Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

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Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.

This chapter contains section titled: Patterns of Inclusion, Cycles of Anticipation, The Evaluation of Relevance, The Promise of Algorithmic Objectivity, Entanglement with Practice, The Production of Calculated Publics, Conclusion, Acknowledgments, Notes

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The Relevance of Algorithms

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

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Paradoxical Infrastructures Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential paradigm of "biopower" developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays explore how modalities of "biopower" (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower (the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice-versa. We emphasize especially the critical importance of exploring the juncture of biopower and energopower in the context of the rising importance of scientific and political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. As human use of energy is increasingly linked to the disruption and destruction of conditions of life (human and otherwise), the tensions between dominant energopolitical systems (like carbon fuel) and biopolitical projects (like sustainability) are increasingly evident, opening new possibilities of anthropological analysis. Both energopower and biopower, we conclude, are entering into a pivotal transitional phase.Returning to the Anthropology of EnergyThe articles in this special collection explore the intersection of energic forces and fuels with projects of governance and self-governance across the world today. To adopt our language here, we are studying the entanglement of "biopower" (the management of life and population) and "energopower" (the harnessing of electricity and fuel). Since biopower will undoubtedly be the more familiar term, I concentrate this introduction on mapping the origins and analytical method of "energopower." Since "energopower" is a new concept (Boyer 2011), a more extensive definition and discussion is obviously in order. But, first, it is important to position this intervention in the context of previous anthropological engagements with energy. Although a recent flurry of important publications in the "anthropology of energy" (e.g., Behrends et al. 2011, Crate and Nuttall 2009, McNeish and Logan 2012, Nader 2010, Strauss et al. 2013) underscores the field's contemporary vitality, the fact remains that this is not the first, but rather by our count the third, generation of anthropology's engagement of energy.The first generation was defined principally by the work of Leslie White (1949, 1959), a maverick who granted energy a prominent place in his efforts to resurrect evolutionary theory in anthropology. For White, energy was not one research area among others; it was the conceptual key to understanding everything about human life and history. In what is arguably his most influential work, "Energy and the Evolution of Culture," White outlines a literally universal theory:Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy. Galaxies, stars, molecules and atoms may be regarded as organizations of energy. Living organisms may be looked upon as engines which operate by means of energy derived directly or indirectly from the sun. The civilizations or cultures of mankind, also, may be regarded as a form or organization of energy. (1943:335)White's key equation was that "cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work" (1943:338).At the beginning of cultural history then, with only the energy of its bodies with which to operate, humanity's cultural development remained at a very low level. To satisfy needs and to improve capabilities, both physical and intellectual, humanity sought to harness new sources of energy, first in the domestication of animals and plants, increasing "tremendously the amount of energy per capita available for culture-building" (White 1943:343). But after several thousand years of steady improvement, humanity once again plateaued until the advancements of the 18th and 19th centuries allowed for the widespread harnessing of fuel and the invention of engines. …

Energopower: An Introduction

Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany

To those of us weaned during the Cold War there are few certainties more bedrock than the antithetical character of liberalism and socialism. For some four decades,liberal‐capitalistregimesandstate‐socialistregimesmarshaledenormous pedagogical and ideological resources to educate their citizens in this singular truth that legitimated the polarized geopolitics of the second half of the 20th century. The gist of this truth was that nothing could be farther from the constitutive liberal rights and freedoms of Western democracy than the tyranny and group think of communism or, seen from the other side, that nothing could be more opposite from the internationalist communitarian values of socialism than the predatory self-interestedness and class warfare of capitalism. It is no small testament to the success of this Cold War pedagogy that the certainty of antithesis has outlived by decades the geopolitics that inspired it. Even as the Cold War geopolitics crumbled in the years 1989 to 1991, a victorious liberalism spared no opportunity to remind the world of its fundamental oppositeness from communism’s “evil empire.” Liberal historiography has subsequently memorialized 1989‐91 as an end-of-history extinction event for socialism (Fukuyama 1992; Kornai 1992), as vindication not only of the idea that the philosophical premises of liberalism amount to human nature but also of the idea that socialism’s experiments to improve human sociality have been absolutely defunct and defrauded. Twenty

https://www.sjsu.edu/anthropology/docs/coursematerials/marlovits/AmericanStiob.pdf

AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and im- passes of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in social- cultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography of experts and cultures of expertise remains underdeveloped in some crucial respects. The body of the article defines expertise as a relation of epistemic jurisdiction and explores the sociological and epistemological dilemmas emerging from research, that poises one expert (the anthropologist) in the situation of trying to absorb another re- gime of expertise into his/her own. With due appreciation for what the anthropology of experts has achieved thus far, I close with a manifesto designed to prompt a reas- sessment of where this research enterprise should go from here. I urge that we treat experts not solely as rational(ist) creatures of expertise but rather as desiring, relating, doubting, anxious, contentious, affective—in other words as human-subjects.

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Dominic Boyer

Papers

Paradoxical Infrastructures Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

Energopower: An Introduction

Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany

AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts