A Conversation with Marilyn Strathern About Intimacy & Entanglement

Marilyn Strathern is probably one of the most important thinkers alive today. Sometimes described as a classical anthropologist, there is actually very little that is traditional about what she does with thinking, concepts and anthropological knowledge. Her work critiques the conceptualizations, especially the material and social relations that body them forth, which produce the figure of the Euro-American individual. Through an engagement with some of the most profound political phenomena of contemporary life she critiques those phenomena and the ideas and relations they reproduce. Her extraordinary effect is to make us think the concepts and the phenomena, particularly Euro-American culture in the late 20th and the early 21st century, differently. She does this through how she rewrites the ideas that underpin them, often through the prism of Melanesian ideas. My boldness in inviting her to have a conversation about intimacy for this volume comes from my own intimate entanglement with her work since first encountering her as a PhD student at Edinburgh (in around 1988) when I had the audacity to write to her and she had the grace to reply. Since then while I suspect that she is suspicious of me as both a sociologist and as a someone overly concerned with performance, she once told me on the publication of my essay on Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits and ‘dividual’ being (Latimer 2008) that she knew there was an example of dividuality outside of Melanesia and that sometimes I do seem to understand what it is that she means. My love of her work and of her as an academic comes from her very real activism. She has dedicated much of her life to institutions and public bodies as well as worked tirelessly both for Anthropology, for women, and as a public intellectual. In the Academy she challenges at every turn the oppressive technologies and forces that emplace and situate creativity, thinking and knowledge-making; while in her writing she expresses something so incredibly hard to express – that despite the endless ways in which we are positioned as individuals our creation(s) is/are in fact the effect of relations and the parts of others that make us up, including the debt we owe for what forms us. And it is some of the intimacy of this vision that I hoped to capture in our conversation

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition:virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety

Professionalization as a governance strategy for synthetic biology

This article considers professionalization as a governance strategy for synthetic biology, reporting on social science interviews done with scientists, science journal editors, members of science advisory boards and authors of nongovernmental policy reports on synthetic biology. After summarizing their observations about the potential advantages and disadvantages of the professionalization of synthetic biology, we analyze professionalization as a strategy that overcomes dichotomies found in the current debates about synthetic biology governance, specifically “top down” versus “bottom up” governance and scientific fact versus public values. Professionalization combines community and state, fact and value. Like all governance options, professionalization has limitations, particularly regarding war and peace. It is best conceptualized as potentially part of a wider range of governance mechanisms working in concert: a “web of prevention”

Data intimacies: building infrastructures for intensified embodied encounters with air pollution

The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in the light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of these data is considered crucial for citizens to manage their own health, and a proliferation of new informational forms and apps have been created to achieve this. And yet, beyond everyday decisions (when to use a mask or when to do sports outdoors), it is not clear whether current methods of engaging citizens produce behavioural change or stronger citizen engagement with air pollution. Drawing on the design, construction and ethnography of an urban infrastructure to measure, make visible and remediate particulate matter (PM2.5) through a water vapour cloud that we installed at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, we examined the effects and affects of producing a public space that allows for physical interaction with data. In Yellow Dust, data from PM2.5 were translated into mist, the density of which was responsive to the number of particles suspended in the air. Data were made sense/ible by the changing conditions of the air surrounding the infrastructure, which can be experienced in embodied, collective and relational ways: what we call ‘molecular intimacies’. By reflecting on how the infrastructure facilitated new modes of sensing data, we consider how ‘data intimacies’ can re-specify action by producing different forms of engagement with air pollution

Reflecting on loss in Papua New Guinea

This article takes up the conundrum of conducting anthropological fieldwork with people who claim that they have 'lost their culture,' as is the case with Suau people in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea. But rather than claiming culture loss as a process of dispossession, Suau claim it as a consequence of their own attempts to engage with colonial interests. Suau appear to have responded to missionization and their close proximity to the colonial-era capital by jettisoning many of the practices characteristic of Massim societies, now identified as 'kastom.' The rejection of kastom in order to facilitate their relations with Europeans during colonialism, followed by the mourning for kastom after independence, both invite consideration of a kind of reflexivity that requires action based on the presumed perspective of another