Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Science & Technology

Outer space

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:54:32 +0000

Rocket launch at Playalinda Beach, Florida, 2017. Picture by Jill Bazeley

Jagiellonian University

Initially published 26 Nov 2025

Abstract:

People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billionaire tourists, astronomers, or the military. However, ethnographic work shows how deeply outer space is intertwined with people’s lives on Earth, from the daily work of space scientists to the impacts of space infrastructure on local communities around the world.

Since outer space cannot often be known directly, what humans know about it and how they relate to it tends to be shaped by what they know about and how they relate to Earth. Consequently, earthly relations and political dynamics inevitably influence human activities in space. At the same time, an anthropological perspective on outer space can help defamiliarise the taken-for-granted contexts and factors specific to the earthly realm, revealing how deeply they shape human lives and people’s understanding of Earth within the cosmos. Thus, examining outer space can help us recontextualise fundamental questions about society and culture, compelling us to expand our analytical framework to encompass the cosmic realm but also encouraging us to explore alternative models for social life on Earth and beyond. This entry showcases anthropological research that has attempted to answer three fundamental questions at the human-cosmos interface: How do people interact with outer space? How does outer space impact human lives? How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Introduction

Outer space exerts a constant, albeit sometimes imperceptible or remote, influence on the daily lives of people worldwide. From treating the sky as the domain of ancestors and a guide for social and environmental understanding, to utilising space-based infrastructures and technologies for essential needs like communication and travel, outer space profoundly impacts human existence. Yet, what constitutes ‘outer space’? How have people interacted with this realm? And given its intimate connection to human life, is the term ‘outer’ space even appropriate?

The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space remains ambiguous, conventionally placed between 80 and 100 kilometres above sea level. Anthropological studies generally avoid rigid definitions of outer space as a purely physical entity, recognising it instead as a domain of human sociality beyond Earth’s atmosphere where diverse political, social, economic, and cultural relations are being played out.

At the same time, media and political discourses often frame outer space within an expansionist, competitive, and developmental narrative, employing terms like ‘space colonisation’, ‘frontier’, ‘race’, and ‘settlement’. Some of these are also used in academic literature. International and national legislation governing space activities, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, frequently reinforce the perception of space as an empty territory, available on a first-come, first-served basis. Some argue that the very descriptors ‘outer’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ perpetuate this sense of detachment, overlooking the long-standing Indigenous connections to the sky and the myriad ways in which it has shaped the lives of various communities and individuals throughout history, both before and after rockets soared through the atmosphere (see, for example, Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Certain critical scholars refer to outer space with the term ‘cosmos’, which usually carries a more philosophical or spiritual connotation than ‘outer space’. Within this entry, these terms are treated as synonymous. Doing so deliberately avoids reinforcing some of the dualisms—such as technology/culture or sacred/profane—that anthropological inquiry strives to critically examine and challenge.

Space anthropology is still an emerging field, despite its roots in early works by Ben Finney and Eric Jones (1986), among others. While it is already grappling with intricate terminological challenges and shifting research foci, its inquiries are fundamentally driven by a desire to ask better questions about humans and understand their place within the cosmos. Thus, ethnographic studies have investigated communities deeply immersed in outer space, such as space scientists discovering new planets by comparing their features to Earth and engineers working with Martian rovers that navigate an extraterrestrial terrain, for whom the cosmos is not merely an imagined realm but also a remote yet tangible and real place. These studies demonstrate that our understanding of the cosmos is not solely derived from an unmediated scientific perception, but rather shaped by a confluence of individual imaginations, organisational structures, and national cultural influences (Messeri 2016; Vertesi 2015).

As people’s familiarity with the vast cosmos deepens, it forces them to re-evaluate Earth’s position within it, broadening understandings of human environments and challenging anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. At the same time, anthropological and historical research consistently underscores the persistent terrestrial impacts of space exploration, the ecological and social footprint of which extends beyond the celestial sphere. Launch sites, research facilities, and other infrastructure are firmly rooted on Earth. These structures are not merely stepping stones to the cosmos; anthropological research argues that they are also intricately intertwined with earthly realities of colonialism, environmental impacts, and social displacement (e.g. Redfield 2000, 212–44). Outer space thus emerges as an arena of political power struggles, military competition, and capitalist expansion, where approaches deemed historically problematic on Earth are apparently readily adopted for exploring the unknown. Despite the powerful forces that frame the cosmos as a domain for profit-making and geopolitical expansion, anthropological perspectives both provide nuance for and problematise these narratives.

As space exploration continues, anthropological analysis has also addressed the more speculative possibilities of encountering extraterrestrial cultures or establishing human habitats beyond Earth. Ethnographic knowledge of intercultural dialogue, encounters, and migrations once served as anthropologists’ claim to a rightful role in space exploration endeavours (Finney and Jones 1986). Today, some continue to envisage outer space as a potential new home for humanity where the limitations and shortcomings of current societies could be transcended (Valentine 2012). This opens up discussions about human futures, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Consequently, outer space emerges as a space for not only critiquing existing politico-economic relations but also for projecting and contemplating alternative social formations.

From an anthropological perspective, outer space can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of terrestrial realities. According to this approach, earthly relationships and dynamics play out and expand within a cosmic context, intricately connected to events on Earth. On the other hand, outer space can also be seen as an overarching realm that encompasses our planet. This perspective recontextualises Earth’s position and significance within the cosmos. It offers potential avenues for imagining alternative social and economic relations both on Earth and beyond. This entry delves into anthropological investigations exploring the profound relationship between humans and outer space. It examines three core questions that have shaped space anthropology so far. These are: How do humans engage with the cosmos? What is the impact of outer space on our lives? And what is its influence on people’s understanding of social reality?

How do people interact with outer space?

Ethnographic research has demonstrated a diverse range of ways in which people around the world engage with the cosmos. Their interactions shape their understanding of its significance within their communities and for humanity as a whole. While these understandings may sometimes differ, their analytical value lies in their capacity to offer alternative perspectives that can enrich, nuance, problematise, or challenge established narratives of space and space exploration. For example, Indigenous connections with the sky often problematise the assumption that outer space is empty and inanimate and no people or beings other than a limited number of astronauts have travelled or lived in space. Reportedly, Inuit peoples in Alaska laughed when an anthropologist informed them about the first Moon landing, as they claimed to have been travelling there for years (Young 1987).

In fact, several Indigenous knowledges express a profound interconnectedness between the earthly and cosmic realms, recognising their mutual dependence. The sky is often considered to be inhabited by ancestors and other beings. Indigenous cosmologies such as those of the Yolŋu in northern Australia are deeply embedded within the stories told about outer space and the sky (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Moreover, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge of the skies not only aid in understanding natural patterns related to weather, seasons, animal behaviour, and plant life but also sometimes pre-date Western scientific knowledge of historical celestial phenomena (Hamacher 2023). Given their close and kin relationships with the cosmos, Indigenous communities worldwide such as the Diné (the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States) often caution against exploitative approaches to space exploration, which they believe disrupt the cosmic order (Bartels 2024).

Non-Indigenous interactions with the cosmos can appear to lack the Indigenous sense of kinship with the sky. Space scientists and engineers within major Western space agencies and laboratories, recently the focus of ethnographic attention, often rely on technological devices and terrestrial landscapes to mediate their interactions with and conceptions of the cosmos. However, even they strive to reaffirm the reality of the cosmic objects they study and operate upon, seeking to establish more intimate and multi-layered relationships with outer space.

For instance, scientists who study planets that circle stars outside our solar system (exoplanets) strive to measure the dimming of a star while the exoplanet transits across its face—a technique known as ‘the transit method’. Subsequently, they visualise and interpret data obtained through such methods to turn the measurements into something that would seem more tangible and relatable. As part of this process, the scientists imagine exoplanets as potential places that they might inhabit, as worlds (Messeri 2016). They draw, for example, upon the more familiar language of the Earth’s solar system to describe the properties of newly discovered planets. Even though their precise parameters remain uncertain, astronomers employ familiar comparisons, calling the exoplanets ‘super-Earths’ or ‘hot Neptunes’, etc. They also utilise a variety of visualisation techniques, from producing curves and graphs to generating statistics, to represent these places that elude visual observation. Similarly, scientists can now translate cosmic phenomena, such as gravitational waves, into audible sounds. While this process relies on established scientific theories, models, and instrumental captures, the resulting sounds are also shaped by a multitude of social and cultural metaphors. For example, an astronomical observatory is compared to ‘a hearing aid’ and sounds of cosmic phenomena to ‘chirps’ or ‘whines’. These visual and acoustic ‘informalisms’ (Helmreich 2016) not only reflect upon the original theories and instrumental data but also foster a more intimate connection between the astronomer and the celestial objects they study.

This connection mirrors the direct experience of observing the night sky at an optical observatory. Although astronomical work increasingly relies on digital data, some astronomers still deeply value the opportunity to conduct research at an observatory, where the distant universe becomes more tangible (Hoeppe 2012). Ethnographic work within science and engineering teams responsible for operating Mars rovers has also underscored the importance of such embodied practices (Vertesi 2015). Various team members identified with the bodies of the rovers, incorporating their physical gestures and movements into their understanding of the rovers and their objects of analysis. This shows how important representational techniques are in establishing and cultivating relationships with the extraterrestrial. Simultaneously, team members aligned their work structures with local and workplace-based norms, meetings, and forms of talk, thereby forging a specific community. Put differently, the intimate engagements with the Mars rovers represented the extraterrestrial as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of a particular social order. People’s representations of and engagements with outer space not only facilitate the scientific exploration of the cosmos and render extraterrestrial scientific objects more legible, but also generate new social relations on Earth, aligning individuals’ aims and values in their collective endeavour to familiarise the unknown.

Many of the techniques that bring the cosmos closer and render it more familiar are inherently social and cultural. Consequently, our representations of outer space are profoundly shaped by cultural tropes and socio-political narratives. The spectacular images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, are not merely unfiltered photographs of the universe; they are products of scientific and aesthetic negotiation. Astronomers had to make deliberate choices about how to translate raw data into meaningful colours and contrasts. In the process, they drew upon familiar geological and meteorological formations, as well as the iconography of nineteenth century American Western landscapes (Kessler 2012). These images were carefully composed for both American domestic and international audiences, serving as a form of scientific outreach and public service. However, by drawing parallels to earthly landscapes and aligning with narratives of outer space as a frontier, these images also encouraged a specific perception of the cosmos: a place simultaneously distant yet inviting exploration. Similar dynamics are evident in other public-facing initiatives, even those designed to be more ‘democratic’, i.e. open to independent public interpretation. For instance, a group of computer scientists at NASA aimed to create an interactive map of Mars that the public could explore independently. Yet, even this initiative promoted a specific way of seeing Mars: as a dynamic, vital place that merits continued research and financial commitment from NASA's exploration project—ultimately reflecting NASA’s overarching mission of extraterrestrial conquest (Messeri 2017). Our highly mediated engagements with outer space offer valuable insights into the socio-cultural nature of how humans represent the cosmos. They also demonstrate how we connect to the cosmic realm while simultaneously shaping our realities on Earth.

Analogue sites (and various forms of simulation training, more generally) offer another example of an important medium for human interaction with outer space, particularly for experimenting with aspects of human spaceflight missions. These sites allow space scientists and future astronauts to familiarise themselves with the unfamiliar environment of outer space while remaining on Earth. Analogue research typically involves travelling to locations with environmental, geological, or other conditions resembling those found on Mars or other celestial bodies, enabling the testing of equipment and mission designs. For example, ethnographic work with scientists at NASA demonstrates how Mars was brought into being as a group of scientists descended upon an analogue site in the Utah desert (Messeri 2016). These ‘mission’ members treated earthly geological formations as if they were Martian, weaving planet-specific narratives about their past and present. This experience provided the closest possible approximation of being on Mars, and it helped maintain the possibility of future human habitation on the planet. The physical and imaginary elements of the analogue mission, including the strict protocols governing ventures outside the ‘space habitat’, induced a cognitive shift among its participants, redefining the experience of living on Earth. However, these missions also possessed more practical elements. At the time of this research, NASA had stalled plans for human missions to Mars. Consequently, the activities observed by the anthropologist present also represented an attempt by NASA employees to cultivate a utopian narrative within the agency, one that preserved the possibility of Martian missions in the future (Messeri 2016).

In another ethnographic study of analogue sites, anthropologist Valentina Marcheselli worked with astrobiologists in Italian caves and mines, simulating potential microbial habitats or shelters on Mars (2022). Their embodied experiences of the caves and mines were crucial not only for transforming these earthly settings into otherworldly analogues but also for establishing astrobiology as a novel scientific discipline. The analogue astrobiological work challenged traditional scientific practices, as its observations and results were no longer solely derived from hypothesis testing but emerged through a more open-ended approach. Such embodied and open-ended research was deemed particularly suitable for a discipline dedicated to encountering and explaining the extraterrestrial unknown. Studying analogue sites, then, reveals something about the inherently dual nature of analogue space missions. In trying to keep Martian exploration viable in times of institutional contraction, or reinforcing the case for a new scientific research method, they aim to make mission participants more intimately familiar with another world, while also utilising this work to influence human engagement with this one.

In a similar vein, astronautics, or the science of space travel, is thought of by US scientists, physicians, and engineers involved in human spaceflight as relying on various ‘systems’ in order to work (Olson 2018). Such systems are defined as technologies that relate diverse concepts and materialities to one another. Thinking of human-technology constellations as systems serves a technocratic function. It contributes to perceiving outer space as governable, thereby perpetuating expansionist narratives of space exploration. The work conducted in extreme terrestrial environments, such as analogue lunar bases on the seafloor, and the allure of radically different extraterrestrial conditions, resonates with a culture in which the extreme has positive connotations as a catalyst for improvement and progress. Consequently, analogue missions participate in a cultural dynamic that frames the extreme as an imperative for overcoming challenges, fostering social innovation, and achieving distinctiveness (Olson 2018).

Earlier research on the European Space Agency (ESA) examined the entanglement of space with a different cultural dynamic, specifically the metaphor of European cooperation (Zabusky 1995). Studied during the 1990s, European cooperation in space science turned out to, paradoxically, rely on both conflict and diversity. The inherent internal diversity of European institutions, in which staff comes from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, helps ESA employees avoid feelings of alienation and stagnation. Through regular, contested interactions and performances of difference, cooperation emerges through space technology as a form of rational solidarity. However, this process is not merely instrumental; it also constitutes a journey through which individuals experience a sacred and intense sense of community (i.e. communitas).

Even though science often claims to be largely impartial and independent of cultural influences, the social nature of the human-space interface is evident not only within the structures and practices of scientific communities, but also in the scientific outcomes of major research organisations such as NASA. Their varied internal hierarchies and interactional norms produce different kinds of scientific knowledge. Sometimes NASA's collective work modes relied on collectivist decision-making structures such as consensus, and emphasised the importance of arriving at a common ground. On other occasions, integrative work modes were favoured, stemming from a position that respected the autonomy of separate units and tried to unite the particular interests of different units in some form of a workable whole. These differing organisational structures were reflected, for example, in the authorship structure of scientific articles and in the influence that different scientific disciplines had in NASA's research (Vertesi 2020).

While the socio-cultural connections between Earth and outer space turn out to be robust, as is evident in human representations and engagements with the cosmos, it is also crucial to avoid an overly deterministic view of this relationship. While human perceptions and interactions with the universe are undoubtedly shaped by cultural narratives and social structures, these influences are multifaceted and nuanced rather than one-dimensional or all-powerful. For example, NASA employees working with Mars rovers encountered significant challenges in aligning their work schedules with the Martian day-night cycle, which is around 40 minutes longer than that of Earth. Despite the use of visual displays and other representational techniques to track Martian time, the inherent mismatch between Earth and Mars time led to confusion and—with ever-changing work schedules meant to allow staff to keep up with Mars—bodily fatigue (Mirmalek 2020). This highlights the limitations of simply imposing external (and extraterrestrial) frameworks on human experience.

Just as the human body cannot simply adapt to Martian time while remaining firmly rooted on Earth, human imaginations are not solely shaped by dominant narratives of space exploration. Ethnographic work with 'New Space' advocates, who invest in commercial space ventures (Valentine 2012), as well as space creators and enthusiasts, who popularise space exploration (Szolucha 2024), reveals a more nuanced picture. While these individuals may operate within the constraints of capitalist relations or navigate the uncertainties of a social spectacle, they also challenge conventional investment strategies, foster community, and actively produce shared visions of the future, thereby creating new social relations. The work of space creators, for example, not only popularises space exploration and makes it comprehensible to a global audience of enthusiasts, but also has the power to mould the public’s collective space myths. The collective imagination of outer space may, therefore, contain possibilities for new narratives of space exploration.

How does outer space impact human lives?

Space exploration leaves a visible mark on Earth, requiring diverse infrastructure for the manufacture and operation of space technologies. These facilities are often situated in locations perceived as remote or uninhabited. However, anthropological research foregrounds the stories of communities impacted by these developments, emphasising their needs, perspectives, and the structural biases that limit their agency. For example, several engaged anthropologists worked during the 1970s with the Yanadi, an Indigenous tribe in India with a nomadic lifestyle historically centred around hunting and gathering (Agrawal, Rao and Reddy 1985). This engagement occurred shortly after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had acquired the Yanadi’s traditional lands to establish a new space centre on an island off India’s eastern coast. The anthropologists documented the profound changes ISRO brought to the region, displacing the Yanadi from their traditional hunting grounds, offering employment opportunities, and creating new community facilities. By collaborating with the Yanadi and ISRO, the anthropologists helped negotiate extended land access rights for the tribe members and educated the ISRO about the social impacts of its activities on the Yanadi community.

The Yanadi case is not an isolated historical incident. Displacement or various degrees of neglect of Indigenous or disadvantaged populations during state or commercial encroachment on their territories has been a recurring theme in the construction and siting of space-related infrastructure, persisting to the present. In the 1980s, the space base in northeastern Brazil displaced Afro-Brazilian villagers, reflecting a history of class and racial inequality within the country (Mitchell 2017). In French Guiana, the construction and operation of ESA’s spaceport in Kourou continues to be entangled with the colonial history of the region (Redfield 2000) and its peculiar status as a European periphery (Korpershoek 2024). Currently, the Native American Esto’k Gna oppose the operations of a private space company for restricting the access to their traditional lands on the southern tip of Texas in the United States (Szolucha 2023). The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred mountain of Maunakea in Hawai'i, despite sustained local protest and predicted environmental impacts, is another example (Hobart 2019; Maile 2019). Anthropologists have helped to amplify the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and disadvantaged groups, documenting the historical legacies of inequality and injustice, while exploring potential avenues for change.

Such examples have led some social scientists to formulate more sweeping critiques of space exploration efforts, characterising them as inherently colonial and exploitative (for example, Rubenstein 2022; Treviño 2023). Against such views, critical scholars propose alternative approaches to engaging with the cosmos, such as celestial wayfinding. Aiming to mirror the way Polynesians navigated the ocean and to avoid the perpetuation of colonial dynamics in space exploration, celestial wayfinding is meant to be guided by principles of sustainable settlement, informed by an animate view of the cosmos and based on a belief in the inherent value and necessary co-existence of all beings (Lempert 2021). The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa have been suggested as a positive and egalitarian model for social organisation of space communities (Lee 1985). Their adaptations were based on the practice of sharing, living in a small group, and being self-sufficient for a very long time. Anthropologists have also considered the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with their emphasis on mutual learning and reciprocal interaction, as a potential model for interstellar migration (Tanner 1985). Furthermore, alternative modes of travelling and living together that have been explored in science fiction movies also hold the potential to inspire and improve space exploration (Lempert 2014; Salazar 2023).

Queer and feminist perspectives on space exploration equally offer frameworks for reimagining it. ‘Queering the cosmos’ would involve liberating it from the constraints of established, often limited, visions of the future and opening it up to multiple possibilities (Oman-Reagan 2015). Similarly, feminist approaches to space travel challenge the presumption of heterosexuality—pervasive within the imaginaries and designs of human spaceflight—and critically examine the ideological and structural biases that lead to exclusionary and oppressive practices and imaginaries (Gál and Armstrong 2023).

While various critical approaches are being proposed to ‘reclaim outer space’ (Schwartz, Billings and Nesvold 2023) a growing body of anthropological work is emerging in parallel that challenges the seemingly monolithic character of modern space projects. On the one hand, space infrastructure developments are typically justified in the name of scientific and economic advancement for a specific community, region, or even nation. While the examples above illustrate some significant challenges and pitfalls of these justifications, space projects may mobilise a sense of hope, agency, and visions of alternative futures that extend beyond serving as an escape plan for a select few (Denning 2023). They can provide alternative visions of international cooperation and even increased ecological care.

At the same time, outer space has always held the potential for increased militarisation, neocolonialism, and extractivism. Anthropologists demonstrate that these two facets, of care and extractivism, are inextricably linked and that space exploration, while perpetuating harmful legacies, also automatically elicits alternative practices and visions of the future (see, for example, Ojani 2024). Many Mexicans, for example, reveal complex imaginaries surrounding space. They see space exploration as a pathway to economic development through technological innovation while simultaneously emphasising the need to critically reflect on the conditions that shape its achievement (Johnson 2020). Similarly, astronomers in Madagascar demonstrate that a problematic and culturally specific notion of the ‘universality of science’ can nevertheless serve as a tool for navigating inequalities on Earth (Nieber 2024). Assuming that science is to some extent universal is not just an epistemic requirement for gaining entry into an international scientific network. It is also a horizon of possibility, one that offers both hope and direction.

