Gisa Weszkalnys

Logics of interdisciplinarity

Abstract This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.

Cursed resources, or articulations of economic theory in the Gulf of Guinea

Abstract Economic experiments, or attempts to shape national and local economies with the help of economic theory, have been typical of post-war development efforts. Economic sociologists have explored the role of such experiments to demonstrate how economics – as a set of practices, ideas and technologies – enacts its worlds. This paper examines one such case of high-powered economic theory and its enactment in an emergent West African oil economy by focusing on economist Jeffrey Sachss advisory project in São Tomé and Príncipe. It pivots on the ‘resource curse’, an economic device that has recently gained purchase in global policy circles. This paper argues that economic devices are not simply imposed on pre-arranged worlds. Instead, they collide with and adjust to already existing politico-economic and socio-cultural conditions, resulting in complex articulations. Drawing on ethnographic material, I critique the ability of the resource curse to make sense fully of apprehensions of the past, present and future consequences of extractive industry developments. Contrasting economic accounts of an incipient curse with competing and complementary local accounts of the effects of oil wealth, I propose a new model for the sociological analysis of the variety of articulations into which an economic device, such as the curse, may enter.

Anticipating oil: the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come

Here, I analyse the temporal politics of economic disaster associated with prospective oil exploration in the African Atlantic island state of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP). I call this politics the ‘not yet’ of disaster - a temporality in which future disaster has effects in the present. The theories and practices of social scientists, global policy institutions, and advocacy groups have contributed to an ontology of oil as a disastrous matter that may cause a ‘resource curse’. Focusing on STPs anticipated oil resources, I ask what political forms, objects and effects are generated by what some consider a disaster in the making. I trace the role of anticipation as a specific temporal disposition, particularly among Santomean state officials and members of civil society, which substitutes fresh certainties and uncertainties about what oil might bring. These include suspicions and uncertainties regarding the operations of anticipation itself. Suspicion, I suggest, is not the target of anticipation but implicated in its practice and may even call it into doubt, thus redirecting anticipation against itself.

Hope & Oil: Expectations in São Tomé e Príncipe

When there is the smell of oil, minds get stirred up … It creates a mirage in peoples heads. If we do not know how to manage it, it will be hell here (Manuel Pinto da Costa, former president of ST...

A doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy

In global debates about natural resource extraction, affect has played an increasingly prominent, if somewhat nameless, role. This paper proposes a theorization of resource affect both as an intrinsic element of capitalist dynamics and as an object problematized by corporate, government, and third-sector practice. Drawing on ethnographic research in Sao Tome and Principe (STP), I explore the affective horizons generated by the prospect of hydrocarbon exploration: a doubtful hope comprised of visions of material betterment, personal and collective transformation, as well as anticipations of failure, friction, and discontent. I also examine the multitude of oil-related campaigns, activities, and programmes initiated by non-governmental organizations and global governance institutions in STP, animated by the specific conundrums presented by oils futurity. In light of this, I argue that what we see emerging is a new resource politics that revolves around not simply the democratic and technical aspects of resource exploitation but increasingly their associated affective dissonances and inconsistencies.

The disintegration of a socialist exemplar: discourses on urban disorder in Alexanderplatz, Berlin

A large public square in Berlins eastern part, Alexanderplatz was rebuilt in the 1960s as an exemplar of socialist planning. In the 1990s, it became a problem for urban planners and ordinary Berliners. Drawing on ethnographic material, the author offers a multifaceted account of how disorder is experienced, governed, and materialized in Alexanderplatz. Talk about disorder has provided a way of discussing the dislocations accompanying unification and the vanishing of a socialist ideal. But it may also be understood as a commentary on the perceived failures of government and the social. These discourses involve two distinct conceptions of “society” and “the social.” One is a familiar notion of the social as a problem space; the other is a utopian notion of society as an unattained ideal, characteristic of state socialism. The author suggests how attempts to create order, such as the new design proposed for Alexanderplatz, can appear to produce the disorder they proclaimed to contain.

The governance of daily life in Africa: ethnographic explorations of public and collective services

