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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 .

Focusing on the efforts of the Japan International Cooperation Agency to improve Phnom Penh's run-down sewage infrastructure, this paper offers an example of what a decentred anthropology of infrastructure might look like. The sewage infrastructure brings together a very diverse set of features, including pipes, road networks, economic considerations, demographic change, geography, climate change, flows of sludge and the lives of people in the city. Giving rise to significantly unpredictable and deeply material relations, the paper brings into view infrastructure as sites of immanent ontological experimentation; junctures where relations between society, technology and nature emerge in variable forms. The paper explores these relations by paying close attention to intersecting activity trails. Kandal market in central Phnom Penh is one site where trails of sewage and garbage collection converge with heavy flows of water during the rainy season. Pipe dreams, too, are generated at this conjunction, ...

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...

I denne artikel diskuterer vi spørgsmået om, hvorvidt vi bebor mangfoldige verdener med udgangspunkt i en amoderne tilgang til videnskabs- og teknologistudier (science and technology studies eller STS), som vi kalder praktisk ontologi. På den ene side er denne analytiske position nært beslægtet med antropologiens nylige interesse for ontologi. På den anden side præsenterer vores tilgang en række vigtige forskelle. Disse forskelle vedrører ikke mindst spørgsmål om materialitetens agens, om informanters begrebsliggørelse af egen praksis og om forholdet mellem etnografisk beskrivelse, begrebslig opfindsomhed og politik. Søgeord: videnskabs- og teknologistudier (STS), multiplicitet, materialitet, praksis, verdener

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.

Wide-ranging research, in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, environmental and infrastructural studies, and elsewhere, can currently be seen to work out the implications of Latour's evocative but enigmatic call for a parliament of things. What are the political materials that would inhabit such a parliament? What are their demands? And how are social scientists capable of getting them into view? Asking these questions, the paper experiments with political materials in a double sense. Putting into conversation a heterogeneous corpus of empirical materials, the paper examines some ways in which different forms of materiality impinge on politics, and conceptions thereof. Doing so, it also highlights different ways in which different kinds of scholarly materials are able to get political materials into view. Environmental infrastructures, the paper shows, are excellent objects for thinking through the implications of political materials because of the sheer ontological multiplicity of their c...

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 this article, an anthropologist examines the question, asked today in diverse forms by an increasing variety of actors: what is the aim or telos of the social sciences? From within the disciplinary communities of the social sciences themselves, the answers given are inseparable from questions of theory and method. This essay engages some recent experimental, postcritical responses as formulated by scholars in the fields of anthropology and STS (science, technology, and society). Following decades of reflexive debates and changing institutional and disciplinary environments, both anthropology and STS currently experience heightened levels of uncertainty about theories and methods, means and ends. In this context, the emergence and vigor of a number hybrid positions, eschewing traditional separations between facts and values, the conceptual and the empirical, and the descriptive and the performative, are noteworthy. This essay examines three distinctive and novel responses to the question of what comes after critique, found in the writings of the anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has defined what he terms a method of hope; in the experimental anthropology of Richard Rottenburg, which offers parables of modern development aid; and in the scholarship of Helen Verran, a philosopher and STS ethnographer who constructs the figure of the good faith analyst. Coming to terms with the challenges, possibilities, tensions, and paradoxes of these and other postcritical responses is the key purpose of the present discussion.

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.

Contemporary disease self-management programs aim to renegotiate the terms on which patients participate in their own health care. Though the notion of ‘patient 2.0’ has mainly been used to speak to patient empowerment through IT, we therefore propose to view self-management as eliciting “the patient” in a different shape. In this paper, we explore the embedded assumptions, imagined potentials and concrete practices of the Stanford Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (CDSMP), in order to understand how this program reconfigures a particular form of global patient. To analyse this process we consider the CDSMP as a traveling technology. First, we demonstrate that its successful globalization has been enabled by tying together specific forms of theorizing, evidence-basing, and scripting in a theory-methods package. Second, we show that the globalization of the program entails various forms of localization in the national health care setting of Denmark. In this context, we examine different kinds of efforts required to maintain the ‘global’ identity of the program even as it is ‘localized’. In particular, we show that the insertion of the program into Danish health care generates frictions. Such frictions are brought to light comparatively as Danish health care policy-makers, practitioners, consultants and chronic patients engage with and reflect upon the characteristics of the program. We argue that this analysis holds implications for ‘patient 2.0’, both as practical accomplishment and as a conceptual tool for social studies of medicine and health care.

