Our recent paper examines the relevancy of the latest dual conception of technopoiesis and technopraxis, the former denoting a situation of the prevailing, manifest importance of a technical process upon its end-product and the latter the overall approach of technology conditioned by a dominantly teleological perspective, proposing the idea of techno-onto-poiesis (counterbalanced by techno-ontic-praxis) that points to the efflorescence of techniques (and their material and metaphysical potentiality) that are classified typologically rather than sequentially. Alongside Edgerton’s view, the response calls on (...) the historians of ancient and modern technology to weigh in on the phenomena of technological changes and alternations, instead of essentializing the “old” and “new,” the “innovative” and the “conservative,” and discusses the potential challenges as we move forwards in the study of the history of measurement and measuring thinking. (shrink)

Until recently, the history of environmentalism was primarily a history of attention to place. In the United States, environmentalists have gotten rather good at protecting and managing particular places such as mountains, forests, and watersheds and specific resources such as trees, soil, wildlife, air, and water. Environmentalism has become an enormously popular social movement, with, by some measures, more than 80 percent of Americans considering themselves environmentalists. Thousands of organizations, ranging from local volunteer groups to national nonprofits, address issues as (...) diverse as open space, air and water pollution, biological diversity, environmental justice, and environmental effects on human health. The successes of this movement have been striking. Our National Parks, National Forests, and wilderness areas are touted as models for the world and are well complemented by state, municipal, and private protected areas. The Endangered Species Act successfully resolves many conflicts between rare creatures and development. Rivers have been cleaned up, and once-spurned urban waterfronts now draw real estate and tourism development. Americans drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air than much of the rest of the world, and attempts to weaken regulatory frameworks are consistently met with public disapproval. (shrink)

Recently, natural scientists have begun to support an interpretive turn in ecology. Yet the ethical implications of interpreting nature have not been sufficiently addressed. In this essay, I use different interpretations of nature to make three distinct but related points relevant to forestry : ecological narratives should be evaluated on the basis of ethical norms, the choice of which interpretations of nature and ethical norms to use in environmental policy should be conducted by a process of public deliberation, and scientific (...) narratives should be denied a priori privilege over non-scientific interpretations of nature for policy purposes. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts begannen die meisten europäischen Staaten, Wetterbeobachtungsnetze zu finanzieren. Damit veränderten sich die klimatologischen Datenpraktiken fundamental. Am Beispiel der Schweiz beleuchtet dieser Aufsatz die politischen, institutionellen und methodologischen Dimensionen nationaler Datenarchive. Die Institutionalisierung der Datenproduktion im nationalen Rahmen führte einerseits dazu, dass mehr und systematischere Beobachtungen angestellt und publiziert wurden. Andererseits waren die Erhebungen an staatliche Grenzen gebunden, was nicht ausschloss, dass die nationalen Institutionen entsprechend ihrem universalistischen Wissenschaftsverständnis eine Standardisierung auf internationaler Ebene anstrebten. (...) Die nationale Rahmung prägte auch die Verarbeitung der Wetterbeobachtung zu statistischen Größen. Diese bildeten die Grundlage für nationale Klimatografien und entfalteten so eine nationsbildende Wirkung. Die Schweizerische Meteorologische Zentralanstalt schrieb ihren Klimadaten sowohl einen praktischen Nutzen als auch ein großes Potenzial für die Forschung zu. Der epistemische Status der Datenerfassung war aber unsicher, zumal physikalisch orientierte Ansätze an Bedeutung gewannen. Für die Aufrechterhaltung der Datenproduktion erfüllte die Antizipation wissenschaftlicher und praktischer Potenziale eine zentrale Funktion. Das präsentierte schweizerische Fallbeispiel zeigt, dass die Klimatologie unter dem Einfluss der Nationsbildung eine Transformation durchlief, die ihre institutionelle Verankerung, ihre Raumbezüge und ihre Epistemologie erfasste. (shrink)

Both scientific realism and social constructionism offer unpromising and even destructive ways of trying to understand nature and human–nature relations. The reasons include what these apparent opponents share: a commitment to the (latterly) modernist division between subject/culture and object/nature that results from what is here called 'monist essentialism'. It is contrasted with 'relational pluralism', which provides the basis of a better alternative – ecopluralism – which, properly understood, is necessarily both ecocentric and pluralist.

