Assemblage Ethnography: Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices
Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport › Bidrag til bog/antologi › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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Assemblage Ethnography : Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices. / Wahlberg, Ayo.
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. red. / Maja Hojer Bruun; Ayo Wahlberg; Rachel Douglas-Jones; Cathrine Hasse; Klaus Hoeyer; Dorthe Brogård Kristensen; Brit Ross Winthereik. Singapore : Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. s. 125-144.Publikation: Bidrag til bog/antologi/rapport › Bidrag til bog/antologi › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Assemblage Ethnography
T2 - Configurations Across Scales, Sites, and Practices
AU - Wahlberg, Ayo
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Understanding how human societies are organised has been at the very core of anthropology since its inception as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. While early twentieth-century social anthropologists set out to characterise the kinship, economic, and political systems that shaped the social life of ‘communal’ societies, by the end of the century, a new style of ethnography had emerged. This chapter provides a genealogy of ‘assemblage ethnography’, showing how it developed as a methodological response to the challenge of understanding social organisation across scales, sites, and practices in a ‘hypercomplex’ technologising and globalising world through three iterations: (1) governmentality-inspired ethnographies that take dispositifs as their object; (2) multi-sited ethnographic studies of how biomedicine is being harnessed to administer and enhance ‘life itself’; and (3) approaches that have deployed a more fluid understanding of assemblages to capture the rhizome-like ways that macro, meso, and micro scales are connected. Assemblage ethnography has become a key approach within anthropology generally, and the anthropology of technology specifically, because of its ability to locate sited ethnographies within the broader complexes that are characteristic of a world in which daily lives are constantly (re-)shaped by technoscience, laws, regulations, technocracies, institutions, and forms of expertise.
AB - Understanding how human societies are organised has been at the very core of anthropology since its inception as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century. While early twentieth-century social anthropologists set out to characterise the kinship, economic, and political systems that shaped the social life of ‘communal’ societies, by the end of the century, a new style of ethnography had emerged. This chapter provides a genealogy of ‘assemblage ethnography’, showing how it developed as a methodological response to the challenge of understanding social organisation across scales, sites, and practices in a ‘hypercomplex’ technologising and globalising world through three iterations: (1) governmentality-inspired ethnographies that take dispositifs as their object; (2) multi-sited ethnographic studies of how biomedicine is being harnessed to administer and enhance ‘life itself’; and (3) approaches that have deployed a more fluid understanding of assemblages to capture the rhizome-like ways that macro, meso, and micro scales are connected. Assemblage ethnography has become a key approach within anthropology generally, and the anthropology of technology specifically, because of its ability to locate sited ethnographies within the broader complexes that are characteristic of a world in which daily lives are constantly (re-)shaped by technoscience, laws, regulations, technocracies, institutions, and forms of expertise.
U2 - 10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_6
DO - 10.1007/978-981-16-7084-8_6
M3 - Book chapter
SN - 978-981-16-7083-1
SP - 125
EP - 144
BT - The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
A2 - Bruun, Maja Hojer
A2 - Wahlberg, Ayo
A2 - Douglas-Jones, Rachel
A2 - Hasse, Cathrine
A2 - Hoeyer, Klaus
A2 - Kristensen, Dorthe Brogård
A2 - Winthereik, Brit Ross
PB - Palgrave Macmillan
CY - Singapore
ER -
ID: 301285658