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.

Professor Naoki Kasuga is the editor of the Anthropology as critique of reality . He has worked at Hitotsubashi University since 2010, when he moved from a position at Osaka University. In many ways Kasuga is a unique figure in Japanese anthropology. He is the author of a series of experimental and highly divergent works, and he was one of the translators of Writing culture into Japanese. This interview weaves together a discussion of Kasuga’s own trajectory with a story of some broader transformations in Japanese anthropology that have lead to current explorations of ontology.

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.

The question of how to measure research quality recently gained prominence in the context of Danish research policy, as part of implementing a new model for the allocating of funds to universities. The measurement device took the form of a bibliometric indicator. Analyzing the making of the indicator, the paper engages the literature on social studies of quantification and classification. The analysis proceeds from the inside out, through description of the organizational processes and classificatory disputes through which the indicator was developed. It addresses questions such as: How was the indicator conceptualised? How were notions of scientific knowledge and collaboration inscribed and challenged in the process? The analysis shows a two-sided process in which scientists become engaged in making lists but which is simultaneously a way for research policy to enlist scientists. In conclusion, the analysis offers suggestions for a reorientations of the of study emergent quantification systems.

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.

In 2000 the American Institute of Medicine, adviser to the federal government on policy matters relating to the health of the public, published the report To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, which was to become a call to arms for improving patient safety across the Western world. By re-conceiving healthcare as a system, it was argued that it was possible to transform the current culture of blame, which made individuals take defensive precautions against being assigned responsibility for error - notably by not reporting adverse events, into a culture of safety. The IOM report draws on several prominent social scientists in accomplishing this re-conceptualisation. But the analyses of these authors are not immediately relevant for health policy. It requires knowledge translation to make them so. This paper analyses the process of translation. The discussion is especially pertinent due to a certain looping effect between social science research and policy concerns. The case here presented is thus doubly illustrative: exemplifying first how social science is translated into health policy and secondly how the transformation required for this to function is taken as an analytical improvement that can in turn be redeployed in social research.

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)

When Elizabeth Costello, the main character in a novel by J. M. Coetzee (2003), is standing in front of ‘the Gate’, she is asked by the gatekeeper to write up a statement about what she believes in...

What emerges is a concern with the machinery of a concept, or rather the processual manner in which a concept enables a number of elements to be ordered in time and space. From this it follows that...

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).

I denne artikel undersøger vi en lille gruppe miljøkonsulenters bestræbelser på at udvikle en standard for monitorering og evaluering af udviklingsprojekter. Vi undersøger disse bestræbelser som et eksperiment i optimering, hvor både kvaliteten af projekterne og den interne kommunikation søges forbedret. Analysen fokuserer på, hvordan konsulenternes evalueringsarbejde begrænser verdens kompleksitet for på den måde at lade den (verden) komme til syne på nye måder. I analysen fremstår monitorering og evaluering som en ikke-reduktiv praksis, hvilket står i kontrast til en kritisk antropologi, der primært fokuserer på de reduktive effekter af optimeringsparadigmet. Et postkritisk perspektiv giver os mulighed for at sammenligne miljøkonsulenternes vidensarbejde med vidensarbejde udført af antropologer. Vi konkluderer, at reduktion af kompleksitet og standardisering er vigtige aspekter af begge former for arbejde, og peger på, at de steder, hvor forskellige former for værdiansættelse mødes, er værd at udsætte for antropologisk analyse. Søgeord: monitorering og evaluering, transparens, NGO-arbejde, videnskabs- og teknologistudier (STS), postkritisk antropologi

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'.

International audience; no abstract