Cécile Laborde has argued that the freedom we think of as ‘freedom of religion’ should be understood as a bundle of separate and relatively independent freedoms. I criticise that approach by pointing out that it is insufficiently sensitive to facts about the sorts of entities that liberal states are. I argue that states have good reasons to mould phenomena such as religion into easily governable monoliths. If this is a problem from the normative point of view, it is not due (...) to descriptively inadequate accounts of religion, but a problem with a lack of realism about the sort of institutions states are. My conclusion is a three-way disjunction: either one must reckon with liberal states’ historically determined limitations in the management of changing social phenomena, or one should direct one’s frustration at the marriage of liberalism and the state, or the very existence of states is normatively problematic. (shrink)

The transition from empire to nation-state poses challenges in managing religious and ethnic pluralism. Empires, characterized by hierarchical structures and diversity, contrast with nation-states, which aim for uniformity and unity. As empires modernize administratively, they grapple with different approaches to pluralism. While Habsburgs were more in favor of a federal plurality, the Romanovs pushed for centralization and assimilation. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Ottomans vacillated between these two alternative paths. This vacillation is most evident in their approach to millet system (...) which simultaneously followed the contradictory policies of undermining millet boundaries in order to promote a sense of unity across the multi-faith society and policies of promoting and safeguarding the privileges and group-specific rights of non-Muslim communities. Ottoman nationalism eventually shifted towards a homogenizing model, akin to the Romanov approach, leading to the exclusion of religious minorities. This process of homogenization continued in the nationalist policies of modern Turkey and resulted in the secular Turkish Republic being less tolerant towards non-Muslims than the Islamic Ottoman Empire. (shrink)

A real but typical case of identity fraud is used to open up the complex web of identification systems in Brazil. It is argued that identification has two poles related to the nature of citizenship—repression and inclusion—and that reactions from citizens to new identification schemes can be attributed to how they view the purpose of the cards in these terms. In Brazil, a sense of inclusion and citizenship based on a fear of anonymity and exclusion predominates leading to widespread support (...) amongst even critics of state activities. However, this may be undermined by the lack of state preparation for an information society, particularly the absence of meaningful data protection laws. (shrink)

By excavating the ambiguities of the helicopter’s machinic-prosthetic view, a perspective which may be distant and abstract, while also near and viscerally present, this article will explore how megacity security is increasingly waged and consumed. The article argues that megacity security marches to the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by military technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the megacities’ most vulnerable. The article takes three aspects, visually expressed and constituted through aerial-helicopter security. Drawing from several (...) megacity examples including Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the first resolves megacity confusion with legibility. In the following section the article examines the mobilization of the security gaze, and the final section explores how helicopter visuality may hold or territorialize megacity space. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally – both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are (...) on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks. Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. Firstly, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Secondly, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just – thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”. (shrink)

Theories of race-making have recognized the confusion and contradiction in state-led racial projects but have not sufficiently elaborated their unintended consequences. Focusing on the relationship between the state, racial science, and immigration policy in the early twentieth century United States, this article illustrates how practical challenges in racial projects can jeopardize and thereby eventually trigger innovations in modes of racial governance. The Dillingham Commission (1907–1911) was a Congressional investigative commission that attempted to collect comprehensive data on immigrants in order to (...) provide a scientific foundation of immigration policy. Specifically, the most powerful members of the Commission’s executive committee wanted to single out Southern and Eastern Europeans (SEEs) and portray them as “undesirable races.” Developing such a classification scheme, however, proved to be difficult, and the facts collected from the field did not support their goal, instead demonstrating that in many cases SEEs were not very different from other immigrants and their native-born counterparts. The idea for national quotas, as well as the theoretical foundation for the inclusion of SEEs, emerged in this process, not as an outcome of ideological design but as an unintended byproduct of knowledge production. I highlight the pursuit of facts-based governance and relative autonomy of middle-level managers as key factors that enabled such process. (shrink)

