Atsuro Morita

The Ethnographic Machine: Experimenting with Context and Comparison in Strathernian Ethnography

Context holds a significant place mediating the conceptual and the empirical in ethnography. This modality of knowledge has also become a significant part of science and technology studies since the rise of laboratory studies. However, conventional modes of contextualization that locate the object of study within a whole—such as within a society or culture—have become a target of suspicion and criticism since the 1980s. This led to the radical alteration of the contextualizing strategies of actor–network theory (ANT) and multisited ethnography. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern is also responding to this crisis by renovating the practice of ethnography in a way significantly different from both strategies. Since contextualization occupies a significant place in the formation of ethnography as a representation of a larger “out there” reality, her alternative contextualization requires a new characterization of ethnography other than representation. This article tries to expound the complicated, and often perplexing, ethnography of Strathern by making an analogy with objects familiar to most science, technology, and society scholars, namely, machines. By doing so, this article argues that Strathern is opening up a new way of dealing with context that is radically different both from ANT and from multisited ethnography.

Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments

ABSTRACT Infrastructures have conventionally been viewed as material substrates underlying social action. On this basis, cultural anthropology has engaged infrastructure as vehicles through which political values and symbols are made manifest. In contrast, this introduction, and the contributions that follow, specifies an orientation to infrastructures as ontological experiments. At issue is a view of infrastructures as experimental systems that integrate a multiplicity of disjunctive elements and spin out new relations between them. The result is the creation and transformation of different forms of practical, materialized ontologies, which give shape to culture, society, and politics. Given that these transformations are often slow and incremental, they often unfold under the radar of anthropological analysis. However, we argue that it is important for the anthropology of infrastructure to find ways of bringing their world-changing capacities into view. The paper ends with a brief introduction to the contributions of the special issue.

Anthropology as critique of reality: A Japanese turn

The impetus for this forum was the recent publication in Japan of the volume Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku (Anthropology as critique of reality) edited by Professor Naoki Kasuga. In the Japanese context, this volume represents the emergent interest in what has come to be called the “the ontological turn” in Euro-American anthropology. This forum offers a depiction of the anthropological genealogies that led to the Japanese interest in “ontological matters,” and it offers an entry point for understanding Japanese interpretations of, and responses to, this set of issues and concerns. The forum comprises an introductory piece by Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita, outlining the histories within Japanese anthropology that led to Genjitsu Hihan no Jinruigaku, an interview conducted by Jensen with Professor Kasuga on his intellectual genealogy in the context of Japanese anthropology, and a translated and edited chapter from Anthropology as critique of reality, Miho Ishii’s “Acting with things: Self-poiesis, actuality, and contingency in the formation of divine worlds.” These pieces are followed by commentaries from Marilyn Strathern, whose work provides a key source of inspiration for the Japanese turn to ontology, and Annelise Riles, who has had long-standing relations with Japanese anthropology, including Professor Kasuga.

Infrastructuring Amphibious Space: The Interplay of Aquatic and Terrestrial Infrastructures in the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand

Abstract The historic flooding that occurred in 2011 in central Thailand revealed fierce struggles over flood protection, which were made particularly complex because of the unruly nature of water itself. The interplay between two forms of infrastructure, each of which shape the flows of water coursing through the Chao Phraya Delta, is key to understanding this complexity. As an ambiguous place in between the sea and land, a delta environment can be seen alternatively as an extension of the sea or as reclaimable land. Constructing infrastructures based on either of these views remakes the landscape accordingly—thus making the landscape more terrestrial or more aquatic. In the Chao Phraya Delta, the terrestrial infrastructure, which consists of road networks and land-based urban living, has been overlaid on a pre-existing aquatic infrastructure characterized by canal transport and flood adaptive architecture. Mainly due to state interest in facilitating water transport, the aquatic infrastructure organized the landscape of the delta until the mid-twentieth century. However, since then the introduction of modern irrigation has progressively rendered the delta landscape more terrestrial. Dry land created by the irrigation system made modern forms of agriculture, commerce and industry possible. While this terrestrial trend seemed to take over the entire delta, the terrestrial infrastructure did not eliminate the aquatic one. Instead it created a dynamic interplay between different forms of infrastructure. The 2011 flood foregrounded the centrality of this interplay in flood protection and sheds new light on the role of the aquatic infrastructure.

