoing anthropological discussions on topology and ontology.

The dichotomy between the conceptual and the empirical is part of common sense, yet its organizing force also extends to intellectual life more generally, including the disciplinary life of science and technology studies (STS). This article problematizes this dichotomy as it operates in contemporary STS discussions, arguing instead that the conceptual and the empirical form unstable hybrids. Beginning with a discussion of the “discontents” with which the dominant theory methods packages in STS are viewed, it is suggested that STS has entered a phase resembling Kuhnian normal science. Based on a discussion of the making of cognitive dissonance theory, it is then argued conceptual–empirical mixtures are unavoidable in actual research practice. This situation can be taken as an encouragement for more sustained exploration of conceptual–empirical relations and their inventive potentials. Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “continuous variation,” the article concludes that STS as a discipline is well served by promoting an ethos of empirical and conceptual experimentation.

In a wide range of contemporary debates on Japanese cultures of technological practice, brief reference is often made to distinct Shinto legacies, as forming an animist substratum of indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmological imaginations. Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’: exhibiting a ‘polymorphous perversity’ that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings. In this article, we deploy instances of Japanese techno-animism as sites of theoretical experimentation on what Bruno Latour calls a symmetrical anthropology of nature-cultures. In staging a dialogue between actor-network theory and Japanese techno-animism, we show how Shinto cosmograms provide an enlivening and alternative diffraction device on several of the ontological motifs manifested in Latour’s work. In particular, by mobilizing the territory of a ‘new’ animism debate in anthropology – manifested in the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – we attempt to infuse Latourian ‘multinaturalism’ with new, other-than-western analytical energy. Extending actor-network theory, we argue, Shinto cosmograms offer an interesting vantage point for interpreting the immanent, affective, enchanting and enabling powers of non-humans in contributing to collective life. By thus broadening the ‘cosmopolitical’ imagination beyond Latour’s own European-Catholic frame of reference, Shinto techno-animism offers up a wider reflection on contemporary entanglements of science, politics, ecology and cosmos. This reflection, we conclude, opens up a new intellectual territory, allowing us to trace techno-animist streams of thinking both ‘East’ and ‘West’, beyond the confines of the scientific naturalism indigenous to European thinking.

What follows from the suggestion to pay attention to what is in-between science and politics? Karen Francois’s paper “In-between science and politics” follows Latour in arguing for the need for political theory to get out of the Platonic cave that it still inhabits. Political theory needs to be brought into the wild through empirical studies of how science and politics in fact intermix. And the Latourian proposition needs to be strengthened by focusing on the embodied knowledges that enable situated objectivities to emerge. Though worthwhile, these arguments are weakened by a superficial treatment of political theory and by a lack of attention to the difficulties involved in combining Latourian actor-network theory with the “strong objectivity” of standpoint theory. Most problematically the paper purports to define as an agenda (exploring the in-between of science and politics) what whole fields of inquiry have already been in full swing exploring for quite a while. The ‘turn to ontology’ in STS and social anthropology and the development of ‘empirical philosophy’ suggests what might be at stake in such explorations.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ‘‘genres’’. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ‘‘do ANT,’’ and (even worse), doing so after ‘‘doing ANT on ANT.’’ In particular the authors examine two post-ANT case studies by Annemarie Mol and Marilyn Strathern and outline the notions of complexity, multiplicity, and fractality. The purpose is to illustrate the analytical consequences of thinking with post-ANT. The analysis offers insights into how it is possible to ‘‘go beyond ANT,’’ without leaving it entirely behind.

The paper takes as its starting point Donna Haraway’s suggestion, “The actors are cyborg, nature is coyote, and the geography is elsewhere”. It discusses first the understanding of the cyborg promoted by Haraway as illustrating an ontological non-humanist disposition, rather than a periodizing claim. The second part of the paper examines some instances of low-tech cyborg identities, which have emerged in developing countries (elsewhere) as a consequence of development initiatives. The paper argues that the quite literal attempts to develop cyborgs in such countries gives rise to developments not foreseen or controllable by the development industries. If cyborg identities are developing and minds and bodies shaped in the frictions between culture, technology, economy, and development projects and activities then what are the implications for cognitive studies. In the final part of the paper this question is considered and it is suggested that cognitive studies would do well to expand their analytical foci to take into account cyborg bodies and minds found “elsewhere”.

