Margaret J. Wiener

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.

Magic, (colonial) science and science studies

This article draws on Latours ethnography of science, analysis of the Great Divide and call for a symmetrical anthropology, to follow magics emergence as a modern category. The focus is ethnology in colonial Indonesia. Tracing a practice initially known as guna-guna, it analyses five successive Dutch texts. Early texts show that guna-guna could affect Europeans but purify guna-gunas effects as either natural or cultural/psychological. In later texts, that translate guna-guna as magic, references to Europeans, efficacy and substances vanish; guna-guna is simply a culturally specific belief. Terming practices magic has ontological and political consequences; irreduction offers an alternative to analytic habits that yield magic.

Optical Allusions: Looking at Looking, in Balinese and Dutch Encounters

This article revisits vision’s relation to power and knowledge through a symmetrical discussion of Balinese and Dutch ideologies and practices of seeing. Juxtaposing Balinese and Dutch allusions to matters optical in anecdotes about meetings between envoys of the Netherlands Indies state and members of pre- colonial Bali’s ruling classes invites a consideration of the role optical technologies play in assembling (partially connected) worlds. Highlighting the mediators that visual practices require, it argues that familiar claims about vision rest on hegemonic ontologies. Looking back at colonial encounters from Bali shows that what eyes see and do goes beyond observation.