DOCUMENTS  

About ARC People


 

What is ARC?

ARC is a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.

 

Constitution
The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences. Its aspiration is to create models for new infrastructures, tools of collaboration, and practices of inquiry appropriate to the human sciences in the 21st century. The core of the ARC collaboratory is ongoing reflection and communication in a now broadening network of scholars about concept formation and collaboratory work in the human sciences. It also includes a variety of specific collaborations.

 

Collaboration

Collaboration is at the core of ARC’s practice. Its aim is to produce the conditions for creative and original inquiry. ARC’s collaborations bring together researchers around significant problems to construct and test common concepts. Over the years, ARC has coalesced around two main projects:

 

Synthetic Anthropos and Nanotechnology

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, after more than two decades of massive sequencing projects, synthetic biology represents a return of the organism; it aims at nothing less than the (eventual) remediation of living organisms in a precise fashion according to instrumental goals set by the engineer. Nanotechnology, especially in the domains of chemistry and materials science, represents a radicalization of the engineering world-view, and is routinely concerned with exploring both new forms of the control of matter and new forms of concern about such control. The research in this project aims at comparison across the two domains of science and at the creation of concepts and equipment that make sense of issues related to security and safety, responsibility, intellectual property and new/emergent objects.


Vital Systems

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, and in the face of possible future catastrophes such as pandemic flu, the character of security has changed dramatically. The Vital Systems Security collaboration asks how, in this context, security is being reproblematized as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of “vital systems” – such as energy, transportation, communication and health – is one significant new norm of contemporary security in relationship to which existing elements are being configured. Click on the links below for more on Vital Systems Security or check out the VSS blog.

More on VSS:

 

 

What is a Collaboratory?

ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. The term “collaboratory” gained currency in the early 1990s, particularly in areas such as the natural sciences and computing. There is a narrow meaning of collaboratory, namely “a distributed research network articulated by means of information technology.” We prefer to think of our collaboratory as a network concerned with more than information: it is a dynamic and emergent form for inquiry and exchange that seeks to re-imagine and remediate many of the things that, in the social sciences, might normally be included within a discipline, such as the norms, standards, and mechanisms of critical rectification that make it possible to conduct inquiry and contribute to the production of knowledge, tools for thought, and modes of collaborative work and care.

 

Directors

Paul Rabinow
rabinow at berkeley dot edu

Stephen Collier
colliers at newschool dot edu

Andrew Lakoff
alakoff at ucsd dot edu

Christopher Kelty
ckelty at rice dot edu

James Faubion
jdf at rice dot edu

 

The ARC network includes a number of different people and institutions who participate in one or more of the collaborations:


ARC People


 

Biopower & the Contemporary

 

 

Vital Systems Security

 

 

On the Assembly of Things

Biosecurity Interventions

Published

 

Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary

Published

 

Document Archive

 

 

 


Instructions for Authors People


ARC Working Papers use the following guidelines:

Style Guide: Formatting instructions for white papers.

Below are the templates for the cover pages. They use the Helvetica Neue Font. Use the pdf or Illustrator versions if you have Illustrator or Acrobat. The SVG is supposed to be a web standard, but will probably look different than the first two.

Cover Page Template (pdf | svg | illustrator CS3)

Inside Cover Page Template (pdf | svg | illustrator CS3)


Collaboration Exchange People


A core feature of work in ARC over the last two years has been an ongoing discussion about method and the possibilities for collective work in contemporary anthropology. In the spring of 2005 George Marcus invited Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff and Paul Rabinow to talk about ARC at the Center for Ethnography at U.C. Irvine. At Irvine and over the following months Marcus, Collier, Rabinow, and Lakoff, along with Jim Faubion, Rebecca Lemov, and Christopher Kelty, had an exchange about concept work and collaboration in anthropology, which culminated in a panel at the 2006 AAA meetings in San Jose, California. Select parts of this discussion have been collected in ARC Exchange #1. Below you can find the original paper by ARC, responses to the paper after the Irvine discussions, and papers presented at the AAA meetings.

Documents


VSS: Documents People


The following documents related to Vital Systems Security have been produced by participants in the collaboration. More will follow soon.

Jump to: Forthcoming/2007/2006/2005/VSS Home

Forthcoming

2007

2006

2005




VSS: Participants People


Participants in the Vital Systems Security collaboration include Carlo Caduff, Stephen Collier, Lyle Fearnley, Andrew Lakoff, Brian Lindseth, Onur Ozgode, and Dale Rose.

VSS HOME


VSS: Topics and Projects People


Work in the collaboration has focused on civil defense, strategic bombing, vulnerability assessment, public health preparedness, pandemic disease, emergency response, scenario planning, domestic security, insurance, natural disasters, and risk. Major projects include a workshop at SSRC that will produce a collected volume on The Problem of Biosecurity, and a book currently being researched by Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier entitled On Vital Systems Security.

VSS HOME


Concept Notes People


ARC Concept Notes

  1. Paul Rabinow (2007). Steps Towards an Anthropological Laboratory.
  2. Paul Rabinow. Wissenarbeitforschung. Anthropology in a Mode of Adjacency, Security and Vigilance.
  3. Nicolas Langlitz (2007). What First-order Observers can learn from Second-order Observers.
  4. Carlo Caduff (2007). Disowning Knowledge: Michel Foucault’s Ethics of Inquiry.
  5. Paul Rabinow. Diffusions of the Human Thing: Security, Virtual Virulence, and Human Dignity.
  6. Paul Rabinow (2006).The Biological Modern.
  7. Paul Rabinow. What Synthetic Biology was in 2004.
  8. Carlo Caduff and Paul Rabinow (2007). Security, Territory, Population.
  9. Carlo Caduff (2007). François Delaporte: La maladie de Chagas. Histoire d’un fléau continental. Paris 1999.
  10. Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis. (2006). Response to “Synthetic Genomics: Options for Governance”.

Publications People


ARC publications are articles, books, and chapters that relate directly or in a general fashion to ARC Collaborations.