For political and literary theorists working on race, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a canonical text. Most political theorists approach the novel through what this essay calls a “martyr reading,” though martyrdom is just one of several political strategies explored in the work. This essay highlights an alternative in Ellison’s repertoire. The “trickster reading” developed here better accounts for several key scenes in the novel and also shows the limits of martyrdom as a technique of democratic politics. While other democratic (...) theorists have identified Ellison with redemptive or deliberative aims, the novel’s references to Homer’s Odyssey, with its own trickster-hero, license a trickster reading of Invisible Man. Tricksters do not take on suffering, loss, or sacrifice in the hope of redemption nor are they necessarily committed to the virtues of deliberation. Instead, they evade sacrifice by resorting routinely to irony, cunning, and refusal. This reading demonstrates the importance of these techniques to Ellison’s vision and to our politics today. (shrink)

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...) argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

Contemporary political ecological problems reduce possibilities for future human and non-human life. These problems are the result of modern capitalist humans’ attempt to break away from multispecies bonds and turn non-humans into resources to be appropriated. These bonds are crucial for the continued generation of life, which can only result from intergenerational and interspecies shared time, effort, and energy. By expanding the works of Mauss’ intellectual heirs and Levinas towards multispecies interactions, this gift of life can be better understood. Life (...) received by newborn humans entangles them in a multispecies gift cycle that obligates them to reciprocate the gift of life’s potentiality. This requires acknowledging humans’ ethical responsibilities for all others, human and non-human, currently alive or potentially born in the future. In turn, this responsibility can only unfold as political ecologically sustainable actions that keep multispecies communities healthy enough to keep giving life’s potentiality to future generations. (shrink)

American ginseng (_Panax quinquefolius_) is a slow-growing medicinal root native to eastern North America. Though it is possible to farm, wild ginseng can sell for twenty (or more) times as much as cultivated ginseng. Declining wild ginseng populations due to habitat loss and overharvesting has led to harvest restrictions, but strong demand for wild ginseng remains. One potential solution is “wild-simulated” ginseng, where ginseng is grown under conditions crafted to mimic a wild forest with the goal of producing roots that (...) look wild. I contend, however, that despite the fact that wild-simulated ginseng grows in a habitat actively tended and monitored by humans, is nevertheless _wild_. I explore wildness as “productive unruliness” and show how wild-simulated ginseng actively crafts wildness through management to maintain if not add complexity, to foster unpredictability, or to facilitate stress. Furthermore, the habitat that wild-simulated ginseng growers are attempting to emulate—“wild” Appalachian woodlands dominated by an assemblage of “native” plants that pre-date the arrival of Europeans in the Americas—are themselves the product of human manipulation. In Appalachia, the boundaries between the wild and the cultivated are blurred. Wild-simulated ginseng is an example of how conservation goals can be achieved by crafting “wild” environments that are not untouched, pristine wildernesses. (shrink)

The present volume is the fifth in the series of yearbooks with the title Globalistics and Globalization Studies. The subtitle of the present volume is Global Transformations and Global Future. We become more and more accustomed to think globally and to see global processes. And our future can all means be global. However, is this statement justified? Indeed, in recent years, many have begun to claim that globalization has stalled, that we are rather dealing with the process of anti-globalization. Will (...) not we find ourselves at some point again in an edifice spanning across the globe, but divided into national apartments, separated by walls of high tariffs and mutual suspicion? Of course, some setbacks are always possible, because the process of globalization cannot develop smoothly. It is a process which is itself emerging from contradictions and is shaped by a new contradiction. They often go much further than underlying systemic changes allow. They break forward, as the vanguard of a victorious army, and then often meet resistance of various social and political forces and may suddenly start to roll back just at the moment when everyone expects their further offensive. We believe that this is what is happening with globalization at present. The yearbook will be interesting to a wide range of researchers, teachers, students and all those who are concerned about global issues. (shrink)

