Dominic Boyer

Energopower: An Introduction

This special collection of Anthropological Quarterly aims to spark new ways of thinking about formations and operations of modern power. Specifically, the articles explore how energic forces and infrastructures interrelate with institutions and ideations of political power. In the hope of fanning sparks into flames, we juxtapose this process of exploration with the influential paradigm of “biopower” developed by Michel Foucault. All of the essays explore how modalities of “biopower” (the management of life and population) today depend in crucial respects upon modalities of energopower (the harnessing of electricity and fuel) and vice-versa. We emphasize especially the critical importance of exploring the juncture of biopower and energopower in the context of the rising importance of scientific and political discourse on anthropogenic climate change. As human use of energy is increasingly linked to the disruption and destruction of conditions of life (human and otherwise), the tensions between dominant energopolitical systems (like carbon fuel) and biopolitical projects (like sustainability) are increasingly evident, opening new possibilities of anthropological analysis. Both energopower and biopower, we conclude, are entering into a pivotal transitional phase.

Introduction Worlds of journalism

In this article we briefly review past and present ethnography of journalism in order to explain the timing and significance of this special issue, ‘Worlds of Journalism’. We make the case for the ethnography of journalism as a key lens for better understanding four sets of research problems facing contemporary social science: (1) the involvement of media professions like journalism in processes of social mediation and cultural production more broadly, (2) the opportunity of reflexive social science to ‘study sideways’ other professional groups through ethnography, (3) the contemporary transformation of institutions and practices of political communication, democracy and citizenship, and (4) the emergence of new modes of translocal social experience such as those experienced by mobile, cosmopolitan professional groupsIn this article we briefly review past and present ethnography of journalism in order to explain the timing and significance of this special issue, ‘Worlds of Journalism’. We make the case for the ...

Censorship as a Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic

What do you think you would find on the desk of a censor? He—almost certainly “he”—would not need much. A jar filled with blue pencils. A coffee cup. A phone for whispering praise to the higher-ups and for ignoring the entreaties of his victims. For reading material, an ideological reference manual or a dog-eared sheaf of instructions would suffice. Surely, one would not expect to find any actual books on the censors shelves—why read when your life is committed to eviscerating literature?

The corporeality of expertise

Abstract In this essay, I write about the relationship between corporeality and expert knowledge while simultaneously, and only partly successfully, trying to avoid writing about ‘theintellectuals body.’ The first half of the essay enlists Marxian social theory to model how the division and specialization of intellectual labors generates a certain experiential relationship between expert and objects of expert knowledge that I have termed elsewhere the ‘phenomenology of expertise.’ I argue that the focus of intellectual labor upon rationality decorporealizes intellectual self-aware-ness while lending ‘objects’ of rational attention a peculiarly material character. The second half of the essay complicates the theoretical arguments of the first half with an ethnographic engagement of the corporeality of eastern German journalism in the 1990s. Here, I focus on the norm of professional corporeal ‘calm’ and on how gesture and reflex can be interpreted to exhibit a mode of critical expertise that is otherwise actively policed in the professional environment of the contemporary eastern German media. In conclusion, I reflect on how expert anthropological engagement with other modes and cultures of expertise creates opportunities for an improved reflexive awareness of the social character of knowledge practices that are neither ‘ours’ nor ‘theirs.’ Intellectuals, taken generally … seem to lack a starting point from which their scriptures come: where are their bodies? This is the simple question I wish to register. Sometimes, but rarely, the body is there - fleetingly and sparingly in journals, diaries, sometimes in letter. … [I]t is noticeable how amongst male intellectuals this is the most remarkable and yet unremarked absence. philip corrigan (1988:369)