Over the last decades the notion of learning has become increasingly popular both as an intellectual site of investigation and as an organizational aspiration. However, learning has many—sometimes contradictory—meanings. For pragmatic sociologists and researchers in science and technology studies (STS) the notion may appeal because of its connotations of ongoing and unpredictable transformation. Yet, a more predominant viewpoint associated with cognitive research, conceive of learning in terms of organized and controllable change processes. We characterize the latter viewpoint as the unbearable lightness of learning. We use Argyris and Schon’s model of organizational learning to illustrate some of the problematic theoretical assumptions and empirical consequences, which are entailed by viewing learning in exclusively cognitive terms. Prominent among these is the inability to analyze social and technologically mediated organizational learning. In conclusion, we argue that alternative models for organizational learning could find inspiration in science and technology studies.

Review of: Barbara Herrnstein Smith: Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)

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.

Scientificity in a cyborg-approach By what criteria can it be decided whether a statement is scientific or not? Some scholars stress the objectivity of the statement, whereas subjective dimensions of the scientific activity are viewed as bias ideally to be removed. Others abandon the notion of objectivity as the ideal of research, and view scientific authority as an instrument of power. The purpose of this article is to establish a perspective on sociological scientificity, which is not dependent on these dichotomous positions. Following Donna Haraway, we call this approach a ‘cyborg-approach’. We claim it has the potential to redefine the problem of scientificity without undermining it. Impor-tantly, the cyborg-approach dissolves several deeply imbedded modern dichotomies, not least the radical divide between the human and the technological. Dissolving these implies reconsidering the notions of objectivity and scientificity anew. From a cyborg-perspective scientificity can be reached by the construction of ‘partial connec-tions’ with the investigated. To illustrate this approach we draw on a discussion of the TV-show Big Brother.

During the past decade, several governmental reports have discussed how information technology can transform Danish society. Most important among these reports is Digital Denmark from 1999.In this article, the authors examine how to analyze Digital Denmark by considering two strategies for engaging reports. The first aims at uncovering and making explicit hidden assumptions or ideologies in the text. This approach is called “reading against the text.” The second approach—inspired by science, technology, and society studies—considers where a text goes and what it does rather than how to critically interpret it. Texts may be read as material-semiotic actors, having effects on their environment that exceed or bypass discussions of content or motivation. This approach is called “reading with the text,” and the authors argue that traveling with Digital Denmark makes visible the limitations of critical analyses, while adding agency to the report as it moves in between practices.

The aim of this paper is to describe parts of the history and development in Denmark of the interdisciplinary field of study known as medical informatics, which has been crucially involved in the current high-profile development of a national Danish electronic care record. This turn of events has enabled an increasing naturalization of the history of the discipline, but in this paper I suggest that this understanding is highly selective and limiting for coming to terms with the heterogeneity and contingency of events, which lead to the current situation. Both science and technology studies (STS) and deconstruction have tried to take such a contingency into account in their historiographic efforts. My experiment is to ‘diffract’ STS (as instanced here by cyborg history) and deconstruction through each other, in order to try to answer the following question: how does one tell the history of medical informatics in a subtle way, which does not lean upon a teleological belief in the development of better technologies and the concurrent need of medical informatics to put such developments to their proper use? The challenge is to tell it instead as formed by a multiplicity of actors, none of whom have been fully in control of themselves or other participants. In other words, it is to write an experimental history of medical informatics, which is not burdened with the idea that the electronic care record necessarily will be the crown jewel of the discipline and that this future was inherent in the discipline’s development from the outset.

Qualitative research and methods are often imagined as relating to a problematic, which we here term the power-knowledge nexus. We argue that the dichotomy between power and knowledge, instantiated, for example, by recent postmodern contributions to the field, is theoretically and empirically problematic and suggest that they are organized around a ‘bad problem’ (Deleuze, 1991). This characterization points us towards an exploration of theoretical and practical consequences entailed by the suspension of the powerknowledge nexus. We suggest that there is a need for a renewed consideration of the capacities of qualitative research. We initiate such discussion by drawing on insights and illustrations from contemporary feminist theory and science and technology studies (STS).

