The House of Kuhn, By the Water

Thomas Kuhn’s one-time vacation home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, is a modest modernist box. Built in 1960 by Nathaniel Saltonstall and Peter Morton, and empty since the 1990s, it is now in some disrepair, here and there sagging and waterlogged. It remains, in spite of wear and mold, legible as an exemplar of Cape Cod modern, a Bauhaus-meets-Frank-Lloyd-Wright architectural style that adapts the sharp lines of modernism to the scrub and pitch pine landscapes of the Outer Cape, a thin neck of land fronted on its east by the Atlantic Ocean and on its west by the Cape Cod Bay. Walking through the Kuhn cottage in May 2012, guided by architect Peter McMahon—head of a nonprofit dedicated to restoring mid-century modernist homes—I was taken, no surprise, by the house’s structure

From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures

What sort of image does the planet Earth possess at the opening of the 21st century? If in the 1960s, the Whole Earth, the planet as seen from space, became a cold war, proto-environmentalist icon for a fragile ocean planet, in the 2010s, Google Earth, the globe encountered as a manipulable virtual object on our computer screens, has become an index for multiple and socially various interpretations and interventions; its thicket of satellite images, text legends, and street level photographs can all be tagged, commented upon, modified. In this essay, I examine a kindred image-object, Google Ocean, asking what sort of representation of the planetary sea is in the making in our digital days. Stirring up the century-old classification of signs by semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, I argue that Google Ocean is a mottled mash of icons, indexes, and symbols of the marine and maritime world as well as a simultaneously dystopian and utopian (that is to say, heterotopian) diagram of the sea - though one that floats in a media ecology that tends to occlude its infrastructural history and conditions of possibility

Potential Energy and the Body Electric

Physics tells us that potential energy is the capacity to do work that a body possesses as a result of its position in electric, magnetic, or gravitational fields. Thinking of “potentiality” in an electric idiom and with reference to its place in human biological processes that implicate electric phenomena, such as the pulses of action potentials that animate the heart and brain, can afford novel angles into contemporary biomedical enactments of humanness. This paper explores the material and rhetorical power of electric potential in cardiac and neurological medicine, paying attention to how discourses of “waves” of energy format the way scientists apprehend bodies as emplaced in time—in a time that can be about both cyclicity and futurity. Attention to electrophysiological phenomena may enrich the way anthropologists of the biosciences think about potentiality, taking scholars beyond our established attentions to the genetic, cellular, or pharmacological to think about the body electric

The potential of natural gas as a bridging technology in low-emission road transportation in Germany

Greenhouse gas emission reductions are at the centre of national and international efforts to mitigate climate change. In road transportation, many politically incentivised measures focus on increasing the energy efficiency of established technologies, or promoting electric or hybrid vehicles. The abatement potential of the former approach is limited, electric mobility technologies are not yet market-ready. In a case study for Germany, this paper focuses on natural gas powered vehicles as a bridging technology in road transportation. Scenario analyses with a low level of aggregation show that natural gas-based road transportation in Germany can accumulate up to 464 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent emission reductions until 2030 depending on the speed of the diffusion process. If similar policies were adopted EU-wide, the emission reduction potential could reach a maximum of about 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent. Efforts to promote natural gas as a bridging technology may therefore contribute to significant emissions reductions

Uma onda de lama: viagem de águas tóxicas, de Bento Rodrigues ao Atlântico brasileiro

This article offers an anthropological examination of the aftermath of the Samarco dam disaster of November 2015. We analyze the widely used metaphor of the wave of mud to track how news, experience, and representation of toxic iron ore tailings water traveled from Bento Rodrigues down the Doce River to the coast. We draw on eyewitness testimonials, on scientific reports, on social media, on documentary films, and on a theatre production. We draw on sociological research conducted by a team at the Brazilian coast. The wave of mud image helps us understand the physical and symbolic effects of this environmental disaster and crime.O artigo oferece uma análise antropológica do momento posterior ao desastre da Samarco, ocorrido em novembro de 2015. Exploramos a metáfora da onda de lama para seguir notícias, experiências e representações sobre o deslocamento de rejeitos de mineração, ocorrido a partir de Bento Rodrigues, descendo o rio Doce até atingir o oceano. Baseamo-nos em testemunhos oculares, relatórios científicos, notícias, redes sociais, documentários e, ainda, em uma peça de teatro. Igualmente, utilizamos trabalho etnográfico conduzido na costa do Espírito Santo. A imagem da onda de lama permite entender os efeitos físicos e simbólicos desse desastre e crime ambiental