Forthcoming

2007

2006

2005

2004


Working Papers People


ARC Working Papers

  1. Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2006). What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?
  2. Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2006). Vital Systems Security.
  3. Lyle Fearnley (2005). Pathogens and the Strategy of Preparedness.
  4. Dale A. Rose (2006). How Did the Smallpox Vaccination Program Come About?
  5. Lyle Fearnley (2005). ‘From Chaos to Controlled Disorder’.
  6. Carlo Caduff (2007). The Ferret Assay. Coming Soon.
  7. Andrew Lakoff (2007). From Population to Vital System.
  8. Nicolas Langlitz (2007). Pharmacovigilance.
  9. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett (2007). A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms.
  10. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett (2007). Human Practices: Interfacing Three Modes of Collaboration.
  11. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett (2007). From Bio-Ethics to Human Practice.
  12. Christopher M. Kelty (2008). Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur.
  13. Christopher M. Kelty (2006) Allotropes of Fieldwork in Nanotechnology

Synthetic Anthropos People


Synthesis: design and composition of pathways
Anthropos: the human thing
Synthetic Anthropos: emergent forms of the human thing

HUMAN PRACTICES

Human Practices is a project to compose new equipmental platforms appropriate to the emergent figure of synthetic anthropos. Such compositional work requires diagnostics: analysis and synthesis.

Ontology:
The issues of what things are, which new things are significant, how they are significant, and how one knows they are new and significant, are of prime importance pragmatically, culturally, and philosophically. Whatever else they do, the post-genomic science will bring new things into the world.
The term that Western philosophy has used to describe reflection on the essence of objects is ontology. Constructing a general ontology is not the task proposed here. Rather, we propose an anthropology of the contemporary world; one which designs techniques to change philosophic discussions into topics of inquiry.
How things come into existence, are named, sustained, distributed, and modified is an issue of primary importance. What stakes are introduced or modulated by such new objects, and how ethical and political equipment can or should be adapted to them is a question of critical importance.

Ethics:
We hold that bio-ethics, as frequently positioned in official settings, undervalues the extent to which ethics and science can play a mutually formative role.
Although such work remains valuable for work on the problems it was constructed to deal with. Emergent things require new equipment. Such equipment is designed to contribute to a “flourishing existence” (eudaemonia). Eudaemonia should not be confused with technical optimization, as capacities are not already known.
The question of what constitutes a good life today, and the contribution of the bio-sciences to that form of life must be posed and re-posed. We are persuaded that within collaborative structures biology, ethics and anthropology can orient practice to the flourishing as both telos and mode of operation.

Synthetic Biology:
Synthetic biology is a maturing scientific discipline that combines science and engineering in order to design and build novel biological functions and systems. This includes the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems (e.g., tumor-seeking microbes for cancer treatment), as well as the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes (e.g., photosynthetic systems to produce energy).

SynBERC:
The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.
SynBERC is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. SynBERC is a program of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3).

CASES
Diagnostics

CONCEPTUAL INVENTORY
Diagnostics


Exchanges People


The “Exchange” series is a vital part of ARC’s effort to promote collaborative inquiry in the human sciences. The series will capture exchanges that are already taking place on blogs, through email, and in conferences. But it will also instigate exchange as a key site of concept-formation. An important aim of the series is to recognize – and to make available for reflection – various contributions to the process of inquiry that are not usually valorized in an academic system of distinction that rewards the production of books and articles. In particular, the exchanges seek to capture the discussion of tentative results and preliminary ideas as they are subjected to critique and revision, and to acknowledge the contributions that the interlocutors in this process make to the final results of academic production.

1. Concept Work and Collaboration in the Anthropology of the Contemporary (2006). Instigated by Tobias Rees


Inrastructure/Infrastructure People


Christopher Kelty

1. Reproduce vs. Emerge

The ARC project interests me for a specific reason. I see one of my tasks here as an attempt to move discussion beyond oppositions such as digital/analog or bits/atoms or new media/old media and towards an approach that I find resonates with the problematic of reproduction/problematic of emergence—namely towards a notion of “collective experimental technical practices and their modulation.” 15 years of being a software programmer manqué has left me more convinced than ever that oppositions like digital/analog are completely meaningless. However, when confronting the kinds of changes we associate with new media and new digital tools it’s also obvious things are not “just the same, only faster.” There are qualitative and quantitative changes at work. As I interpret it, a problematic of reproduction would be wedded to determining the difference between new and old media, digital and analog, and a committed to a rhetoric of radical transformation balanced by one of lasting sameness. In this mode, the ultimately interesting question is always “but is it new?” and the answer is always something like: no, it’s just the relentless power of capitalism/empire/ideology/technocratic dominance etc. By contrast, A problematic of emergence would open up the possibility for thinking about how organized and settled assemblages of human practices, technical objects, legal regimes and ideologies are modulated over time until, through quasi-controlled collective experiment, something unfamiliar emerges—something surprising. Novelty in this case is not radical transformation, but constant, though heterogeneous and stratified, change. In my own research the paradigm case is Free Software—and my goal has been to explore it not in order to show how it is just one more example of the relentless dissolving power of technology (or capitalism) but how it emerges in response to a problematic of knowledge and governance that is itself emergent—but at a considerably slower pace.

In terms of ARC and the idea of a novel form of collaboration, the question can be directed at the production of scholarly work, rather than the domain of software—that is to say, to explore how the transformations of technical, legal and organizational practices of knowledge production can be related to the theoretical questions of concept work. In this respect, I am very much in favor of thinking through experiment—namely thinking through the problems of setting up a clear experiment, keeping track of its project, verifying its outcome, using the result as the basis for the next experiment, and above all making such a system into a “generator of surprises.” In my participation with ARC (i.e. especially in the domain of setting up, configuring, imagining and promoting certain kinds of technical-social solutions, from websites to wikis to blogs to content management systems), it is the notion of “keeping track of” that is central. These tools change the nature of scholarly work—not radically, but “emergently”—they present us with ways of doing what we have always done differently, and it is in making such modulations that we are in the midst of experimenting—and thus need to take stock of what we’ve changed, why, and what the outcome is. Such tools are a replacement infrastructure for a professional system that used to (and in many disciplines still does) keep track of the development of concepts and results. They are not merely “new media, not merely digital replacements for analog practices—they modulate rather than replace. The practices of arguing, writing, circulating, re-writing—and indeed, the practice of “concept work” itself—is modulated in the doing. Thus, I advocate a more careful attention to the “collective technical experiment” as the concrete environment that makes “concept work” now different than “concept work” then.

