ANTHR 6479 - [Technocracy: Anthropological Approaches]

Spring. 4 credits.

Next offered 2013-2014.

A. Riles.

In recent years, anthropologists have begun to turn their attention to the character of bureaucratic and technical knowledge at play in diverse contexts, from indigenous activist organizations to scientific laboratories and even the academy. This new turn has brought anthropologists into renewed debate with scholars in science and technology studies, sociology, law, cultural studies, and architecture. Topics of concern to anthropologists include the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the practices of technocracy, the forms of agency that produce and are produced by the technocratic, the temporality of bureaucratic practices, and the nature of innovation. There are methodological questions as well: How should such practices be studied ethnographically? What kinds of interpretive frames should anthropologists deploy where categories such as “the social” or “culture”, or oppositions of global to local, or symbolic to material seem already displaced by the subjects of study? What is the relationship of anthropological understanding to critique? This seminar aims to explore these themes as they present themselves in contemporary ethnographic work.