This editorial offers new ways to ethically practice, evaluate, and use quantitative research. Our central claim is that ready-made formulas for QR, including ‘best practices’ and common notions of ‘validity’ or ‘objectivity,’ are often divorced from the ethical and practical implications of doing, evaluating, and using QR for specific purposes. To focus on these implications, we critique common theoretical foundations for QR and then recommend approaches to QR that are ‘built for purpose,’ by which we mean designed to ethically address (...) specific problems or situations on terms that are contextually relevant. For this, we propose a new tool for evaluating the quality of QR, which we call ‘relational validity.’ Studies, including their methods and results, are relationally valid when they ethically connect researchers’ purposes with the way that QR is oriented and the ways that it is done—including the concepts and units of analysis invoked, as well as what its ‘methods’ imply more generally. This new way of doing QR can provide the liberty required to address serious worldly problems on terms that are both practical and ethically informed in relation to the problems themselves rather than the confines of existing QR logics and practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

Based on the French notion of terroir or ‘the taste of place,’ a certified geographical indication (GI) identifies an agro-food product as originating in a particular territory and suggests that its quality, reputation, or other characteristics are essentially or exclusively attributable to its geographical origin. Previous scholarship exploring the social construction of terroir has focused on how disparities in political, economic, and cultural power shape GI regulations, certification procedures, and territorial boundaries. While these works have considered knowledge as a resource (...) deployed through relations of authority, studies of GI implementation have not adequately considered an important aspect of power in contemporary politics: the epistemic authority to assert the legitimacy of knowledge and its relevance to policymaking. In contrast, in this article, I take the accomplishment of epistemic authority – to determine the ‘essential’ and ‘exclusive’ physical and/or cultural attributes of place that shape product character – as key to the social construction of terroir and the institutionalization of GI regulations. This process is explored through a case study of Ecuador’s 2013-2019 implementation of a GI for Galápagos Islands coffee. I draw on analysis of relevant policy and regulatory documents and semi-structured interviews with 21 key stakeholders to argue that analytical attention to the legitimacy and relevance of terroir knowledge explains how coffee producers were able to deploy authoritative knowledge to disrupt and reinforce relations of authority and challenge the terms and mechanisms of GI qualification. (shrink)

Most recently, two distinctions—echoing the cross-disciplinary critique of the teleological and “quantitative” approach of human arts and sciences at the expanse of the “qualitative”—have been foregrounded by Amzallag (Philosophy and Technology 34, 785–809, 2021) and Crease (2011), respectively, between the modern understanding of “technology” (as technopraxis) and the “forgotten dimension/phase of technology” (called technopoiesis) and between the ontic and ontological measurement. Pace gently the denotation of technopoiesis as a juvenile phase of technological development and the “ontological measurements” as logical and (...) practical impossibility in the modern, mathematized metroscape, the paper reexamines the relevancy of the distinctions (ontic/ontological and po[i]etic/practical, both recalling Heidegger’s “hermeneutical” critique of Husserl’s phenomenology) in non-Platonic/Aristotelian contexts and, in the process, seeks to refine the vital notion of technopoiesis by looking at the intersection of these fuzzy domains. In particular, the ancient Chinese measurements and their understudied onto-poietic dimension in the shifting econ-political contexts may offer an alternative approach to the otherwise elusive presence of technopoiesis and its ontological roots. Arguing that the techno-onto-poiesis does not necessarily belong to the foregone Arcadian past, the paper proposes refined “signals” for recognizing the technopoietic as well as new “forms” of its presence—“interactive emergence” (the cross-stimulating agonistic interactions between techniques of different “stages”) and “poietic clusters” (poietic ideas and/or implements that survive as “cluster” into the future), calling for future investigation of technical inventiveness (even in modern times) that reveal the process of how technopoietic elements enter the lives of technology through least expected embodiment. (shrink)

In the mid-19 th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize this new mass (...) of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen. (shrink)