How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Outer space not only affects people’s lives but also recalibrates their structures of understanding. Being outside Earth and thinking about the cosmos involves encountering extraterrestrial materialities and contexts that are unfamiliar or behave in unexpected ways. Living in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS), for example, removes the people involved from the familiar bounds of Earth and from usual ways of being and feeling human. The physical experience of weightlessness affects emotions and their social expression, demonstrating how gravity—a condition we typically take for granted—influences not only the human body but also emotions and social relations. This is because the effective communication of emotions and human relations depends on certain material conditions. When those are dramatically altered in such environments as outer space, a simple hug, for example, becomes a challenge because bodies behave and react differently than they would on Earth. The hug becomes a somewhat awkward experience, because bodies of astronauts struggle to align and exchange the same sense of touch they would under the conditions of gravity (Parkhurst and Jeevendrampillai 2020). Similarly, venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere allows us to reconsider its role as a primary context, one that provides the reference points for our fundamental understandings and distinctions, such as the one between nature and culture, for example (Battaglia 2012; Valentine 2016). An anthropological engagement with outer space turns out to broaden the notions of what constitutes an ‘environment’ and to decentre our geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives (Battaglia, Valentine and Olson 2015; Helmreich 2012; Olson and Messeri 2015).

This recalibrating nature of outer space has also prompted a rethinking of anthropological methodologies (see, for example, Gorbanenko, Jeevendrampillai and Kozel 2025). Specifically, it has been suggested that anthropological research be recontextualised in ‘more-than-terran’ spaces (Olson 2023), to think about fieldwork as having significance and being localised beyond Earth, and as being entangled with entities, dynamics, and phenomena beyond Earth-based contexts. While humans’ earthly embeddedness is undeniable, an expanded methodological toolkit would acknowledge that societies already exist on a boundary between terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms. However, how radically methodologies need to be adjusted is currently somewhat under dispute. Given that people constantly negotiate their social existence through a dialogue with their social and material worlds, life on Earth may be quite mediated already and therefore not that different to study than life in space (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2023).

Ethnographic research in locations like the ISS is unlikely to occur anytime soon, given how expensive and hard it is to access. Studying Earth-based space infrastructures related to it, such as its Mission Controls, is much more feasible and can still be highly elucidating. Ethnographers can more easily enter a meeting in ground-based buildings by government agencies and companies designing space experiments or observe livestreamed conversations with ISS crews. Seemingly remote locations can thus be studied via the multiple, interconnected sites, media, and groups of people that constitute a field both up in space and here on Earth (Buchli 2020). These include the constant online presence of the ISS, multimedia archives, and communities tracking the ISS from Earth.

Space activities, both on Earth and in outer space, are dispersed across vast distances and dynamically evolving networks. Therefore, field sites are never stable entities but are better understood as sometimes-atomised and relational spaces connected through shared meanings and materialities (Timko 2024). The distributed nature of space-related sites and globally dispersed communities has led to the idea of a ‘planetary ethnography’ (Szolucha et al. 2022; 2023). This approach to research seeks to push the boundaries of representation to uncover new perspectives both by engaging with diverse social groups across different cultures and by bringing them into a comparative analysis that can reveal unexpected alliances or effect a change in perspective. These under- or unrepresented experiences and viewpoints, much like the extraterrestrial itself, should have the potential to revisit and reorient entire fields of understanding, rather than simply adding another perspective, one that remains on the periphery.

Conclusion

Although outer space remains a physically distant horizon, unreachable for most, it is closer than one may think. It plays a significant role in the everyday lives of diverse groups, from Indigenous communities to the global network of space professionals. Through their engagement with outer space and its many representations, they make communal histories, social norms, as well as distant celestial objects and phenomena more readily comprehensible. In doing so, they reshape social relations and realities here on Earth. Regardless of how they connect with the sky, people worldwide seem to actively strive to forge more intimate relationships with the cosmos, underscoring its inextricable link to human life.

But why is this connection with the universe so important? Perhaps the answer lies in viewing outer space as a social and cultural canvas, one on which individuals and communities can project their understanding of the present social order and their aspirations for the future. For example, Russian cosmonautic amateurs who build and test satellites and other space technologies hold the idea that anyone can participate in space exploration, even without government backing (Sivkov 2019). Their activities highlight the importance of merit and technological know-how in driving space exploration. Therefore, engaging with the cosmos allows them to critique the social and political realities of their country. Outer space can thus be understood as a field for critiquing current social conditions and experimenting with potential alternatives.

Popular representations of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects (‘UFOs’) have also been interpreted as expressions of broader socio-political concerns. These include feelings of alienation and mistrust towards political representatives. Alien abduction narratives equally reflect anxieties, including concerns about racial and ethnic difference. In other depictions, extraterrestrial beings are viewed as divine, expanding the scope of human understanding beyond purely scientific explanations. Historically, ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs—emerged from anxieties surrounding military tensions and technological advancements (Battaglia 2006), a dynamic that continues to resonate today.

Public interest in the cosmos waxes and wanes, driven by the vagaries of politics and cultural trends while popular sentiment toward even the most successful space programmes is often ambiguous (Launius 2003). However, anthropological research has definitively demonstrated that people worldwide actively seek deeper and more complex connections with the cosmos. It is an inextricable part of daily life, shaping their past, co-creating their present, and prefiguring their future.

This understanding challenges the detached view of the cosmos as an outside domain, a perspective some argue was reinforced by the first images of Earth taken by astronauts of Apollo missions from the void of space (Arendt 1968; Cosgrove 1994). This seemingly detached ‘view from nowhere’ may perpetuate the notion that the cosmos is simply there for the taking, whether by technologically advanced nations or an oligarchy-controlled private sector. If technological engagement with outer space expands in the coming decades, largely fuelled by commercial and military-led space ventures, what convergences and tensions will emerge with the fundamental human drive for cosmic intimacy? One thing is certain: humanity will discover ever-new ways to imbue outer space with meaning, both on Earth and beyond.

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Note on contributor

Anna Szolucha is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of new technologies, natural resources, and society.

Research for this article received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

Anna Szolucha, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, ul. Golebia 9, 31-007 Krakow, Poland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8938-6066

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Deep sea

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 23:59:15 +0000

A glass sponge known as ''Advhena magnifica'' in the Pacific Ocean being collected in 2016, at a depth of 2,000 meters. Picture by the US Office of Ocean Exploration and Research.

Marta Gentilucci

University of Bergen

Initially published 11 Aug 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25deepsea

Abstract:

The mystery evoked by the deep sea—its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility—has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering documentaries reflect a fascination with unveiling the unknown; this spirit of discovery, of bringing light into the depths, remains alive today and has arguably even intensified. The deep sea has also emerged as a critical geopolitical space. Scientists race to study its fragile and little-understood ecosystems before commercial deep-sea mining gains momentum, aiming to fill urgent knowledge gaps. In this high-stakes environment, anthropologically ‘being (down) there’ is no longer solely about exploring the abyss itself. Rather, it is increasingly about gaining a voice within scientific discourse and broader societal debates. Today, more than ever, anthropology must engage with this sociopolitical space.

This entry highlights anthropology’s shy yet critical approach to the deep sea as an ethnographic site—one imbued with meanings that shift depending on who encounters it, with what tools, and through which mediations. It does so through interdisciplinary insights from the social sciences and reflections that are profoundly anthropological in theory. The first section explores the deep sea’s otherness or strangeness, a space that challenges terrestrial frameworks and poses questions about the nature of knowledge. The second examines how the deep sea is socially constructed through politics of (in)visibility and the deep sea’s representation as a chaotic and messy space. The third highlights how relationships between human and non-human life in the deep sea can be reimagined in non-extractive and porous ways. The fourth presents another approach, viewing the deep sea as a privileged site from which to interrogate the past, critique the present, and envision Afrofuturistic futures. Polyphonic in nature, this entry invites readers to explore the deep sea through multiple social science perspectives, collectively capturing its complexity and significance.

Introduction: Under pressure

As the spectre of deep-sea mining (DSM) looms large, it has galvanised a diverse coalition of scientists, activists, NGOs, artists, writers, and global communities. In the near future, large quantities of minerals, including those used in electronics, batteries, and green technologies such as copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, manganese, and rare earth elements, are highly likely to be extracted from the seabed. Scientifically, the deep sea refers to oceanic regions below approximately 200 meters—the depth at which sunlight gives way to perpetual darkness. However, global attention is increasingly drawn to even greater depths, as DSM is expected to extend down to 5,000 meters. Now more than ever, the media spotlight is focused on the deep sea and its ‘alien’ creatures—organisms with extraordinary adaptations that allow them to survive under extreme pressure and in harsh, lightless conditions. At these depths, pressure increases dramatically, while temperature, oxygen levels, and food availability sharply decline. DSM is also under pressure, facing growing scrutiny from scientists, policymakers, and civil society. Unlike historical precedents in industries such as oil and gas—where legislation typically followed technological and commercial breakthroughs or disasters—DSM is experiencing a reversal of this pattern: regulatory frameworks are being developed in advance, actively shaping and steering both technological innovation and commercialisation efforts.

A realm governed by the vast timescales of geological and ecological processes—what Richard Irvine (2014) calls ‘deep time’—the deep sea has become a major geopolitical issue (Hannigan 2016), caught in a clash of competing temporalities. Despite the inherently slow epistemic process, scientists are working with urgency to fill critical knowledge gaps about its ecosystems before the accelerating mineral rush begins. In this high-stakes context, ‘getting (down) there’ is not only about reaching physical depths but also about navigating the tension between ocean preservation and industrial exploitation.

Today, more than ever, anthropology must engage with this seascape, which—as this entry shows—is increasingly seen as a sociopolitical space. In recent decades, anthropology has expanded its focus beyond coastal fishing communities to engage with the ocean more broadly (Helmreich 2009, 2015, 2023; Aswani 2020; Leivestad 2022; Dua 2024a, 2024b). This includes explorations of human-ocean creature relations (Uimonen and Masimbi, 2021; Ahlberg 2022), underwater worlds (Helmreich 2007; Rodineliussen 2024), and offshore industries (Appel 2012; Schober 2022; Markkula 2022), including deep-sea mining (Gentilucci 2022, 2024; Larsen 2024). This growing attention to the ocean is part of a broader shift in the social sciences and humanities—variously termed the ‘oceanic turn’ (Deloughrey 2016), the ‘blue turn’ (Braverman and Johnson 2020), or ‘blue humanities’ (Mentz 2023). These movements have contributed significantly to challenging ‘terra-centric’ perspectives on the sea (Steinberg and Peters 2015), advocating for approaches that think in and through the ocean as a form of radically situated knowledge (Jue 2020). More recently, hydrofeminist perspectives, which emphasise a reciprocal relationship with water—learning from it while also giving back by embracing shared responsibility—have further deepened these discussions (Shefer, Bozalek and Romano 2024). Despite the growing anthropological literature on the ocean, the deep sea itself remains relatively understudied in anthropology, especially when compared to the growing attention it has received in other social sciences.

It is then crucial to highlight anthropology’s subtle yet critical approach to the deep sea as an ethnographic site—one imbued with meanings that shift depending on who encounters it, with what tools, and through which mediations. Equally important are the foundational insights contributed by historians of science, geographers, media scholars, and cultural theorists. These reflections are pivotal to anthropology, enabling it to recentre its voice in the scientific and public debate. While the approaches outlined here are marked by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, and ethico-political aims, they share at least two key features: a critical engagement with the scientific and epistemological challenges posed by the deep sea, and an emphasis on the environment’s unique materialities that blur the boundaries between distance and proximity, the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the visible and the invisible, as well as connection and disconnection.

The entry is divided into four sections. The first focuses on the deep sea as an (un)familiar place that challenges epistemologies of life. The second takes on a political lens, showing how the deep sea’s unique characteristics give rise to a politics of (in)visibility. The third section explores the potential for porous encounters between humans, machines, and the abyss. The last one approaches the deep sea as a colonial space in which the past, the present, and new alternative futures are claimed. The conclusion invites reflection on the deep sea as an ethnographic field, encouraging a rethinking of how fieldwork is conducted in unconventional or hard-to-access environments.

Life and knowledge at the edge

A significant inspiration to the anthropological study of the deep sea comes from historians, who trace the scientific and cultural history of how the deep ocean emerged as a distinct territory—one in which nations began to assert claims of sovereignty and control (Rozwadowski 2005). Between 1840 and 1880, British and American scientists and hydrographers extensively studied the deep sea, a period marked by heightened cultural fascination with maritime depths. Scientific exploration during this era intersected with a broader acknowledgment of the economic and social importance of the maritime world, shaped by mid-nineteenth century maritime practices, technologies, and cultures. This setting was characterised by a masculine naval culture, physical challenges, and harsh conditions—a blending of scientific inquiry with maritime work cultures. Notably, this period included the first global deep-sea exploration, conducted by the HMS Challenger expedition (1873–76), which carried out meteorological and biological observations, as well as soundings to identify potential submarine cable routes.

The deep ocean, once regarded as an ‘unfathomable barrier’, gradually became a space accessible to technological observation, facilitated by the laying of submarine cables aimed at generating knowledge about undersea landforms, deep trenches, and seafloor conditions (Starosielski 2015, 203). While these expeditions occasionally retrieved organisms when recovering cables, misconceptions of the deep sea as a lifeless abyss persisted for decades. The serendipitous encounter with life in extreme conditions ‘turns out to be a relatively recent possibility, not just technologically but epistemologically’ (Helmreich 2009, 36). It is worth highlighting here the vivid account of the encounter with hydrothermal vent chimneys, cylindric structures on the ocean floor that may emit mineral-rich water, during the 1978 Galapagos Hydrothermal Expedition (Ballard and Hively 2017): ‘We couldn’t help but wonder what so many animals were doing at that depth, in that eternal darkness. […] But we were not biologists. We were supposed to be finding warm water’ (170). The discovery sparked profound fascination: ‘We felt as if we had glimpsed unknown, alien life on a new world, or at least an alternate version of life as we know it’ (Ballard and Hively 2017, 173).

This unfamiliar life at the bottom of the ocean, particularly deep-sea microbes thriving at the edges of hydrothermal vents and adapted to extreme conditions, captivated public imaginaries, scientific debate, and anthropological interest in these debates. Questions on whether these microbes could be humanity’s most ancient ancestors remain unanswered, but they show how these organisms challenge human-centred notions of lineage and evolution (Helmreich 2009). The deep sea is in fact a complex ecosystem that defies anthropocentric perspectives and resists being captured in a singular narrative. These organisms are ‘strangers’: beings that are ‘not yet—or not fully ever—friend or enemy, self or other’ (Helmreich 2009, 17).

Life in the deep sea and the knowledge surrounding it are central themes in the ongoing debate on DSM. Establishing a baseline—the current state of the environment—for assessing the impact of mineral extraction is challenging due to significant scientific gaps in our understanding of the fauna inhabiting this remote and largely unexplored habitat. Anthropologists ask what it might mean for people to develop an interest in life at the ocean’s depths—and to care for creatures so profoundly different from the animals humans typically recognise (Alaimo 2025). The deep sea is an unfamiliar environment: unlike forests, mountains, or other recognisable landscapes, it remains inaccessible to tourists or casual observers and can only be experienced through costly, technologically mediated scientific expeditions (Alaimo 2025). It evokes a multifaceted aesthetic engagement—ranging from ‘the beautiful, the adorable, the surreal, the weird, the monstrous, the grotesque, the psychedelic, the unfathomable, and even the self-reflexive Anthropocene’ (Alaimo 2025, 13). These aesthetic dimensions deeply influence human imagination and ethical reflection. The deep sea’s extraterrestrial nature is a realm where life hovers at the very limits of what humans can comprehend (Helmreich 2009, Alaimo 2012).

However, this otherworldly perception of the deep sea should not alienate us from recognising the real and tangible consequences of climate change, ocean acidification, mining, industrial fishing, and pollution. The fact that abyssal zones differ from shallow waters does not imply a lack of interconnection between them. Oceanographers, for example, remind us that benthic creatures (organisms that live on or near the bottom of marine ecosystems such as sponges, worms, sea stars, etc.) rely on phenomena like whale falls, in which whale carcasses sink to the deep-sea floor. Framing the deep ocean as unknowable could reinforce the mistaken idea of it as ‘a separate realm where human harms dissolve into invisibility’ (Alaimo 2025, 11).

As we encounter different aesthetic and scientific captures of deep-sea creatures, the question of what it means for the depths to be unknowable will repeatedly arise — as a way to dodge legal and financial responsibility, as an admission of scientific or scholarly failure, as a pervasive cultural trope, as a mathematical impasse, as an impetus for environmentally ethical epistemologies, or as an ordinary, even clichéd, sense of the wondrous and sublime (Alaimo 2025, 12).

The (un)knowability of the deep sea raises an epistemological dilemma. With DSM now at stake, this largely unknown and enigmatic maritime space is being transformed into one that must be rendered visible, mapped, and digitised as extensively as possible. Evidence must be gathered to reduce uncertainty and risks. Notably, the United Nations’ Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development has endorsed Seabed2030, a flagship programme driven by a global consortium of partners across industry, government, academia, philanthropy, and civil society, with the ambitious goal of producing a complete map of the world’s ocean floor by 2030.^[1] Furthermore, significant public and private funding is currently directed toward both ‘unlocking’ the value of the deep—to use the terminology favoured by many DSM stakeholders—and filling knowledge gaps in deep-sea ecosystems through scientific research. As the deep sea becomes increasingly entangled in economic, technological, and political ambitions, questions emerge not only about who has the right to know but also what kind of knowledge has to be sought. It is this tension that surfaced, for example, at the Deep-Sea Minerals Conference held in Bergen, Norway in April 2025, where the pressing issue was: when do we know that we know enough? — a question driven mostly by the market imperatives of DSM. It is therefore important to consider the ‘context of motivation’ among scientists leading deep-sea exploration—specifically, how they frame their mission as a pursuit of something larger than themselves, a moral imperative or higher calling (Oreskes 2021, 499). What scientists choose to make knowable (visible), and what they allow to remain unknowable (invisible), is ultimately a political decision.

Both knowing and unknowing the deep sea present their own problems. In the name of science and for the ‘love of facts’—and because environmental assessments are essential for regulating the future of deep-sea mining—scientific research can sometimes become entangled in extractive logics. For instance, whether or not to extract a sample from an active hydrothermal vent can become a point of contention among scientists. While collecting data to understand fluid chemistry is crucial for comparing life at active versus inactive vents—and ultimately for challenging the ambitions of deep-sea mining proponents—some stakeholders in deep-sea mining argue that such scientific practices should also be subject to regulation. For example, in an effort to protect coral reefs, scientists could deploy killer robots programmed to inject a lethal substance into crown-of-thorns starfish which feed on coral (Braverman 2020). While robots, with their physical capacity to perform tasks that humans cannot, can bring us emotionally and epistemologically closer to the ocean, they can also obscure the ethical implications of violence in marine ecosystems. By outsourcing harm to non-human actors, they displace responsibility (Braverman 2020, 162). The mechanisation of knowledge production in marine environments—deciding which species ‘make live’ or ‘make die’—not only obscures human agency but also generates a space of biopolitical governance, where life is managed remotely and often invisibly (Braverman 2020, 148).

As in the oil and gas sector, environmental risk legislation in the DSM sector is tightly linked to the setting of ecological thresholds. To establish these thresholds for ecotoxicology (how toxic substances affect the reproduction and survival of organisms within an ecosystem) in deep-sea fauna, scientists assess the balance of entire ecosystems. While some species may be more resistant to stress than others, the goal is to integrate various data types to evaluate the overall impact. Crucially, the loss of a particular species is not necessarily a concern—what matters is whether its ecological function can be replaced. This involves determining whether another species can fulfil the role of a sensitive organism.

The current rush to collect as much data as possible—whether to support DSM, to monitor its impacts, or to oppose it—raises urgent anthropological questions. Why is it so difficult to leave the deep sea unknown, unmeasured, undivided, and uncontrolled? What does this compulsion to know—and thereby to claim—reveal about our broader relationships to nature, science, and power?

The deep sea is already deeply entangled with legal regimes, ranging from international treaties to national jurisdictions. These numerous and often overlapping legal frameworks are largely invisible to the public. ‘Like the ocean’s abyss, the legal abyss, too, is out of sight, out of mind, and out of the frame of reference for most lay persons’ (Braverman 2024, 4). Most people onshore remain unaware of ‘those dark, remote, and unexciting practices that take place in locations so vastly removed from the ocean’ (Braverman 2024, 4).

Material politics of (in)visibility

The deep sea oscillates between visibility and invisibility depending on the stakes involved. It is both an untouched, mysterious frontier far from sight, and a critical, contested space for human industrial or scientific extraction. Catastrophic events—such as the Deepwater Horizon spill, one of the largest environmental disasters in history, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010—have the power to expose and disrupt an industry, like the oil industry, that largely operates out of sight of the oil-consuming public (Watts 2015). It also showed to politicians, fishers, and tourism operators the danger of taking marine resources for granted (Adler 2019). The deep sea has long occupied a special place in the human imagination, seen as exotic, empty, otherworldly—a kind of earthly outer space. It is precisely the perceived absence of humans in the deep sea, coupled with the opaque materiality of water, that helps sustain the enduring notion of the ocean as a frontier space (Ratté 2019).

This frontier can be seen as a space of disorder, where the oil supply chain not only absorbs but also accumulates and generates systemic risk, because ‘much of what is entailed in deepwater production is literally invisible (underwater), but also because the normalized operations [are] in extremis laid bare’ (Watts 2015, 214). As a result, the offshore oil industry often remains hidden until a disaster makes its precariousness undeniable, drawing attention to the risks inherent in its operations and the ethical dilemmas that arise when the deep sea is treated as an invisible resource frontier. The chaos and ‘messiness’ of the deep sea are also key factors in ethnographies that analyse how companies, for example, legitimise deep-sea mining projects (Childs 2019; Han 2022). Hydrothermal vents, underwater volcanoes, and the irregular crusts of seamounts are characteristics of the deep sea that corporations emphasise to influence political decisions. The sediment plume — underwater ‘clouds’ composed of dissolved materials and fine particles suspended from the seabed and generated by mineral collectors — is often described by DSM actors as relatively imperceptible, in stark contrast to the black smoke of hydrothermal vents (Childs 2019). This reframing serves to minimise the environmental impact of mining operations, which create sediment plume, as relatively invisible within the dynamic and chaotic deep-sea environment. The black smoke of hydrothermal vents, by contrast, is highlighted to depict the environment as legible and manageable (Childs 2019).