Anthropology and STS: Generative interfaces, multiple locations

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference—where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

Multispecies Infrastructure: Infrastructural Inversion and Involutionary Entanglements in the Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand

ABSTRACT This paper aims to elucidate the central role floating rice has played in the formation of water management infrastructure in the Chao Phraya delta in Thailand. Operating in the background of everyday activities, infrastructures often remain overlooked by the actors that rely on them. However at certain moments, such as breakdowns, infrastructures make visible usually hidden connections between humans and non-humans. In recent years, the infrastructural role of floating rice has become a matter of concern for many actors in and around the Chao Phraya delta. This paper examines the particular multispecies relations between water management infrastructure, farmers and rice in the delta. In particular, the paper traces moments of infrastructural inversion that shed light on rices involutions as part of a multispecies infrastructure. Attention to these involutions, the paper argues, facilitates a reconsideration of infrastructures relationship with nature.

Traveling Comparisons: Ethnographic Reflections on Science and Technology

This special issue aims to investigate some novel uses of the comparative method at the intersections of STS and anthropology through ethnographic accounts of technoscience in various Asian contexts. In todays globalizing world, knowledge is under constant negotiation and reordering around conflicting ideas of progress and development. Nowhere is it more evident than in the daily practices of living and working with old and new technologies. Scientists, mechanics, physicians, and farmers whom anthropologists encounter in the field see development, uniqueness, or backwardness in their innovations in the midst of complex relations, which connect local innovations and routines with the transnational circulation of people, objects, and information. How do these flows and unexpected connections stimulate innovators and users to make comparisons in their daily engagements with technologies? How should anthropologists and STS scholars reflect on the fact that while comparisons make connections, connections make comparisons as well? This introduction tackles such questions in order to account for the rich traffic between conceptual frameworks and methodological tools in the five articles that follow.

Traveling Engineers, Machines, and Comparisons: Intersecting Imaginations and Journeys in the Thai Local Engineering Industry

Recent studies in STS and anthropology have elucidated that the travel of science has been entangled with various forms of travel, including indigenous modes. While the Western style of travel often entails comparative imaginations about the difference between places and people focusing on culture, some anthropologists argue that the indigenous conceptualization of difference and travel can be radically different from Western notions. This article explores the intricate relationship between travel of technology and imaginations about difference by focusing on two modes of comparisons found in engineering practices in two significantly different contexts in Thailand: in a technology-transfer project sponsored by the Japanese government and in small factories in the informal sector, which is the supposed target of the project. In both contexts, comparisons between engineering practices are almost inevitable as the Japanese engineers and Thai mechanics make sense of the relationships between the two countries as iterated in their practices. Embedded in the structure of the Japanese transfer project is an interest in the social contexts of technology; following that impulse, this article juxtaposes two largely different modes of travel and comparative imaginations and sheds light on the unnoticed presumptions of the modern comparative imagination.

Encounters, Trajectories, and the Ethnographic Moment: Why "Asia as Method" Still Matters

In “Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method” in this issue, John Law and Lin Wen-yuan forcefully argue for what they call “a third postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry” (214). This insistence is firmly rooted in their ethnographic encounters with practices of Taiwanese STS and Chinese medicine. In these encounters, Law and Lin put their own analytical practice in a symmetrical relation with their interlocutor’s Chinese medical practice, such that not only does STS provide insight into Chinese medical practice but also the latter informs an alternative mode of STS. Their complex mode of contextualization is striking. Anthropologists often see context as a set of connections between the object in focus and its surroundings. Because context plays a significant role in giving meaning to the object, contextualization, in the sense of providing a new set of connections, transforms the object’s meaning. Such transformation is usually part of what it means to do anthropological analysis. Context, that is, makes sense of a phenomenon that at first glance looks strange (Dilley 1999; Strathern 1987). Law and Lin’s exploration is no exception. They start with a perplexing moment in a STS workshop in Hsinchu, which gave rise to “disconcertment” (Verran 2001)

Ocean, travel, and equivocation: A response to Anne Salmond's "Tears of Rangi"

Salmond’s paper speaks to two significant but rather underexplored aspects of the turn to ontology: travel and equivocation. In current debates, the ontological turn is often taken as a (re)turn to the radical alterity of non-Western modes of conceptualizing and composing worlds. The radical alterity of non-Western ontologies can be fruitfully understood in light of histories of travel that have brought about the encounter between Western and non-Western ontologies. Focusing on travel obliges our arguments to begin from the middle-ground where different parties encounter, exchange, and diverge. In these encounters equivocation plays a significant role.