This volume examines how African citizens tackle their relationship with the state, and how the state tackles (with more or less efficiency) its quotidian tasks, including sanitation, waste management, water supply and all manners of public services. It takes an ethnographic approach, showing how ‘governance’ has become a local, discursive resource and what it means for contemporary African citizens to ‘collectively and individually govern themselves in their daily lives’ (p. ix). It contributes to an exciting body of anthropological work on imaginations and enactments of the state at a local level by its citizens and functionaries. In the face of processes of privatisation, a weakening of public institutions and a more general retreat of the state in Africa, the idea of ‘the State’ has remained surprisingly pervasive, even if frequently only as representation: ‘a state grasped more in terms of its desired or perceived essence, than through the reality of its routine functioning’ (p. 18). Reasons for this include the severe limitation of economic resources, the influence of political elites and systems of patronage, and the proliferation of illicit transactions: African states are being privatised both from within and without. The volume contains 12 chapters by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, economists and public health specialists who have studied state bureaucracy, health systems, corruption, conceptions of public and private, and the management of refugees in Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa. The editors’ introduction outlines some cross-cutting themes. First is the question of how colonial regimes of rule reverberate in the governance of the post-colony (Olivier de Sardan, Becker, Bouju, Fresia, Turner). Olivier de Sardan’s chapter demonstrates how pre-colonial forms of power were disrupted and reshaped by francophone colonial administrators. The colonial period also laid the foundation for systems of clientelism and the impunity of civil servants through its cultivation of specific notions of contempt and privilege differentiating civil servants from the population at large. A second theme in the volume is how citizens and bureaucrats alike have to deal with the quotidian public infrastructures and bureaucratic powers in their everyday lives. Obrist discusses the gendered nature of water provision, sanitation and waste management in a Dar es Salaam neighbourhood, arguing that women’s role in these domains means that they are the ones predominantly dealing with local service providers – which should be more actively acknowledged. Given the pervasive sense of arbitrariness when it comes to the application of bureaucratic regulations, service operators and users often draw on a shared but informal system of knowledge and practice, which allows a more or less successful negotiation of this situation. Anders discusses the ‘backstage’ of such interactions, focusing on a ‘parallel social order’ (p. 135), centred on asymmetrical power relations and

Book Review: Andrew Apter, Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007

Beyond Words aims to provide an ethnographic response to V.Y. Mudimbe’s call for a revision or even refutation of the ‘Colonial Library’ of ideologically distorted constructions of Africa. Doing so requires, for Andrew Apter, the search for critical agency within a repertoire of African discourse and practice without slipping into counter-productive assumptions about indigeneity, fixity or timelessness. Beyond Words provides an important interdisciplinary revision of a series of classic texts, combined with original empirical research on Yoruba ritual. In the Preface, Apter sets out the influences that drove him in the production of this book. There’s John Comaroff’s 1975 study of the role of oratory in Tswana politics; Karin Barber’s analyses of Yoruba oral literary practices and their deconstructive potential; H.L. Gates’s account of the myth of origin in Yoruba politics in 1988; and, written in the same year, V.Y. Mudimbe’s philosophical critique of the invention of Africa as an object of knowledge. While reflecting Apter’s historical expertise, his interest in semiotic analysis and what he terms the ‘hermeneutics of power’ (explored, for example, in his previous work on Yoruba politics and religion, Black Critics and Kings), the book addresses issues that will resonate with scholars working with different approaches on historic and contemporary Africa. Its overarching aim and relevance are ‘[to] oppose the very conditions in which Africa is pathologized’ (p. ix) and to show ‘how ritual languages in Africa carry significant illocutionary force in local worlds and speak to the larger challenges of representing Africa both within and beyond the academy’ (p. 14). The key shortcoming of Mudimbe’s exposé, which Apter seeks to remedy, is his inattention to the ways in which the colonial fantasy of Africa works on the ground. Critical agency – conceived as vernacular criticism, as having the capacity to transform the contexts in which it operates – is explored here through a variety of empirical instances, including ‘the politics of praising, blaming, invocation, and evaluation’, which are all understood as forms of ‘discursive negotiation of political authority’ (p. 13). Importantly, rather than viewing African ritual oratory as a type of fixed, codified knowledge, Apter seeks to reveal that it is ‘context specific’ and not ‘stable and timeless’ (p. 98). Chapter 1 sets the tone, posing the question ‘Que faire?’ and suggesting that ethnophilosophy needs to be replaced by ethnopragmatics, focused on concrete, ethnographic domains of critical agency. Chapter 2 invokes Finnegan’s notion of the panegyric, which she examined in her studies of praise poetry as a form of political critique. The discussion is continued in Chapter 3, which engages Gluckman’s and Beidelman’s contrasting interpretations of the Swazi Ncwala. While Gluckman saw them as rituals of rebellion, Beidelman offered a very different symbolically informed interpretation that posited the ritual as simultaneously marking the king’s separation from his people and praising his extrahuman powers. Drawing on Radcliffe-Brown, Apter in turn proposes to see these dispraises as a species of joking relationship, characterized by ‘permitted disrespect’, which is asymmetrical – thus transcending the all too familiar anthropological function–meaning dichotomy. The joking relationship is also a form of politics. The Ncwala merges praise and dispraise, avoidance and familiarity, the king’s office and the person of the king. Thus, it works ‘not to protect the kingship but to strengthen the alliance between the king and his public’ (p. 62). Chapter 4 presents some of Apter’s ethnographic material from north-eastern Yorubaland, exploring the songs of the Oroyeye, a cult slightly different from the 474