Sediment plumes have emerged as a significant conceptual and analytical lens through which the deep sea is examined in the social sciences. They are characterised as ‘spectral’ phenomena, existing at the threshold between the perceptible and imperceptible, the visible and invisible (Han 2024). In popular imaginaries of the deep sea, expanding tendrils of fluid and smoke continue to evoke associations with war, fire, and contamination, ‘connected to hell itself’ (Ballard 2023). Traditionally, plumes have served as visual markers of destruction and disturbance, yet they can also function as invisible hazards, potential risks for investors, or visible manifestations of broader, intangible events and natural phenomena that can be strategically managed through dispersion (Han 2024). The efforts to regulate these environments and control plume mobility—‘making visible that which is always in the process of becoming invisible’ (Han 2024, 96)—depend on a range of technological interventions, including sensors, dyes, and other monitoring devices designed to render the unseen legible within modelling technologies. Examining how scientists and corporate managers interpret sediment plumes—through their abstraction into graphs, simulations, and digital imagery—reveals how the deep sea is not merely discovered but actively constructed through scientific and industrial practices (Gentilucci 2024).

Porous encounters

Anthropological reflections on how the remote, seemingly human-less deep sea is rendered knowable—via visualisation, digitisation, and data extraction—have turned attention toward the embodied experiences of scientists themselves, particularly as they operate marine robotics. Oceanographers’ reliance on sensors and robotic technologies—deeply entangled with the sea’s material and affective dimensions—produces novel sensory relationships between humans and nonhumans (Helmreich 2009; Lehman 2020). In a similar vein, the anthropology of outer space has highlighted the embodied engagements of scientists with their technological surrogates, such that they ‘become rovers’ by learning to ‘see like a rover’ (Vertesi 2015).

The sensory modes through which the deep sea has been scientifically understood have evolved over time—from the tactile to the auditory and, finally, to the visual (Helmreich 2009). This progression has made the submarine world simultaneously more comprehensible and more fantastical (Helmreich 2009). To gain experience of the deep sea, anthropologists and other social scientists rely on the same technical aids as the oceanographers with whom and through whom they study. Stefan Helmreich, for example, boarded the renowned submarine Alvin—the same that accompanied Ballard and other oceanographers during the first explorations of hydrothermal vents—which led him to conceptualise human interaction with the deep sea through the lens of what he terms the ‘submarine cyborg’. This medium of engagement ‘blurs distinctions between inside and outside, artifice and environment’ and is simultaneously ‘hyper-present and invisible’, much like the water surrounding the submarine itself (Helmreich 2009, 214). What distinguishes the submarine cyborg is not merely its ability to operate within boundaries but its capacity to dissolve them entirely, merging interior and exterior spaces.

The dissolution of boundaries in the deep sea has prompted scholars to explore more porous and reciprocal forms of engagement with the ocean. Investigations of the architectural innovations of Olivier Bocquet are interesting in this respect (Brugidou and Clouette 2021). Bocquet is an architect collaborating with scientific institutes in Paris to design underwater habitats, including those at abyssal depths. His projects extend beyond the technological advancements of deep-sea robotics to address a more fundamental question: abyssal habitability. Among his innovations is the BathyReef ramp, a 3D-printed biomimetic concrete mesh designed to support remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). Bocquet conducted an extensive inventory of sponge forms to identify those best suited to support the robot’s weight while simultaneously fostering a habitat for microorganisms. The ramp is thus conceived not merely as a structural element but as a catalyst for life, engineered to attract bioluminescent microorganisms that may aggregate over time. This luminous presence, in turn, could attract other species, gradually transforming the structure into a multi-layered habitat—one that ultimately contributes to conceptualising the possibility of human habitability in the deep sea. The ramp is deliberately unfinished at the moment of immersion. Rather than being a static structure, it evolves dynamically as local and transient organisms colonise it, transforming it into a living system (Brugidou and Clouette 2021). The materiality of the deep sea and the relationships it enables allow the ramp to function as a sanctuary for organisms drawn to light. While its foundation is human made, its subsequent layers emerge through interactions with non-human actors such as robots, bacteria, and marine life. In this context, the human is no longer central to reflections on abyssal architecture. The design of a ‘cohabitation reef’ constitutes not only a technical challenge but an ontological one, redefining the relationship between human and non-human life in the deep-sea.

(T)he boundaries of the human are no longer central to the reflection on abyssal architecture. […] The design of a cohabitation reef becomes the technical, and even ontological, challenge of architectural work. This is what we call the symbiotic paradigm (Brugidou and Clouette 2021, 3).

If capitalist, extractivist, and industrial approaches to the deep sea are ‘a-porous’ (‘aporétique’), this example examined by social scientists offers an alternative framework—one in which human presence in the abyss is porous, shaped through the gradual co-creation of a shared habitat as microorganisms settle and transform the environment (Brugidou and Clouette 2021, 3). Understanding the deep sea as a highly sensory place that allows for porous human–non-human encounters helps us acknowledge the agency of the beings that inhabit it. In contrast to portrayals of the deep sea as an empty, lifeless void, ethnographic writing reveals it to be a vibrant, non-human-rich ecosystem—one that may even be haunted by ‘ghosts’ (Palermo 2022).

The Blackness of the abyss

In the social sciences and humanities, the deep sea is sometimes conceptualised as a ‘ghostscape’—a space where the histories of the transatlantic slave trade resurface, and where Afrofuturist imaginaries and alternative world-views begin to take shape:

Coming from the Abyss, these ghosts re-emerge to question us about the past, the present, and possible alternative sea-related futures, as a presence-absence on the threshold between the visible and the invisible, the no-longer and the not-yet: a space of possibilities (Palermo 2022, 41).

This perspective challenges visions of the ‘cyborgs of the deep’ as the only ‘heroes’ that will allow society to meet the requests of the ‘Green Shift’, i.e. of transitioning towards more environmentally friendly ways of living (Palermo and Steinberg 2024, 9). The deep sea is populated by ‘unseen bodies […] whose hauntings persist’ even as their stories are obscured by the plumes of the remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) used to collect minerals (Palermo and Steinberg 2024). Recognising these ghosts and incorporating Black history into our understanding of the deep sea means examining the relationship between colonialism, exploration and the ocean.

Thus, the abyss is the space of the White Whale described in Moby-Dick—the formidable, uncontrollable force that defies human dominance and ‘whose rolling and vaulting in the depths of the sea stands for the alliance between modernity, capitalism, coloniality, and the conquest of ocean-space’ (Palermo and Steinberg 2024, 10). The whale’s roundness symbolises the idea of the globe as something to be conquered, mapped, and controlled, while its elusiveness reflects the unattainable nature of these desires when driven by capitalist and colonial imperatives. The abyss is also the space of ‘the Drexciyan myth’, developed by Drexciya—an electronic music duo from Detroit, composed of James Stinson and Gerald Donald. They reimagine the transatlantic voyage of slaves (‘the Middle Passage’) as the origin of an underwater nation, born from the unborn children of enslaved African pregnant women thrown overboard during the transatlantic crossing. Such Afrofuturist mythology—expressed through music, visual art, comic books and novellas—show that our understandings of the deep sea are deeply historically informed, often harking back to times of slavery and colonialism.

Some scholars have even called for the Middle Passage to be formally recognised as cultural heritage within the legal framework of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which governs DSM activities in international waters (Turner et al. 2020). While the ISA does adopt the language of heritage—referring to deep-sea resources as the ‘common heritage of humankind’ and requiring that ‘a prospector shall immediately notify the Secretary-General in writing of any finding in the Area of an object of actual or potential archaeological or historical nature and its location’—it notably excludes recognition of intangible heritage.^[2] It is not uncommon to find marine archaeologists at DSM-related meetings—perhaps because their interests align more closely with mining operations than one might expect. Indeed, ‘the blue archive and the blue frontier are two sides of the same coin’ (Han 2024, 30), and special attention must be paid to how we collectively make sense of the deep sea.

The construction of a speculative seabed archive through the language of common heritage can thus, practically speaking, become a tool of colonization. In the blue archive, the notion of a ‘resource’ or ‘cultural artifact’ is thereby invented alongside the designation of others as obstacles (ocean waste, natural turbulence, indigenous communities, environmental fragility) (Han 2024, 45-46).

The jurisdictional structure of maritime space has increasingly become the politically-sanctioned battleground for turning the deep sea and its seabed into economic territory (Gentilucci 2022). For several decades, coastal states have been permitted to submit claims to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS, established in 1997) to extend their continental shelf. In the juridical definition, this concept refers to the seabed and subsoil extending beyond a coastal state's territorial sea, up to 200 nautical miles from the baseline, within which the state holds exclusive rights to explore and exploit natural resources. Meanwhile, the ISA—composed of 167 member states, with the United States being a notable exception—has entered into 15-year contracts for the exploration of mineral resources in the deep-seabed with 22 contractors operating across various oceanic regions.

Alongside legal and extractive frameworks, alternative imaginaries—such as those inspired by Drexciyan mythology—disrupt dominant logics of ownership and exploitation. Attuning ourselves to these forgotten heroes, buried in the seabed and disturbed by the drilling of robotic machines, invites a critical rethinking of the ongoing territorialisation of the ocean. These visions ‘re-turn colonial geo-logics, slowly tearing at colonial pasts, presents, and futures in an iterative, ongoing process of imaginative decolonisation’ (Stuer 2025, 33-4). The ghosts of a violent past call us to awareness, mourning, and action, urging us to envision oceanic futures that resist repetition and reclaim submerged histories (Patrizi 2024).

Conclusion: ‘Being (down) there’

The deep sea is not yet a distinct subfield within anthropology, nor is it likely to become one. It will probably be integrated into the broader domain of the anthropology of the ocean. Yet this does not diminish its significance as a site for anthropological reflection. On the contrary, the issues raised by scholars engaging with the deep sea are deeply anthropological in nature. They involve questions of otherness and estrangement, which unsettle terrestrial assumptions and challenge conventional ethnographic methods. The deep sea also invites to contemplate concepts such as chaos and disorder, and to critically examine the politics of corporate legitimacy. It blurs the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the interior and the exterior, the knowable and the unknowable, the familiar and the alien. In doing so, it opens up space for porous, entangled, and multi-species encounters but also for rethinking the past and imagining alternative futures.

All the reflections raised in this entry lead back to a central question: can the deep sea be considered an ethnographic site? And if so, how can anthropologists uphold the foundational principle of ‘being there’—a core tenet of ethnographic fieldwork—when the field itself resists direct human presence? Much like outer space, the deep sea challenges conventional understandings of fieldwork (Messeri 2016; Gorbanenko et al. 2025). However, physical and experiential distance from the object of study does not necessarily undermine anthropological engagement. ‘Are we still anthropologists if we go to space using only our imaginations?’ (Dovey and Potts 2025, 130). Anthropology needs to expand ‘being-in-person modes of ethnographic immersion’ (Dovey and Potts 2025, 130) and embrace a ‘one step-removed presence’—a partial, mediated, and prosthetic form of engagement (Helmreich 2007).

Marine biologists’ immersion of devices, like their robot, in the deep sea, my immersion for a time in their social practice and language; their remote readouts of deep dynamics, my semi-detached participant-observation... The more I thought about it, though, the stranger fieldwork seemed as a word for what we were doing... (Helmreich 2007, 21–2).

Like oceanographers, anthropologists cannot directly observe the deep sea with their own eyes. The engagement with this environment is highly mediated—through research vessels, remote sensors, autonomous machines, graphs, images, algorithms, and other technologies. Anthropologists who want to ask about this ‘out of sight and reach’ realm, the deep sea, should look ‘over the shoulder of marine biologists’ (Helmreich 2007, 28) and scientists at work. However, they may encounter challenges in doing so, such as trying to join research-based sea expeditions.

Being on board a research cruise, sitting in control rooms where scientists navigate remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), or observing their work in laboratories—all of this depends on access and permissions granted. The deep sea today is not a neutral scientific space—on the contrary, it is highly contested and politicised. In the current ‘call for science’ to gather knowledge before industrial exploitation intensifies, anthropologists—and social scientists more broadly—are not always welcomed participants. Research cruises are costly endeavours, often funded by industry, and participation is tightly controlled. Priority is typically given to natural scientists collecting quantitative and computational data, rendering anthropologists potentially superfluous in their eyes.

What kind of knowledge, then, can anthropologists contribute? This entry aims to encourage deeper engagement with this ethnographic realm, asserting the importance of claiming a voice within both scientific discourse and broader societal debates.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and to the OEA Managing Editor, Hanna Nieber, for their thoughtful feedback and support in developing this entry. I would also like to sincerely thank Stacy Alaimo for generously sharing the introduction to her book, The abyss stares back: Encounters with deep-sea life (2025, University of Minnesota Press), which had not yet been published at the time of writing. My thanks extend as well to Giuliana Panieri, principal investigator of the EXTREMES project (UiT, ePhorte 2023/62800), and to the entire research team, for the invaluable insights they continue to offer on the geological structures and ecosystems of the deep-sea. The ethnographic material presented here is part of the ongoing research conducted through the OCEAN-MINeD project, funded by the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Fellowship (HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01).

Note on contributor

Marta Gentilucci is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, where she leads the project OCEAN-MINeD. She is also the co-founder and co-convenor of the EASA Anthropology of the Seas Network.

Marta Gentilucci, PO Box 7802, NO-5020 Bergen, Norway. ma.gentilucci@gmail.com. ORCID: 0000-0002-5825-8624

[1] Seabed2030. The Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project. seabed2030.org.

[2] ISA. 2013. Decision of the Council of the International Seabed Authority relating to Amendments to the Regulations on Prospecting and Exploration for Polymetallic Nodules in the Area and Related Matters. Kingston, Jamaica: ISA. https://www.isa.org.jm/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/isba-19c-17_0.pdf

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Technology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:57:05 +0000

Woman operating machinery in a Philippine textile mill, 1960. Picture by Harrison Forman.

Geoffrey Hobbis Stephanie Ketterer

Wageningen University

Initially published 21 Jul 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25technology

Abstract:

Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship’. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this understanding as a starting point, but many study technology in a much broader sense. They ask instead how humans and non-humans purposefully make or do things, and how such activity is shaped by broader sociocultural dynamics. Framing the topic in such terms allows anthropologists, among others, to think of technology beyond the machines of Western industrial-capitalism and engage with technologies across time and space—from stone tools to smartphones to satellites—and across human and non-human actors. Anthropologists have also promoted vernacular definitions of technology that emphasise technological effectiveness as understood by the actors involved in creating and using it. This has led them to challenge the analytical usefulness of the concept of ‘technology’ itself, highlighting concepts such as ‘technological systems’, ‘technical ensembles’, or ‘technics’, each time focusing on the complex interaction between technical objects such as tools, technical actions such as gestures, and the milieu or context in which technologies are embedded. Seeking to understand this complexity, anthropologists have highlighted that technologies have a rhythm that entangles diverse actors, resonates within particular milieus or contexts, and challenges the subject-object divide. Focusing on rhythmic resonance is one of several ways in which the study of technology offers unique insights into the dynamics that render some societies and their technological systems more resilient than others.

Introduction

The anthropology of technology covers a variety of enquiries into the social life of action-upon-matter, be it the action of weaving a basket or of typing on a keyboard to arrange bits into digital texts. Technologies have been an essential part of being human for as long as humans have existed. The use of technology was even thought to be the distinguishing feature of humanity, until tool use—a central feature of many technologies—was witnessed amongst great apes, crows, and octopi, among others (cf. Joulian 1994). By some estimates Kenyanthropys platyops, who lived about 3.5 million years ago in current-day Kenya, were among the first hominids to use stone tools beyond the Homo genus (Harmand et al. 2015). Since then, tools and more broadly human-driven actions-upon-matter have proliferated. They have also exponentially increased in complexity and in transformative capacity, accelerating changes of not only the human condition but also the condition of earth itself. This happened to the point that particularly geographers (cf. Larsen and Harrington Jr 2020) as well as anthropologists (cf. Mathews 2020) have come to debate if humanity’s capacity for action-upon-matter has so radically changed the world that it warrants its own epoch, the Anthropocene, ‘a new planetary era… in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and process’.

Anthropologists engage with technology across this vast spectrum of action, across time and space, and increasingly also across species and beyond humanity. From stone tools to ballistic missiles (Latour and Lemonnier 1994), the scope is as wide as the human and more-than-human experience itself. It is this vastness that defines the anthropology of technology and its complex, fluid, and expansive engagement with ‘technology’ as a gateway for understanding society as a whole, a powerful lens into the study of everything.

What is ‘technology’?

So what is ‘technology’? Unsurprisingly perhaps, anthropologists have no simple, or comprehensively agreed upon, definition. Technically, ‘technology’ refers to the ‘-ology’ or study of tekhne, an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship,’ or more broadly, for the ‘art’ of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ (cf. Coupaye 2022b). In many ways, anthropologies of technology employ this understanding as a starting point. They are variously concerned with how people purposefully do things, how they make them, and with how such doing and making shapes, and is shaped, by broader societal dynamics (Naji and Douny 2009). However, the devil here lies in the definitional technicalities.

In English, ‘technology’ only really emerged as a term in the nineteenth century. It rose to prominence as a catch-all for scientific and engineering knowledge that is being industrially produced (Marx 1997). This association with industrial production facilitated the rise of ‘technology’ as a prominent noun, or category of things, that is deeply associated with ‘modernity’. Simultaneously, the perceived link with industrial modernity, and the utopian promises surrounding industrial technologies (Moore 1990), enabled technology to be thought of as profoundly ‘agentive’, i.e. of producing effects in its own right. For example, by frequently promising to change the world, technology appears capable of acting autonomously, of ‘determining the course of events’ (Marx 1997, 968) without any substantive human involvement. When we insist on its agentive capacity, technology tends to project a veneer of neutrality and modernity (cf. Sigaut 2002). It promises to act on its own and to do so in a highly deterministic fashion, i.e. to bring about reliable, predictable change ‘according to principles of mechanical functioning that are entirely indifferent to particular human aptitudes and sensibilities’ (Ingold 1997, 131). It also promises to perform according to its designers’ intents, largely irrespective of the context in which it is being used (cf. Orlikowski 2007).

Anthropologists have variously studied such industrially-produced technologies, be they smartphones (Hobbis 2020; Tenhunen 2018), robotics (Deturche 2019; Gygi 2018), or plastics (Dey 2023). However, they have also challenged the modernist focus on industrial production and its ‘ethnocentric potential’ (Sautchuck and Mura 2019, 4), i.e. the risk of unwittingly universalising our understandings of technology even though they are specific to our own time and circumstances. Instead, many anthropologists have proposed conceptualising technology in the widest possible sense. They have suggested we focus on our interactions with objects whenever we try to secure some desired result in a creative and roundabout manner, i.e. when we use ‘a certain degree of circuitousness in the achievement of any given objective’ (Gell 1988, 6; emphasis in original).

Such interactions with objects can include the aforementioned tools at various scales, from dresses (Richards 2009) to eel traps (Lemonnier 2012) to military checkpoints (Hammami 2019). Yet, tools themselves are not sufficient or even necessary components of technologies. Instead, anthropologists have emphasised that actions-upon-matter are, first and foremost, tied to ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1973) such as swimming and whistling but also the handweaving of baskets (Bunn 2022), moving through space while using a mobile phone (Nova et al. 2012), or ‘growing materials’ as part of biofabrication (Cristi 2023). Such techniques may vary in their ‘degree of technicality’, meaning ‘the number and complexity of the steps which link the initial givens to the final goal which is to be achieved’ (Gell 1988, 6), yet the degree of technicality is, from an anthropological perspective, a point of investigation and does not indicate what counts as ‘technology’ and what does not.

Anthropologists of technology are also rarely concerned with the perceived rationality of given technical actions, the ‘given objective’, as implied in the industrial definition of the term. Instead, they tend to focus on ‘vernacular [i.e. locally, context-specific] efficacy [that] takes into account all acts considered appropriate by the actor, whether they are aimed at matter or at intangible entities or substances’ (Coupaye 2022a, 42; emphasis in original). Consider for example how the Abelam people of Papua New Guinea grow and consume yams. Here, yams are anything but ‘just’ food, but are in fact symbols of society itself, and thus they are ‘not only grown, they are also “made”’ (Coupaye 2018, 17). Yams are centrepieces for social and cultural reproduction: their phallic properties semiotically represent and constitute masculinity and male hierarchy, and their ability to produce desired effects are closely embedded in relationships between spirits and humans (Coupaye 2013).

Based on this vernacular embedding, anthropologists have proposed an expanded understanding of technology that recognises technics, at various scales, as part of a multi-faceted ‘technological systems’ (Lemonnier 1989). Often embedded in particular, perhaps anachronistic, national research traditions, anthropologists have variously debated the specific boundaries of technology-focused terminologies including the difference between ‘techniques’ (French approaches) and ‘skills’ (English approaches) (cf. Brunn and Wahlberg 2022; Coupaye and Douny 2010; Sautchuk and Mura 2019). Still, roughly speaking, they agree that technological or technical systems usually involve (1) ‘technical objects’ like spears, dresses, or smartphones; (2) ‘technical actions,’ like the gestures used for basket weaving, which can either be ‘effective’, from the vernacular point of view of the actor, or ‘traditional’, based on historical dynamics of transmission and change (Coupaye 2021a, 49); and (3) their ‘milieus,’ such as the presence of spirits for the Abelam (Coupaye 2013) or the tropical ecologies of the Solomon Islands that undermine the durability of digital materials (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2021). ‘Milieu’ is here ‘summarised as a global field in which an entity (living organism or technical object) is immersed and with which it interacts but also upon which its existence depends’ (Coupaye 2021a, 51).

By emphasising the enmeshment of these three technical features, some anthropologists not only reject modernist definitions of ‘technology’ but also the distinction of subject- or object-centric engagements with technology. They focus on techniques, or technical actions, to highlight the fluidity of subject-object relations, and to consider technologies as relations between movements. To them, it is conceivable that humans as well as non-humans ‘are their movements’ rather than ‘beings that move’ (Ingold 2011, 168; emphasis in original). ‘Techniques’ here emerge as the contextually-embedded, vernacular, and malleable binding agent between subjects, objects, and their milieus. They thereby stress the connections between humans and the rest of the living world, the denial of which is common in modernist and agentive engagements with technologies (Leroi-Gourhan 1993, 400). Simultaneously, the ‘technical’ is more than the ‘material’ (Latour 2014) revealing how even a bodily action upon its own self-as-matter is culturally inflected and connected to larger social processes.

