Memes are hypothetical cultural units passed on by imitation; although nonbiological, they undergo Darwinian selection like genes. Cognitive study of multimodular human minds undermines memetics: unlike in genetic replication, high-fidelity transmission of cultural information is the exception, not the rule. Constant, rapid 'mutation' of information during communication generates endlessly varied creations that nevertheless adhere to modular input conditions. The sort of cultural information most susceptible to modular processing is that most readily acquired by children, most easily transmitted across individuals, most (...) apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration. (shrink)

The tendency in the past has been for aruhropobgists to rationalize away the native claim that spirits exist. But in this study, a number of incidents, some of which happened to the author, are described and used to bring this positwistic assumption into question. The author shows that "participant observation" in the fullest sense requires taking the final leap and "going native" in the most complete way possible.

The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for (...) transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition. (shrink)

Neurotheological approaches provide an important bridge between scientific and religious perspectives. These approaches have, however, generally neglected the implications of a primordial form of spiritual healing—shamanism. Cross‐cultural studies establish the universality of shamanic practices in hunter‐gatherer societies around the world and across time. These universal principles of shamanism reflect underlying neurological processes and provide a basis for an evolutionary theology. The shamanic paradigm involves basic brain processes, neurognostic structures, and innate brain modules. This approach reveals that universals of shamanism such (...) as animism, totemism, soul flight, animal spirits, and death‐and‐rebirth experiences reflect fundamental brain operations and structures of consciousness. The shamanic paradigm can contribute to a reconciliation of scientific and religious perspectives by providing a universalistic biopsychosocial framework that explicates the biological underpinnings of spiritual experiences and practices and provides a basis for neurotheology and evolutionary theology approaches. (shrink)

Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented (...) information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of another culture, or more intelligible to members of the culture in which these phenomena occurs, as do anthropologists and historians. One may also try and explain causally how these cultural phenomena emerge, stabilize and evolve.. (shrink)

Ultimacy talk -- Dreaming -- Suffering -- Creating -- Ultimacy systems -- Slipping -- Balancing -- Eclipsing -- Ultimacy manifestations -- Loneliness -- Intensity -- Bliss.

Al tratar de disolver la neta separación entre una mente racional y la materia inerte abogada por el dualismo Cartesiano, el monismo lucha por reunificar estas distintas realidades ontológicas. Tal como para Claude Lévi-Strauss y Baruch Spinoza, esa dicha unificación no puede prescindir de la trascendencia de la mente humana como locus del pensamiento y conocimiento de la naturaleza externa. A través de una discusión entre las abstracciones de la etnología Amerindia (animismo-perspectivismo), las teorizaciones del estructuralismo y las relaciones que (...) estos tienen con algunas especulaciones filosóficas occidentales, este artículo trata de analizar las intricadas interacciones humano-naturaleza entre los Shuar de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana. De esta forma, se argumenta que las realidades metafísicas de las experiencias oníricas y visionarias están ontológicamente determinadas por el grado de intensidad de contacto que los humanos establecen con las subjetividades materiales del ecosistema. (shrink)

The article sets out a framework for analysing the way discourses construct legitimation for social practices in public communication as well as in everyday interaction. Four key categories of legitimation are distinguished: 1) ‘authorization’, legitimation by reference to the authority of tradition, custom and law, and of persons in whom institutional authority is vested; 2) ‘moral evaluation’, legitimation by reference to discourses of value; 3) rationalization, legitimation by reference to the goals and uses of institutionalized social action, and to the (...) social knowledges that endow them with cognitive validity; and 4) mythopoesis, legitimation conveyed through narratives whose outcomes reward legitimate actions and punish non-legitimate actions. Examples are drawn from texts legitimating or de-legitimating compulsory education, including children’s books, brochures for parents, teacher training texts, and media texts. (shrink)

The article argues that environmental planetary discourses have coalesced into the Anthropocene crisis narrative and reformulated the state of nature apparatus of Western political theory. The Anthropocene, as an ecological state of nature of late capitalism, casts light on the logics of geopower, which assembles species thinking, a fascination with nonlife and sovereignty, and the imaginary of extinction and mutation. Geopower shifts governmental technologies from human populations and their ‘milieu’ to nonhuman species, energy flows and ecosystems, from political economy and (...) biopower to Earth science and systems ecology. This configuration of power suggests a shift in the neoliberal agenda and imposes the Earth as a political personage, generating threatening political myths and figures of chaos and sovereignty, such as Gaia, Chthulu and Climate Leviathans. (shrink)

Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

Warlpiri Aborigines utilize graphic and cognitive systems to represent their connections to landscape. The Dreaming is the primary mechanism through which Warlpiri organize and understand the significance of places. Each Dreaming myth has an accompanying graphic map, which references incidents and places associated with Ancestors. The maps recount sites along Dreaming tracks, and provide assessments of resources. Warlpiri create these coded images to coordinate physiographic and mythical components of the landscape. They structure knowledge about the world and facilitate the recollection (...) of activities in space. Dreaming maps signify, among other things, aspects of cultural ecology around which society is organized. (shrink)

Warlpiri Aborigines utilize graphic and cognitive systems to represent their connections to landscape. The Dreaming is the primary mechanism through which Warlpiri organize and understand the significance of places. Each Dreaming myth has an accompanying graphic map, which references incidents and places associated with Ancestors. The maps recount sites along Dreaming tracks, and provide assessments of resources. Warlpiri create these coded images to coordinate physiographic and mythical components of the landscape. They structure knowledge about the world and facilitate the recollection (...) of activities in space. Dreaming maps signify, among other things, aspects of cultural ecology around which society is organized. (shrink)

:This article interrogates “masculinity” as a named object of study for the social sciences, and sociology in particular, by drawing on the analysis of sense and language in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. While rejecting essentialist definitions of masculine attributes, sociologists have long insisted that masculinity can be defined as a strategic articulation in the pursuit of social goals. Developing Deleuze's notion of the “singularity” within signifying series, this article argues that sociological emphases on goal-oriented practices have elided important (...) problems around the individuation of social relations, as well as neglecting the subsequent textual work of naming such relations as masculine. To develop this argument, the article begins with R.W. Connell's concept of “hegemonic masculinity” as one example of empirical investigation that proceeds by way of specialised metaphors – strategies, positions, goals – that make masculinity appear self-evident as an innate communication between men. In scrutinising the efficacy of such metaphors, the article questions the paradigm of homosociality as a methodological a priori in social scientific research. Finally, the article asks how masculinity studies might engage a more critical relationship to observation and description, a question that remains urgent for developing the ethical vision of gender studies more broadly. (shrink)

not only anomalous animals, but also exemplary animals often take on a symbolic value, thus raising a second problem. A solution to both problems is suggested, based on an examination of the cognitive..

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

This article aims at contributing to the contemporary reception of Heidegger’s thought in eco-philosophical perspective. Its point of departure is Heidegger’s claim, in his Bremen lectures and The Question Concerning Technology, that today the earth is submitted to permanent requisition and planned ordering, and that, having thus lost sight of its auto-poiesis, we are no longer capable of listening, tuning in, and singing back to what he calls in his course on Heraclitus the “song of the earth.” Accordingly, first we (...) examine how the inherently reciprocal dynamics of “earth” and “world,” as thematised by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, have become opaque. Second, we analyse whether it is possible to find those same dynamics at play behind Heidegger’s “Fourfold,” which we propose to reread in binary key in dialogue with contemporary anthropology, from Bateson and Lévi-Strauss to Wagner and Viveiros de Castro, and in light of Guattari’s notion of “trans-entitarian generativity.” Third, we stress the need to reposition Heidegger’s thought alongside contemporary concerns on “worlding” and we explore its plausible intersections with today’s object-oriented ethnography. Lastly, we discuss the possibility of rereading Heidegger’s Fourfold afresh against the backdrop of Heidegger’s non-foundational thinking, as a conceptual metaphor for the joint dynamics of Abgrund and Grund. (shrink)

This essay explores the theoretical implications of Freud's notion of `the narcissism of minor differences' - the idea that it is precisely the minor differences between people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. A comparative survey shows that minor differences underlie a wide range of conflicts: from relatively benign forms of campanilismo to bloody civil wars. Freud's tentative statements link up with the insights of Simmel, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Elias, and (...) Girard. Especially helpful is what Bourdieu writes in Distinction: social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat. An outline of a general theory of power and violence should include consideration of the narcissism of minor differences, also because its counterpart - hierarchy and great differences - makes for relative stability and peace. (shrink)