2. Discipline vs. Profession

One distinction that has been offered in ARC is that between a profession and a discipline. In the AAA Panel associated with this exchange, Collier answered a question from the audience by suggesting that anthropology is a “discipline without discipline” by which I suspect he meant that it was a professional organization—encompassing a rather radical diversity of possible topics and approaches—with no agreement about central problems, concepts or methods. It may not be the case that any discipline actually possesses firmly agreed on problems, concepts and methods, but there is certainly a spectrum, so that computer science, for instance, in its various subfields has very rich disciplinary (and professional) structures, as does economics. The downside of course is that the stronger the discipline is, the less likely heterodoxy and critique are to survive within the Profession.

One of the ways in which both the Discipline and the Profession organize and reproduce themselves is through the practices of publication that they adopt. Entrants learn how to recognize immediately (in an article, for instance) what the common problem is, whether a new concept is being proposed, or a proposed one tested; and learn, through time, not only how to judge and discriminate, but to make use of, re-use, test, build on work, in ways that are more complex than simply citing another work, or using another work as evidence. Concepts enter an “archive” that is not necessarily co-terminous with an archive of literature identified with a Profession. It’s an “archive” in a notional sense only—it belongs to the practitioners who navigate the field and understand the structure of the discipline. The texts are the traces of the disciplinary structure. To borrow an overwrought image from Roland Barthes, concepts are the imaginary tail of the texts—the meteroid is the text, while the comet, that flash in the sky, is the concept. To the extent that an audience of scholars is looking, there are concepts which they all see in a particular body of texts, but which disappear once that audience disappears.

Thus, the claim at least by some observers within the Profession, that anthropology has no concepts. For example, the virtuoso text—the extravagantly written, the philosophically polymathic or simply the empirically hyper-detailed text—does not participate in a discipline so much as construct its own—a comet reflecting on its own entrance into a vacant atmosphere, or one peopled by a few friends and insider colleagues. By this caricature, some of the most widely respected writing in the Profession would also be some of the most unwilling to collaborate as a discipline of concepts. A bit further down the scale are sub-fields like science studies that seem to have a pretty widespread core of problems and concepts, loosely shared across many professions. Even further down the scale, one might put Meso-American archaeologists, who (if my recent tenure on a job search committee is any indication) seem to have an extremely robust set of disciplinary problems and concepts to which they refer—at the expense of being able to translate that to any other field, even seemingly close ones like Africanist archeology.

If it is the case that ARC sees anthropology in this way—a discipline without discipline—then along with the obvious requirement of convincing other like-minded scholars to join, it faces the “technical” problem of publication and circulation directly. If it cannot rely on a professional system that promotes the development of disciplinary (conceptual) collaboration, then how, practically speaking, can it develop this practice of proposal, counter-proposal and building? On the one hand, it strikes me as absurd to suggest that ARC can do any such thing—disciplines are evolved, not made, even if charismatic personalities sometimes inaugurate them. On the other hand, we have the technology today to constitute a space that is focused on evolving discipline, but which is very different from existing Professions. It is truly, a different kind of public and publication to be able to instantly circulate everything—it raises very hard questions about how to sort, sift, validate, refine, ensure quality, find quality, maintain discussion, etc—to say nothing of simply dealing with the information overload.

So, I return to the question of “collective experimental technical practices and their modulation” and propose that one way ARC should be approaching its activities is by revealing how the collective experimental technical practices of Profession-making and Discipline making differed in the past and how they differ now. I think this question is behind the urge to conjure forth a genealogy of collaboration, such as Rebecca Lemov’s contribution to the panel, and the repeated reference to issues such as complicity and adjacency or to past failures like the New Nations project. Is it possible to explain past practices within anthropology through the lens of Profession-making/Discipline-making? Is it further possible to ask how exactly contemporary practices and technologies are modulating these past practices, transforming them into something that serves the goal of providing a space for concept work perceived to be absent from anthropology as it exists today?

3. Collaborate vs. Coordinate

Collaboration is hard to distinguish. The first distinction within an anthropological setting is usually collaboration with “informants” (complicity, adjacency, co-optation, earnest service, collegiality, critique and denunciation) versus collaboration with colleagues (co-writing, co-granting, pedagogy, circulation of written work, hierarchy and division of labor). The distinction breaks down in almost every case, for different reasons: we “co-write” with informants all the time, we develop complicity with our colleagues, or denounce and critique them. Especially those working amongst elites and high-tech situations, the idea of a distinction between informants and colleagues is usually a question of whether they are formally in the department or not (and sometimes not even that, pace Donna Haraway amongst primatologists, or ethnographers amongst the archaeologists). A recent American Ethnologist volume devoted to IRB politics raises these issues in a particularly stark way: Rena Lederman’s attempt to study IRB’s turns bathetic when the IRB itself tries to evaluate her research on human subjects, who are members of the IRB. More broadly, linguists and earnest anthropologists of the down-trodden and oppressed insist for political reasons on the use of “collaborator” instead of “informant.” The breakdowns are endless, the issues of responsibility and accountability a thicket of conceptually bleak auto-ethnography.

By the same token, when collaboration works, it seems to work absolutely. The best ethnographies seem to have at their heart a really delicious interplay between the knowledge of a “native” informant and the critical and probing reactions of an anthropologists. Successful collaboration amongst academics can leverage multiple depths of expertise that no single anthropologist can bring—and at the limit produce genuinely surprising results for everyone involved. This is just to say that despite the inability to distinguish between collaboration with informants and collaboration with colleagues, collaboration nonetheless still happens, and kind of like pornography, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

Thus a third distinction: between coordination and collaboration. Coordination includes all those collective experimental technical practices that bring people and things into a particular kind of order. Disciplines, journals and conferences coordinate; calendars and email and letters coordinate; issues of access are issues of coordination—so jobs, letters of recommendation/introduction, internships, and all those forms of insinuating oneself into a field are about coordination. There has been less reflection on this practice than one might think. Almost all coordination practices are in the realm of the informally taught, the “just do it” school of methods; almost all successful coordination disappears precisely because the goal of coordination is to become transparent to the action of what coordination facilitates: collaboration.