Accordingly, ‘technology’ can be understood as a lens into everything social. Studying it creates new empirical sensibilities and allows for perceiving and dealing with relations and processes that go beyond the usual topics and methods of the social sciences (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 5). Thus, anthropologists have variously shown the complex interplay between how societies make technologies and how technologies make society, or ‘that human and social reality is as much as a product of machines as of human activity’ (Escobar 1994, 216). Anthropologists have, in their engagement with this technology-society dialectic, highlighted the fluid rhythm of technologies that entangles diverse actors beyond the subject-object divide, asking how technical rhythms resonate within particular milieus or contexts. Moreover, they have asked what rhythmic resonance may teach us about the resilience of some societies and their technological systems.

The rhythms of technologies

Several anthropologists have uncovered and showcased the ‘rhythmic dimensions of technical relations’ (Sautchuk and Mura 2019, 10; cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1993; Stiegler 1998). Take the technical actions involved in breadmaking such as kneading, for example. Kneading involves forming and orienting an elastic gluten structure that is necessary to contain air produced during fermentation processes within bread. Effective kneading requires repetitive, or rhythmic, actions that include the stretching, lifting, and folding of usually ball-shaped dough. It is the consistency and particular patterns of the rhythm that distinguishes a ‘great’ baker (or a great kneading machine) from a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one, according to culturally specific norms. Rhythmic kneading entwines the baker’s body (or kneading machine) in a particular way with the dough, its various ingredients, as well as the surface on which the kneading takes place. Thus, it plays a central role in the broader technical actions that bring bread into being. Multiple actors are at play in these processes. For example, while the baker, with or without the use of machines, may attempt to ‘control’ the behaviour of yeast, as a key ingredient, it is the yeast itself that acts based on and in response to various factors, including its age, the surrounding temperature, and the kneading rhythms. Yeast operates, in this case, according to its own particular rhythm within the broader technological system involved in making bread. Such a rhythmic plurality also marks how guide dogs engage their human counterparts (von der Weid 2019) or how the Dogon in Mali consider the sheen from wild silk as being imbued with a living force (Douny 2013).

By recognising the agency of non-human actors, such as yeast, in technological systems, the anthropology of technology supports broader efforts aimed at transgressing common epistemic dichotomies, including that of nature vs. culture or human vs. non-human (e.g. Descola 2013, Vivieros de Castro 2004; Vilaça 2016). It foregrounds the role of rhythmic techniques in human attempts to ‘control’ or ‘manipulate’ non-human actors, but also the non-human actors’ resistance to, and diverse engagement with, such attempts. For example, the technical processes involved in extracting latex from rubber trees involves applying a toxic chemical solution of ethrel and water to the ‘last cut’ of a tree in order to prolong the sapping period. The ratio of ethrel to water, and the frequency of its use, are interpreted in a moral framework in the relationship between employer and tapper. Bad employers use lower ratios and apply more frequently than their more perceivably benevolent counterparts. Latex extraction thus includes attempts at controlling or, in this case, ‘taming’ trees through working rhythms that maintain this tamed status over multiple days. These rhythms, in turn, account for the characteristics of the rubber tree as an agentive being while also reflecting the rhythmic relations between tappers and their employers (Di Deus 2019). Thereby latex extraction reveals ‘a complex interactive human-plant dynamic’ (Die Deus 2019, 17) that ‘[surpasses] a purely metaphorical dimension of the idea that plants have “agency”’ (Di Deus 2019, 18).

As implied in the tapper-employer relationship, the rhythmic dimensions of technical actions are not necessarily harmonious, equal, or deterministic. On the contrary, anthropologists contend that technologies and their rhythms are not fixed but open to allow for context-specific adaptations (cf. Fisch 2018; Simondon 2017). In other words, the rhythms of technical actions are inherently flexible. They allow for a continuous renegotiation of the relationship between the actors involved, including not only humans, animals, plants, or spirits but also machines. This holds true for various technological relationships, whether these involve bakers and dough, workers and rubber trees, or machine-centric technological systems such as Tokyo’s commuter train network. Michael Fisch (2018), for example, has shown how Tokyo’s commuter train network operates reliably, whilst working nearly always ‘beyond capacity’ (2018, 1). It works not because of a strict, inflexible, and controlling insistence on having ‘zero errors’. Instead, its tight schedule is made possible because Tokyo’s train system is open to rhythmic changes between the humans that operate and use it, as well as its machines, from subtle and finely tuned infrastructural configurations to abrasive techniques of employees shoving passengers into cars before doors close. Regularity in technical systems such as the commuter train network can, thus, emerge through irregular flows between various actors.

Studying technology’s more fluid rhythms thus confronts the myth that technologies are functional because they are external to humans and non-human actors. It challenges the ‘rational linear determinism’ (Coupaye 2022a, 37) of modernist understandings of technology and foregrounds the importance of studying complex socio-technical entanglements.

The resonance of technologies

The rhythmic movements that underlie technologies further generate resonances between technical objects, technical actions, and their milieus. For example, among the Panará in southern Amazonia, hunters’ use of particular weapons such as firearms resonates with ‘the territory, or the land (terra)’ (Bechelany 2019, 20) that they move through. By how a firearm is positioned next to the hunter’s body while moving through the forest, the firearm facilitates circular movements of the hunter, ‘guiding him to always walk towards the same side, taking him back to the point from whence he started off’ (Bechelany 2019, 8). Simultaneously, firearms as a ‘thing of the whites’ (Bechelany 2019, 8) embed the hunt in broader Panará relationships with ‘the whites,’ because firearms, including ammunition, need to be purchased. Firearms, thus, resonate differently than bows in Panará lifeworlds. Bows facilitate different movements through space and, as self-made hunting tools, creating a less dependent relationship with ‘the whites’. Resonances surrounding the ‘technical ensemble’ (Simondon 2017) of the hunt, thus, reveal something bigger about the Panará than ‘just’ how they hunt. They show shifting relationships between the Panará, animals, other (white) humans, and their territory.

Anthropologists of technology have further argued that similar to technical rhythms, technological resonances are not predetermined. Technical actions or objects may be designed to achieve particular goals. However, the achievement of such goals is never guaranteed. A mobile phone may be designed to allow for telecommunication, but telecommunication may not be the dominant function that is being used, if it is at all. Among the Lau speakers of Solomon Islands, for instance, mobile phones were, in 2014 and 2015, used most frequently as flashlights or calculators (Hobbis 2020). Reasons for such deviation from designers’ intent and objects’ primary tendencies are diverse. They depend on context and are rarely explainable solely through arguments that focus on people’s need for resources. When the Lau, an Indigenous language group of approximately 15,000 people in Solomon Islands, needed to make a phone call in 2015, their access to the necessary monetary funds to pay for, and make, phone calls was limited. This facilitated a ‘metered mindset’ (Donner 2015) with many Lau choosing to use mobile phone functions that did not incur additional expenses such as the aforementioned flashlights, which served as primary light source at night in off-grid villages (Hobbis 2020). Simultaneously, money alone did not explain a general reluctance towards making phone calls: phone calls were also discouraged due to perceived possibilities for immoral actions such as the facilitation of extramarital affairs (Hobbis 2020).

In other words, as particular technical actions or objects interact with, or better resonate within, a specific milieu, the actors involved situate these actions and objects in the interests, needs, and values of the milieu as reflected in the Lau’s concerns with the immorality of mobile phones. Technologies may, thus, have some built-in ‘tendencies’ (Leroi-Gourhan 2013), meaning they are likely to be used for a particular purpose (e.g. phones have a tendency to be used to make phone calls). However, anthropologists of technology have shown that usage patterns are not predetermined. Instead, there is substantive diversity in how people engage with technical objects such as mobile phones or how they engage in technical actions, from fire management (Fagundes 2019) to mathematical techniques (Vilaça 2018). Put another way, technologies resonate in unique ways in particular milieus, and technological capacity is only one of multiple factors that determine how they are produced, used, and discarded.

While technologies always ‘have reciprocal relationships with the social systems to which they belong’ (Lemonnier 1989, 156), the degree of such resonance is not always the same. Some technologies, specifically some technical objects, resonate more intensely than others in a given context. As ‘compositional objects’ (Hobbis 2020)—objects that uniquely connect diverse actors within specific milieus through particular technical actions—they have a unique ‘blending power’ (Lemonnier 2014) or ability to engage with processes of social reproduction and enable to share ideas and build social relations. They do so, for example, through their origin myth, and physical modes of use (Lemonnier 2014, 538). These objects may be exceptional in their visibility such as Gawa canoes (Munn 1977) or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw totem poles (Boas 1955), but they may also be seemingly ‘mundane objects’ (Lemonnier 2012) such as pottery among the Marakwet of Kenya (Derbyshire et al. 2020) or yams among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea (Coupaye 2013).

Insofar as they seem mundane, compositional objects can disappear into the background of everyday life, remaining ostensibly insignificant. Yet, they can be anything but inconsequential. The mortuary drums of the Ankave of Papua New Guinea are a good example. When playing and hearing the drums during a mortuary drum beating ceremony, the Ankave have been shown to witness their recently deceased relatives leave the Ankave ‘realm of the living’ (Lemonnier 2012, 72). As this happens, those present at the drum beating ceremony recall their mythic origins and in so doing the drums invoke a whole network of associations in the minds of the participants, ‘connecting cannibal monsters, shamanism, the various origins of illnesses and the ways to cure them, the management of mourning, the representation of life, and the proper conduct in the presence of maternal kin’ (Lemonnier 201, 72–3). The drum beating ceremony, as a technical ensemble marked by redundancy, emphasis, and technical resonance, communicates what words could not about a key dynamic of Ankawe lifeworlds. It brings into being highly idiosyncratic key values and key characteristics of social relations, such as ‘the unspeakable status of maternal kin as gentle life-givers and detestable killers and cannibals’ (Lemonnier 2012, 75). During the ceremony, the drums serve as ‘perissological resonators’ (Lemonnier 2012, 127), i.e. as objects that can achieve something in social relations that words seem unable to do (Weiner 1983).

There are some technical objects that can resonate perissologically across diverse contexts. They are ‘supercompositional’ (Hobbis 2020, 217) in that they ‘bridge social networks and cultural meanings on a sociocultural and technological level’ (Ketterer Hobbis and Hobbis 2024, 5). Smartphones seem to have such a capacity. ‘As purely technological system they are assemblages of constituent materials that act on matter’ (Hobbis 2020, 217), no different in principle from, for example, a hammer (cf. Lemonnier 1992). However, they are special compared to other compositional objects in that their sociality and cultural meaning-making are built into them at a technological level. Smartphones are designed to facilitate social relationships through, for instance, the call function or through social media apps. In addition, they condense cultural meanings through their capacity to store, consume, and produce material cultures such as music (Hobbis 2020). People may choose not to use these social and cultural features of smartphones, yet they still resonate in contextually-specific ways (cf. Horst and Miller 2006; Tenhunen 2018). Hence, some technical objects such as smartphones are particularly interesting for uncovering resonances that are both context specific and that occur in ‘shared worlds’, allowing us to ‘take account of the evident and effective connections between peoples—even those who seem very different from one another’ (Hirsch and Rollason 2019, 10).

The resilience of technologies

Anthropologists of technology also speak to the broader study of continuity and change, as for example in religious conversions (cf. Macdonald 2020) or non-modern people’s encounters with modernity (cf. Robbins and Wardlow 2005). In doing so, they often focus on the idea of resilience, highlighting that technological systems are marked by ‘both stability and transformation’ and that their change is never fully chaotic (Redman 2005, 72) but usually governed by ‘technological choices’ (Lemonnier 1993). Such choices are made by persons or groups of people at all stages of technological processes including design, production, consumption, and disposal. This necessarily challenges deterministic narratives in broader technological discourses and research which often predict ‘rupture’ with a status quo following the emergence, development, or adoption of new technologies.

One good example for such resilience is the adoption and adaptation of data-driven digital technologies. Dominant discussions on digital economics in media studies and adjacent fields suggest that digital technologies, especially smartphones, by design spread the values and practices of capitalism to anyone who uses them, because the data that they collect can be commodified and used to advance capitalist interests (cf. Couldry and Mejias 2019; Sadowski 2020). In other words, societies that have long resisted absorption into industrial-capitalism such as Indigenous hunter-gatherers in Amazonia or horticulturalists in Melanesia, are thought to unavoidably become more, if not completely, industrial-capitalist as a result of their embrace of the smartphone (Hobbis 2021). However, longstanding economic systems and values are much more resilient. Rather than simply assimilating to the economic values embedded in digital designs and submitting to data-driven commodification, Solomon Island horticulturalists have decided to adapt, for instance, Facebook buy-and-sell groups in such a way that they extend and strengthen longstanding reciprocal systems of exchange (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). More so, they undermine the capitalist business practices of urban brick-and-mortar retail stores, while obscuring and disrupting the commodification of their individual data (Hobbis and Ketterer Hobbis 2023). Similarly, in neighboring Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, Melanesian mobile phone users have resisted the capitalist economics of international copyright laws to continue longstanding music sharing practices as ‘a constituent part of social relations’ (Stern 2014, 2). Here, music tasks and sharing networks increasingly expand beyond immediate kin, enabled by mobile phones (Crowdy and Horst 2022). In other words, because of digital technologies, Melanesian systems of circulation, sharing, and exchange are changing, but this change is resilient. It builds on existing systems and values, rather than simply dismantling them.

Anthropologists of technology have engaged with this resilience by interrogating context-specific knowledge or ‘social representations’ (Lemonnier 1989) regarding the choices and constraints of particular technologies (Lemonnier 1992). These social representations are crucial for understanding why some technologies succeed, and others fail, and why success and failure are disconnected from the modernist focus on technological tendencies for performing an intended task. Studying social representations allows us to understand the resilience of particular ways of making and doing things as contextually more ‘effective’ even if not more ‘efficient’. Consider, for example, the commercial failures of some airplanes, such as the Mitsubishi MU-2. The Mitsubishi MU-2 was, in terms of its performance as a machine, superior to its competitors (Lemonnier 1989). However, it encountered two problems in its social representation: It had an unusual shape, and its design ‘required new piloting procedures’ (Lemonnier 1989, 167). Because of these problems with social representation, this particular type of airplane not only failed to achieve its commercial potential, but also shaped design possibilities over the long term. Once a particular design fails, it is unlikely to be re-introduced. ‘Designers themselves, at least most of them, only produce machines that fit their own representation of what [a technology] should look like’ (Lemonnier 1989, 168). An already-failed design is basically the opposite, a context-specific representation of what a technology should not look like.

Of course, technological choices also reflect context-specific power relations. As designers or funders of particular technologies that are being developed or implemented decide on their design, they not only consider material functions ‘but also [consciously, or not] express and coercively reinforce beliefs about the differential allocation of power, prestige, and wealth in society’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 283). For example, when Indonesia launched its first satellite system in 1976, it not only served the purpose of transmitting telephone and TV signals, but also advanced the political visions of government actors, engineers, and entrepreneurs within the Suharto regime (Barker 2005). Satellites were here discursively embedded in nationalist struggles, the defeat of Japanese and Dutch colonialism, and the promise of a unified Indonesia through control over ‘electronic media’ with ‘communications signals [passing] as the truest and purest medium for the new nation’ (Barker 2005, 711). These nationalist unification discourses gave shape to Indonesia’s satellite programme ever since. They were the reason why a particular satellite system was developed, why Indonesia became the first so-called ‘developing country’ to have its own satellite system, and they have informed how satellite technologies in the country have evolved since (Barker 2005). Simultaneously and importantly, these nationalist satellite discourses were closely aligned with pre-existing localised discourses surrounding technology and nationalism, rather than creating a fundamentally new techno-political system. Satellites in Indonesia, thus, exemplify the resilience of broader socio-technical dynamics, even when seemingly fundamentally new technologies are introduced in a particular context.

Technological change also opens up opportunities for challenging dominant systems, as the practices and discourses surrounding adoption and adaptation processes are rarely, if ever, unified. Instead, they are sites of ‘technological dramas’ that allow for the renegotiation of (power) relationships around new technical objects and related technical actions through ‘user appropriation, user modification, sabotage, and revolutionary alterations, as a series of counterstatements in a historical discourse’ (Pfaffenberger 1992, 285). For example, as mobile phones are being integrated into the contested milieu of religious conversions to Pentecostalism in Kinshasa, they have become a new battleground over morally acceptable femininities and intimate relations (Pype 2016). In rural India, access to smartphones among Bagdis, the lowest caste group, has facilitated an uneasiness among elites, alongside a somewhat contrarian pride in lower classes over inclusion in hi-tech India (Tenhunen 2022, 348–9). Importantly, though, these contestations exist by no means outside of particular, context-specific social representations. Instead, they all reflect broader societal dynamics, such as those surrounding Pentecostal conversion. Each actor inside of these technological dramas ‘[infuses]’ technologies ‘with their own logic’ (Mahias 1993, 158) seeking to assert their own respective vision for new technological futures, that are inevitably both stable and transformative, resilient in a context of change.

Finally, anthropologists of technology have variously highlighted how resilience is visible in the continuities of some technologies, and specific technical objects and actions, across long periods of time. Lithic technologies, for instance, not only predate the existence of Homo sapiens (Harmand et al. 2015) but are present today, in the technological systems surrounding pestle and mortars in kitchens, laboratories, and pharmacies. Similarly, dry stone masonry, commonly used in medieval architecture across the British Isles as well as medieval Great Zimbabwe, continues to exist as a construction technology, with new dry stone trends emerging in urban locales or as feature of tourist spaces (cf. Mhairi 2015; Sagiya 2022). Such resilient technologies persist even when seemingly ‘better’ technical objects or actions are available. A group of Amazonian lake fishermen, for instance, agreed to, and even pushed for, a ban of nets to catch the Pirarucu fish, even though nets combined with motor boats are much more efficient at catching Pirarucu than the longstanding combination of canoes, paddles, and harpoons (Sautchuk 2019). This rejection of the net and resilience of the harpoon is at least partially due to the rhythmic relations between harpooner and fish and how these rhythmic relations resonate within a broader ‘(harpoonmorphic) subjectivity in these lakes’ (Sautchuk 2019, 188). By choosing the ‘effective’ harpoon over the ‘efficient’ net, fishermen sought to maintain broader human-non-human relations expanding far beyond the technical object itself. They reveal the fundamental entanglements between rhythm, resonance, and resilience.

Conclusions

The anthropology of technology continues to make significant contributions to understandings of human-non-human relations. By carefully dissecting the complex meanings of ‘technology’, anthropology demonstrates how dangerous it is to conflate ‘technology’ with ‘hi-tech’, i.e. with ‘advanced’ tools and machinery. Such conflation is widespread, as when hearing someone say ‘I hate technology’, when what they are really saying is ‘I hate digital technology’. Anthropologists study ‘technology’ in all its diversity, without imposing hierarchies such as ‘low-tech’ and ‘hi-tech’ from the start. This allows for valuing and thinking critically about how old, even ancient, technological systems continue to contribute significantly to lives around the world. It also enables the use of the notion of ‘technology’ as a jumping off point to intervene in broader, interdisciplinary debates on what the term ‘technology’ may mean. Anthropologists of technology tend to recognise that the technical always entails an interplay between material, conventions, and beliefs, often according to vernacular values and logics.

By searching for the interplay between constraints and choices through a focus on actions-upon-matter, anthropologists’ understanding of ways of being, social continuities, and change are unavoidably grounded in the materialism of technical systems: to open up a wine bottle without a corkscrew, for example, clever means must be devised (Lemonnier 2014). Investigating technologies through an emphasis on action-upon-matter opens up insights into a quintessential part of the anthropic—that is to say, human—experience. While economic anthropology has (and critiques) Homo economicus, the self-interested, rational person (cf. Yan 2020), the anthropology of technology has Homo habilis: the ‘handy’ person, a point in physical anthropology wherein our distinctive humanity was established through tool use. A better name may be Homo transformatio, the ‘transforming’ person, because, that is what technology, and being human, is really about: transformative processes through actions-upon-matter that rhythmically and resiliently resonate with and between human and non-human actors, and that continuously shape and remake the world.

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Vilaça, Aparecida. 2016. “Versions versus bodies: Translations in the missionary encounter in Amazonia.” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 13, no. 2: 1–14.

———. 2018. “The devil and the hidden life of numbers: Translations and transformations in Amazonia: The inaugural Claude Levi-Strauss lecture.” Hau 8, nos. 1-2: 6–19.

Vivieros de Castro. 2004. “Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3: 463–84.

Von der Weid, Olivia. 2019. “On the way: Technique, movement and rhythm in the training of guide dogs.” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 16: 1–19.

Weiner, Annette B. 1983. “From words to objects to magic: Hard words and the boundaries of social interaction.” Man 18, no. 4: 690–709.

Yan, Yunxiang. 2020. “Gifts.” In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Facsimile of the first edition in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/20gifts.

Note on contributors

Geoffrey Hobbis an anthropologist and assistant professor at the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group, Wageningen University. His research uses the anthropology of technics to understand emerging digital cultures and societies with a current focus on the digital transformation of non-industrial economies and diverse markets.

Geoffrey Hobbis, Assistant Professor, Wageningen University, Knowledge Technology and Innovation Group, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-8644-6916

Stephanie Ketterer is an anthropologist based at the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University. She is also affiliated with the Department of Knowledge Infrastructures, University of Groningen. Her research brings together anthropologies of technics, infrastructures and the state, with a current focus on contested data infrastructures in rural environments.

Stephanie Ketterer, Associate Professor, Wageningen University, Sociology of Development and Change, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, the Netherlands. ORCID: 0000-0001-7038-7413

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Race and racism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:30:34 +0000

Photo: Ernest Cole: Segregational signs at a South-African train station, before 1972.

