Material Entanglements: Scales of Liveliness
Material Entanglements: scales of liveliness questions the traditional ethnographic presumptions on scales of agency. Humans exercise power upon things in the world, while many things simultaneously exercise power upon humans, resulting in a complex relationship. How, and to what extent, should ethnographer learn to see non-humans as actors? How do we investigate the ways in which human and non-human actors exist together in harmony or dis-harmony?
Participants:
Stefan Helmreich, Hugh Raffles
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Opening Remarks:
This panel is about things, animals, places, and people. It’s prompted by an interest in methodological questions that arise out of an attentiveness to the distribution of what we’re calling “liveliness” across an ontological range. There’s recently been a growing interest in the discipline in questioning the central position of the human as the focus of ethnographic work. We’re wondering what becomes of ethnography and anthropology when the agentive and collaborative capacities of animals, places, and things are recognized and engaged seriously on their own terms and these nonhumans become more than tools used by humans, more than sceneries in which human agency unfolds, and more than empty vessels to be filled with meaning. This interest in the material basis and effects of the complex entanglements of the human and the nonhuman prompts us to think through the notion of scaling in yet another way.
Scaling, in this context, points in one sense to the extension of ethnographic attention beyond humans and beyond epistemological questions that assume ontological singularity and stability. Yet this is not the only sense in which we are understanding scaling. Recognizing the entanglements of humans and nonhumans suggests scaling as a process generative of new events and new worlds. Beginning from the sense that different kinds of beings suggest different spatial and temporal scales of experience, and resisting the urge to reconcile these disparities in a unitary framework, we understand scaling as the work by which things of different scale become entangled and become recognized as entangled in relationships that produce material effects. We consider scaling, in this sense, ongoing processes of collaboration between humans and nonhumans. These processes produce effects that are material, but never final. There is no given scale, but ongoing processes of co-creation, translation or mediation that create lively entanglements where nothing is big or small, significant or insignificant, once and for all. Experience unfolds across scales, not within them.
We see the work of Stefan and Hugh as addressing these concerns in extremely challenging ways. Stefan’s latest book, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, is an ethnography of the practices by which microbial life in the ocean becomes meaningful for human life. “This book tracks how marine microbiologists seek to make new scientific knowledge about biological life forms meaningful to social and cultural forms of life. It follows how they scale from microsopic to macroscopic, how they define parameters of social and scientific relevance,” Stefan writes in the introduction. In following how microbiologists scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic, he points as well to the other processes of scaling embedded in their practices—from the local to the global, from the present to the past as well as to the future, and from the actual to the virtual, to name a few. His project prompts us to think about technologies of scaling and materialities of scaling. It also raises questions we’d like to explore about scaling-projects as a pursuit common to ethnographers and oceanographers as expert subjects.
Hugh’s 2002 book In Amazonia: A Natural History and his forthcoming The Illustrated Insectopedia encourage us, through quite different projects, to consider scaling—the work across scales—as a way of thinking about relations and also about difference. In Amazonia, an ethnography of Amazonia as a place both materially and discursively made, Hugh describes as “a book of intimacies, an account of the differential relationships of affective and often physical proximity between humans, and between humans and non-humans.” Recognizing these intimacies requires recognizing relations across scales as well as resisting purifications into separate categories of scale—“local and global, past and present, materiality and meaning-making, affect and rationality, human and non-human.” Scaling describes here both analytic work and material practices. In The Illustrated Insectopedia Hugh turns his attention specifically to smaller beings. In looking at insects, he explores how spatial scale co-articulates with and against other dimensions of scale, asking when do insects seem the smallest of beings and when do they seem the largest.
With these brief words of introduction to Stefan and Hugh’s work, we’d like to open the conversation by asking about difference within relationships. Given an approach that emphasizes seeing the world as made up of relationships among different beings and things, how do you account for differences among those beings and things? How does this emphasis on nonhuman-human relationships speak to the immediately apparent difference between a microbiologist and a microbe. In particular, in what ways is difference a matter of scale? How does analysis move among scales so as to recognize relationships across them? What does it do to your understanding of difference to attend to practices of scale-making rather than taking static scales for granted? We’d also like to move to conversation to speak on the discipline of anthropology itself, asking about the ways in which you feel a commitment to speak to/out of the discipline. We want to ask how you think about the kinds of knowledge your work produces and about what this knowledge is intended to do.
