Platypus

Anthropos Tomorrow: Transhumanism and Anthropology

 Jon Bialecki  February 22, 2017

Editor’s note: This week, we’re bringing you the first look at something slightly different. In addition to our regularly scheduled programming, Platypus has decided to experiment with guest-edited thematic series, which will bring together a range of anthropologists working on similar issues for a more theoretically-oriented conversation held over several weeks. Here, Jon Bialecki and Ian Lowrie introduce our first series, on Transhumanism and Anthropology. If you are interested in participating, please let them know; if you are interested in organizing a future thematic series, please do get in touch with the Editor. Anthropologists, long relatively comfortable bearing the mantle of studying humanity, today find themselves working in increasingly posthuman theoretical spaces. Anthropos, as a unitary figure, had already began to crumble under the weight of postcolonial, feminist, and deconstructive critique during the eighties; lately, however, our empirical work is pushing us still further beyond the human. This is particularly, but not uniquely, true for those of us working on the anthropology of science and technology: we often find ourselves, whatever our theoretical commitments to the posthuman, grasping for an appropriate language as we try to figure the multispecies assemblages, vibrant matter, and sociotechnical infrastructures we encounter alongside the humans we interact with in our fieldwork. (read more...)

The Technocratic Antarctic: Jessica O’Reilly on Science, Dwelling, and Governance

 Ian Lowrie  February 16, 2017

Editors note: this week, we’re pleased to bring you a conversation between Stefan Helmreich and Jessica O’Reilly about her new book, The Technocratic Antarctic: An Ethnography of Scientific Expertise and Environmental Governance, just published by Cornell University Press. Stefan Helmreich: Why Antarctica? Jessica O’Reilly: I came across the 1980’s environmentalist movement to make Antarctica a World Park when I was putting together a campfire talk, while I was a park ranger in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park. That fall, I began grad school and began reading Bruno Latour. At the beginning of We Have Never Been Modern, Latour writes about an imaginary ethnography of the ozone hole—this is one of his examples of the hybridity of nature and culture. This idea seemed so weird and wonderful. Once I began reading about and talking to people who live and work in Antarctica, I learned there was this fascinating blend of speculative adventuring and intense governmental scrutiny and cooperation. Environmentalists often describe Antarctica as a “last wilderness,” along with the deep oceans and outer space, and I wanted to take the opportunity to explore how Antarctic people mapped out their activities and ideas in relation to this. (read more...)

Learning to be Trans on YouTube

 Baird Campbell  February 14, 2017

Esta publicación está disponible en español aquí.

Editor’s note: This week, we have a first for the blog: a bilingual post! “When I first started to come out as trans, I went straight to YouTube, and watched a bunch of videos trans kids, and then I started to find videos from people my own age.” Sitting in the living room of his parents’ house in suburban Santiago, Chile, days before his double mastectomy in June 2016, Noah told me a story I would hear repeatedly, with surprisingly little variation, over the course of my fieldwork. He continued, “Even then, the reality I saw was very different. The majority were from the US and England, but at least they helped me understand, ‘OK, so you can start to transition at the age of 19 or 20, like me.’” After an adolescence of not knowing quite where he fit, Noah had found a global community of people like himself with the click of his mouse. (read more...)

Weekly Round-up | February 10th, 2017

 Ian Lowrie  February 10, 2017

This week’s round-up is a bit more focused, with threads on Mars colonization, automation, and artificial intelligence. As always, we also ask you to write or find great stuff for us to share in next week’s round-up: you can send suggestions, advance-fee scams, or Venmo requests to editor@castac.org. (read more...)

Data Friction

 Dawn Nafus  February 7, 2017

A few years ago, Paul Edwards and colleagues (2011) introduced a notion of “science friction”—the idea that scientific datasets do not magically fuse together into a readily accessible “open” stockpile, and instead must be communicated and reshaped in order for scientists to collaborate across them. While it is all too easy to imagine endlessly wired interoperable devices, and bodies thoroughly mediated by fluid streams of measurement, the reality is not that simple. The Data Friction panel at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings this past year attempted to take the idea of science friction further, and ask what else can we see when we turn our attention to frictionful encounters with data. This panel considered what alternative forms of knowing become possible by paying attention occasions where data fails to be mobile, or to the ways data and bodies resist being bound by models, devices, and infrastructures. What we see when we pay attention to frictions are significant questions of ownership, the slipperiness social relations, and examples of how people inhabit more fundamental social, material and conceptual incommensurabilities that data often surfaces. These social formations open up broader questions of the work that underlying notions of what constitutes “data” are doing. (read more...)

Weekly Round-up | February 3rd, 2017

 Ian Lowrie  February 3, 2017

This week’s round-up brings us stories on climate change, robot overlords, copyright, and video games. As always, we also ask you to keep an eye out for interesting digital tidbits that we should include in next week’s round-up: you can send them, along with any hate mail, compliments, or cat pictures, to editor@castac.org. (read more...)

The More Things Change…

 Ian Lowrie  January 31, 2017

Things are more than a little unsettled, lately. The past ten days since the Inauguration have been a maelstrom of activity, leaving many of us feeling profoundly uncertain about our political, technological, and scholarly futures. Of course, we haven’t been passive. Whatever else it has been, the rise of Trumpism has been an occasion for a great deal of anthropological activity. Anthropologists from around the world have been hard at work attending to the emergence of this phenomenon as both scholars and citizens. If our activities at each of these levels have seemed somewhat disconnected, somewhat divorced from one another, it is perhaps a testament to the profound challenge to our inherited sensibilities, our disciplinary and political commonplaces, represented by the transformations we are witnessing. I think, however, that this is in some respects a constitutive feature of our discipline; anthropology has long been haunted by a tension between its ethical commitment to engagement and its methodological commitment to untimeliness. (read more...)

Weekly Round-up | January 27th, 2017

 Ian Lowrie  January 27, 2017

Stories on data archaeology, global medical infrastructures, mushrooms, and open-access futures weekly round out this week’s weekly round-up of cool stuff from around the web. Remember, if you stumble across or create any blog posts, open access publications, or objets d’internet art that you think might fit here, just shoot a link to editor@castac.org. Help break us out of our habitual media itineraries and parochial corners of the internet! (read more...)