Collaboration, by contrast, would depend absolutely on the forms of coordination in place. Collaboration is not amenable to control or planning—but it is also not possible without some kind of structure and play through which it takes on its shape as a game or as a project. A complete lack of coordination (and hence no collaboration) is the situationist dérive—wandering flâneurs and cultural studies’ idiosyncratic observations of public matters. Too much coordination is the natural sciences laboratory: a hierarchical division of labor completely subordinated to the creative genius of the scientist, or worse, to the demands and exigencies of funding, fashion or politics—here collaboration is stringently produced and enforced. But in the middle, an amazing heterogeneous field of possibility. How to think carefully about controlling coordination—whether between anthropologists and informants, or amongst anthropologists—in order to maximize the potential for collaboration?

Collaboration is constrained and enabled by the kind of coordination in place. Students’ projects are often failures when they choose a form of coordination that does not incorporate them in the heart of things: watching a corporation from the outside, for instance, rather than figuring out how to get inside it; or sticking with public sources and public culture rather than risking intimacy with families, communities, or organizations.
A current Rice Graduate student, for instance, studying Iranian NGOs in Washington, captures this beautifully when she discusses how hard it was to resist becoming an “intern” at one NGO, so that she could still openly associate with another one—one that eventually tried to incorporate her as a family member and in turn angered the first NGO which demanded transparency. Such a situation requires careful analysis after the fact—and the student is gifted at doing so—but it might also have benefited from more careful coordination before the fact, so that she could become more comfortable with the possibilities and limits of collaboration in the field.

While students are expected to collaborate with informants, the idea of collaboration between two or more graduate students is seen as deadly—dangerous to their careers because the system expects individual virtuosity first. This implies that collaboration is a zero-sum game, rather than the surprising production of something neither individual could have done on their own. What forms of coordination might facilitate collaboration that is not zero-sum? Collaborations that both/all parties can claim ownership of without diminishing it in another case? I think that the ARC discussion about concept-work is focused on these Utopian questions—but to me they are not first theoretical questions about the nature of what a concept is, so much as they are practical questions about the experimental structure of knowledge production: keeping track, auditing even, and making public the results of this work in a form common to all participants, but available to each of them as their own.

My own thinking on this subject is heavily influenced by my understanding of Free Software—and in particular my understanding of how coordination works in Free Software; the Linux operating system kernel is the canonical case. One of the most well known claims about Free Software is that it involves the collaboration of hundreds, if not thousands of volunteers who work together on the creation of highly complex software projects, like Linux. Common wisdom suggests that this mode of collaboration (or “peer production,” to use Yochai Benkler’s term) is somewhat anarchic and free-wheeling—a bazaar, not a cathedral. Further research has revealed that it is not anarchic at all, but that it does proceed in strikingly different ways than a conventional software company might. Although it is driven by volunteerism, and individuals are free to work or not work on whatever they choose, it is nonetheless extremely highly coordinated.

The Linux project, for instance, consists of a leader (Linus Torvalds) with a hierarchy of lieutenants each responsible for different parts of the kernel; a mailing list on which all participants are encouraged to communicate in implicitly structured ways (The Linux Kernel Mailing List, or LKML); and a source code management system (SCM) that coordinates collaboration by keeping track of who writes what and when—SCMs allow for a certain degree of automatic management of asynchronous, distributed contributions from participants around the world. There are, however, no goals and no planning. The project privileges a particular form of adaptability at all costs—whatever someone creates, it can be incorporated so long as it passes a series of tests having to do with a largely unarticulated, but learned, intuition about technical elegance, functionality, and the structure of the kernel itself. Torvalds and lieutenants facilitate this kind of contribution, but do not direct it. As a result, the Linux kernel does a great many things, some of them relevant only to very obscure architectures or uses, some of them useful to every user—but it was never designed to do any of them.

Of course one should ask: How do people know what to do? In some ways, this is the role of pedagogy: the construction of a disciplinary structure within which it makes sense to pursue one kind of problem rather than another. Linux makes sense because generations of students have been taught what an operating system is and should look like by studying UNIX (in the 80s and 90s) and Linux (today). The coordination of contributions to Linux is largely automatic and invisible. People learn what to do and how to do it and they simply do so. What emerges, sometimes, but not always, are forms of collaboration: co-work, co-labor, co-thinking about how to identify problems and functions, and how to solve them. Much of this work takes place on the LKML, simply as a kind of question and answer discussion, often with flame-wars around controversial topics. As people settle into these collaborations, coordination sets the stage: the structure of lieutenants, the mailing list and the SCM set the constraints around how that collaboration will unfold, and more importantly, keep track of it and manage it as an experiment. The success of a collaboration is in the outcome, not in the justification or planning—higher risk, higher reward, less bureaucracy and planning mentality.

ARC has a similar potential—as do any coordinations of people and tools in the scholarly world—a system that encourages a free software-like approach to unplanned problem-seeking investigative research, in an open but coordinated space. But this also raises a tricky question: is it clear what the operating system is, so to speak? A radical absence of such an organizing discipline would result in nothing more than a chaotic production of ideas and questions. But in fact ARC possesses a background that is resolutely ensconced in cultural anthropology and social theory, even as it seeks to break free from it. The “operating system” kernel is implicitly clear. To end on a playful note, that perhaps only crossover geek/scholars might appreciate, the background of ARC can be named: Weber and Foucault signal the core function of process management, the CPU as it were; others like Dewey (a file system, I presume) and Luhmann (memory management) form other key components; outside this kernel are loadable modules: Wittgenstein (framebuffer), Deleuze (virtual memory), Bourdieu (multi-tasking), Geetrz (garbage collection) etc. But the activity of ARC is hardly interested in such names per se—instead I would hope that they form the implicit ideal of an operating system, controlling in part what kinds of projects and potential collaborations make sense to existing and potential collaborators. It is unlikely that this core set of (continental, male, dead) names will change radically—just as it is unlikely that Linux will ever be anything other than a UNIX operating system—but it is just as likely that they will change slowly, in response to creative tuning and testing.


