Search Results for: CASTAC

Technology and Religion: An Interview with Michael Sacasas of The Frailest Thing (Part 1)

Michael Scroggins October 7, 2014

(Michael Sacasas is a PhD candidate in the “Texts and Technology” program at The University of Central Florida. He blogs about technology at The Frailest Thing.) Thank you for agreeing to an interview for CASTAC. I read your blog on a regular basis, largely because you write cogently on the relationship between religion and technology. Both are traditional anthropological topics currently undergoing a renaissance within the discipline, yet they are not commonly set in explicit conversation. In contrast, you write within a tradition of thought in which technology and religion are commonly set in explicit conversation. For example, in a February 2014 post, Traditions of Technological Criticism, you suggestively compare the place of theology as an organizing and animating principle in the medieval university to the place of technology in the modern university. Can you elaborate? Thank you for the invitation to contribute to the conversation at CASTAC. I’m an outsider to the discipline of anthropology, but I’m glad to hear that there is renewed interest in both religion and technology. As you note, my work, such as it is, has been influenced by scholars who have enriched our understanding of technology by exploring its religious dimensions. (read more...)

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2014 Diana Forsythe Prize Winner: S. Lochlann Jain for Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us

Patricia G. Lange September 29, 2014

The Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) announce that S. Lochlann Jain (Stanford University) is the winner of the 2014 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) and that Adriana Petryna (University of Pennsylvania) has been awarded an Honorable Mention for her book When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009). The Prize Committee chose these books from among a remarkable set of nominated volumes. (read more...)

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“Let it Flow Down the Long Grey Line:” The West Point Class Ring Memorial Melt

Elizabeth Ferry September 15, 2014

In a light-industrial district of Warwick, Rhode Island stands a long low concrete building. It is much like the surrounding buildings, with shipping bays, offices with windows, numerous vents, and a large chimney, but with a more spruced-up presentation than its neighbors and a sign in front discreetly announcing its business: Pease & Curren Refiners. Pease & Curren has served jewelry makers, pawn shops and dental laboratories since 1916. It receives jewelry, plate and scrap from these clients and refines them to extract gold, silver, platinum and palladium. On February 24, 2014, Pease & Curren provided its refining service in a rather different context, hosting the 14th Annual West Point Class Ring Memorial Melt. Each year since 2000, West Point graduates and the families of deceased graduates have donated the gold rings to be melted down and joined with a gold sample from which future class rings are forged; so far 322 rings have been donated. The industrial process of turning solid gold into liquid and back again is a central part of the ceremony. (read more...)

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Note from the Field: Charting Territories without Maps

Leah Zani September 9, 2014

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) does not have postal codes, street addresses, or mail delivery. Streets rarely have codified names. Since I started doing fieldwork in Laos in 2012, I have been fascinated by the ingenious maps that people make to navigate a country without codes. Every day, people make-do by making their own maps. Map making technologies (like GPS, digital mapping software, graph paper) are also important tools for my informants in the bomb clearance sector, where I do much of my fieldwork. Here, as well, people learn to make do by making their own maps. The present writing, however, is the first time that I have consciously tried to chart the source of my fascination. (read more...)

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Knowledge Transfer, Transparency, IT: An Infrastructure Report from Co-Chairland

Jennifer Cool August 31, 2014

“Does CASTAC still serve a purpose?” “Should it continue?” This was the discussion at the first CASTAC meeting I attended at the 2006 AAAs in San Jose. It was like coming upon a cadre of fascinating people who share your intellectual proclivities only to hear tell of how this had been a most excellent and renown party—a veritable Cambrian explosion of Anthro-STS—but that was back before you got here, and there was beer. (read more...)

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Public Numbers, Public Land: Learning to Count Trees in British Columbia

Tom Özden-Schilling August 19, 2014

2001 was a long year for British Columbia’s (BC’s) Ministry of Forests. In April, provincial elections replaced the incumbent New Democratic Party (NDP) with Gordon Campbell and the BC Liberals, a right-leaning party sharing little but name with the Liberal Party covering the rest of Canada. By the end of the year, the province’s “dirt ministries” were in flux. An assortment of public institutions covering provincial forests, lands, mines, geology, parks, and fisheries, the dirt ministries and their matters rarely reach the headlines of the Vancouver Sun or the Victoria Times Colonist. Even before entitlement spending began to dominate provincial budgets in the 1990s, BC’s public mines inspectors and forestry researchers commanded a relatively meager share of the provincial budget. Members of the Ministry of Forests maintained a particularly low profile, despite being managers of a land base covering half a million square kilometers (think all of Ukraine, or Madagascar), an economic sector generating an eleven figure annual revenue for the province, and a job source for close to half the residents of BC’s sprawling rural north. Foresters periodically appeared in the news only to offer up seemingly self-explanatory numbers – this many cubic meters of lumber harvested last year, that many hectares of forest lost to fire. After 2001, however, deciding which forests get counted, who (or what) counts them, and how, got a lot messier. Enter Dendroctonus ponderosae – the mountain pine beetle. (read more...)

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Red Lights, Dark Nights, and Heavenly Bodies – Field Notes from a Star Party

Todd Hanson July 29, 2014

For a fleeting moment, I am blind. Standing frozen in the dark, I am afraid to take even a single step while waiting for my pupillary light reflex to kick in. Happy voices murmur in the deep darkness that envelops me. As I begin to dimly make out my surroundings, I look up to a black sky with a billion celestial objects bisected by the Milky Way and circumscribed by the mountain peaks that surround me. Another moonless, mid-summer night and I’ve returned to the field to continue a multi-year ethnographic study of North American avocational astronomers at their annual “star party.” For those unfamiliar, star parties are ritualized stargazing events sponsored and hosted by recreational astronomy clubs that bring participants together in remote locations to observe the night sky. Part science, part party, star parties serve as a way of connecting with others around a telescope. Beyond simply forms of serious leisure, star parties also serve as venues for informal learning and opportunities for community-building. (read more...)

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