Mårup Church, on the northwest coast of Jutland in Denmark, is facing a predicament. Every year, the sea eats further into the dune on top of which it stands, and soon the church will tumble into the sea. This has generated a heated debate on whether or not the church should be saved. In this paper we explore the arguments various actors bring to bear on this controversy. How are the complexities of change in nature and culture articulated in the context of Mårup Church? The context of this discussion is markedly hybrid; argumentative resources span modern categories such as nature and culture, politics, economics, history, geography and geology. We observe the work of particular agents in constructing ontological narratives that support specific versions of reality that would allow the church either to stand or to fall. Following Geoffrey Bowker, we refer to these as configurations of time and space. A discourse of nature management, which defines changes in relationships between nature and culture as matters of choice, has gained momentum within Danish administrative agencies. Reflexively, however, it would seem as if change or becoming is undermining the ability to realize such choices. In this situation, our challenge is to renew conceptual work in order to construct an imagery for coping with the swirl of ever-changing relationships between entities we used to call `natural' or `cultural'. We sketch this challenge under the heading of `the politics of hybridization'.

This paper points out the need for an analytical and ontological reorientation of the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). It is argued that even though this field is heterogeneous it is marred by general problems of conceptualising the co-constitutive relations between humans and technologies. This is demonstrated through readings of several recent CSCW analyses. It is then suggested that a conceptual improvement can be facilitated by paying attention to newer scientific studies, here exemplified by Pickering, Haraway and Latour.

Throughout its history, science and technology studies (STS) have been inspired by continental philosophy in various guises. In this essay we argue that inspiration does not have to be one-way but that philosophy might likewise learn from STS. Engaging philosophy through STS enables us to develop the notion of empirical philosophy proposed by STS scholar Annemarie Mol (2002). Empirical philosophy takes seriously the ways in which actors deal in practice with what are usually considered philosophical concerns: what is good, what is right, what is true, and so on. Thus John Law and Annemarie Mol have argued that: Most everyday practices make use of, or try to create, scales to measure or contrast ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. This opens a space for an empirical philosophy. An ethnographic interest in practice can be combined with a philosophical concern with ‘the good’ to explore which ‘good/bad’ scale is being enacted, and how this is being done. (Law and Mol, 2002, p. 85)

Power, dominance, and hierarchy are prevalent analytical terms in social studies of health care. Power is often seen as residing in medical structures, institutions, discourses, or ideologies. While studies of medical power often draw on Michel Foucault, this understanding is quite different from his proposal to study in detail the "strategies, the networks, the mechanisms, all those techniques by which a decision is accepted" [Foucault, M. (1988). In Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-84 (pp. 96-109). New York: Routledge]. This suggestion turns power into a topic worth investigating in its own right rather than a basic analytical resource. It also suggests that technologies form an integral part of the networks and mechanisms, which produce and redistribute power in medical practice. The paper first engages critically with a number of recent discussions of technology and power in health care analysis. It then formulates an alternative conception of this relationship by drawing on Foucault and historian of science and technology Geoffrey C. Bowker's notions of infrastructural inversion and information mythology. Illustration is provided through a case study of a wireless nursing call system in a Canadian hospital.

The relationship between the supposedly small—the micro—and the supposedly large—the macro—has been a long-standing concern in social theory. However, although many attempts have been made to link these two seemingly disjoint dimensions, in the present paper I argue against such an endeavour. Instead, I outline a fractal approach to the study of space, society, and infrastructure. A fractal orientation requires a number of related conceptual reorientations. It has implications for thinking about scale and perspective, and (sociotechnical) relations, and for considering the role of the social theorist in analyzing such relations. I find empirical illustration in the case of the development of electronic patient records in Danish health care. The role of the social theorist is explored through a comparison of the political and normative stance enabled, respectively, by a critical social theory and a fractal social theory.

Inspired by Marilyn Strathern's fractal analyses, this article develops the notions of domain and scale making as a way of conceiving the Mekong uncommons. Juxtaposing the perspectives and activities of community forestry and ecotourism in Kratie Province with policy controversies concerning dam development on the Laos-Cambodia border, I depict each domain as an ontological test site that scales reality in its own distinctive way. Despite their incongruence, these scales gradually become interwoven due to the interactions of domains. These interactions make up the continuous actual becoming of Mekong realities. Rather than conforming to any general ontological schema, however, the outcome is the emergence of divergent, only partly commensurable, practical ontologies. Instead of adding up to a “whole” Mekong, what comes into view is the proliferation of the Mekong uncommons.