Meg Stalcup People


MEG STALCUP is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Ph.D. program in Medical Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco. She obtained a B.S. in Biology from UC San Diego and an M.S. in Biological Sciences from the Museu Nacional-Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, with a thesis on the ethnobotany of an urban market. She completed the U.C. Santa Cruz program in Science Communication in 2001. She is currently a National Science Foundation Fellow and is conducting research with law enforcement groups on information and knowledge production, specifically the epistemology of intelligence gathering and analysis.


Network People


The ARC network includes a number of different people and institutions who participate in one or more of the collaborations


Affiliates People


The ARC network includes a number of different people and institutions who participate in one or more of the collaborations.


The Personality of Anthropology People


Rebecca Lemov

Having just moved, I was recently unpacking some boxes containing my collection of the American Anthropologist, circa 1950s (the 1940s having been left in the trunk of my car), when I came across a 1959 article by Kroeber with the title, “The History of the Personality of Anthropology.” Thinking this might shed some light on the discussions shared with me between ARC and its interlocutors, I took a look. Most pressingly, it strikes the reader how little the field today has in common with the vision that Kroeber was painting in order to discover its “personality.” Even the idea of the discipline having a personality is somehow quaint. Yet North American anthropology almost fifty years post-Kroeber is recognizable, still, and that is perhaps even more surprising. (Here I find resonances with the initial discussion between Marcus and ARC, because it seems that there are different ways of seeing one’s connection with the past of a discipline and its first-and second-order practices.)

Perhaps salvagable from Kroeber’s analysis, most of which is utterly unhelpful, is Kroeber’s view of the anthropologist’s relationship to ‘the real.’ Aside from the shared urge of anthropologists to be holistic–“perhaps what is most distinctive of us as a group,” avers Kroeber–is a countervailing set of other qualities: “This is balanced by a love of fact, an attachment to phenomena in themselves, to perceiving them through our own senses…. There are anthropological museums of tangible objects, but no sociological museums….” On fieldwork, reinforcing this theme of no-ideas-but-in-things, Kroeber had this to say about anthropologists: “We insist on fieldwork as an opportunity, a privilege, and a professional cachet. We want the face-to-face experience with our subjects….”; elsewhere Kroeber speaks approvingly of those fieldworkers who can successfully describe “concrete culture functioning.”

Instead of either grab-bag empirical studies or top-down theoretical ones [the scourge, too, of many new academic approaches], he describes a radical empiricist approach of encountering but not reducing the empirical (perhaps akin to what ARC calls “soundings”?) and minimizing but not eliminating the theoretical (ARC’s ‘critical rectification’?). Here is something possible to grasp and use. To put it another way, it is to sidestep a pitfall inherent in attempting to study reality in a systematic way, by means what Rheinberger describes as the goal to “perforate any nontemporal dichotomy between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ between fact and artifact, that pitfall of naïve realism.” Likewise what can be rescued from Kroeber, and perhaps located in ARC, is this strand of non-naive realism. I do believe this is related to the present goal of ARC, which seems to entail a renovated and non-deterministic, non-naive functionalism, although taking care to steer clear of such anthropological impossibilities as cultural materialism or “naïve objectivism” or even functionalism as it was generally expressed within anthropology proper in its heyday.

Of course, Kroeber very comfortably could speak of “we” anthropologists, whereas the ARC group can do nothing of the sort, at least not to gesture a smidgeon beyond its own membership. (That’s what some of conversation seems to come down to: what is this “we” of ARC and who can potentially be included?) Yet in some ways, to me, the project seems to represent the re-instauration of a trajectory and a tradition. Its own emphasis on being forward looking, tuned to emergence, and the apparently contradictory fact that its “in-house language” may seem, as Marcus puts it at one point describing some of the shared tropes, a throwback, is a point of interest. Faubion makes a similar point, I think, in mentioning ARC’s and others’ eagerness to identify “rupture” with the anthropological past & yet the harking-back feeling one gets from ARC’s somewhat stern emphasis on reference rather than the tendential. In ARC there appears to be a rehabilitation of some scholarly and systematic strivings that have not been much called on of late.

I’m still in the midst of thinking about what these strivings might be, how they are characterized, and how they differ from the kind of thing that often circulates in the field in the name of defining anthropology by means of forward-looking “cutting edge” theory or backward-looking moralistic finger-wagging. I think it hinges on the question of method. In fact, the ARC discussions so far have caused me to look with new interest at almost every discussion of method I come across – for example, the complacency with which fieldwork is considered, inherently and of itself, a “method.” It is interesting to mark it as a technique, and to observe that method inheres within the application of a certain discipline of inquiry. Distinguishing fieldwork-as-technique from the search for adequate methods seems at the heart of the ARC undertaking. Fieldwork, to be seen as method, must incorporate not simply the bare encounter with the empirical “this” and “now” but the generative interaction by which ideas are found to inhabit the tumult of things and of the field. The language ARC used of “thrashing around” in the field was interesting. Thrashing around implies that there is a tolerance for being at the intersection of knowing and not-knowing, which will allow the critical rectifier (?) to express what hasn’t hitherto found formal expression. “What we are trying to talk about is not on the level of technique but on the level of methodology or mode of inquiry.” It is about seeing empirical inquiry always in relation to its conditions of possibility.

A last comment: Although this impression comes admittedly from brief familiarity, it strikes me that Rheinberger’s historical view of how experimental systems work is quite in line with what ARC is doing as second-order observers. I don’t see Rheinberger privileging the search for the “scarcely imaginable” new exclusively over the identification of norms and forms by which meaning is produced. Phrases he uses such as “a never ending ramification” to describe scientific research as pattern formation do not exclude finding form and even formal properties. Also, interestingly, he doubles his analysis by characterizing his own observations of observers (research on researchers) as a parallel struggle to express emergent entities that could not hitherto and up to that moment be expressed. In all this, I’m reminded of Robert K. Merton’s methodological use of what he called “strategic research materials,” about which he elaborated in the 1950s-1970s: “Strategic research sites, objects, or events exhibit the phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage and in such accessible form that they enable the fruitful investigation of previously stubborn problems and the discovery of new problems for further inquiry.” Such materials—sites, objects, events, or areas that are strategic—will highlight “turning points” in the sciences to great and un-ignorable advantage.