Sindre Bangstad Agustín Fuentes

KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Princeton University

Initially published 30 Nov 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23raceandracism

Abstract:

Racism is premised on the idea that humanity could and should be divided into distinct biological groups or ‘races’, and that different races stand in a ranked and hierarchical relation to one another. Racism understands human races to be separate and clear-cut clusters of people, based on biological criteria that are fixed and relevant for their behavior. While humans do vary biologically, their variation does not fall into such clusters that correspond to racial categories. Speaking of human races thus ignores the contemporary science of human variation, whilst intimately mixing the study of human biology with hierarchy, stigma and prejudice.

As a worldview, racism was historically pervasive in the academy and in anthropology, a discipline that emerged in the context of colonialism, colonial discovery, and the exploration of human diversity. While the concept of race was in many respects foundational to the development and practice of anthropology it is now contested. As we will discover in this entry, the concepts and definitions of race, and their applicability, have changed greatly over time. Drawing on ethnographic material from various social and political contexts, and attempts at theorising race and racism, this entry will discuss important ways in which anthropologists have shaped both concepts in the past and in the present. Their work contributes to the important insight that race is not biologically but socially constituted. ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’ (Coates 2015, 7).

Introduction

There are no biological races in humans. This is the conclusion of scientific bodies such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as well as the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA; formerly the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, or AABA). As the 2019 AABA statement makes clear, ‘no group of people is biologically homogeneous’, and human populations are ‘not biologically discrete, truly isolated or fixed’.^[1] The 1998 AAA Statement identifies ‘race’ as ‘an ideology about human differences’, and states that physical variations in the human species have problematic non-biological meanings culturally and politically ascribed onto them.^[2] These anthropological associations are not alone in rejecting the biological nature of racial groups, with genetic, psychological, and other scientific associations also publishing concordant statements.^[3]

Yet, one need only look at news items about police violence towards African-Americans in the US; ethnic minority mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK; xenophobic violence against African migrants in South Africa; or the on-going hardening of borders of Europe to prevent the resettlement of migrants and refugees from African and Asian countries (de Genova 2018), to understand why race and racism remain such important topics in our time.

Knowledge about race and racism is produced in the interstices between popular and scientific ideas (Reardon 2005). Anthropology is one of the social sciences that has a contradictory disciplinary heritage (Mullings 2005, 669). ‘Anthropology’s early professionalization as a science was associated closely with the elaboration of typologies and techniques for classifying and operationalizing the discrete “races of man”’ (Harrison 1995, 50). Historically, the discipline has been involved in and complicit with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023; Asad 1973). We may even regard the concept of race as a ‘master concept’ in anthropology, emerging from the context of colonialism and settler colonialism and continuing right until the emergence of powerful critiques of the concept of race in the twenty-first century. Recent anthropological critiques of race grew out of a long-standing concern relating to the origins and uses of the concept in the era of so-called ‘scientific racism’. Scientific racism tried to prove the existence of distinct human races by seemingly scientific means, building on biological concepts of race that had been in existence since the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday from the late 18th century, and was disproven in the early 20th century.^[4]

The ideas which underpinned scientific racism were anything but scientific. They flowed from the very racism they were evoked to support. Its lingering effects are still with us, and its central tenets of hierarchical biological difference between human groups have made a disturbing return in recent years (Saini 2019). Concern with scientific racism, and against race as a fixed socio-biological category, was spurred by some anthropologists gradually adopting explicitly anti-racist positions, in line with insights from biological and socio-cultural studies: all humans are now seen as belonging to one and the same human race, thus being endowed with the same inherent value, and the same right to life and dignity. This perspective is broadly recognised as socially and biologically accurate by much (but not all) of the academy and a smaller portion of the broader public. It took long and protracted struggles to undo racist understandings of human groups. The term ‘racism’ was coined in the late nineteenth century, but only adopted in the twentieth century (see below). It provided a starting point for what would mature into a critique of the concept of race both in anthropology and beyond.

Race does not reflect biological reality

Humans vary biologically and that variation is important in understanding the human experience. However, that variation is not distributed in clusters that correspond to racial categories based on phenotype (e.g. Black, white, Asian, etc.) or continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) (Lewis et al. 2022). In the context of human variation, it is often assumed that specific physical differences attest to specific racial, biological, or evolved group differences between racial categories of people, but they do not. In spite of over 300 years of trying to classify humans into mostly distinct biological units, human genetic, morphological and physiological variation does not correspond to racial categories such as Black, white, Caucasian or Asian. Instead most evolutionary scientists today think of human group variation in terms of existing populations, i.e. groups of people who either live in the same place or share other connections such as eating similar food or having children together. Human blood groups, body sizes, immune systems and skin colour simply do not map onto racial categories (Fuentes 2022, 74-91). The vast majority of genetic variation does not even occur across human populations but within them, as different parts of the human genome have different ancestral histories. In fact, there is nearly twice as much genetic variation among human populations in Africa as among all populations elsewhere (Fuentes 2022, 74-91).

This has not stopped humans in the past from trying to impose hierarchical social orders based on assumed biological differences. For example, in the era of segregation in the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ meant that a person known to have one ancestor who was Black was, for the purposes of the law, considered to be Black. Under the racist regime of apartheid in South Africa (1948-1990), the authorities introduced laws which imposed a system of racial classification on the South African population in the form of the 1950 Population Registration Act. Under this and other South African apartheid laws, ‘coloureds’ were classified as an intermediate racial category, and deprived of many basic rights as citizens. In the context of the Population Registration Act, South African citizens whose racial classification was unclear to the authorities were subjected to the so-called ‘pencil test’. The pencil test involved running a pencil through a person’s hair to determine that person’s racial classification. If the hair was straight, and the pencil dropped out of the person’s hair, the person would be classified as ‘white’; if the person had curly, coily or kinky hair, the person would be classified as ‘coloured’ or in some cases as ‘native’ (i.e. Black). Long after the demise of apartheid, such apartheid categories of racial difference remain socially and materially salient.

The category of being ‘native’, also holds negative connotations in Europe. An ethnographic study of a small and mixed coastal community in Northern Norway in the late 1940s found that public identity markers of the Sami ethnic group carried with them a significant social stigma. Locals of Sami background avoided such markers by avoiding use of Sami language and attire in public, and making derogatory remarks about nomadic Sami as ‘primitive’, especially when in the presence of non-Sami Norwegians. Being Sami was associatively linked to ‘uncleanliness’, and some locals of Sami background even referred to Samis as forming part of ‘an inferior race’ (Eidheim 1966; Eidheim 1969). Even today, Norwegian Samis remain targets of discrimination. These few historical examples of which there are countless others testify to the persistence of official and popular beliefs about the existence of biological race.

But race has real social and material consequences

Race is not biologically real, but its social and material consequences surely are (Hartigan 2013, 188). Racist systems, processes, and structures create the linkages between non-biological racialised groups and specific social, political, economic, and health-related outcomes. For example, statistics pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US found that whilst average life expectancies had fallen by two years in the population at large as a result of the pandemic, that figure rose to seven years for Native Americans and Alaskan Americans.^[5] The social and material realities of racism can create specific biological consequences connected to racial categories, such as the reality that Black American women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white American women.^[6]

Ethnographic studies from Brazil also point to the important effects of racism and discrimination on Black Brazilians. One early 1990s study of a small town in Rio’s coffee-growing interior, shows that racial inequality was upheld as the town’s inhabitants embraced aesthetic features that pointed to European ancestry, denigrated physical traits that point to African ancestry and wilfully forgot the non-white parts of their family histories (Twine 1998). Here racism endured, in part because commonsense definitions of it focused on direct human interactions. They excluded more complex and covert forms of racism, such as institutional racism or racist media imagery. As a result, Black Brazilians were routinely the subject of racist jokes, remained underpaid and were excluded from privileged social, educational and occupational spaces (Twine 1998).

While insisting on biological racial difference is not scientifically defensible, refuting the idea of biological race can also have negative consequences. In large parts of Latin America, the idea of mestizaje, or of people being biologically and culturally mixed, often serves attempts to whiten the population or to facilitate nation building (Hordge-Freeman 2015, 11-13). However, it is also part of more recent efforts to stop focusing on biological differences and to remedy centuries of racism and discrimination as part of democratic nation building (Wade 2017). Yet this emphasis on ‘mixture’ has its limits. It continues to provide a space within which Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness can implicitly be hierarchically valued. Insisting on people’s sameness may even blend into opposition to affirmative action policies. In Brazil for example, the insistence that race is not a primarily biological category has led some activists on the political left and right to argue against policies that explicitly recognised racial groups in society so as to give them special rights (Wade 2017, 129). This undermines efforts of those Black and Indigenous activists who are actively fighting to be recognized as racially and culturally distinct. The myth of a Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ thereby undercuts affirmative action policies, with the argument being that if race does not exist in Brazil, racial quotas should not either. It equally obscures the important processes of racialisation, which routinely lead to gendered racism and racialised sexism in the country (Caldwell 2007, 8).

Histories of race, histories of racism

‘The history of race and racism is a major component in the development of modern anthropology’ (Sussman 2014, 9). Anthropologists now generally contend that racism is epistemologically prior to race, or that ‘racism made race’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 5). This can be a bit confusing, because the term ‘racism’ is in fact a much more recent addition to the lexicon than ‘race’.

As a designator for biological ideas about human difference, the term ‘race’ emerged in the period of 1730-1790 in Europe (Bancel, David and Thomas 2019), whereas the first recorded instance of the term ‘racism’ in a Western language appears to be that of the French anarchist Charles Malato in his Philosophie de l’anarchie (1888), and in English that of the US military commander Richard Henry Pratt in Proceedings of the Mohonk conference (1902). Arguably the most central scholarly contribution to popularising the term came in the form of the exiled German Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s posthumously published monograph Rassismus (1938).^[7]It was not until 1942 that the term ‘racism’ appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for the first time.

A first clear-cut example of racism in Europe that historians tend to point to is the discrimination faced by Muslim and Jewish converts to Catholicism—moriscos and conversos—during the Catholic Reconquista of the Muslim-controlled al-Andalus area of the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth century onwards (Bethencourt 2013). These converts to Catholicism and their patrilineal descendants were for centuries denied full civil rights with reference to their alleged lack of ‘purity of blood’ ('limpieza de sangre'). We may distinguish between biology as a science which assesses the organic dynamics of bodies, and biology as popular ideas about the body. Biology as a contemporary science did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Catholic Reconquista. And yet, the idea of an essential link between blood and descent appears to be already present, although there was no underlying concept of biological race involved: raza or ‘race’ in Spanish referred at the time to ‘noble birth’, rather than biological race.

The biological conceptions of race, in which skin colour and other phenotypical markers of human difference are made salient and prominent, are a product of the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment science enabled race to ‘become biological’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 21). For example, botanist Carl Linnaeus’ classified humans into ‘five varieties’ in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae from 1758 (Marks 2017; Blunt 2002). Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology linked skin colour to human character and intellect, describing humans of paler skin as superior to humans of darker skin (Mills 2017). ‘Skin colour is the primary criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition’ (Jablonski 2021, 437), but skin colour was only one of the criteria: physical markers such as hair texture, head size, bodily shape, eye colour and shape, and the size of one’s lips, nose, and sexual organs have at various times also been seen as marking race. What is rarely appreciated is ‘the extent to which current thought and research remain influenced by colour-based race concepts’ (Jablonski 2021, 437).

European colonialism was also integral to the development of racism, as European conquest sought to legitimate itself by recourse to arguments about human difference in an age of European discovery of other parts of the world. Given that anthropology emerged as a science intimately linked to European colonialism (Asad 1975, Trouillot 2003; Gupta and Stoolman 2022), it is hardly surprising that early anthropology would play a central role in the development and elaboration of ideas about human difference and otherness intrinsic to European colonialism that created ‘biological’ (but actually social) conceptions of race. These ‘biological’ understandings of human difference have adapted to highly variegated historical, social, and political contexts, and have adopted different forms. It is in reference to this that cultural theorist Stuart Hall referred to race as a ‘floating’ or ‘sliding signifier’ (2017) or a concept with no fixed categories or meanings. Hall’s is not an argument for the timelessness and universalism of all forms of racism but rather for the malleability of race concepts underpinning racism. According to him, race works like a language. The meaning of racial categories is not primarily defined by what they refer to. Instead, their meaning depends on other meaning making concepts. People’s different histories, experiences and modes of living determine which racial categories they may find convincing. For Hall, the study of how racial categories are made and remade is thus not primarily about human and scientific progress, but it is driven by socio-cultural ruptures and continuities.

For example, racial regimes of colonialism and settler colonialism varied according to time, context, and targets: the racism faced by African-Americans and Indigenous American Indians in the US differed from others in form and character. The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a racialisation whereby African-Americans were seen as property and sources of labour, while settler colonialism resulted in Indigenous Americans being viewed as obstacles to extraction and control of resources (Mamdani 2020). Simply subsuming them under the same umbrella of racism risks under-emphasizing the specific forms of violence that people in different times and places have had to endure.

Scientific racism

By the nineteenth century the idea that there were innate human differences attributable to assumed races was considered as established scientific knowledge, as well as simple common sense in large parts of the world (Saini 2019). Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for scientific racism, included humans among the animal species and divided them into different varieties based on skin colour as well as real and assumed behaviour (Kenyon-Hyatt 2021). Linnaeus’ contemporary, the eighteenth century biologist Comte de Buffon believed that an original white ‘Caucasian’ race had degraded into other races due to environmental factors such as difficult climates and poor diets. Though he admitted that humans were one single species and any classification of humans was bound to be arbitrary, he still held the view that there was a biological racial hierarchy. The biologist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) divided humans into ultimately five hierarchically structured races, based on people’s anatomy as well as their linguistic and psychological features (Bethencourt 2013; Gates, Jr. and Curran 2022). Race thinking in scientific racism cut across the divisions between ‘monogenism’, which posited a single origin of humanity, and ‘polygenism’, which held that human races had different origins. Historians have documented how the tenets of Western scientific racism were exported to other parts of the world and applied to local circumstances by local elites (see Skidmore 1993 for Brazil, Zia-Ebrahimi 2016 for Persia/Iran and Weaver 2022 for India).

Scientific racism also provided license and legitimation for eugenics (el-Haj 2007), the belief that human ‘stock’ could and should be ‘perfected’ by means of restricting the right to reproduce for certain categories of humans. Such reproductive restrictions were usually imposed on racialised others, the poor and people with mental or physical disabilities. Eugenics counted on widespread support from white academic, social, political, and media elites in both Europe and the US (Rutherford 2022). The eugenicist idea that humans could and should be ‘perfected’ was intrinsically linked to a racial hierarchy in which the supposed ‘white race’ was placed on top. ‘Miscegenation’ between supposedly different races of humans was declared either undesirable or outlawed. Moreover, the right to biological reproduction of people or groups of people of all colours was limited. In places like South Africa under apartheid, the US South in the era of segregation, and in Nazi Germany, sexual relations, co-habitation, and marriage between individuals deemed to belong to different ‘races’ was prohibited by state law. The obsession with ‘interracial’ sex, and the casting of hypersexualised Black and brown men, in particular, as sexual threats against white women, has been and remains an ever-recurrent facet of racist thought from slavery and colonialism to the present (Stoler 2010).

Arguments for eugenics often came wrapped in arguments about the supposed ‘superiority’ of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, and physical anthropologists provided data in the form of cranial and other physical measurements meant to lend credence to these ideas (Kyllingstad 2012). Given these ideas about alleged racial superiority of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, it should not be any surprise that the eugenicists’ calls for restricting the right to reproduce often also entailed calls to restrict ‘non-white immigration’ and interracial sexual relations in the name of ‘preserving racial purity’ both in the US and in Europe. There was in fact an extensive trans- and inter-continental traffic of racist ideas about the ‘white’ race and/or ‘Nordic’ and/or ‘Aryan’ racial superiority with the US white supremacist and eugenicist movement (Whitman 2017).

Though European colonialists legitimated any number of atrocities and violence inflicted on colonised peoples by recourse to ideas central to scientific racism—such as the transatlantic slave trade, genocide, and the forced removal of children from their families and communities—broader European and Euro-American popular recognition of how lethal and dehumanising these ideas actually were was catalysed by Nazi extermination policies. These views culminated in the Holocaust against - among others - Jews, Roma, queer, and disabled peoples from 1942 to 1945. The central role of some German anthropologists in this horror is well documented (Schafft 2003).

The Boasian turn

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideas of scientific racism were dominant among liberal Western elites. They were also dominant and widely taken for granted among anthropologists—and not least in physical anthropology. Work by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin (1885) directly countered and challenged 19th century racial typologies and their associated racism. He insisted on focusing on people’s moral and intellectual dimensions, rather than their physical attributes, leading him to argue for the essential equality of humans. His work did not make a global impact during his time or over coming decades, in part due to the racist biases of the academy. However, it did foreshadow later arguments about the social construction of race (Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his successors received the most attention in challenging the ideas about biological race so central to scientific racism. Influenced by and in dialogue with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Boas and his students took on key elements in the push against racial essentialism and the racism it supported (but not without issues: see Baker 2021 and below).

Physical anthropology in Boas’ time was wedded to the idea that one could derive conclusions about the mental and intellectual capacities of purportedly different races through determining physical attributes such as head size and shape. It was Boas’ 1912 monograph Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants that demonstrated that, contrary to dominant claims at the time, the lived human environment was a significant factor in the development of physical attributes among humans (Baker 2004; Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard 2003). The book showed that the physical aspects of European immigrants to the United States changed more drastically than expected, and more the longer their parents had been to the United States. Boas and his successors conducted this study in the context of struggles against eugenics and white supremacist movements in Europe and the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and not the least German Nazism (King 2019). Central in the new anthropological conceptualisation of what was and should be the focus in the study of human difference and variety was the concept of culture. Cultural differences were increasingly seen as being more important than biological differences. More specifically, the ‘Boasian turn’ in anthropology disrupted the ideology that biology underlay culture. Previously presumed biological traits and cultural phenomena were no longer causally linked (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997, 525), and one could no longer proclaim that ‘group X does this because of biological trait Y’.

Whereas Boas had hedged his bets, and retained the concept of race itself, his radical student Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) launched a full attack on the concept in anthropology (for a related, if somewhat more demure, anti-racism in mainstream physical anthropology, see Washburn 1963). For Montagu, race was a myth, and ought to be replaced by the concept of ‘ethnic group’. The ethnic group was not intended to merely ‘substitute’ for race; it entailed adopting an entirely new viewpoint (Montagu 1962, 926). Montagu, who during World War II published the seminal monograph Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race (1942), would later become the main author of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race, in which race was declared to be a non-scientific concept (Brattain 2012). The Statement foregrounded humanity’s common ancestry and genetic similarities across populations to argue that racism was nothing but an inherently aggressive ideology and a misguided feeling. Montagu believed that the concept of race was so intertwined with racism that one could not do away with the latter without first doing away with the former (Yudell 2014).

Though they have in time become part of the anthropological common sense, it often seems forgotten, even within anthropology itself, how radical Montagu’s ideas about race and racism were at the time. The years that followed the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race also revealed that Montagu’s radical anti-racist stance as a drafter of the statement had uneven support among the cross-disciplinary group of scientists involved in UNESCO: it would be followed by more anodyne UNESCO statements on race in 1951, 1967 and 1978 (Hazard, Jr. 2012). Another anthropologist involved in the 1950 UNESCO Statement, and critical of the concept of race, was Claude Lévi-Strauss (Rouse 2019). But in anthropology, Montagu, building on Firmin, Boas, Washburn, and the work of many others, won out, and the lingering effects of his contribution can also be found in the various institutional statements on race and racism today.

The critique of Boasian racial liberalism

Changes brought by the Boasian turn were incomplete. In the eyes of its detractors, the dominant Boasian ‘racial liberalism’ in anthropology in the post-World War II era turned out to be quite compatible with the continued exclusion and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and other racialised scholars (Baker 2021). The idea of racial liberalism foregrounds that liberalism has been racialised, as liberal theory long restricted full personhood to white men, and its insistence on liberal values trivialises white supremacy (Rana 2020). Liberalism has historically tended to describe white supremacist and racist imaginaries about state and nation as pertaining to the political fringes (Shoshan 2015). This is an analytical and conceptual move which often exceptionalises racism and reinforces notions of ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2015).

Radical critiques of Boasian racial liberalism starting in the 1960s, inspired by the nascent field of Black studies (Anderson 2019; de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023). They took aim at what they declared to be the fiction that anthropology itself and the societies it studies had become ‘post-racial’ by declaring race to be a social construct and adopting a ‘no race’ position. Boasian racial liberalism would also at times appear to efface the central role that transatlantic slavery played in the formulation of anti-Black racism (Harrison 1995, 52), and to have reduced racism to a matter of individual attitudes rather than social structures and systemic practice. Critiques of Boasian racial liberalism have also taken aim at the notion that replacing the concept of race with the concept of ethnicity—as popularised by the works of Montagu (1942) and anthropologist Fredrik W. Barth (1969)—would do away with racism. For turning ethnicity into the ‘master principle of classification’, in the words of its critics, ‘euphemized, if not denied race’ by not specifying the conditions under which racism emerges and persists (Harrison 1995, 48).

The radical critique of Boasian racial liberalism also took on board the empirically registrable fact that far-right and racist movements had shifted from a discourse highlighting immigrants and minorities’ physical and phenotypical features to a discourse about the culture and religion of ‘racial others’. They had done so in a very elaborate and conscious attempt at evading the very accusations of racism that often blocked their popular appeal. Diagnosed as ‘cultural racism’ by Frantz Fanon (1967), this was not so much a ‘new racism’ (Balibar 1991), as a return to the very origins of European racism by making culture and religion the central markers of exclusion of ‘others’ (Stolcke 1995). Peter Wade makes the important point that ‘race has always been seen as a natural-cultural assemblage in which “nature” and “culture” are always shaping each other and the differences between them are not always clear’ (Wade 2015, 53).

