Tuesday, October 30, 2012
On Sunday afternoon, I left West Virginia where I was camping and climbing with some friends. A large winter storm that eventually dropped a foot of snow on the very place we were staying was at my back, and the largest hurricane in the Atlantic in the last quarter of a century was in front [...]
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
If agency is efficacy (at least in part), then expressing your agency means making a difference (to revitalize a tired trope).
Last night I was doing some reading and watching for the upcoming UMD Anthropology Theory Discussion Group session on materiality, embodiment, and non-human agency. I was thinking about this concept of agency that’s so important to my work and to the work of others who have inspired me – Latour, Stengers, Bennett, Bryant, etc. First [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
Also tagged agency, Bennett, Bryant, determination, efficacy, Haraway, intentionality, Materialism, science, Stengers, work
|
Saturday, September 8, 2012
In addition to The Mangle of Practice, I’ve also begun reading Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. I’ve only made it through the introduction and part of the first chapter, but so far it is an engaging and thought-provoking work. Tsing’s main concept that drives the ethnographic study (of Indonesian forestry) is the [...]
Life on here has been pretty slow lately. This is because, for the past month or so, I’ve been preparing for my first area exam. Last week, I took it and submitted on Friday. Now I’m just waiting for the grade and prepping for the beginning of the semester, so I have a little space [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
Also tagged anthropology, Callon, culture, Haraway, hybridity, Law, methods, Nature, Nature/Culture, ontological constructivism, post-constructivism, Stengers, theory
|
The following is part of this talk from Latour on his Modes of Existence project. I thought this was a very goo analysis of what anthropology has been, with Latour imagining what anthropology could be. Anthropology … is the way the modernising see the “other.” That’s a very strange anthropology, a very assymetric anthropology because [...]
One of the most important things I’ve taken from my philosophical engagements – notably Levi Bryant, Gregory Bateson, and Bruno Latour – is that change (even existence) takes work. I’ve talked a lot about work before. This is because it is, for me, a foundational concept. In order to understand something, we have to follow [...]
In the recent edition of Imponderabilia (in which I have an article, but that’s not what we’re talking about here), Alisa Maximova from the National State University in Russia has a nice little piece about “Understanding Ethnographic Work: Through Fieldnotes and Diaries.” In it she draws upon the sociology of science – specifically Kerin Knorr-Cetina, [...]
Levi Bryant’s latest post argues for a materialist-oriented ontology (the cow says… MOO!) alongside Jane Bennett, Michael, and Ian Bogost. However, in spite of the fact that I agree with much of what Levi is arguing for (that all beings are material in some sense, and that there is no action at a distance), I’m [...]
Filed in Uncategorized
|
Also tagged anthropology, Bennett, Bogost, Bryant, cartography, Harman, Holism, Idealism, Materialism, Michael, OOO, Realism, theory
|
I just read an article by Isabelle Stengers titled “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism” and found it to be the most concise and readable account of her philosophical work that I’ve read. The overall purpose of the article is to slow down the critical move characteristic of (post-)modernity – [...]