Writing, Method, Design (Labinar) People


What is the Labinar?


Copyright People


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Private: OLD About ARC People


What is ARC?

ARC is a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC’s current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.

Constitution
The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences. Its aspiration is to create models for new infrastructures, tools of collaboration, and practices of inquiry appropriate to the human sciences in the 21st century. The core of the ARC collaboratory is ongoing reflection and communication in a now broadening network of scholars about concept formation and collaboratory work in the human sciences. It also includes a variety of specific collaborations.

What is a Collaboratory?

ARC is a collaboratory in the human sciences. The term “collaboratory” gained currency in the early 1990s, particularly in areas such as the natural sciences and computing. There is a narrow meaning of collaboratory, namely “a distributed research network articulated by means of information technology.” We prefer to think of our collaboratory as a network concerned with more than information: it is a dynamic and emergent form for inquiry and exchange that seeks to re-imagine and remediate many of the things that, in the social sciences, might normally be included within a discipline, such as the norms, standards, and mechanisms of critical rectification that make it possible to conduct inquiry and contribute to the production of knowledge, tools for thought, and modes of collaborative work and care.

DIRECTORS

Paul Rabinow
rabinow at berkeley dot edu

Stephen Collier
colliers at newschool dot edu

Andrew Lakoff
alakoff at ucsd dot edu

Christopher Kelty
ckelty at rice dot edu

James Faubion
jdf at rice dot edu


Arpita Roy People


ARPITA ROY is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. She graduated from the University of Delhi in Sociology in 2000. She has recently written and published on the history of quantum innovation.


Rebecca Lemov People




George Marcus People




Dale Rose People


DALE A. ROSE is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, U.C. San Francisco. He is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, where he received his Master’s degree in Science & Technology Studies, and U.C. Los Angeles, where he took up a degree in history. He is currently undertaking a study of public health preparedness and biosecurity in the US, at both local and national levels, with a specific emphasis on the controversial Smallpox Vaccination Program. Dale Rose has written and co-written two book chapters exploring various facets of vaccine R&D and immunization policies in the US and abroad. He expects to complete his degree in Fall 2006.


Tobias Rees People


TOBIAS REES is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. He received his MA in anthropology, philosophy, comparative history of religion, and education from the University of Tuebingen (2000), and obtained a diploma in neuropharmacology from the Pasteur Institute (2003). From 2002 to 2004 he has conducted research in neurology and pharmacology laboratories in Paris. The focus of his work is on how the discovery of cerebral plasticity has led to a new (and distinctly contemporary) way of thinking and knowing the brain – as locus of the human. Tobias Rees has published on the relation between modernity and religion, and has translated and edited several books.


Adrian McIntyre People


ADRIAN McINTYRE is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. He returned to California in 2005 after spending 14 months in Darfur, Sudan as a media coordinator and policy adviser for Oxfam. Fluent in Arabic, he has over 12 years of experience in the Middle East, where he has worked as an aid worker, archaeologist, educator, journalist, and social science researcher in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Sudan, and Syria. He earned a Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from La Sierra University in 1996. He has co-edited September 11: Contexts and Consequences (2001) and wrote the JNEPI Iraq Country Handbook (2003), an overview of the political and legal context for humanitarian agencies in Iraq. A former Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation fellow, his current research interests include humanitarianism, civilian-military relations, the political economy of conflict, private military/security companies, and the “Global War on Terror.”


Nicolas Langlitz People


NICOLAS LANGLITZ is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Ph.D. program in Medical Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. San Francisco. He studied medicine and philosophy in Berlin and Paris. In 2004, he graduated as Doctor medicinae from the Medizinische Fakultät der Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin at Humboldt-Universität and Freie Universität with a thesis on the practice of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A revised version has been published under the title Die Zeit der Psychoanalyse. Lacan und das Problem der Sitzungsdauer (2005). At present, Nicolas Langlitz is conducting fieldwork on contemporary research on hallucinogenic drugs in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States.


Frédéric Keck People


FRÉDÉRIC KECK is Chargé de Recherches at the CNRS in Paris. He works as a member of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, an interdisciplinary laboratory in the social sciences combining theoretical questions with empirical studies. Frédéric Keck has conducted research on the relations between philosophy and the social sciences in the French context (Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss), has translated Paul Rabinow’s French DNA (2000) into French, and is currently beginning a research project on food safety raising contemporary questions on a classical anthropological theme


Lyle Fearnley People


LYLE FEARNLEY lives and works in Tianjin, China. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2005. Currently, his work focuses on the development of syndromic surveillance, a technology designed to detect emerging epidemics without relying on diagnostic reports, which has emerged as a site where security and health practices are under re-formation. His research combines inquiry into the history of disease surveillance in the United States with contemporary investigations, including ethnographic work among syndromic experts in local health departments.


Monica Eppinger People


MONICA EPPINGER is a joint degree candidate, Ph.D./J.D., in the Department of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley and Yale Law School. A U.S. diplomat from 1992-2001, she developed regional expertise in the former Soviet Union through postings to U.S. Embassy in Kiev and to the Secretary of State’s Office for the New Independent States. In Kiev, she covered the Ukrainian Parliament and the post-Soviet transition process, and drafted the State Department’s 1996 Country Human Rights Report on Ukraine. In Washington, as member of an interagency working group for strategic energy diplomacy, Monica Eppinger authored policy for the Secretaries of State, Defense, Energy, and Commerce and represented the U.S. in negotiations at the Ministerial level in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.


Carlo Caduff People


CARLO CADUFF is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Zurich in 2002 where he worked as an assistant to the Chair of the Department of the Social Studies of Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He co-translated two books by Paul Rabinow into German: Anthropologie der Vernunft. Studien zu Wissenschaft und Lebensführung (2004) and Was ist Anthropologie? (2004). Carlo Caduff is a regular contributor to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and is currently conducting research on avian influenza.