What this return to cultural racism translated into in practice was the racist and discriminatory treatment of Muslim and/or Black populations throughout Western societies in particular, a form of racism often described as ‘Islamophobia’ (Bangstad 2022). Islamophobia is by no means limited to the West. The new forms of racism represented a ‘racism without races’ or a supposedly ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Omi and Winant 1986). By the 1990s, it had arguably become a dominant form of racism in Europe and the US. Regardless of the elaboration and differentiation of the concept of culture in anthropology, out in the real world, ‘culture’ would, over the course of the 1990s, assume some of the very same essentialised properties as the concept of race once had. The new ‘culture talk’ was exemplified in the political construction of the category of ‘Muslim’ which followed in the wake of al-Qaida’s terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001 (Mamdani 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).

Noteworthy in this context of racism against Muslims was also the ubiquity of racist stereotyping of Muslim males as existential sexual threats against women and women’s rights worldwide (Abu-Lughod 2015). That racist trope travelled fast and far and has been present in, for example, the anti-Muslim hate speech and rhetoric of Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar as well as among Hindutva nationalists in India in recent years. Darren Byler has also noted that the production of Uyghur Muslim men, in particular, as ‘subhuman under the sign of terror’ is characteristic of both state authorities and settler colonial discourse in Xinjang, China (2022, 9). Arjun Appadurai identified a ‘fear of small numbers’ (2006) as a central element of global racisms: with the rise, mainstreaming, and circulation of far-right and racist ideas about white ‘replacement’ or ‘extinction’ in various societies such as Europe, the US, India, and South Africa. Those fears have long since become global.

New frontiers in the anthropological study of race and racisms

Anthropology has been taken to task for largely ignoring race and racism as central to its history, practice, and development (Pierre 2013; Jobson 2020). That anthropological scholarship about race and racism has overwhelmingly focused on Western contexts should not blind us to the fact that while racism is not a human universal (i.e., found in all human cultures), it is certainly a global phenomenon (i.e., found in contemporary human societies in all parts of the world) (Hage 1998; Twine 1998; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Pierre 2012). Anthropological studies have also demonstrated that many societies that are profoundly multiracial and multicultural—such as in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa (Pierre 2012)—have developed and sustained elaborate racial hierarchies premised on the retention of privileges for the ‘least Black parts’ of the population (Wade 2017). Anthropologists have equally documented how racism can even pervade institutions in which there is a formal commitment to equal treatment or the eradication of racism (Rouse 2009; Shange 2019). Inspired by critical whiteness studies, they have also reversed the tendency to study race through the study of people of colour, and explored the intersections between class, gender, and race among white people (Hartigan 2005). In the ‘decolonizing turn’ in anthropology in recent years, critical calls to dismantle past and present structures of white privilege and white supremacy within anthropology (de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023) as well as to de-centre white epistemologies have been central (Allen and Jobson 2016; Gupta and Stoolman 2022).

Anthropological theories and analyses do not evolve in isolation from developments in society and politics at large. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has engendered a shift from definitions and analyses of racism premised on seeing it as the articulation of individual attitudes, to definitions and analyses with concepts such as ‘systemic’ and/or ‘structural’ racism. That shift now provides directions and new avenues for future research (see, among others, Gilmore 2022), and is discernible in Laurence Ralph’s study of the use of torture alongside everyday incidents of police violence against Black Americans in Chicago (2020) as well as in Ruha Benjamin’s studies of how digital technology structures (coders, developers, users) reinforce racial discrimination and biases that create and inform coded inequity or what Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code” (2019). Inspired by work on science and technology, anthropologists have also taken an interest in how the rise and popularity of modern and privatised DNA testing and the new science of genomics may re-inscribe racial frames and engender racism (M’charek 2005; el-Haj 2007; Fullwiley 2011; Nelson 2016; Abel and Schroeder 2020; Abel 2022). Yet, they have also discussed how the use of genomic analyses can be used to push against racist and colonial frames, for example by solidifying empowering forms of otherness (Benn-Torres and Torres-Colon 2021).

For what it will be worth, in an uncertain human future under conditions of man-made and intertwined ‘polycrises’ including global climate change and environmental destruction, increased migration flows coupled with the bordering of the richer parts of the world, global pandemics, and ravaging wars, anthropology seems in recent years to have taken more substantive steps in the direction of anti-racism (Mullings 2005). As anthropology helps us recognise and address racism, we may in turn be in a better position to deal with looming threats to the idea of a shared humanity.

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Note on contributors

Sindre Bangstad is a Research Professor at KIFO, Oslo, Norway. He was a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at Princeton University 2022-23.

Sindre Bangstad, KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Øvre Slottsgate 6B, 0192 Oslo, Norway. sindre.bangstad@kifo.no

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Agustín Fuentes, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. afuentes2@princeton.edu

[1] ”AABA statement on race & racism.” 2019. American Association of Biological Anthropologists, March 27. https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

[2] “AAA statement on race.” 1998. American Anthropological Association, May 17. https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-race/

[3] See, for example, ” American Society of Human Genetics statement regarding concepts of ’good genes’ and human genetics.” 2020. American Society of Human Genetics, September 24. https://www.ashg.org/publications-news/ashg-news/statement-regarding-good-genes-human-genetics/#:~:text=Genetics%20demonstrates%20that%20humans%20cannot,ancestry%20have%20no%20scientific%20evidence

[4] From roughly 1840-1945; see “Scientific racism.” Confronting anti-Black racism resource, Harvard Library. https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism

[5] Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2022. “U.S. life expectancy falls again in ‘historic’ setback.” The New York Times, August 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-covid-pandemic.html

[6] Population Reference Bureau. 2021. Black women over three times more likely to die in pregnancy, postpartum than white women, new research finds. Washington, D.C.: PRB. https://www.prb.org/resources/black-women-over-three-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-postpartum-than-white-women-new-research-finds/

[7] The authors would like to thank Dr. Tobias Hübinette, Karlstad University, Sweden for information on this.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Infrastructure

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:58:08 +0000

Rehabilitation of the L train tunnel in New York, 2019. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York

Hannah Knox Evelina Gambino

University College London, University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Mar 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23infrastructure

Abstract:

Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.

Introduction

Rarely a day passes without infrastructure being mentioned in the news, with recent crises making their importance ever clearer. Climate change raises questions over the sustainability of fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure; the COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of infrastructures of health care, equipment supply chains, and the emergence of new infrastructures of care and surveillance; and the war in Ukraine and its effects on both energy and food has demonstrated the contingency and importance of the networks that enable the systems of production, extraction, and accumulation on which much of contemporary life is dependent. Pipelines, roads, railways, airports, and ports are at once fragile and ubiquitous, mundane and political, extending far beyond any one human society whilst they (re)organise the humans and objects out of which such societies are made.

In spite of the intensity of contemporary concern over infrastructure, until recently, it was not a category or class of objects that anthropologists were particularly known for studying. As a material substrate (‘infra’ meaning ‘below’) for social life proper, infrastructures tended to remain in the background as mundane, unremarkable, and technical objects rather than controversial, vibrant, and cultural forms. However, in recent years all this has changed. What would once have been seen as a niche topic for anthropological study has blossomed into a lively comparative field which brings together political and economic anthropology, material culture studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the anthropology of the state to interrogate, in a huge range of places and contexts, what infrastructures are, how they come to be, and the role that they are playing in contemporary social life. This entry provides an orientation to this developing field, exploring why this turn to infrastructure has taken place, and what the payoff of studying infrastructures might be.

Anthropologies of infrastructure

The anthropological study of infrastructure has emerged in part from a long-running question facing anthropologists about how to study the large-scale systems within which we are all entangled (Larkin 2013, Troillot 2003). Anthropology is a discipline which specialises in understanding local experience and forms of social life that take place in particular communities. However, anthropologists are also aware that any experience in place is shaped by things and processes happening elsewhere. Understanding things like capitalism, globalisation, colonialism, and the state have been long-running concerns within the discipline, leading to the creation of key concepts such as ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005), ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 1996), and ‘socio-technical networks’ (Latour 1991).

Anthropologists have found infrastructures promising in this regard for they are both concrete material forms which can be studied ethnographically in particular places, but they also function as infrastructures precisely because they traverse and transgress space and place (Harvey et al. 2017). Whilst the method of ethnography may have been developed in small-scale social settings, it is nowadays invariably conducted in relation to issues like globalisation, economic exchange, global religion, media, and migration which exceed the boundaries of any one research project in any particular place (Eriksson 1995, Anand et al. 2018; Anand 2011; see also Amin and Thrift 2014). By turning their attention to infrastructures, anthropologists have shown how their systemic qualities are created through tangible activities that take place in offices, in laboratories, in communities and neighbourhoods, in debating chambers, on websites, social media platforms, and in images and documents which circulate through social networks online and offline. Many social scientists understand infrastructural systems in terms of technological progress, the pursuit of seamless connectivity, and the materialisation of geopolitical relations (cf Harvey 1989; Therbon 2007; Levinson 2006; Easterling 2014; Cowen 2014). Within the anthropology of infrastructure, the emphasis has been on how these ideas (of technological progress, seamlessness, and geopolitical importance) come to be attached to infrastructure. Paying attention to infrastructures allows us to account for the everyday work that goes into making, breaking, and living with systems of power, control, possibility, and inequality (see also Megoran 2006).

Another reason why anthropologists have been drawn to infrastructure is that more and more state projects that they encounter in their field sites are now classified under this term. Things like roads and energy systems have not always been grouped together as ‘infrastructure’. As Ashley Carse shows, the term has a particular history, emerging initially in English to describe the substrate that underlay railroads, rather than the railroads themselves. Over time, infrastructures have gradually come to be conceptualised as a class of things in their own right—as ‘hard technical artefacts or systems, rather than processes’ (Carse 2014, 11), allowing engineers and anthropologists alike to think about diverse material systems all as forms of ‘infrastructure’. This is not just a matter of terminology. With the term we have seen the emergence of a much broader set of concerns about the appropriate techniques and practice of governmentality that infrastructures demand. This has particularly been the case when it comes to the relationship between infrastructures and the governance of risk.

For Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2020), the identification of infrastructure as a class of object that entails particular kinds of risks and possibilities has shaped the kinds of projects that states invest in. Specifically, Collier and Lakoff link state-led infrastructure projects to processes of securitisation, showing through a historical analysis of twentieth century military organisation how infrastructures emerged as a material response to challenges of international security. In an analysis of the emergence of the concept of ‘critical security infrastructure’, they trace how the problem of infrastructure for the US Army emerged first as a logistical problem of how to move troops and their resources across land, a challenge which stimulated socio-material inventions, from floating pontoon bridges to the very idea of supply chains. Over time the concern with building infrastructures to support military incursions shifted into a concern with how to protect them from attack, thus opening the way to thinking of infrastructures of production and circulation as critical sites of risk. This state preoccupation with infrastructures as subject to and technologies of risk management has stimulated investment in both national and international megaprojects, whose structural complexity and social impacts have come to shape anthropologists’ field sites in profound and unavoidable ways. As a result anthropologists have found themselves exploring such issues as the place of speculation, futures, and markets in the making and reshaping of people’s lives, the exclusionary quality of infrastructure megaprojects that disconnect some people even as they connect others, and the ongoing legacies of power and colonialism that are made evident when new infrastructures appear.

If infrastructures have emerged empirically as sites of contestation, politics, and social change within anthropological field sites, they have also become available as topics for study. This was the result of shifts in theoretical discussions and debates within the social sciences and humanities. Infrastructure studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field which traverses geography, science and technology studies (STS), political sciences, history, sociology, and urban studies. Across these disciplinary boundaries, scholars are held together by a range of shared theoretical approaches that foreground questions about the role of materiality, object agency, process, and form in processes of social and political change. Key influences in this broader interdisciplinary discussion include actor network theory (ANT) (Latour 2005, Law 1999), and in particular the work of Bruno Latour and his early studies of the production of scientific knowledge and the workings of infrastructure, such as the collected essays in Pandora’s hope (1999), and his parable about a speculative rapid transport system, Aramis: or the love of technology (1996). ANT helped draw attention to the active role that seemingly inert objects play in social life, and to the way that knowledge and understanding of the world is the outcome of material practices of ordering, translating, and transforming signs and matter.

One of the most well-known definitions of infrastructure is ‘matter that moves matter’ (Larkin 2013, 238). Infrastructures like roads and railways are tangible material forms that exist in particular places and that people use in their everyday lives. Yet infrastructures are not just material forms that exist in one location, but function precisely because they hold together a range of things—rail tracks, standards, ideas, policies, labour practices. It is this ability to connect that enables things and people to move, and societies to function. Brian Larkin therefore argues that infrastructures are not only things ‘but also the relations between things’ (2013, 239). Those who have sought to understand the more explicitly political implications of these mutable socio-material relations have built on the work of scholars like Langdon Winner, whose pioneering publications in the social studies of technology illustrated how artefacts can come to act violently and reproduce or rework social inequality (Winner 1986). This is most clearly articulated in Winner’s discussion of the bridges built by the planner Robert Moses over the Long Island Expressway. These bridges were too low for public buses to pass under, with the effect that they kept low-income citizens away from the beaches of Long Island. Extending this attention to infrastructural power, scholars have also drawn on the work of scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and Paul Edwards who have shown how the standards, classifications, and knowledge systems that frame and shape infrastructures are both informed by, and in turn inform, relations of inclusion and exclusion (Star and Bowker 1999, Lampland and Star 2009, Star and Ruhleder 1996, Edwards 2003).

Pushing this critical attention to the political life of materials further, infrastructure studies have also been deeply influenced by the feminist STS scholars like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad, whose work has sought to recover the political possibilities inherent in the hybrid, categorically transgressive, and messy work of making knowledge and making worlds (Barad 2007, Haraway 1991, Stengers 2005). In the 2010s, much of this conversation about materiality and object-agency coalesced into a field of study known as the ‘new materialisms’, which brought together these materialist approaches with political science to advocate for a more explicit attention to the affective properties of lively matter in shaping political relationships (Coole and Frost 2010, Braun and Whatmore 2011). Proponents of this school argued we should pay attention to the specific chemical properties of materials such as oil, gas, coal to learn about how different forms of political consciousness take shape. For example, Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated that the specific composition of coal, its heaviness, location, and the methods necessary for its extraction have played a crucial role in shaping workers’ ability to make democratic claims. This is because, unlike oil, coal extraction is predicated on the concentration of large groups of workers in one place (2011).

Although there are tensions between these different intellectual threads, what they share is an openness to understanding human worlds as inherently entangled with material processes and properties, and a curiosity as to the implications of this entanglement in domains ranging from science to politics, religion, health, technology, and, of course, infrastructure.

As we can see, there is no single anthropology of infrastructure, nor a unique definition of what infrastructures are. Instead, the way anthropologists have come across infrastructures and sought to incorporate them into their analysis has created practical and conceptual challenges that have in turn reshaped wider debates within the discipline. The sections below outline how an attention to infrastructures have produced new perspectives on: the state, the environment, conceptualisations of space/time, and, finally, how these elusive networks have helped anthropologists to develop new understandings of politics.

Infrastructures and the state

With ethnographic studies of infrastructure frequently taking anthropologists into the offices, field laboratories, and spaces of protest associated with infrastructure projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that their study has often also been the study of the state (Harvey and Knox 2015, Von Schnizler 2010, Collier 2011). As large-scale public works projects, infrastructures are dependent on states to finance or underwrite their investment. They are also tied to states through standards, regulations, legal regimes, planning systems, and political decision-making processes (Collier et al. 2016). Arguably, large-scale infrastructures like roads, electricity networks, and railways would not be possible without the existence of modern nation states, and thereby offer a promising way into studying the everyday life of the state itself (Sharma and Gupta 2006, Gupta 2012).

One of the issues that has faced anthropologists of the state has been the challenge of actually studying the state ethnographically (Mitchell 1999). ‘The state’ is a concept that points to political institutions such as councils, governments, military, and the courts, but it also includes a wider range of people—tax payers, citizens, businesses, charities—objects and processes, such as forms, elections, referendums, consultations, policies, and standards, through which norms of appropriate behaviour and conditions of belonging are worked out (Taussig 1997, Coronil 1999). Anthropologists have found in state infrastructure a promising object through which the subjects and objects which generate ‘state effects’ can be traced and followed in practice (Harvey 2005).

If infrastructures are not possible without the state, then the opposite is also true: namely, that the state is not possible without infrastructure. Infrastructures can thus be thought of as key technologies through which states enact, perform, and reproduce themselves. Ethnographies from South America to Central Asia to Europe have shown how roads, railway borders, and other structures are the crucial threads through which the limits of nation states are stitched and, indeed, unstitched (Harvey and Knox 2015, Mukerji 1997, Reeves 2014). In this sense, infrastructures have been central technologies of colonisation and machines of colonial and racial violence (Zeiderman 2020; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). The recent history of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway exemplifies this infrastructural (un)stitching. In the aftermath of the first Nagorno Karabakh War in 1993, the railway was rerouted away from Armenia, creating a corridor connecting Azerbaijan with Turkey, through Georgia. This effectively and willingly materialised a logistical border to Armenia’s participation in regional and international trade. Furthermore, as Tekla Aslanishvili and Evelina Gambino explore in their ethnographic film, A state in a state (2022), this geopolitical function and the funding structure of the train gave life to a series of borders of different kinds, exacerbating forms of marginalisation along ethnic lines and generating new insecurities amongst the populations affected by this infrastructure (Aslanishvili 2022; Gambino 2022, 2019).

Anthropologists have pointed to the frequently inherent coloniality of infrastructures, showing how rather than being just a means to an end, they have shaped the logic through which colonisation has been enacted (Cupers and Meier 2020, Vaughn 2021). Sarah Vaughn’s research on water infrastructure and climate adaptation in Guyana, for example, has shown how contemporary attempts to manage the watery coastline of Guyana rests on infrastructural histories of dam construction that involved colonisation, slavery, plantation agriculture, and racial politics. Contemporary infrastructure projects demand a reckoning with these embedded histories, even as they seek at times to depart from them. In other contexts, infrastructures have enacted a politics of colonisation by enabling peripheries and frontiers to be tamed and tied into state systems of bureaucratic oversight and governmental control. They have shown how roads and supply chains, for example, link sites of extraction and allow novel forms of circulation, exchange, and profit (Tsing 2005, Scott 1998). Not content with seeing this as just a matter of domination, however, anthropologists have sought to tell more complex stories about these incursions, showing how large-scale projects of domination are domesticated and embodied by those who inhabit these infrastructural worlds. Laura Bear, for example, who studies the Indian railways, has shown how as railways travelled to corners of the subcontinent never connected before, a myriad of new relations emerged that would permanently reconfigure not just the institutional but also the intimate lives of Indian citizens (Bear 2007).

If some infrastructure projects have been a way of inserting state power over territories, people, and the environment, others have been part of a process of state transformation as state forms become obsolete, splinter, or are replaced over time. Stephen Collier’s ethnography (2011) of the attempted neoliberalisation of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union charts how infrastructure becomes a means through which such change is pursued and also thwarted. Collier’s ethnography looks at the attempted privatisation of heating systems across the territories left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, demonstrating how communal heating systems emerged problematically as material instantiations of the Soviet political system. The author explores what happens to such infrastructures in the face of political change. Focusing on the transition from socialism to neoliberalism, Collier follows pipes and flows of heat to show how the establishment of the free market in a former Soviet town took the shape of a battle against the infrastructures of Socialist urbanism. Here, the pipes heating the USSR operated according to centralised estimates of the city’s needs and could not be controlled by individual households. Similarly, Antina von Schnitzler has shown how water meters became political in the South African context of post-apartheid politics. When these meters were installed in South African townships in the 2000s, this seemingly benign technology operated as a tool of governance that sought to counter an anti-apartheid era of payment boycotts and usher in an era of neoliberal citizenship. Through the implementation of water metering, township residents were asked to become ‘calculating subjects’, whose civic contract with the state entailed an entrepreneurial ethos (von Schnitzler 2008). Here the water meter was a technology that helped bring into being a new form of governmentality.

If the material work of grappling with pipes and meters is one way that states transform their modes of governance, another is through the knowledge infrastructures of paperwork, bureaucracy, standards, regulations, and law. Ethnographers have shown how contracts (Appel 2019, 137–204; Tsing 2005, 69), forms of expertise (Ong 2005; Mitchell 2002, 2011; Harvey and Knox 2015; Gunel 2019) or the calculations that sustain global financial flows (Appel and Kumar 2015; Ho 2009) operate as powerful knowledge infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. Ethnographies show that infrastructures of information—such as documents—operate very similarly to the more obviously material infrastructures we can observe around us. Hannah Appel’s ethnography looks at the place of contracts in establishing petro-capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. Like bridges and roads, contracts work by connecting some entities (i.e. the state and private enterprises), and, like territorial borders, they disconnect others. As juridical tools, contracts come to fix the relationship between corporations and the state, with the latter guaranteeing profits for the former. This fixing has infrastructural qualities. Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey highlight how ‘a finished road makes invisible or seemingly unimportant the conditions of its construction’ (2012, 529). ‘There are several ways in which things can become un-noticed’, says Hannah Appel, ‘there are things that you don’t notice because you rarely come across them, and there are the things you don’t notice because you come across them so frequently’ (2019, 137). In its mundane, modular form, a signed contract provides a legal coat under which the terms, parties, and negotiations brought together by a specific deal can remain unseen and therefore unquestioned (Appel 2019, 137–61; Tsing 2005, 69). As scarcely visible substrates, contracts are shown to have powerful infrastructural effects, enabling legal practices such as offshoring and sanctioning the distribution of underground oil deposits between private corporations. As such, they effectively function as key infrastructures of this particular kind of extractive capitalism, organising its economic and social impacts.

Whether depicting infrastructures as public works, splintered networks, arteries of domination, or invisible substrates, they provide us with a greater understanding of state processes by allowing us to study the state in a concrete manner. In this way, ethnographies of infrastructure propose new ways to understand how state power is formed and maintained, and the shapes states take within different historical moments.

