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

This paper forms part of the feminist critique of the regulatory consequences of biomedicine’s systematic exclusion of the role of women’s bodies in the development of reprogenetic technologies. I suggest that strategic use of notions of the sacred to decontextualise and delimit disagreement fosters this marginalisation. Here conceptions of the sacred and sacralisation afford a means by which pragmatic consensus over regulation may be achieved, through the deployment of a bricolage of dense images associated with cultural loyalties to solidify support (...) or exclude contradictory elements. Hence an explicit renegotiation of the symbolic order structuring salient debates is necessary to disrupt and enrich the entrenched and exclusionary dominant discourse over reprogenetic regulation. I draw upon previous analyses of strategic rhetoric associated with the regulation of infertility treatment and embryo research in the United Kingdom, the cultural anthropology of biomedicine and feminist ethnographies of reprogenetics to illustrate these claims. (shrink)

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. 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. (shrink)

The concept of the future is re-emerging as an urgent topic on the academic agenda. In this article, we focus on the ‘politics of the future’: the social processes and practices that allow particular imagined futures to become socially performative. Acknowledging that the performativity of such imagined futures is well-understood, we argue that how particular visions come about and why they become performative is underexplained. Drawing on constructivist sociological theory, this article aims to fill this gap by exploring the question (...) ‘how do imagined futures become socially performative’? In doing so, the article has three aims to identify the leading social–theoretical work on the future; conceptualize the relationship of the imagination of the future with social practices and the performance of reality; provide a theoretical framework explaining how images of the future become performative, using the concepts ‘techniques of futuring’ and ‘dramaturgical regime’. (shrink)

In the present age AI emerges as both a medium to andmessage about the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects.Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the humanhorizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ ofAI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become livingmyths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broaderappropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, bydrawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers–and his conceptof thelimitsituation–I offer (...) an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of‘the new AI Era’ of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submitthat the present moment of technological transformation and of escalatingmulti-faceted and interrelated global crises, is adigital limit situationin whichthere are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatorymedia. Attending to them as a‘future present’,taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. Theessay concludes thatprecisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing apost-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and SocialSciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of aninclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability. (shrink)