Gaymon Bennett People


GAYMON BENNETT is a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His work concerns the interactions of religion, politics, and science, with focus on bioethics. He is co-author of Immortal Lines: Theologians Say Yes to Stem Cell Research (forthcoming 2007), and co-editor of two volumes on science and religion The Evolution of Evil (forthcoming 2007) and Bridging Science and Religion (2004). He has published articles on the cloning and stem cell debates and has served on both private and public bioethics committees. His is currently working of the forms and norms of bioethics and the contemporary.


James Faubion People




Mary Murrell People


Mary Murrell is a third-year graduate student in the anthropology department of the University of California, Berkeley. She is developing an anthropology of the contemporary book. She begins her fieldwork in September 2008. Before coming to Berkeley, she was a senior editor at Princeton University Press. She is a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow (2006-2009).


The Tendential, qu’est-ce que c’est? People


“The Tendential: Qu’est-ce que c’est? A response to JDF”
Paul Rabinow

Many thanks to Jim for his thoughtful opening and extension of this on-going discussion of anthropology.
Here are some initial responses.

1. What is the tendential?
2. What is fieldwork?
3. What is the distinctiveness of fieldwork-based, tendentially oriented, anthropology?

While waiting for Jim’s answers, here are a few more off the cuff responses.

(1)

* Observation: The use of concept is too broad and covers diverse things that should be specified and distinguished.
* Response: Yes. Beginning the work of specification should have a high priority.

(2)
* Observation: We want to refuse referential determination while maintaining referential functionality.

* Response: We are with Dewey on this one. We want our concepts to contribute to orientation, inquiry, and diagnosis (or assessment). Hence our use of concepts is ex-static = outward bound and in motion and eminently contestable. In some emergent cases, the concepts may not be determinative (either in a constructivist or realist sense) but may well be productive.

(3)

* Observation: The referential function aspires to realism as opposed to the statistician’s “best fit.” Or Giddens’ and Bourdieu’s truth functions which are tendential.
* Response: I don’t understand this. Bourdieu was adamant that he was referring to the way things are — his statistics corrected all the false determinism and abstraction of earlier Durkheimians. From Quetelet to Galton, the statistical is referential and captures things (objects of a specific sort). So, please explain this more. Jim’s disagreement with Collier over ideal types is relevant here. Weber’s repeated attempts to respond to his critics (available in translation) point to the difficulty about making stable and clear claims about the status of ideal types and “empirical reality.” Once we have more clarification on the tendential then perhaps we can engage further on this point.

(4)

* Observation: We confuse the distinctions between the general and the universal (and their pairs).
* Response: We are with Foucault on this (What is Enlightenment?) that the general is not the universal. On the other hand, Jim is absolutely helpful in calling for more specification of the seemingly disparate and diverse things whose functionality our concepts seek to orient us toward. So, let’s try Hacking’s very down to earth preface to his Historical Ontology. There he says “call me a historical ontologist or a dialectical realist” the labels don’t matter much as long as one is not a universalist.

(5)

* Observation: There is affect, polemic, and confusion about the distinctiveness of fieldwork. And its relation to the discipline of anthropology.
* Response: OK. Et-tu James?

(6)

* Observation: The key shift is in temporality. From the ethnographic present to the recent-past and near-future.
* Response: Yes. And hence from Geertz back is both set in motion as historical and diminishing in his pertinence today. And Malinowski-Maurer?

(7)

* Observation: What is distinctively anthropological is “real-time observation” and narration of that temporality.
* Response: That is part of the story. The problem is how much of that real time narration is about anthropos. Anthropos as that figure caught in its doubles or an anthropos emerging from those doubles and taking a different shape. This issue is unresolved. And while it requires real-time observation or at least close and adjacent observation and engagement - it can not be reduced to that.

(8)

* Observation: Too much rupture.
* Response: Not convinced that the discipline is the concept we need.

Topoi.

* If one is taking as one’s object “anthropos + logoi” then the place of serious speech acts to sanctioned speech acts needs more exploration. This refers to George’s theme that Rabinow’s work method can’t be applied to ordinary people.
* What is fieldwork? What was fieldwork? What should fieldwork be within the new temporality, positionality, and orientation?
* What is there in the discipline that is not residual or becoming so? And what use and abuse could one make of that residual-ness? Does it have a critical function? If so, please discuss?
* What is the tendential? What is its temporality? How do we know it? What is its relation to the ideal type? Or the Gedanken Bild?


Concept Work, A Response People


James Faubion

I’ve finally got around to reading your exchanges on concept work and fieldwork and offer a few reactions and reflections that might keep the conversation going. The first is that “concept” strikes me as being too far-reaching a category to be of the best use, since it tends to encompass (in your exchanges, but also elsewhere) and so to suggest the effective sameness of such essentially general notions as that of “organization” or “assemblage” and such essentially non-generalizable notions as that of “vital systems security” or “risk society.” This confuses or at least makes more difficult to articulate the distinction that ARC is pressing between their intellectual labor and that of the production of theory  la Giddens.

Actually, I think it presses that distinction toward somewhat misleading and unhappy dichotomizations–but more on this slightly later. The appeal to “concept” as a blanket category also tends to encourage posing the question of the difference between “concept work” as ARC is putting forward and other modes of scientific-intellectual labor as the difference between particularization (or nominalism) and generalization (or universalism), which is logically too strong a way of formulating what is at issue–i.e., it is a formulation that entails more in the way of further commitments than it needs to or probably should entail. I think that it can appropriately be said as much of Giddens as of ARC that “concept work” consists in the fashioning of intellectual tools that serve a diacritical purpose. Giddens’ notion of the post-traditional serves just this purpose. Its difference from your own notions has to do with a second characteristic: it’s referential function. Like Dewey, you want to evade the referential determination of the truth-functionality of the claims you make with the notions you fashion, but you definitely seem to me to want to preserve the referential functionality of those same notions. That is to say, one of the criteria of the adequacy of notion-formation that guides you is the criterion of referential precision. Ideally, you want notions that correspond to or are as isomorphic as possible with the actual assemblages you’re encountering.

Perhaps your notions don’t stand or fall solely on the basis of whether or not they have this functionality, but they come fairly close to doing so if I’m not mistaken. This isn’t so with Giddens’ intellectual apparatus any more than it is so of Weber’s apparatus of ideal types or Bourdieu’s apparatus of such model-operators as “class.” I happen to think better of all these latter apparatus than Arc or George apparently does, but that’s not the point. The point is that none of the latter have been fashioned to have referential functionality as one of their primary criteria of adequacy. The function of the latter is “tendential,” not referential; they are pointers to trends–like the statistician’s line of best fit–rather than pointers to the actualities themselves. The issue is thus not–though at certain moments in your exchange, it sounds as if it is–that your “critical rectification” is not to be confused with mere “corroboration” or “verification” and so is not to be confused with what the (natural-)scientific theorist would be pursuing in testing his or her hypotheses. In fact, your concern with referential functionality allies you more with the natural scientist that you let on. The issue is rather that you depart from the (proper) theorist of any sort–natural- or social-scientific–in your secondary interest or even positive disinterest in the tendential, notionally or analytically. Yet this does not make you “particularists” as opposed to “generalists” (or universalists, better put).

Some of the notions you come up with–such as that of the assemblage–are in fact perfectly general. The scope and degree of the generalizability of some of the others you use is itself quite variable. “Concepts” come in all different sorts of shapes and sizes and your “concept work” is in fact exemplary of that diversity. You thus neither need nor would do altogether well to insist–as your rhetoric often suggests you’re doing–upon your “particularism” as against the “universalism” of “social theory.”

As I have tried to suggest above, the real distinction you’re seeking is a slightly different one. Your Aristotelian urge to “hold onto the phenomena,” your loyalty to the empirical realm, also suggests that you think that the various techniques of that method-that-is-not-one called fieldwork are a far more intrinsic dimension of critical rectification than your tone of resistance to fieldwork-as-method suggests. I’m inclined to agree with you that fieldwork should not be thought of as a method. Yet, I have to join George in pressing you on the distinctiveness of anthropological vs. other disciplinary modalities of fieldwork. I detect in your exchange less than ardor and perhaps some disagreement on whether or not the “concept work” that ARC does and the role of the techniques of empirical collection that are typically thought to be part of fieldwork merits consecration (or condemnation?) as anthropological. Yet, as what I’ve already said hints, I don’t think it’s enough simply to say, well, you’re not doing social theory, but if sociologists and political scientists of various sorts adopt precisely the same processes of critical rectification that you do–share your toolkit–then they’re as much anthropologists as you’re political scientists or sociologists and let that be an end to it. This seems to me to be a bit evasive, and what it evades is what makes critical rectificatrion and the techniques of fieldwork to which it has resort distinctively anthropological even when it is being done by someone in another discipline? (And conversely, what makes it distinctively unanthropological even when being done by an anthropologist?) I think you point to the outline of an answer to this question even if you avoid drawing the outline.

The first has to do with the temporality of research and its relation to the historicity of its primary object of study–the contemporary, and within it the assemblage. I recall in this vein Foucault’s argument in The Order of Things that the proliferation of the human disciplines in the nineteenth century hinges on the revelation of the multiplicity of historicity and that each discipline owes its distinctiveness as a discipline first and foremost to the distinctiveness of the historicity of its primary object/subject of investigation. The temporality proper to the anthropology of the primitive (and of the ethnographic “present” as its mode of expression) is in fact that of the infinitive; it is timeless. The anthropology of the contemporary is that of the (highly ungeneralizable) recent past-near future: the temporality not of the primitive nor of the modern and certainly not of the tendential system, nor for that matter of avant-guardist novelty, nor of journalistic newsworthiness, but still proximate (if you will) to that of the infinitive in its relative indefiniteness, for that is what the range between the recent past and the near future definitely is. So a good bit of what makes critical rectification anthropological is that it attends to a temporality distinctive of particular phenomena.

You suggest a further refinement of just this point when you’re characterizing something quite different–namely what separates assurantial reason from that of the scenarist of disaster. The latter has a must have an attachment to “real time.” The former is content–and must be–to be “archival.” I think the scenarist has his fellow traveler not in the insurance actuary but in the scenarist instead, precisely in his or her real-time attachment to and engagement with the phenomena under investigation, in the “being-there” of what is still the most obdurate dimension of anthropological-qua-”ethnographic” authority, even if there are no ethn ª left to graph. This is central to what continues, then, to make anthropology a discipline for which fieldwork–as real-time engagement–is of the essence. I don’t think this is the whole account of the anthropology-fieldwork relation. I think the rest has to come through a further development of the issue of what constitutes a significant problem of investigation, for surely what does so varies among the disciplines and not only for the reason that their temporal interface with the world is itself various. It also varies, I think, due to the inescapable connectedness of the determination of the (anthropological) significance of a problem in any time t with determinations of the (anthropological) significance of problems at times t-n. This is a matter not of the temporality of anthropological things but of the connection between the present of anthropology as a discipline with its past. This is a matter that you all–ARC and George included–seem to want to cast far, far more in terms of rupture than in terms of continuity–and in some, perhaps even many respects, that’s right. But it can also be misleading, at least to someone as inclined toward the tendential as I am myself. I throw the ball back into your courts.


What is Concept Work? An Exchange People


George Marcus, Andy Lakoff, Steven Collier

This exchange was initially circulated via email between George and Steve and Andy. It’s been added here in collapsed question-answer form. Click on the blue and red links to reveal the whole exchange.

ARC (SJC and AL): George posed a number of questions about what “concept-work” is and how it differs on the one hand from branded terms such as “friction”, and on the other hand from “field-work” as method:

query 1: GM

query 2: GM

ARC: Some background:

query 3: GM

ARC: These [questions] lead to further methodological issues: How are knowledge-claims generated, and defended? How might such claims contribute to broader discussions — and to a project that advances thought? In response, we began to develop a way of collectively developing and refining concepts in relation to findings in “the field”.

query 4: GM