ISSN 2436-1410
Issue 6 (2023/2024)
Approaching Digital Anthropocene(s): A Double Vision
It is becoming increasingly difficult to address environmental questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with digital concerns. We observe and make our understandings of environments through, for example, digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. Conversely, we make the digital through the appropriation of environmental forms; crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld devices, while powering our data use through vast quantities of energy consumption. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, whose politics is pressing. While it is evident that the anthropocene is constituted through colonial histories, what this collection foregrounds is how deeply interwoven it is with the tools, devices, and computational logics that are part of such histories. In this special issue, we bring together four anthropology and Science and Technology (STS) scholars, each of whom offers a different empirical instance of approaching digital anthropocenes. Through various modes of sensing, governing, intervening, and speculating, each article reveals a particular colonial legacy that provokes an alternate form of politics (proto, limit, civic, and pre-figurative). What is revealed in each case, we claim, is the legacy of a colonial infrastructure that whilst saturated in forms of technological inequality and injustice also affords a counter political re-imagining through digital mediations.
Issue 5 (2019)
Anthropology and Science Fiction: Experiments in Thinking Across Worlds
The anthropological interest in fiction is growing. In the introduction to Crumpled Paper Boat, Anand Pandian and Stuart McLean (2017, 1–2) describe ethnography as carrying “beings of one world into another,” and writing as a “material adventure.” Their emphasis is on anthropology but the point is far more general: novels and poems, for example, can also be seen as adventurous movements of being across forms and worlds. Decades ago, Donna Haraway (1990, 149) made a similar observation with particular reference to science fiction: any supposedly clear boundary with “social reality,” she wrote, is but “an optical illusion.” Years later, upon receiving the Pilgrim Award, she presented her version of “material adventure” with the image of Navajo string figures, na’atl’o’ (Haraway 2011). Rather than “containing” worlds, she argued, speculative science fiction should be seen as an emerging, co-created web—as patterns made and transformed as they are passed on, from one writer or reader to the next, with unpredictable effects. Volume 5 of NatureCulture on “Experiments in Thinking across Worlds: Anthropology and Science Fiction” is intended both as an exploration of and an addition to this emergent web.
Issue 4 (2017)
This special issue of NatureCulture on ‘Life under Influence’ has its origin in a multidisciplinary workshop that was organized by Dominique Lestel at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo. Its starting point was to grasp the challenge of the question of the ‘living’ and of ‘life’ in contemporary culture. This challenge has two main components, which are intertwined but never exactly merge with the other. The first one deals in a privileged fashion with explanatory principles that cultures, both Western and non-Western ones, elaborate in order to make sense of such a complex phenomenon as life. The second component is the one that is linked to contemporary technological and scientific innovations, which markedly reshape what one thinks it means to be ‘alive’ and offers the opportunity to consider particular phenomena and practices in non-Western cultures.
Issue 3 (2015)
What happens if we start to think ethnographically through the technosocial hybrids that have become the almost unquestioned terrain of science studies since the 1990s? Contrary to recent critiques of the human-centred social sciences, nonhuman worlds have long been a concern within anthropology. Kula armbands, ghosts, manioc or cattle, to mention just a few, have significantly shaped the science of humanity. That being said, the origin of this special issue is in more mundane things, physical objects such as medical instruments and agricultural machines. Our common editorial ground is a shared interest in entities of kinds that generate few words.
Issue 2 (2013)
From berdache to kinship, from gift to mana, native and anthropological concepts travel between multiple realities, the field and the desk being only two of many possibilities. This, of course, should come as no surprise since anthropology was built on the back of indigenous concepts. Our ideas are used for different ends, just like we have been using others’ ideas for decades. In short, translations are on the move.
Issue 1 (2012)
Human and larger social entities, the two protagonists of this discipline, are no longer what they used to be. Observers are reluctant to consider them as undeniable objects, given realities susceptible to simple observation, description, and analysis. These days we start by reconsidering what these things might be. Could they be merely a bundle of effects caused by some combination of or linkages between various other things, living or non-living, tangible or intangible? The question of the human and the social is now a central concern in anthropology, a question to be elaborated by tracing how the human and the social are enacted by other things. Anthropologists seek to characterize actors, agency, networks, assemblages, and other nodes and forces in open-ended generative matrices.