The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the politics of its naming and framing. We lay out a set of propositions and emphasize the moral aspects of claims about potentiality as well as the productivity of the ambiguity involved when dealing with that which does not (yet and may never) exist. We suggest that potentiality is both an analytic—one that has appeared explicitly and tacitly in the history of anthropology—as well as an object of study in need of further attention. To understand contemporary meanings and practices associated with potentiality, we must integrate an awareness of our own social scientific assumptions about potentiality with critical scrutiny of how the word and concept operate in the lives of the people we study

Périls et promesses de l’abondance microbienne

Au cours des dernières années, la vie microbienne a été très présente dans l’actualité. Épidémies d’Escherichia coli, discussions sur les bienfaits des aliments crus et fermentés, recherches sur des formes de vie capables de vivre dans des environnements extrêmes : le modeste microbe est devenu une figure qui permet de penser les présents et les futurs possibles de la nature, au sens le plus large comme le plus étroit du terme. En partant du constat que les représentations dominantes de la vie microbienne sont passées du langage du péril à celui de la promesse, nous affirmons que les microbes – en particulier lorsqu’ils se multiplient sous la forme de communautés microbiennes – sont considérés comme des écosystèmes modèles au sens prescriptif du terme, c’est-à-dire des indices de ce que devraient ou pourraient être les rapports écologiques entre humains et autres organismes. Notre propos s’appuie sur deux études de cas : les politiques réglementaires sur les fromages au lait cru, et les recherches spéculatives de l’astrobiologie. Penser les communautés microbiennes comme écosystèmes modèles permettra peut-être de corriger les déterminismes à l’œuvre dans certains discours récents qui s’intéressent à la matérialité des objets scientifiques.Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promise, we argue that microbes – especially when thriving as microbial communities – are being upheld as model ecosystems in a prescriptive sense, as tokens of how organisms and human ecological relations with them could, should, or might be. We do so in reference to two case studies: the regulatory politics of artisanal cheese and the speculative research of astrobiology. To think of and with microbial communities as model ecosystems offers a corrective to the scientific determinisms we detect in some recent calls to attend to the materiality of scientific objects

‘A Chain of Creation, Continuation, Continuity’ : Feminist dramaturgy and the matter of the sea

This article considers what remnants of the imaginary link established between the maternal and the sea might still be useful in feminist performance practice and theory. It does so by discussing a practice-as-research experiment that adapted strategies from Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine–which performs a liquification of ordering structures in prose writing–into a dramaturgical form based on the logic of waves. The article goes on to suggest that such a dramaturgy recasts creation as a fluid state of becoming ex tempore, resisting the masculine-connoted vision of creation as an act of the singular genius ex nihilo. It further argues that drawing on a non-human phenomenon, the sea, to describe and theorise a type of dramaturgical composition might be read as a twofold attempt on the hegemony of patriarchal culture: through its associative link with the maternal body the creative potential of the feminine is revalued while at the same time the generative capacity of the non-human is recognised via Gaston Bachelard’s notion of the material imagination. The article concludes by proposing that the sea, together with its analogic association to the maternal, can be instated as a figure that gives temporary shape to an alternative vision of cultural production

Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies

Sound studies and Deaf studies may seem at first impression to operate in worlds apart. We argue in this article, however, that similar renderings of hearing, deafness, and seeing as ideal types - and as often essentialized sensory modes - make it possible to read differences between Sound studies and Deaf studies as sites of possible articulation. We direct attention to four zones of productive overlap, attending to how sound is inferred in deaf and Deaf practice, how reimagining sound in the register of low-frequency vibration can upend deafhearing dichotomies, how “deaf futurists“ champion cyborg sound, and how signing and other non-spoken communicative practices might undo phonocentric models of speech. Sound studies and Deaf studies emerge as fields with much to offer one another epistemologically, theoretically, and practically