Exchanging Equations: Anthropology as/beyond Symmetry

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Spider web anthropologies: ecologies, infrastructures, entanglements

Ecologies, infrastructures, entanglements. Anthropology and STS have recently found some unsuspected common groundings in the relational, emergent and self-organizational affordances of these three conceptual systems. Vibrant yet fragile, interactive and responsive whilst simultaneously resilient and solicitous, the earthy and muddled and tenacious engagements afforded by ‘ecologies’, ‘infrastructures’ and ‘entanglements’ have brought new sources of analytical vitality and valence to social theory. These are languages of description that conjure worlds of material and biotic interdependencies, human and non-human agencies weaving themselves into and around filaments of energy, matter, history and decay. Worlds that hold on; worlds that creep up. Spider worlds and spider webs calling for spider web anthropologies. In this chapter I want to introduce the figure of the spider web as a heuristic to helps us think our current predicament of expulsion, ruin and precarity. The spider web, I want to suggest, offers an apposite metaphor for a world that holds itself in precarious balance, that tenses itself with violence and catastrophe but also grace and beauty, and that calls out and silhouettes promissory worlds of entanglements. However, what draws me to the metaphoric seduction of the spider web, I must add, is one specific trait: its semblance and vocation as a trap. Spider webs are traps. It is their materiality as traps, their condition as material and epistemic interfaces between worlds, that helps us ‘capture’ new openings for the work of imagination and description today. I am interested in the work that traps can do for description, in the trap as a method for description. The spider web offers a beautiful example of how this method works: the spider web entangles the worlds of prey and predator and in so doing outlines and crystallizes the infrastructure of their ecologies. The spider-web-trap is an ecology, but it is also an entanglement, and it is also an infrastructure. I shall return to each one of these registers in some more detail shortly. The method of description that the spider-web-trap sets in motion is a specific type of ‘recursive’ operation: think of the spider’s spinning of the web, eating part of it daily to recuperate some of the energy expended in spinning. The operation of recursion works therefore as a source environment for future descriptions and an environmental palette itself. We may think of it as a technique of ‘double environmentalisation’: weaving worlds into existence at the same time as it re-captures existing worlds. Describing worlds and worldling descriptions. Worlds that hold on, worlds that creep up.Peer reviewe

Madrid ‘en construcción’: polis y apocalipsis en una sociedad hipotecaria

Este artículo versa sobre los modos en que un grupo de jóvenes profesionales residentes en Madrid se representan el funcionamiento de la economía política y la convivencia democrática a través de la imaginación de la ciudad (polis) como escenario inmobiliario e hipotecario. Tal escenario define y da forma a la ciudad como proceso político ‘en construcción’, que se auto-genera precisamente por no estar todavía terminado, por habitar una suerte de límite o apocalipsis democrático. Qué significa habitar este espacio apocalíptico, y qué rasgos le atribuyen mis informadores, es lo que el artículo intenta explicar.Peer reviewe

En relación: una entrevista con Marilyn Strathern

We are delighted to mark the change of name of our journal with an interview with Marilyn Strathern, one of the most original and influential anthropologists of the last fifty years. The text is in three parts. The first part offers a short historical and institutional background to Strathern’s academic life. The second part is an introduction to her work. The third and final part is an interview that Alberto Corsín Jiménez conducted via email with Marilyn Strathern between September and November 2018.Nos complace celebrar el cambio de nombre de nuestra revista con una entrevista a Marilyn Strathern, una de las antropólogas más originales e influyentes de los últimos cincuenta años. El texto consta de tres partes. La primera parte ofrece una panorámica de la trayectoria académica y vida institucional de Strathern. La segunda parte presenta una introducción a su obra. En la tercera y última parte se ofrece una entrevista que Alberto Corsín Jiménez realizó por correo electrónico a Marilyn Strathern entre septiembre y noviembre de 2018

We Fall

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Managing the social/knowledge equation

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Ethnography: A Prototype

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Ethnos on 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2015.1133688”.The article describes a long-term collaboration with a variety of free culture activists in Madrid: digital artists, software developers and guerrilla architectural collectives. Coming of age as Spain walked into the abyss of the economic crisis, we describe how we re-functioned our ethnographic project into a ‘prototype’. We borrow the notion of prototype from free culture activism: a socio-technical design characterised by the openness of its underlying technical and structural sources, including for example access to its code, its technical and design specifications, and documentary and archival registries. These ethnographic prototypes functioned as boundary objects and zones of infrastructural enablement that allowed us to argue with our collaborators about the city at the same time as we argued through the city. Providing a symmetrical counterpoint to the actions of free culture hackers elsewhere in the city, our anthropological prototypes were both a cultural signature of the radical praxis taking place in Madrid today and its expressive infrastructure.Peer reviewe

Matters of sense: preoccupation in Madrid's popular assemblies

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Ecologies in beta: the city as infrastructure of apprenticeships

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An Anthropological Trompe l'Oeil for a Common World: An Essay on the Economy of Knowledge

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as ‘big’ as the world itself: talk of ‘public knowledge’ and ‘public goods,’ ‘the commons’ or ‘global justice’ create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l’oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic ‘trap’ of the trompe l’oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released.Peer reviewe