Infrastructures and space/time

Infrastructures also enable social scientists to reconsider the importance of time and temporality in social life. Time is a foundational topic for anthropologists, both in terms of understanding how time is constructed, measured, and valued in different social worlds, and in terms of an on-going reflexive critique of the temporal assumptions embedded in the socio-cultural study of society (Wolf 1982, Fabian 1983, Gell 1992, Pels 2015). Many of the questions that animated these debates about time in anthropology have been reinvigorated in recent years by studies of infrastructures.

Attention to infrastructures has revealed how shared conceptions of time are codified (Bear 2016), opened up questions about the relation between space, place, and time (Gupta 2015, 2018), and allowed an interrogation of how different ideas of time are enlisted into projects of accumulation, exploitation, and, indeed, revolution (Bear 2014, Appel 2015, Pedersen and Nielsen 2015). Crucially, anthropologists have found that infrastructures actively ‘work on time’ (Mitchell 2020). That is, they change and modulate basic assumptions about how societies are temporally ordered and they do so in often unexpected ways. One good example of this is the temporal effects of the introduction of the railways in the nineteenth century. Railroads revolutionised the relation between space and time, shrinking the time that travel took in ways that created not just shorter journeys but also a whole new concept of space. The arrival of trains quite literally informed a new understanding of time and landscape: the necessity to synchronise train schedules across a national territory pushed for the unification of national time under a single time zone; the speed of travel separated people from the land through which they travelled; and new railways into frontier zones materialised a sense of progress into the future (Schivelbusch 1986).

The spectacle of new infrastructures often manifests as a kind of technological sublime (Nye 1996), with infrastructure megaprojects presented as indices of progress and the presence of concrete, steel, and glass symbolising the appearance of modernity (Anand et al. 2018, Barker 2005, Laszczkowski, 2011, Schwenkel 2015). Anthropological studies of infrastructure have long been replete with examples of this, particularly in urban settings (Rabinow 1989, Graham and Marvin 2001, Joyce 2003). Today as in the past, infrastructures continue to have a powerful capacity to enact the future in the present (Mrazek 2002; Mitchell 2020). They do this in various ways. First, infrastructures provide durable structures upon which investors can secure a revenue of capital into the near future. In this sense, they provide a concrete anchor for the promises of development made by states and international institutions alike (Abourhame and Salamanca 2016). Second, in order to attract investment, infrastructures are presented by states and corporations as promissory, enchanting, and at times almost magical tools through which politicians, speculators, and other institutional and non-institutional actors can claim to be able to secure a better future (Anand et al. 2018, Abram and Weszkalnys 2011). Yet ideas of modernity materialised by infrastructures also coexist and are entangled with other very different conceptions of time.

This is the case of the Soviet-era electrification programme in Mongolia described by David Sneath (2009). Electricity was of utmost importance to the Soviet modernising mission; Lenin famously described communism as ‘Soviet power and the electrification of the whole country’ (Lenin [1920] 1965). The establishment of cables and transmission lines and the extraction of hydropower and fossil fuels were key technologies through which the Politiburo (the main policymaking committee of the Communist Party) sought to tame the peripheries of the Soviet Union. A new rational and modern ‘cult of light’ was set to permanently eradicate the unmodern imaginaries that populated the margins of the USSR. However, rather than displacing the imaginative registers of traditional practices, as Sneath describes, electricity became domesticated by local publics and started to coexist next to the very beliefs it was set to displace. As divination remains widely practiced to this day, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, one might visit a diviner famous for using ‘modern technical devices’ such as a pocket calculator to tell fortunes, all the while experiencing ‘Lenin’s light’ as the glow of modernity (Sneath 2009, 88). In this case the infrastructures of electrification in Mongolia did not establish a new modern subject; instead, they contributed to a new mixed world made of imbroglios between the technical and the magical, the scientific and the prophetic.

As well as ushering in modernity, infrastructures also intervene in temporality through their promise of creating speed (Harvey and Knox 2008). The technological ideal of overcoming ever-greater distance in increasingly less time remains at the heart of contemporary ideas of progress (cf Marx [1857] 1993, Virilio 1986). Following Marx, the geographer David Harvey has famously termed this this tension ‘space/time compression’ (1989), which he places at the core of contemporary capitalism. Indeed in our daily lives this compressed space/time seems to be everywhere: commodities we buy arrive on our doorstep in less than 24 hours, the fruits and vegetables we eat have travelled thousands of kilometres before even becoming ripe, and fibre optics cable allows communications in seemingly ‘real time’ (Riles 2004). The most remote corners of our planet are interconnected through seemingly continuous flows, so that when a giant container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in the spring of 2021, impacts were felt across markets all over the world. The complex logistical choreographies of this constant circulation and compression have been at the heart of lively debates in the social sciences about the relationship between infrastructure and time, in particular in relation to shipping, trade, and commodity flows (Cowen 2014; Khalili 2021; Chua et al. 2018, Mezzadra and Neilson 2019).

Anthropology’s original contribution to these interdisciplinary debates can be found in its unique ability to account for the frictions that populate the world of logistics (Tsing 2004, 2009; Lee and Li Puma 2002; Rofel and Yanagisako 2018; Bear et al. 2015; see also Katz 2001). Paying attention to actually-existing logistics from specific places, anthropologists have criticised the idea of space/time compression as the dominant condition of contemporary capitalism. Nicole Starosielski shows this well in her study of the cables that make possible the real-time communications sustaining financial markets and global trade (Starosielski 2015). She shows that ‘thinking of time-space compression through infrastructure paradoxically draws attention to the slowness of the process of speeding up’ (Anand et al. 2018, 15), the time it takes for cables to arrive in communities and the slow speeds that result once they are there. She describes how our ‘wireless world’ is made possible by a resolutely material undersea network of cables. These cables, made up of resources extracted from a variety of places, are laid by armies of workers and disrupt already existing environments populated by animals and people, and which are sometimes deemed as sacred by local populations. Starosielski’s ethnography sheds light onto the actual temporalities of infrastructure, as well as considering what, and indeed, who, is left out from collective imaginations of the high-speed internet. The space/time compression that we experience when speaking in real time with a distant friend through the internet, thus, exists not separate from but in accretion with a host of other logics of time and space (Anand 2018).

Here, anthropological inquiry works once again ‘against the grain of paradigm setting’ (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 16). Ethnographic attention to the infrastructures of logistics has produced thick descriptions of the time/spaces that populate global flows, allowing anthropologists to develop a ‘polyglot language’ (Tsing 2009) that is capable of showing how diverse times and spaces are made by contemporary forms of circulation.

Infrastructure and the environment

If the anthropology of infrastructure cut its teeth on the study of national and global networks such as canals, fibre-optic cables, or electricity networks, the focus on infrastructure ‘proper’ has expanded since to include things that might not at first glance look very ‘infrastructural’. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction, the field is not defined by studying a particular class of things generally called ‘infrastructure’ but it studies the relationships whereby some things take on the quality of being ‘infrastructural’. For example, for a driver in a car travelling along a highway, we might say that the highway is ‘infrastructure’ in that it enables driving to happen. However, for the road maintenance worker, the road appears less as infrastructure and more as an object of repair. As Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder famously put it, we should not be asking ‘what’ is an infrastructure, but rather ‘when’ is an infrastructure (1996). Understanding infrastructures in this relational way has meant that the term has been opened up by recent scholarship. If ‘infrastructure’ is merely something that enables something else to happen, a ‘system of substrates’ that support other forms of life (Larkin 2013), then it may make just as much sense to say that soil, or air, water, or carbon, are infrastructures as much as bridges, electricity networks, or shipping routes.

In the face of climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss, the infrastructuring qualities of environmental forms have become increasingly evident. This has linked environmental anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure in a range of insightful studies, seeking to bring into view the role that non-human life forms play in sustaining human lifeworlds. Their broad understanding of infrastructure encompasses insects, forests, sand, and waves. Leading discussions about the entanglement of humans and non-humans in the face of environmental destruction, Anna Tsing, in her monograph Mushroom at the end of the world (2015) and multimedia project Feral atlas (2021), attends to the ways that labour, cultural practice, and the material agency of things swirl together to create world-shaping and world-breaking forms. Tackling the role of natural forms in sustaining infrastructure, a recent study of the Panama Canal draws attention to the way that engineered infrastructures always also entail a reckoning between ‘nature’ and technology (Carse 2014). In this case, Carse describes how the flow of water that feeds the Panama Canal is regulated by forests and their hydrological properties. Deforestation by farmers and loggers in the region not only threatens local ecosystems but also poses a threat to the infrastructure of the canal itself—thus linking local environmental dynamics to a key infrastructure of global trade. Plants, states, and citizens can also become co-implicated in environmental destruction, as a recent study of soya bean farming in Paraguay shows (Hetherington 2013). Here, attempts by monocrop agribusinesses to manage their environmental harms demonstrate the limits of government as a tool to tackle socio-natural destruction. Instead of a simple story of power (of agribusinesses) and resistance (by local people), what we find here is a more complex tale of how swathes of land in Paraguay came to be given over to soya bean farming, and how this form of agriculture persists through the everyday interactions of regulators, growers, peasant activists, migrants, and non-humans such as pesticides and the beans themselves. What these studies show is the complex imbrication of engineered infrastructures with ecological systems which become co-implicated in attempts to bring about social change (see also Knox 2020, Dewan 2022).

All of these studies of infrastructure and the environment tend to build on a tradition of research that has fundamentally dismantled the idea that nature is an inert substrate upon which human affairs are conducted (Latour 1993). Instead, by positing an infrastructural approach to the environment, they demonstrate the inherently political status of ‘nature’ as a space of extraction, enclosure, conservation, labour relations, and state making. Those studying environment/infrastructure have shown how landscape, environment, and matter are being imagined and created as infrastructures of consumerism and capitalism. They also draw attention to the environmental effects of engineered infrastructures from dams to data centres, including the social and material conditions of mineral extraction, pollution, disposal, repair, and contamination (Parikka 2011). In doing so, such studies have brought discussions of infrastructure squarely into debates about the human experience of living in ‘the Anthropocene’, a term that denotes the entanglement of people, technology, and matter in the contemporary era. Indeed, the historical emergence of the Anthropocene epoch, particularly during the twentieth century, coincides with the spread of engineered infrastructures. Whilst the Anthropocene has been a somewhat contested concept within anthropology (Moore 2016), the issues that it raises are well served by the work that has already been conducted under the umbrella of the anthropology of infrastructure.

At the same time as the environment has become understood as inherently infrastructural, so too infrastructures have undergone their own shift to become themselves more ‘environmental’, in the sense that they are becoming active and responsive parts of the milieux in which people live (Gabrys 2018). This has manifested particularly through the digitalisation of infrastructure whereby existing infrastructures have undergone a transformation, with materials becoming augmented or ‘informed’ through the use of continuous monitoring or sensing (Barry 2005, Fortun 2004). We see this with things like urban dashboards (Mattern 2015), networks of sensors in the ocean or on trees (Helmreich 2019, Myers 2018), driverless cars (Tennant and Stilgoe 2021), and anything designated with the adjective ‘smart’ (Halpern et al. 2017). These studies show how, as infrastructures become augmented with sensors, digital communication, and AI, they take on cybernetic qualities. That is to say, infrastructures are no longer simply stable forms, inserted into social worlds, but are now expected to respond to and ‘learn’ from their milieu (think of the ‘smart motorway’, iteratively changing speed limits in relation to road conditions). This has led some to argue that infrastructures are in this sense becoming ‘environmental’ in that they are both substrate and agent, thus dismantling the figure-ground relationship upon which the very concept of infrastructure has until recently rested (Knox 2022, Gabrys 2018).

Counter-political infrastructures

A final area to highlight is the recent ethnographic attention to dynamics of resistance, repurposing, and reappropriation of infrastructures by both local and international communities of citizens and activists. One risk with the anthropology of infrastructure is that it draws too much attention to the capacity of top-down imposed socio-material change. A powerful counter to this is the extensive work that now exists on bottom-up, often counter-political forms of infrastructure development. These have emerged either as alternatives to dominant infrastructural systems, or in the gaps left by failing or crumbling infrastructure (Dalakoglou 2016, Corsín Jiménez 2014, Simone 2004, Barry and Gambino 2019, Gambino 2022). Ethnographies of squatters, activists, programmers, laborers, and migrants have explored how the centralising, exclusionary, and extractive logics of dominant infrastructural forms are being countered by alternative principles of open source, collaborative, and collective design based on principles of sharing, participation, and care (Kelty et al. 2010, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ethnographic sites for this work are diverse. Chris Kelty and Gabriella Coleman, for example, have taken as their focus the high-tech world of the free and open source software communities, community hacker spaces, and open hardware movements (Kelty 2010). Others have focused on the infrastructural work done by activist groups like the Occupy movement, 15M in Spain, and the solidarity movement in Greece (Postill 2020, Chan 2015, Corsin-Jimenez and Estalella 2017, Juris 2008, Dalokoglou 2016). This has drawn attention to much longer-running forms and methods of bottom-up civic action, bringing into the study of infrastructure an appreciation of the importance of community-based networks of social support. Here people and their social relations of exchange and mutual support are created by groups like migrants, inhabitants of informal settlements, or racially marginalised communities that are either excluded from or subjected to the violence of state-sanctioned infrastructural systems (Holston 2009, Simone 2004).

The key contribution of these studies of alternative, distributed, and bottom-up ways of making and doing infrastructure is to offer a reconfiguration of anthropological understandings of how power and politics work. AbdouMaliq Simone, for example, asks how collective will is enacted. For over three decades, Simone has observed the way in which informal urban networks come to be assembled in cities of the Global South. His work demonstrates how an attention to infrastructures refigures politics as ‘a choreography of experimentation’ (Simone in Bear et al. 2018, 49; Simone 2004) that binds together designs, materials, pipes, places, and relationships between urban dwellers as they seek to intervene in the worlds in which they live. It is from this makeshift (infra)structure that forms of resistance materialise. Anthropological work on these bottom-up infrastructural forms has served to counter techno-determinist analyses of infrastructures and their effects. Instead, they have shown how infrastructures are sites of political struggle, on-going negotiation, and social and cultural creativity. There is often an activist register to these studies. They illustrate how even in the face of seemingly immovable material structures put in place by states and corporations, people find ways of tinkering, reworking, and altering infrastructures to forge not only new material arrangements but also, perhaps even more importantly, alternative anticolonial trajectories of imagining possible futures. These studies deploy ethnographic description to the ends of a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that society might take (Estalella and Criado 2019, Pink et al. 2018).

Conclusion

Infrastructure has emerged as an alluring topic of study for anthropologists, but it has not been without its critics. The 2015 meeting of the UK based Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory discussed the motion: ‘Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political’ (Bear et al. 2018). The discussion pivoted around the tendency of infrastructure scholars to extend the category to a bewildering array of things and topics, including affects, values, languages, ethics, temporalities, exchanges, and culture. Those in opposition to the motion argued that this risks depoliticising and generalising the specific historical and cultural saliency of engineered infrastructures as built forms (Lazar in Bear et al. 2018). They also held that extending the category risks forcing incommensurable ‘ontologies’ or world-views, such as those upheld by the Indigenous communities that are so often affected by infrastructural developments, into a universalising, Western techno-political lens (Rival in Bear et al. 2018). In substance, infrastructure was criticised for being at once too vague and too narrow, risking erasing diverse ways of seeing the world as well as becoming too diluted to have any analytical purchase (Harvey in Bear et al. 2018, 4).

While the motion did not pass, many anthropologists remain committed to exploring human and non-human worlds through an attention to infrastructure. Expanding the definition of infrastructure further, some argue that it is best understood as ‘the movement or patterning of social form […] the living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlan 2016, 393). Others highlight infrastructures’ character as the ‘enablers’ of different systems and encourage seeing the infrastructural turn in the human sciences as a sign ‘that we are conceptually re-arming ourselves for the struggle against the Anthropocene and the modernity that made it’ (Boyer 2017, 226). However, rather than proliferating an endless list of things to categorise under the heading ‘infrastructure’, ethnographic accounts speak more importantly to the ability to detect when and how the infrastructural quality of things comes to matter, and to map the different kinds systems they underwrite (Star 1999).

Finally, as the study of infrastructure has become consolidated as a subfield of anthropology, it has begun to explore what role scholars might play in making and imagining future infrastructural systems and shaping people’s entanglement with them (Bryant and Knight 2019, Pink 2022). This work involves awkward but necessary collaborations between anthropologists and a range of other scholars and practitioners (Aslanishvili and Gambino 2022; Knox 2022, Khandekar et al. 2021, Bremer et al. 2020, Ogden 2021). These kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations are already underway, with studies such as the Feral atlas (2021) coming into being at the intersection of different forms of knowledge, including history, art, architecture, engineering, and natural science. As the anthropology of infrastructure comes of age, it has thus begun to extend beyond the discipline, seeking out collaborations with local communities, artists, programmers, architects, and infrastructures themselves. Its goal of tracing and creating alternative ways of seeing, being, and organising life is all the more important in the face of challenges to come.

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Note on contributors

Hannah Knox is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her work explores the relationship between technology, environment and the state with a particular interest in communications and data infrastructures. Her books include: Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise (2015, Cornell University Press); Ethnography for data saturated world (2018, Manchester University Press); Digital anthropology (2012, Berg) and her most recent monograph, Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change (2020, Duke University Press).

Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL, Room 241, 14 Taviton Street

London, WC1H 0BW. h.knox@ucl.ac.uk

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research applies a feminist-materialist lens to the study of large infrastructural projects and developmental horizons in the South Caucasus. She is one of the editors of the volume Gendering logistics: Feminist approaches for the analysis of supply chain capitalism (2021, Bologna University Press), co-author of the experimental film A state in a state (2022), directed by Tekla Aslanishvili, and is currently completing a monograph on infrastructural failure and practices of future-making.

Evelina Gambino, Girton College, University of Cambridge Huntingdon Rd, Girton, Cambridge CB3 0JG. eg666@cam.ac.uk

Photography

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:48:03 +0000

Hanoi, Vietnam 2018. Young men line up for school pictures at the Temple of Literature. Photo: Brent Luvaas.

Brent Luvaas

Drexel University

Initially published 22 Dec 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22photography

Abstract:

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand the social and cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout the globe. This entry examines the work anthropologists have done on, and with, photography. It surveys the conclusions anthropologists have reached about the social and cultural impacts of photography and discusses the multimodal experiments that define the use of photography in anthropology today. Photography, anthropologists argue, is never an impartial representation of the world around us. It is part and parcel of making the world what it is. It is an active medium through which human beings define and re-define themselves and their societies.

Introduction

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. ‘Every two minutes’, writes media theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Americans alone take more photographs than were made in the entire nineteenth century’ (2016, 4). In 2021, some 350 million photos were shared per day via the social media app Snapchat, another 350 million via Facebook, and around 95 million through Instagram. We see photographs in books, on billboards, in storefronts and on television screens, and nearly every time we pull our phones from our pockets, which for much of the world’s population is well over a hundred times per day.

Photography, then, is more and more pervasive in our daily lives. Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working to understand the implications of that pervasiveness. Photography, their research shows, is continually expanding its social utility, cultural salience, and political relevance. It has become a tool of power and persuasion (Sekula 1992; Edwards 2001; Azoulay 2008), of memory and connection (Wright 2013; Campbell 2014; Miyarrka Media 2019). It operates as a kind of language (Miller 2015; Jurgenson 2019) through which we communicate our moods and our thoughts, and a social currency through which we imagine, construct, and add value to our public identities (Abidin 2018).

This does not mean, however, that everyone everywhere uses photography in the same way. Anthropologists, through long-term, in-depth studies of specific communities in diverse regions around the globe, have uncovered a range of meanings and uses associated with photography. For some, photography is a tool for capturing reality ‘as it really is’: its indisputable objective nature (Edwards 1992), or its spiritual essence (MacDougall 1992). For others, photography is a medium for self-invention, a way of depicting what could or should be (Pinney 1998; Bajorek 2020). For still others, it is a method of deception, of distorting or manipulating reality, or of convincing others that reality is different than they had imagined it. In many cases, photography is all of these things at once (Strassler 2021).

Anthropology is not unique among the social sciences and humanities in giving photography this sort of critical attention. What sets it apart from other disciplines is its emphasis on lived experience. For anthropologists, photography is felt and embodied, not simply encountered or consumed. Photography is part of how we understand our selves and the world around us. As such, anthropologists often study photography by immersing themselves in other peoples’ photographic practices: experiencing, to the extent that it is possible, what it is like to consume and create photographs from the vantage point of one particular population at one particular moment in time. They also recognise the value of photography in communicating anthropological ideas and have been on the forefront of efforts to use photography to enhance, expand, and complicate social scientific work. In a world where the image is rapidly supplanting text as the primary means through which we communicate, we increasingly see photography as a rich alternative mode of anthropological representation.

This entry shows how photography has been both a subject and medium of anthropological work. It surveys many of the observations and conclusions anthropologists working among diverse populations have made about photography. It also explores experiments to use photography to document, communicate, and expand the audience of anthropological work.

Part 1: Photography as research subject

‘When writing about photography’, Rosalind Morris notes, ‘one often feels that almost everything has been said before’ (Morris 2009, 13). The same arguments and insights are recycled again and again. In part, this stems from the simple functionality of a camera. You press a shutter release button, and light passes through a lens. That light either leaves a physical trace on film or a plate through reacting with some sort of chemical agent (silver nitrate, most commonly) or is stored as data on a memory card. What could be more straightforward and easier to interpret than that?

The recycling of insights on photography also stems from the tendency of theorists of photography, including anthropologists, to cite a rather small, and predictable, body of theory in support of their work, with Susan Sontag’s On photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera lucida, and Walter Benjamin’s A short history of photography foremost among them. Photography, in this canon of thought, has specific, observable effects. The technology itself always, to some extent, determines the outcome. The medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). Photography acts as a mode of capture, reinforcing colonial conquest and the male gaze (Sontag 1976); it triggers reflections on death (Barthes 1981); and it opens pathways to the ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin 1931). Where anthropologists have complicated this canon of thought is in their insistence on placing acts of photographic production and consumption within particular cultural and historical contexts. For anthropologists, photography is always part of a larger assemblage. It is always ‘entangled’ in different social and political systems (Pinney 1997, 10). It cannot, then, be understood in isolation nor as a purely mechanical process with predetermined results.