This article provides an extract from the second half of Lestel's book Animality . His book is divided into two parts. In the first part Lestel considers a number of ways in which humans and animals have been represented, particularly with respect to their supposed differences and borderline cases, over the course of Western history. To this end one reads of various depictions, construc- tions, and erasures of animals, including those of feral children, the animal-machines of Des- cartes and company, (...) animals of ethological study, as well as artistic animals, suffering animals, speaking animals, cultural animals, and more. The first part is largely devoted, then, to past representations of animals as seen through Lestel's unique perspective. The second part, much of which is translated here, conveys Lestel's own observations, as developed most explicitly in his concept of “hybrid com- munities” between humans and animals. It is equal parts evolutionary and cultural anthropol- ogy, ethologi.. (shrink)

Totemism, a topic that fascinated and then was summarily dismissed by anthropologists, has been resurrected by evolutionary psychologists' recent attempts to explain religion. New approaches to religion are all based on the assumption that religious behavior is the result of evolved psychological mechanisms. We focus on two aspects of Totemism that may present challenges to this view. First, if religious behavior is simply the result of evolved psychological mechanisms, would it not spring forth anew each generation from an individual's psychological (...) mechanisms? Yet, Australian Totemism, like other forms of Totemism, is profoundly traditional, copied by one generation from the prior ones for hundreds of generations. Regardless of personal inclinations, individuals are obligated to participate. Second, it is problematic to assume that all practitioners of Totemism actually believe their religious claims. We propose an alternative explanation that accounts for the persistence of Totemism and that does not rely on an assumption that its practitioners are preliterate or naive because they have strange beliefs. We focus on Totemism as a cultural mechanism aimed at building and sustaining social relationships among close and distant kinsmen. (shrink)

Animal stereotypes are used to describe, circumscribe and label people. They also serve to negotiate what counts as familiar and what is expelled as foreign. This article explores the composition of animal stereotypes and examines why they continue to influence the way humans understand themselves. Referring to dehumanising language in contemporary political discourse, anthropological theories of mimicry and representation as well as ethnological observations of human–animal relations, this article argues that if animals are regarded as intelligent and compassionate rather than (...) irrational or violent, the debasing intent of animal stereotypes fails. While a deeper understanding of the mutual dependence of humans, non-humans and their environment is of academic and social interest alike, the projection of images of oneself onto animal others only highlights certain features, whilst leaving others in the dark. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

When studying the work of Émile Durkheim, scholars must consider how his intellectual development in a traditional Jewish environment contributed to and informed his ideas. This article details how Durkheim’s upbringing endowed him with a traditional rabbinic thought-model. The author analyzes five of Durkheim’s major works to argue that the system of classification, language, and style of argument Durkheim used to define concepts in his scholarship mirror streams of rabbinic thought. The article builds off the sociology of knowledge to illuminate (...) how Durkheim employed his codified knowledge of biblical texts and modern Jews to bolster his arguments, and reveals the subtler ways he demonstrates his tacit knowledge of the texts and argument styles. The article ends with an exploration of how conceptual frameworks from the sociology of knowledge may be applied to other leading sociological thinkers—how the modes of thinking instilled during formative years may orient scholarship and the benefits and limitations of this approach. (shrink)

The modern biomedical research laboratory is increasingly defined by dynamic social material conditions requiring researchers to traverse multiple shifting cognitive ecologies within day-to-day practice. Although the complexity of biomedical research is well known, the mechanisms by which the social and material organisation of this space is negotiated has yet to be fully considered. Integrating insights from Material Engagement Theory and Enactive Cognition with observations undertaken within a biomedical research laboratory, this paper develops an understanding of how actors are able to (...) respond to the dynamically changing world that is enacted with and around them. (shrink)

. This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...) and diversity effects and basic level phenomena either are not found or pattern differently when we move beyond undergraduates. From the perspective of domain-specificity, standard populations may yield misleading results, because such populations represent examples of especially impoverished experience with respect to nature. Conceptions of humans as biological kinds vary with cultural milieu and input conditions. We also show certain phenomena that are robust across populations, consistent with notions of domain-specificity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 251-277.

