Journal ArticleDOI
Unmade in China: Reassembling the Ethnic on the Gansu–Tibetan Border
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TLDR
In this article, an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China is presented. But this approach is restricted to the case of Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in China.Abstract:
This essay articulates an actor–network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on ‘ethnic’ (minzu) categories of much recent work on minority areas of China, it employs an inductive associographic method in order to provisionally disarticulate and reassemble the ‘units of common participation’ in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Ultimately, it both makes a case for the usefulness of after-ANT modes of description for work on classical (i.e. non-Science, Technology, and Society-derived) anthropological topics and pushes anthropologists of human difference in China and beyond to pay attention to the ways in which the shapes of their tools may affect the shapes of their projects.read more
Citations
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The Jade Emperor’s Last Taste of Water : An ethnography on the making of a village in China
TL;DR: In this article, the Jade Emperor's Last Taste of Water takes an ethnographic approach to deconstruct how an ethnic minority village is constituted, adjusted and redefined from the vantage point of where one stands.
Belonging and Ethnicity in China's West: Urbanizing Minorities in Xining City on the Eastern Tibetan Plateau
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors use discourse analysis of Chinese public intellectuals and policy changes to show how the Chinese state conceives of the Western Region as a state development project and how Tibetans and Muslims come to live in Xining City, the provincial capital of Qinghai Province.
References
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and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39
Susan Leigh,James R. Griesemer +1 more
TL;DR: A model of how one group of actors managed this tension between divergent viewpoints was presented, drawing on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years.
Journal ArticleDOI
Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39:
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a model of how one group of actors managed the tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings in scientific work, and distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.
Book
Actor Network Theory and After
John Law,John Hassard +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the following: 1. After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology: John Law (Lancaster University). 2. On Recalling ANTs: Bruno Latour (Ecole des Mines de Paris). 3. Perpetuum Mobile: Substance, Force and the Sociology of Translation: Steven D. Brown (Keele University) and Rose Capdevila (Nene University College). 4. From Blindness to blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject: Kevin Hetherington (Brun
Journal ArticleDOI
Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond "Politics"
TL;DR: The notion of politics as usual, that is, an arena populated by rational human beings disputing the power to represent others vis-a-vis the state as discussed by the authors, is insufficient, even an inadequate notion, to think the challenge that indigenous politics represents.