Predictive uses of data are becoming widespread in institutional settings as actors seek to anticipate people and their activities. Predictive modeling is increasingly the subject of scholarly and public criticism. Less common, however, is scrutiny directed at the data that inform predictive models beyond concerns about homogenous training data or general epistemological critiques of data. In this paper, I draw from a qualitative case study set in higher education in the United States to investigate the making of data. Data analytics (...) projects at universities have become more pervasive and intensive to better understand and anticipate undergraduate student bodies. Drawing from 12 months of ethnographic research at a large public university, I analyze the ways data personnel at the institution—data scientists, administrators, and programmers—sort student data into “attributes” and “behaviors,” where “attributes” are demographic data that students “can’t change.” “Behaviors,” in contrast, are data defined as reflective of what students can choose: attending and paying attention in class, studying on campus, among other data which personnel categorize as what students have control over. This discursive split enables the institution nudge students to make responsible choices according to behavior data that correlate with success in the predictive model. In discussing how personnel type, sort, stabilize, and nudge on behavior data, this paper examines the contingencies of data making processes and implications for the application of student data. (shrink)

This article examines adaptive resource management as it has been applied to the US horseshoe crab fishery over the past decade. As a critical yet constructive exercise, I have three goals: to suggest how adaptive management, for all its promise, can still be improved; to add a nuanced case study to the literatures on the quantification of nature and environmental decision-making; and to use the example of ARM to make certain temporal aspects of contemporary natural resource management more salient to (...) science and technology studies scholars—that is, to show the ways in which time matters in environmental science, policy, and the analysis thereof. I draw attention to the time-related aspects of adaptive management by developing the notions of temporal orientation and chronological accountability. Temporal orientation refers to the time-based perspectives and epistemological commitments—that is, past-facing empiricism versus future-oriented modeling—that scientists of different types bring to bear on environmental problems. Chronological accountability refers to the missing link in adaptive forms of environmental governance: firm time lines and commitments to reflexively revisit management decisions. The time-related aspects of natural resource management deserve greater attention among both environmental managers and analysts of environmental policy. (shrink)

Contemporary work on the links between geography and morality tends to focus on the spatial aspects of moral conduct. This paper argues that in addition to geographical space, geographical scale also plays a crucial role in the construction and maintenance of moral frameworks. Focusing on the emergence of the sustainable region in the UK, this paper argues that purportedly sustainable spaces, like the region, contain distinctive moral codes of socio-ecological conduct which are designed to guide actions and locational decisions within (...) regional space. Drawing on the case of regional development in the West Midlands, however, analysis shows that sustainable regions are characterised by not only a moral geography of space, but also a morality of scale. Combining recent work on moral geography with analyses of the political construction of geographical scale, this paper uses the case of post-war regional development in the West Midlands to show how the construction of moral landscapes is intimately tied to the production of particular moralities of scale and scales of morality. (shrink)

Experimental cattle aided agricultural scientists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their efforts to produce beef and milk more efficiently for the growing human populations of the United States. Feed experiments were especially important for understanding how and what cattle needed to eat to better produce this food. However, as experts dedicated their time toward creating the most “economical” rations, their organism of focus shifted. This essay describes how scientific efforts to understand feed conversion in livestock became increasingly focused (...) on the role of ruminant microorganisms over the course of the twentieth century. Highlighting media coverage of fistulated cows and the design of artificial rumens, I argue that the scientific shift from macro- to microorganism was contemporaneously embraced and, in turn, funded by agricultural chemical companies to better market animal feed products by the postwar period. (shrink)

This essay examines President Nixon's drug policy during the early 1970s, specifically the government's reaction to heroin use by American soldiers in Vietnam. The official response, discursively (through the employment of the drugs-as-a-disease metaphor) and on the policy level illustrated how of issues of national- and self-identity othering, and modernity intersected in the formulation and implementation of what is now termed the Drug War. Heroin using soldiers and domestic addicts, labeled as carriers of a contagious, foreign, and antimodem, dangerous disease, (...) threatened to undermine a contingent national identity an identity weighted by capitalist modernity. Unearthing how addiction's ostensibly antimodern condition contributed to the othering of addicts as a foreign danger reveals how the United States' antidrug character and policies help maintain a national identity bound to the tenets of capitalist modernity. Methodologically, this essay combines historical analysis with literary and critical theory. (shrink)