The theriosphere refers to a site of exchange, interaction, and hybridization where the forms and behaviors of the θήρ, the wild animal or living creature, deeply form the being and becoming of the particular animal human. In a dynamic, vibrant, and multifaceted context of interactions and influences between different animals, humans as a primate with a prolonged period of care for their young are dependent on social engagement and open to the world in an ongoing way that makes them permanently (...) dependent on animal interactions and references. Plurispecific maternal communities account for interspecific social and domestic units found throughout human societies and among many accounts and videos of interspecies friendship. Human observation and imitation of animals is a key source of the development of human behaviors and a means of extending the capabilities of the human body. Animal forms influence human art and inquiry from music to painting and engineering. Nonhuman animals are kn.. (shrink)

Research concerned with human beings is always an interference of some kind, thus posing ethical dilemmas that need justification of procedures and methodologies. It is especially true in social work when facing mostly sensitive populations and sensitive issues. In the process of conducting a research on the emotional life histories of Israeli men who batter their partners, some serious ethical questions were evoked such as (a) Did the participants really give their consent? (b) What are the limits of the researcher-participants (...) relationship and who decides them? (c) For whom is the study beneficial? and (d) To what degree did the methodology fit with the participants? In this article, I discuss the Socratic idea of truth revealed through dialogue and the idea of reciprocity that was developed in Buber's (1949) ethics of dialogue and Habermas' (1990) communicative ethics. The 3 essential conclusions drawn from the ethical questions raised and the discussion of the thinkers that are mentioned previously are (a) dialogical methodology is ethically justified; (b) dynamic interactions give a more holistic perspective of the human nature, thus enriching the field; and (c) through dialogical methodology both researcher and participant profit from growth of knowledge, which is a key for empowerment and change. (shrink)

This article examines the cultural dimensions of synthetic ‘body fat replicas’, anatomically modelled objects used in educational and medical settings to train subjects in particular affective responses to fat/ness. Specifically, I focus on theorizing the phenomenological experience of embodied engagements with such models, and exploring the manner in which the replicas are designed to participate in the shaping of emotional orientations toward one’s own body and those of others. Appealing to the work of contemporary social and cultural theorists, I consider (...) how the capacity of objects to act as nexuses for the commingling of abstract and concrete, psychological and material, inner space and outer life, and meaning and affect situates these lumps of polyvinyl chloride as valuable aids to elucidating the cultural polyvalence of ‘fat’. This article is oriented around the application of a selection of insightful theoretical work, drawn from the multidisciplinary field of science and technology studies, as well as from sociological research on medicine and the body. I argue that, by moving toward an understanding of fat/ness as a phenomenon comprised, in Annemarie Mol’s terminology, of ‘multiple enactments’, we can better understand how ‘fat’ has come to embody particular sets of meanings and emotions in the context of a contemporary medicalized transnational culture. (shrink)

This article uses a Chinese narrative of ‘nature-human harmony’ as the main thread to connect the contributions of ontological anthropology. I argue that the best of the critiques of nature-human or nature-culture dualism in social anthropology propose rebuilding a world that ‘pursues harmony while preserving difference’ in the double sense of nature and culture. Given that most social scientific problems are indeed related to utilitarian individualism, I argue that research on ‘ontology’ should re-engage the ancient notion of ‘ ji’, construed (...) as ‘others-comprised self’, which forms the foundation of a perspective of ‘broad human relationship’ between humans and their others (other humans, things, and divinities). Perspectivism inherits many categories of Western cosmology that it critiques and represents a kind of inert ontology. Grounded in the cosmology of life ( sheng), we hope to contribute to a new anthropology of the compatibility between self/others and subject/objects. (shrink)

El presente artículo constituye una metacrítica del tardigotchi, en cuanto producto híbrido biológico-tecnológico, derivado del tamagotchi, y en cuanto praxis del arte objetual, con una aproximación transversal de las diversas perspectivas humanísticas, i.e., la ontológica, la ética, la estética y la psicológica. La exégesis de las relaciones intrincadas entre el tardigotchi y su génesis humana, por consiguiente, nos permite dar cuenta de las coordenadas onto-psicológicas del tardigotchi y de las nuevas humanidades y, asimismo, la materialización de nuevas reflexiones sobre las (...) relaciones entre lo material y lo humano, entre las ciencias humanas, la tecnología y la ecología. (shrink)

