How to Do Things With Words

Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

Preface to the Second Edition Part 1: Philosophical Bearings 1. Aims and Strategy 2. The Underlabourer Conception of Philosophy 3. Philosophy and Science 4. The Philosopher's Concern with Language 5. Conceptual and Empirical Enquiries 6. The Pivotal Role of Epistemology in Philosophy 7. Epistemology and the Understanding of Society 8. Rules: Wittgenstein's Analysis 9. Some Misunderstandings of Wittgenstein Part 2: The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour 1. Philosophy and Sociology 2. Meaningful Behaviour 3. Activities and Precepts 4. Rules and Habits 5. Reflectiveness Part 3: The Social Studies as Science 1. J.S. Mill's 'Logic of the Moral Sciences' 2. Differences in Degree and Differences in Kind 3. Motives and Causes 4. Motives, Dispositions and Reasons 5. The Investigation of Regularities 6. Understanding Social Institutions 7. Prediction in the Social Studies Part 4: The Mind and Society 1. Pareto: Logical and Non-Logical Conduct 2. Pareto: Residues and Derivations 3. Max Weber: Verstehen and Causal Explanation 4. Max Weber: Meaningful Action and Social Action Part 5: Concepts and Actions 1. The Internality of Social Relations 2. Discursive and Non-Discursive 'Ideas' 3. The Social Sciences and History 4. Concluding Remark

The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy.

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.

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (vol. 10)

The Whole beyond Holism: Gambling, Divination, and Ethnography in Cuba

“This edited book is central to the main currents of anthropological work on politics, and to the understanding of discourses of security. It addresses these bodies of literature, uniquely and creatively in the opinion of this reader, through a consideration of anthropological work on time and temporality—another lively and current key theme of much recent anthropology. Times of Security o! ers compelling ethnographies of security from a range of di! erent geographical contexts, from South America to Europe and the Middle East, and at di! erent scales, ranging from considerations of local contexts to nation states and even the planet in its entirety.”

Times of Security

How do revolutions form persons? Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Havana (2015–17), this article takes as its point of departure the trajectory of a middle‐aged woman's involvement with state structures and institutions during the course of constructing the house in which she lives. Describing ethnographically the ways in which these state involvements intertwine with other areas of her life, I suggest that this woman's sense of having been “formed in the revolution” is owed partly to the way in which the revolutionary process penetrates (or “flows”) deep into the minutiae of her life. Contrasting this manner of subjectivation with Che Guevara's conception of conciencia and the formation of a “New Man,” I suggest that the immanence of this process of infrastructural penetration may enable us to articulate an alternative way of understanding how revolutionary subjects are formed.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jlca.12344

“I Have Been Formed in This Revolution”: Revolution as Infrastructure, and The People It Creates in Cuba

Introduction: the cosmological frame in anthropology - Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad PART I: Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole? 1. To be a wonder: anthropology, cosmology, and alterity - Michael W. Scott 2. A new man: the cosmological horizons of development, curses, and personhood in Vanuatu - Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen 3. Auto-relations: doing cosmology and transforming the self the Saiva way - Soumhya Venkatesan 4. Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology - Don Handelman 5. Coordinates of body and place: Chinese practices of centring - Stephan Feuchtwang PART II: Cosmological constitutions: economies, politics, and the cosmos 6. Stranger kings in general: the cosmo-logics of power - Marshall Sahlins 7. Transitional cosmologies: shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia - Morten Axel Pedersen 8. Portioning loans: cosmologies of wealth and power in Mongolia - Rebecca Empson 9. Maize mill sorcery: cosmologies of substance, production, and accumulation in Central Mozambique - Bjorn Enge Bertelsen PART III: Embedded modernities: cosmos, science, and the movies 10. A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia - Caroline Humphrey 11. Facebook and the origins of religion - Daniel Miller 12. Don't yell fire! The origin of humanity goes to the movies - Gregory Schrempp 13. Cosmology and the mythic in Kubrick's 2001: the imaginary in the aesthetic of cinema - Bruce Kapferer Index

Framing cosmologies: The anthropology of worlds

Building critically on anthropology’s “ontological turn,” this article isolates conceptualization (as distinct from explanation and interpretation) as a core concern for anthropological thinking: a...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0048393120917917

Martin Holbraad

Papers

The Whole beyond Holism: Gambling, Divination, and Ethnography in Cuba

Times of Security

“I Have Been Formed in This Revolution”: Revolution as Infrastructure, and The People It Creates in Cuba

Framing cosmologies: The anthropology of worlds

The Shapes of Relations: Anthropology as Conceptual Morphology