Intermediaries are social agents who can be found in all types of different environments, cultures, and organizations. More often than enough, intermediaries are middlepersons between two power centers, yet their agency is precarious due to their position as brokers who gain from bridging otherwise unconnected parties, or marginalized vulnerable individuals who suffer from the invasion of the neighboring power holders. How can these two different perspectives of the intermediaries be reconciled? Under what conditions do they shift from one type of (...) agency to another? Previous scholarship attributes the agency of intermediaries to static positionality. This paper treats the position of the intermediary as an opportunity structure, which is shaped by multi-level relational dynamics. We show the changing agency of three intermediary tribal groups (i.e. the Tibetans in northwestern China, Uriyangqad Mongols, and Jurchens) who were situated between the sedentary Chinese and nomadic Mongols during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) through a systematic study with horse trade data. The group-based and officially-regulated horse trade constituted the most important linkage between the intermediaries and these two power centers. We study the changes in the dynamics of their contact during trade, and explain why these intermediaries became client, client to two patrons, and broker in their trade with the Chinese and Mongols in different eras. We argue that the position of the intermediaries did not provide definite advantages for their exploitation, nor did it paralyze them with any concrete disadvantages. Rather, their position offered them unpredictable opportunities that arose from their relational dynamics with the power centers. Moreover, the self-serving and local interests of the intermediaries, and the strategies and tactics that they used, determined their capacity to respond to emerging and unpredictable opportunities and capitalize on them. (shrink)

The proposed list of 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals sets out to reframe development according to a more holistic perspective. Yet, drawing on the example of the need for sustainable, resilient and biodiverse agriculture, it is argued here that the SDGs remain essentially grounded within one cultural understanding of how to address poverty. At least with regard to agriculture, the SDGs thus remain mono-cultural, one-dimensional, overly technocratic, and are far from universal as they fail to acknowledge the stipulated alternative pluriverse, (...) frequently understood in the Global South. The problem outlined is neither a technical nor political one: being essentially related to knowledge production it calls for the pluralization of approaches to both global ethics and sustainability. (shrink)

In the interwar years the Gran Paradiso ibex population followed two subsequent, contrasting trends: a steady rise once the national park was established in 1922, followed by a precipitous fall after the Fascist regime took direct control of conservation in 1934, which almost led to the colony’s extinction. This paper addresses the issue of how models taken from population ecology may inform historical narratives. The data for the interwar years were analyzed using a statistical model based on climate and population (...) density, which has proved reliable for most of the post-World War II period. The article highlights the pivotal role of anthropic variables in determining the inter-war trends and how these are best analyzed using historical scholarship. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth (...) century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery. (shrink)

Why and how have lay people participated in scientific observation? And on what terms have they collaborated with experts and professionals? We have become accustomed to the involvement of lay observers in the practice of many branches of science, including both the natural and human sciences, usually as subordinates to experts. The current surge of interest in this phenomenon, as well as in the closely related topic of how expertise has been constructed, suggests that historians of science can offer a (...) valuable contribution to these vital questions. A historical approach to lay participation allows us to better understand the making of expert-lay relations in science, and it offers a broader, long-term perspective on contemporary debates about that boundary. (shrink)

Based on 10 months of mixed ethnographic and archival research, this study is concerned with ways in which contemporary agro-environmental subjectivities and practices in a southwestern Oklahoma farming community are rooted in the massive state-level interventions of the New Deal era and their successors. We are likewise concerned with how those interventions have become interdigitated with moral discourses and community ethics, as simultaneous expressions of both farmers’ identities and the systems of power in which they practice farming. Through historic and (...) ethnographic evidence, we demonstrate the ways in which the localization of American agricultural conservation and the attendant, edificatory role of resource bureaucracies have shaped contemporary practices and ideologies of natural resource stewardship among conventional farmers and ranchers. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 80-92, March 2022.

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 80-92, March 2022.

This study examines activities and processes through which projects of moral regulation are implemented as well as lived, transformed, and resisted by their targeted actors. Our ethnographic study focuses on discourses and practices of civic duty for orderly and hygienic conduct in the rehabilitation of marketplaces in Yaoundé, Cameroon. By drawing on the inhabited institutions approach and the literature on ethics as practice, our analysis extends research on moral work to put forward a perspective on moral regulation as a situated (...) practice. We show how moral work is built on individual reflections but is simultaneously negotiated through actors’ relationships, that is, responsibilities to family, interactions within the community, and personal history. (shrink)

Social boundaries separate us fromthem. Explaining the formation, transformation, activation, and suppression of social boundaries presents knotty problems. It helps to distinguish two sets of mechanisms: (1) those that precipitate boundary change and (2) those that constitute boundary change. Properly speaking, only the constitutive mechanisms produce the effects of boundary change as such. Precipitants of boundary change include encounter, imposition, borrowing, conversation, and incentive shift. Constitutive mechanisms include inscription–erasure, activation–deactivation, site transfer, and relocation. Effects of boundary change include attack–defense sequences. (...) These mechanisms operate over a wide range of social phenomena. Key Words: social boundary • mechanisms. (shrink)

Before the passage of the US Immigration Act of 1924, governments of migrant-receiving countries decided whether to admit most prospective immigrants only after they arrived at the border; afterward, the United States and then later other migrant-receiving states required prospective migrants and visitors to apply for visas in their country of residence before coming—an institution that Zolberg has termed “remote control.” Previous scholars wrote about remote control in terms of how it increased the capacity of states to reduce immigration, protect (...) their societies from external threats, and maintain sovereignty, but did not analyze in detail how it did so. Here I analyze three ways through which remote control was a model for a more general revolution in migration control that simultaneously reduced interactions between inhabitants in migrant-receiving societies and those in migrant-sending societies, slowed down the historical reduction of inequality between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving societies, and reduced research and critical awareness within migrant-receiving societies about remote control’s structural impact on societies in general. First, this institution brought more order and precision to the process of individually evaluating prospective visitors. Second, it enabled states to select and define authorized migrants according to their migratory purpose and to force other migrants either to demonstrate enough stamina and strength to enter unauthorized or to die trying. Third, by moving the migrant selection process to migrant-sending societies remote control reduced contact between residents in migrant-receiving societies and prospective migrants in migrant-sending societies. In these three ways, remote control has more generally constrained migratory opportunities and global mobility of individuals between distinct societies. (shrink)

With an estimated one billion smartphones producing over 5 petabytes of data a day, the spatially aware mobile device has become a near ubiquitous presence in daily life. Cogent, excellent research in a variety of fields has explored what the spatial data these devices produce can reveal of society, such as analysis of Foursquare check-ins to reveal patterns of mobility for groups through a city. In such studies, the individual intentions, motivations, and desires behind the production of said data can (...) become lost through computational aggregation and analysis. In this commentary, I argue for a rethinking of the epistemological leap from individual to data point through a seating of the reflexive, self-eliciting subject as an object for spatial big data research. To do so, I first situate current research on spatial big data within a computational turn in social sciences that relies overly on the data produced as a stand-in for the subject producing said data. Second, I argue that a recent shift within geography and cognate disciplines toward viewing spatial big data as a form of spatial media allows for study of the sociotechnical processes that produce modern assemblages of data and society. As spatial media, the spatial big data created through mobile device use can be understood as the data of everyday life and as part of the sociotechnical processes that produce individuals, data, and space. Ultimately, to understand the data of everyday life, researchers must write thick descriptions of the stories we tell ourselves about the data we give off to others. (shrink)

The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly, people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes (...) the legitimacy to act on the public. Business ethics and private law are not designed to answer these questions, which are primarily political. If people have lost the right to disengage with commercial technologies, we may need to hold the companies that offer them to the same standards to which we hold the public sector. This paper first defines the problem and demonstrates that it is significant and widespread, and then argues for the development of an overarching normative framework for what constitutes non-domination with regard to digital technologies. Such a framework must involve a nuanced idea of political power and accountability that can respond not only to the legality of corporate behaviour, but to its legitimacy. (shrink)