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of (...) religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to identify the reasons why the dialogue between sociocultural anthropology and animal rights theories and movements continues to be difficult and scarce. At first sight this weakness of communication is surprising, if one looks at the amount of anthropological studies on human/animal relationships, in most cases pointing to how animals are considered in many cultures as non-human subjects or persons. For understanding the roots of this state of affairs, I compare the ways anthropologists and animal (...) rights theorists and activists have engaged with the issue of the differences and commonalities between human beings and nonhuman animals. For this aim, I contrast the search, among philosophers and activists, for a universal rational ethical foundation of animal rights, to which natural sciences’ findings can give support, with sociocultural anthropologists’ focus on the embeddedness of human/animal relationships in symbolic systems and in political relationships. In spite of the paradigmatic shifts intervened in a century and half of sociocultural anthropology, I show, through a critical review of the recent works of Ingold, Descola, Viveiros de Castro and Kohn, that even today this difference in approach is far to be overcome. (shrink)

The first part of this paper makes five points: First, the problem of Otherness is different and differently constructed in modern differentiated societies. Therefore, approaches to Otherness based on traditional notions of difference and boundary between societies and systems of shared belief will not suffice; Second, because solidarity can no longer be maintained through boundaries between ingroup and outgroup, social cohesion has to take a different form; Third, to the extent that Otherness is not a condition of demographic, or belief (...) based, exclusion in modern societies, but rather something that happens to people otherwise available to one another in interaction, othering is a processthat occurs over the course of interaction, turn by turn, not a set of beliefs or a state of mind; Fourth, othering may be supported by accounts and narratives, and these may exist before the fact – or be articulated after the fact. But, over the course of an ongoing interaction, beliefs and narratives do not explain what goes wrong with practices; Fifth, practices require reciprocity and trust. Therefore, practices require a morestringent form of morality – not a less stringent form – and moresocial cohesion – not less – than traditional society.The second part of the paper illustrates these five points with an extended analysis of a cross-race interaction in which accounts are invoked, reciprocity breaks down, and participants are rendered as Accountable Others. (shrink)

The article analyzes the conception of a trading zone as a space of action and belief coordination. P. Galison proposed the conception based on anthropological and linguistic analogies. The article reviews the anthropological analogies aimed at building up the conception and the legitimacy of their use. The conclusion is that the analogies used are not accurate enough. If the tribes interacting in trading zones have a common history, material culture, and practices, they can hardly have significant differences. If they are (...) not in possession of all these characteristics, they are unlikely to remind us of different groups of scientists who participate in common researches. The article also contains the hypothesis that acceptance of a common habitus is a condition subject to which the scientists can arrange the mutual understanding space. It issues new challenges to the scientific community, as all people related to university education also accept the scientists’ habitus. (shrink)

In 1971, Günter Blobel and David Sabatini proposed a novel and quite speculative schematic model to describe how proteins might reach the proper cellular location. According to their proposal, proteins destined to be secreted from the cell contain a “signal” to direct their release. Despite the fact that Blobel and Sabatini presented their signal hypothesis as a “beautiful idea” not grounded in experimental evidence, they received criticism from other scientists who opposed such speculation. Following the publication of the 1971 model, (...) Blobel persisted in conducting experiments and revising the model to incorporate new data. In fact, over the period of 1975–1984, Blobel and colleagues published five subsequent schematic models of the signal hypothesis, each revised based on new laboratory evidence. I propose that the original 1971 model can be viewed as an epistemic creation. Additionally, analysis of the subsequent schematic diagrams over the period of 1975–1984 allows one to track Blobel’s changing conception of an epistemic object over time. Furthermore, the entire series of schematic diagrams presented by Blobel from 1971 to 1984 allow one to visualize the initial conception and subsequent reworking of a scientific theory. In 1999, Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the signal hypothesis, which was ultimately supported by experimental evidence gathered after the speculative model was published. (shrink)