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

Visiting knowledge in anthropology: An introduction

It is symptomatic of my dilemma in introducing this special issue of Ethnos that the title of this project went through a half-dozen different iterations before settling at ‘Revisiting the Anthropology of Knowledge.’ The provisional title had been ‘New Directions in the Anthropology of Knowledge’ but the farther we all delved into the problem of knowledge, the clearer it became that there was nothing particularly ‘new’ about anthropology’s interest in it. The term ‘revisitation’ by contrast evokes a return engagement, even a home-coming. In truth, it would be difficult to locate anthropological research that did not, at some level, speak to and about human knowledge. Especially if one understands the standard referentiality of a term like ‘knowledge’ as codifying the habituated epistemic forms produced by the human capacity for meaningful semiosis (e.g., ‘culture,’ more or less, in its postwar anthropological trajectory), how could any investigation of meaningful action and experience not also, at once, be an investigation of local schemes and settlements of knowledge and modes of knowing? Moreover, explicit engagement with certain dimensions of knowledge (particularly rationality, logic, and cognition) was one of the key watersheds in the disciplinary development of anthropology in the 20th century. The debates surrounding the characterizations of ‘primitive’ knowledge in texts like E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think, for example, centered anthropological discourse on the question of the universality of human epistemic forms, processes, and contents. Did primitives have the same logical and cognitive capabilities as moderns? Were their knowledge works different, but equivalently valid, or instead erroneous? Lucien Levy-Bruhl argued that primitives had logical and cognitive capacities like us but that they were

Turner’s Anthropology of Media and Its Legacies

In the 1990s, Terry Turner produced some of the most conceptually and ethnographically important research anywhere in the anthropology of media, apparently without having intended to do so. This article reviews the impact of his collaboration on the Kayapo Video Project both in terms of its effects in Kayapo communities and in terms of the debates it catalyzed in anthropology over the relationship of human productive powers with representation and social mediation in its broadest sense. Turner’s anthropology of media (and indeed his anthropology more generally) emphasizes that human production always contains a historical excess within itself, which is the potential to transcend and to transform fundamentally the dominant social relations of production and reproduction in a given time and place. As such, Turner’s work challenges what I describe as more ‘Hegelian’ theories of media that emphasize the inaccessibility of social mediation to human agency. In conclusion, I celebrate Turner’s own historical excess and his vehement rejection of the pure/applied split in anthropological knowledge and praxis.

Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico

The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.

Introduction to Turner Special Issue

This special issue of Critique of Anthropology collects revised versions of several papers presented at a conference honoring Terence Turner – ‘For a Critique of Pure Culture’ (held at Cornell University, Department of Anthropology, 16–17 April 2004). These papers only hint at what all participants agreed to be Terry’s wide-ranging, diverse and profound impact upon anthropology, indigenous and human rights, and culture theory. The conference began with a keynote lecture entitled ‘A History of Aboriginal Futures: The Politics of Indigenous Presence’ by Fred Myers (co-authored by Faye Ginsburg), followed the next day by 10 shorter presentations.1 We collect some of these papers here not only because they are worthy of publication in their own right and as a testament to Terry’s achievements, but also because we hope they will encourage others to emulate Terry’s example of integrating academic and political values. To this end, and because Terry’s institutional engagements have been so diverse and multifold, we include a selected bibliography of his writings.2 Those who know Terry and his work well regard him as an anthropologist’s anthropologist in several senses. First, anthropology is arguably best distinguished from other disciplines claiming ‘culture’ as object by our method – fieldwork – and our mode of representation – ethnography. Terry’s nearly lifelong engagement with the Kayapo of central Brazil is exemplary in this regard. In an era in which thoroughgoing familiarity with situated communities increasingly loses ground to other interests in the writings of academic anthropologists, few can match Terry’s record either in terms of the breadth of his expertise (ranging across kinship, politics, ritual and history) or continuity of involvement (beginning in 1962 and continuing to the present, his resumé lists 23 trips to Brazil to conduct fieldwork). This commitment to the Kayapo has not prevented Terry from pursuing enthusiastically an anthropological understanding of broader regional and global historical forces (Turner, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002c, 2003), but he is a leader among those anthropologists who insist that comprehending macrolevel phenomena requires attending to local realities. Second, insofar as analytical creativity (or ‘theory’) constitutes an important academic value, Terry’s work is, simply put, unmatched. Against the current of contemporary trends that draw theoretical inspiration Article

Energy, Anthropology of

This article reviews anthropological research on energy dating back to the 1940s. Three generations of research are identified and explored: the first was Leslie Whites pathbreaking effort in the 1940s and 1950s to rethink models of cultural evolution through the lens of energy use. Then, in the 1970s, a second generation of anthropological research took shape in response to the global oil shocks and the beginning of serious political debates over the need for transition to renewable energy resources. Those conversations were largely silenced by a political recommitment to carbon and nuclear fuel across the world in the 1980s. However, in the past several years, a third generation of anthropological research has rapidly developed, spurred by mounting evidence of anthropogenic climate change and its impacts of human and nonhuman life across the world.