Nonetheless, anthropologists too have often reiterated the same general arguments about photography, even if they word them differently. One of those arguments is that photography is never merely a way of representing the world around us; it is also itself a world-making practice, a means by which we transform the social, political, and material conditions of our lives. Photography, in other words, makes things imaginable and thinkable by changing the sensual apparatuses through which we encounter, understand, relate to, and act towards the things and beings around us. Photographs, anthropologist Terrence Wright explains, ‘intrude on, and become part of, everyday perception’ (Wright 1992, 28). ‘We do not simply “see” what is there before us’, elaborates Deborah Poole. ‘Rather, the specific ways in which we see (and represent) the world determine how we act upon the world and, in doing so, create what the world is’ (Poole 1997, 7).

Indeed, photography significantly impacts how anthropologists do, and think through, their own work. As is often noted , anthropology and photography developed in tandem as two mid-nineteenth century efforts to capture the elusive nature of the world around us (see Edwards 1992; Edwards 2001; Pinney 2011). Early anthropologists, just like early photographic innovators William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, saw photography as a direct translation of what was out there ‘in the world’ onto a photographic plate. As such, photographs, for nineteenth century anthropologists, served as data or evidence of human cultural and morphological diversity. Photographs could chronicle the precise details of a subject with far greater precision than drawings or textual descriptions. Before ethnographic fieldwork was an established part of anthropological practice, anthropologists depended upon photographs from explorers and missionaries for key details about the populations they studied. Photography was the perfect medium for documenting dress, architecture, and artefacts. It also became a tool for documenting difference, a means by which European and American anthropologists visually reinforced their own peoples’ perceived superiority to others. In the most extreme form, this amounted to anatomical studies, where native populations were forced to stand naked before a grid, their bodily proportions and facial features subjected to the scrutinising gaze of ‘racial science’ (Edwards 2011; Pinney 2011). Here, photography was an instrument of colonialism, working side by side with an incipient anthropology to categorise and classify human beings around the world in ways that served the interests of European imperial powers.

By the early part of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski recognised the unique capacity of photography to present human populations with greater nuance and complexity ‘than any written commentary’ (Young 1998, 26) could. Though anthropology remained largely a discipline of words (Mead 1974), its ideas communicated through written articles and monographs, scholars like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, used photography to capture ‘the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior’ (Bateson and Mead 1942, xii), or to ‘record visual impressions’ that could later be ‘carried into the laboratory for refined analysis’ (Collier 1957, 846). Photographs, after all, contain a superabundance of information. They capture errant and ‘quotidian details’ (Young 1998, 1) that often exceed the intentions of the persons who take them or who chose to include them within a text (Taylor 1996). Sometimes they even contradict the intentions of an anthropologist, revealing greater complexity than their own argument could allow. In such cases, photography is not merely a passive or neutral recorder of personal observations but rather exists alongside those observations, expanding upon and complicating them. In short, photography exerts a kind of agency over anthropological practice. It helps shape the field of anthropology rather than merely serving its ends.

Multiple forms of agency

Another argument that anthropologists make repeatedly is that photography does not just do things to us; we do things with it. Photography is always entangled with other kinds of agencies, other agendas, other social projects. It never simply serves one end. In the case of the colonial photography of early anthropology, for instance, the photographed also exerted some agency over the images produced. ‘Rather than seeing photography purely as a tool of the colonial project’, writes Jane Lydon, of her work on archival images of Aboriginal Australians, ‘a closer look at the production and consumption of the photographic images under scrutiny here reveals a dynamic and performative relationship between photographer and Aboriginal subject’ (Lydon 2005, xiii). While colonisers use photography to demonstrate their difference from the colonised, the colonised use photography to present a more complicated picture: of their own modernity and sophistication, their own syncretic and hybrid identity, their fluidity and continuity in the face of imperial powers. Photography does not just act upon colonial subjects: it can also act with them.

A similar point has been made about the Peruvian Andes. Anthropologist Deborah Poole argues that the ‘image world’ of the Andes, constructed through a range of photographs taken by colonists and others, shapes the world experienced by the people in the Andes themselves. However, it is never simply a top-down world imposed from on high by colonial powers. Image worlds instead are negotiated through millions of small acts of image-production, circulation, and curation, an ‘intricate and sometimes contradictory layering of relationships, attitudes, sentiments, and ambitions, through which European and Andean peoples have invested images with meaning and value’ (Poole 1997, 7-8). The meaning production connected with photography, in other words, is a continually unfinished process engaged in by multiple parties with different stakes in the outcome. Some of those parties may have disproportionate power to shape the meanings invested in photographs, but that doesn’t mean other parties have no power. The colonised too participate in meaning-making. They too help shape the image world photography constructs around us.

Recognising that photography can serve different ends in different contexts, anthropologists studying photography have committed themselves to looking beyond the Western world, chronicling the multiple, intertwined histories of the practice and displacing a Eurocentric perspective (Pinney 2003; Behrend 2013). In doing so, they again and again note the agentive practices of photographers and the subjects of their photographs. In the Indian city of Nagda, for instance, photography is employed for various projects of state and self-making (Pinney 1998). While the Indian government continues colonial-era practices of using photography to document, define, and track the whereabouts of its citizens, citizens themselves often use photography to thwart or undermine these ends. While the state invests in a ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ paradigm of photography, in which what is depicted is simply an accurate representation of what ‘is’, Indian citizens frequently use photography to project a kind of dream version of self and place, exploring the potential of photography to enact, through elaborate staging and post-production practices, particular kinds of fantasies and desires. Here, photography is more about imagination than representation.

The line between the two, however, is not always clear. In Mussoorie, a resort town in the foothills of the Himalayas, domestic Indian tourists dress themselves up as ‘idealized peasants, bandits, Arab sheiks, and pop stars’ (MacDougall 1992, 103) to get their portraits taken in photography studios. They do this, claims anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall, not simply to play act or mess around, but to represent a deeper, spiritual self, a self not necessarily visible to onlookers. Photography, here, becomes a form of self-actualisation, bringing the private self into alignment with the public self. MacDougall’s film on photographic practices in Mussoorie, Photo wallahs, allows us to observe this practice from multiple vantage points, itself demonstrating the irreducibility of visual (or audio-visual) content. In Chinese-owned photo studios in Dutch-colonial Java, similarly, customers got their photos taken before elaborate backdrops of foreign lands. These portraits, argues Karen Strassler, serve as ‘a form of virtual travel beyond the horizons of the everyday’ (2010, 77). Photography here is more about what ‘could be’ than what currently ‘is’. It works ‘to expand the horizons of the actual’ (Strassler 2010, 79).

Such photographic horizons are often inseparable from political ones. The people of Senegal, for instance, have used photography ‘both to document a time of radical social and political change and to effect these changes’ (Bajorek 2020, 5). Sometimes this takes on the seemingly innocuous form of the fantastical studio portraits described by Strassler, MacDougall, and Pinney, or as documented in Ghana by Tobias Wendl in his film Future remembrance (1998). Sometimes it depicts explicitly political events, like presidential rallies and protests. In either case, photography is not neutral. By representing themselves supported by crowds, politicians reinforce their power (Bajorek 2020). By documenting the masses drawn to their protests, movements of resistance gain momentum. Even studio portraits retain a certain transformative political potential. By depicting themselves as cosmopolitans and sophisticates, surrounded by consumer goods or in front of private jets, West African people work to transform their social and economic status (Bajorek 2020).

The political potential of photography, however, is not limited to what is depicted in images. What is left out, omitted, and censored also has importance, helping shape social and political realities. In Kenya, Heike Behrend argues, choosing not to depict oneself, or appearing only in veiled or altered form, has taken on a deep political significance for the Islamic minority (2013). The Kenyan government, like nearly all governments in the contemporary world, makes heavy use of photography in surveilling and accounting for its population. Official identification headshots, required for state-issued IDs and other bureaucratic endeavours, are one example. Kenyan Muslim women, who often choose to veil for both religious and personal reasons, are frequently required to remove their veils for official photographs, subjecting them to the scrutinising eyes of the state. It should come as little surprise, then, that many Kenyan Muslims are suspicious of being photographed, whether for state purposes, advertisements, or tourist images. Behrend refers to the efforts of Kenyan Muslims to go without photographic depiction, and to conceal, mask, and disguise their images when they do appear in photographs, as ‘the aesthetics of withdrawal’ (Behrend 2013, 20).

After all, once our images are ‘out there’, circulating by hand or through media, they are often outside of our control. They take on a life of their own when they are defaced, reproduced, or taken out of context, for example. They can generate parody images, be cut and pasted into collages and montages, or become street art or Internet memes. Karen Strassler, discussing the tendency of images to multiply and circulate in the media environment of contemporary Indonesia, refers to occurrences where photographs get mixed up in larger public debates and political discourses as ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2021). An image-event, she writes,

is a political process that crystallizes otherwise inchoate and dispersed imaginings within a discrete and mobile visible form that becomes available for scrutiny, debate, and play as it circulates in public (Strassler 2021, 13).

Image-events can take many forms: a picture of a celebrity in a men’s magazine that may or may not be nude, an image of a killed political activist photocopied and pasted onto walls, a caught-in-the-act shot of a politician engaging in unseemly or outright illegal behaviour. Photographs get intertwined with larger social processes, a fact, claims Strassler, that should lead us to abandon the conception of photographs as static depictions of particular moments. It may be worthwhile to think of ‘all images as “events” of varying intensity, duration, and scale’ (Strassler 2021, 13).

Photography’s multiple meanings

That does not mean that images are fully available to the academic gaze, or that we can come to any complete understanding of what a photograph does or means as it circulates in public. Photographs retain something of a stubborn opacity. Images in colonial-era Java, claims John Pemberton, reveal ‘unintended traces of a ghostliness within the machinery of the modern’ (Pemberton 2009, 49). There are presences within images that can’t always be accounted for, details that fail to conform to our understanding of events. What is that shadow in the corner of the image, that smirk creeping up the side of a face? Photographs don’t only show us what we want them to show but they can also reveal elements otherwise hidden and contradictions not easily contained.

Photography can move through different modes and functions even within a single cultural context. In his study of photographic practices in the Roviana Lagoon of the western Solomon Islands, Christopher Wright describes the ‘entanglement’ of Roviana people with photography in various ways: ‘through being the subjects of colonial photography, through their own uses and expectations of the medium, and through the role photography can play in their ideas of history’ (Wright 2013, 2). In Roviana, as in Nagda or Java, there is no single, simple explanation of what photography is or does. There are only singular instances in which the Roviana use photography towards various ends. Roviana people are both the subjects and objects of photography. While colonists used photography to capture and categorise the Roviana, the Roviana used photography to tell their own oral histories, forge their own understanding of the past, and even to re-imagine, and rework, the colonial encounter.

Given photography’s frequently multiple meanings, the conclusions anthropologists reach about a particular body of photography are not necessarily shared by their interlocutors. In his work on the interpretation of colonial-era photography in The Gambia, Liam Buckley shows how citizens of postcolonial countries often interpret photographs in ways that are unpredictable, sometimes even contrary to the political and theoretical ends of the anthropologist herself (Buckley 2014). Gambians, he explains, denied him the sorts of ‘subaltern narratives’ he was hoping for in their interpretations of colonial photographs, focusing instead on aesthetic details: their age, their flatness, their amateurishness (Buckley 2014, 721). In essence, they rendered them largely meaningless, incapable of inflicting the kind of social or psychological harm anthropologists, and other experts, might imagine of them.

The same can be said of Yolngu practices of smart phone photography in contemporary Australia. As anthropologist Jennifer Deger has written in her collaborative account of the practice, ‘my Yolngu friends and family use mobile phones as a technology with which to tap into—and amplify—the push and pull of life’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 9). Through fancifully edited photographs, mobile-phone-wielding Yolngu people use photography to connect with each other, their sense of identity, and their memories of past events. Photography doesn’t impose a singular view on Yolngu people. It gets mixed up in larger Yolngu projects of individual and collective becoming, projects that will never be finished.

‘All photographs’, writes Craig Campbell ‘are actually agitating; even the most mundane and seemingly transparent images…have the capacity to agitate against or undo our meaning making endeavors’ (2014, xiv). The inherent indeterminacy and instability of photographic meaning enables different populations to interpret photographs differently, employing them towards diverse, and often explicitly political, ends. Even photographic archives, Campbell shows, retain a dynamic capability, continually repurposed and reimagined for the concerns of the present. During the Soviet era, for instance, Russian communists used images of Indigenous Siberians to cast them as part of a larger national narrative, in which a continuity existed between Indigenous social structures and experiments in communist utopia. Today, Indigenous Siberians, and anthropologists like Campbell, use the same images to find gaps in this narrative, and to tell a messier, more complicated story about Indigenous survival under colonisation. Once again, as Strassler (2021) argues, not even still photographs are static.

A useful way to make sense of this semantic multiplicity of photographs is to ask how they appear and circulate in particular ‘visual economies’ (Poole 1997). Some participants in this economy will have more influence than others on how an image will be received and understood, as well as the kinds of stories it will be made to tell. One such disproportionate power resides with those that Zeynep Devrim Gürsel refers to as ‘image brokers’, the photography commissioners and editors for newspapers, websites, and other media resources where we encounter photographs. Image brokers choose which images to include with articles, and which images to use to illustrate a particular point, to represent a particular people or place, or to break up the text in visually arresting ways. ‘Image brokers’, writes Gürsel, ‘act as intermediaries for images through acts such as commissioning, evaluating, licensing, selling, editing, and negotiating’ (2016, 2). Their power, of course, is not unlimited. They too are subject to significant constraints: the authority of editors and advertisers, the perceived interests of their readership, and the fluctuations of the news market. Nonetheless, image brokers play a significant role in determining how audiences see and perceive the world around them. ‘Professional image making’, writes Gürsel, echoing by now a familiar sentiment, ‘is central to processes of worldmaking’ (2016, 13), as it shapes how we understand and act towards the world around us. Americans learn to regard other countries in particular ways in large part due to how they perceive them based on the images of them they have encountered. How would Americans conceive of Russia, Afghanistan, or other countries distant from them without the work of image brokers operating behind the scenes? Image brokers, then, hold an enormous sway over American, or any other, foreign policy. They are one set of power players in world politics who go largely unnoticed, their work too often mistaken for reality as it is.

While anthropologists have spent considerable energy uncovering the political potential and limitations of photography, it is important to note that not all photography is political in any explicit sense. In his open-access publication on uses of photography on social media apps like SnapChat and Instagram, Daniel Miller claims that photography is employed for all sorts of quotidian tasks. In these tasks, it operates like a language, expressing any variety of ephemeral moods and thoughts in ways not meant to have a lasting impact or be taken in an overly serious manner (Miller 2015). Nathan Jurgenson (2019) refers to this as photography’s ‘phatic’ function. Photography can be said to be functioning in a ‘phatic’ manner when it serves to create or maintain social connection, rather than communicate something meaningful.

Singaporean social media influencers may similarly reject many of the high and mighty purposes academics might want young people online to engage in through online photography (Abidin 2016). Photography on social media, instead, is for making silly faces in acts of self-deprecation, for amusing oneself and one’s friends, for expressing opinions without having to take the time to compose one’s thoughts into words (Miller 2015). Crystal Abidin describes this variety of phatic photography as ‘subversive frivolity’ (2016). In any case, with most photos now taken on smart phones, photography, Miller claims, has been thoroughly democratised. It is no longer the domain of elite image-makers. It is a medium for all of us, and as we make use of photography in more and more domains of our lives, we are continually expanding the boundaries of what photography can say and do.

Part 2: Photography as research medium

It should come as no surprise, then, that anthropologists are exploring what photography can say and do within their own work. Where previous generations of anthropologists used photographs largely to illustrate or support points made through text (Taylor 1996, 66; Strassler 2021, 27), anthropologists today are increasingly exploring ways to make photographs speak alongside their texts, telling a different, more open-ended, kind of story in a uniquely visual language.

One thing photography is understood to do is provide a medium through which diverse vantage points can be expressed. In photography, what is in the frame and outside of it, in focus and out, determines what we see and how. What we see is not the whole truth, but the selective and edited truth of one person, occupying one position at one moment in time. Recognising this feature of photography and looking to include their interlocutors as active participants in the production of knowledge, anthropologists have frequently provided cameras and other tools of visual representation to their interlocutors to do with as they will. To chronicle their harrowing journey across the Sonoran desert, for instance, Jason DeLeon (2015) supplied undocumented migrants with disposable cameras. To gain inside access into what it feels like for Somali refugees to await asylum in Delhi, India, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (2015) gave cameras to the young men with whom he was shooting a documentary film. The method, known as ‘photovoice’, purports to give the marginalised, and often unrepresented, a ‘voice’ to depict themselves. It is often part of a larger project of ‘decolonising’ anthropology, challenging the power relationships that have constituted, in fact that continue to constitute, the discipline. Yet typically it is the anthropologist who selects from among the photos taken for inclusion within their work, and it is the anthropologist who provides context and interpretation for them. ‘Although these projects push against imbalances of power inherent in the act of photographic representation’, writes Alexander Fattal of photovoice, ‘echoes of those very imbalances inevitably resound in their implementation’ (2020, 153). Nonetheless, photovoice projects, like Fattal’s own among youth in drug-war-torn Colombia, can provide moving, evocative, and unsettling representations from outside the academy.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the interventions of photovoice will retain their relevance in the era of near-ubiquitous photography. ‘These days’, writes Paul Gurrumuruwuy as part of the Miyarrka Media collective, ‘every Yolngu has a phone’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 1), and nearly every phone has a camera. Photographs are more present in the lives of the people anthropologists study than they ever have been. They are also more prosaic. There are, of course, still people in the world without regular access to cameras, such as the youth Fattal worked with, but their numbers are diminishing quickly, and with numerous social media platforms at their disposal, their dependence on anthropologists to present their work is less pronounced. The idea that anthropologists might play some crucial, interventionist role in providing their interlocutors with a means of documenting their own lives seems increasingly outdated. In most cases, anthropologists are simply not needed for that. Instead, liberated from a sort of salvage visual anthropology, they are exploring other, more experimental roles photography might play within their work.

‘The way to restore photography to a concrete contribution within the discipline’, wrote Elizabeth Edwards at the beginning of the digital era, ‘is to harness those qualities peculiar to the medium of still photography’ (1997, 53). Those qualities, she explains, are the open-endedness of photography, its inherent ambiguity, its incompleteness, and its inability to include everything within a frame. These are attributes that can be harnessed towards ethnographic ends, made to evoke rather than illustrate, and present non-reductive, multidimensional representations that enable us to ‘see through different eyes from beyond the Boundary’ (Edwards 1997, 54) that separates one cultural world from another. Anthropologists in the last two decades have found diverse ways to do just that.

Seeking to capture the affective landscape of a Brazilian sanatorium, Joao Biehl, for his book Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment (2005), partnered with photographer Torben Eskerod. The resulting black and white images are less illustrative than evocative, immersing readers in the feeling of the place, rather than revealing details or reinforcing arguments. The images here work alongside the text, neither one subordinate to the other. The same is true in Righteous dopefiend (2009), an emotionally wrenching depiction of life on the streets of San Francisco for unhoused heroin addicts that Philippe Bourgois wrote in partnership with photographer, and then anthropological graduate student, Jeff Schoenberg. The book’s images provide emotional texture in addition to expository information, doing different, but no less important, work than the text.

The epistemic and emotional work that photography does depends on its ability to capture, without explicit commentary, a viewpoint that is both expansive and particular. To harness that dual potential, anthropologist Filip De Boeck partnered with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, and later Sammy Baloji, for the books Kinshasa: Tales of the invisible city (2004) and Suturing the city: Living together in Congo’s urban worlds (2016). Both books attempt to depict the irreducible complexities and contradictions of life in a contemporary Congolese city. Here too, the images add another dimension to the work. Rather than being a mere visual accompaniment, they make their own sort of ‘sensory argument’. The visual depicts what words cannot: a city lived and experienced, rather than theorised or explained.

While some anthropologists have partnered with photographers to create a more immersive sensory component to their work, others have taken their own photographs and made them central to the act of ethnographic communication. Throughout his book Monrovia modern: Urban form and political imagination in Liberia (2017), former photojournalist Danny Hoffman employs full-colour photographs to show how Monrovians inhabit, manipulate, and move through the deteriorating built environment of their city. Shot with wide lenses and available light, with human subjects often blurred or as tiny figures in the background, the images are both architectural and emotive, capturing something of the lived feeling of making do with a collapsing infrastructure and crumbling economy. Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela’s co-authored book Art of captivity (2020) also uses photography to demonstrate the way people occupy and make use of space. Focusing their lenses on Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala, their richly coloured photographs of small, dank spaces capture the claustrophobia of captivity, human figures collapsed like plastic tarps in the corner of their cells. For both Hoffman, and O’Neill and Fogarty-Valenzuela, photography is a tool for depicting affect, those pre-articulate moods and sensations that animate the atmospheres around us (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010), even when we are unable to define what they are or mean. Their photos are complex and ambiguous, opening up multiple interpretations rather than presenting a specific argument. Borrowing from a street photography tradition that emphasises the ambiguity, complexity, and irreducibility of the image, my own photo-ethnographic essays on the streets of Indonesia (Luvaas 2022) and in the confines of my own home during the coronavirus pandemic (Luvaas 2021) mimic the opacity of lived experience, and expose the inability of theory to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of everyday life. It is up to us, Thera Majaaland (2017) explains in regards to her own photographic work that shows the facades of houses in Denmark, South Africa, and elsewhere, to fill in the gaps of what is not shown in an image. Photographic images tend to provide no closure.

In enabling such open-ended modes of representation, photography has become one part of a larger move towards what have been called ‘multimodal anthropologies’, a range of experiments in non-textual, or at least more-than-textual, sensory media with the intention of expanding the parameters of what counts as anthropological work and who is included within its practice (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017). Here, photography can be used as a way of collaborating with the natural environment, for example, whether by literally using plants to make images (developing film with stinging nettle or mashed up rose) or re-creating archival photographs of national parks in order to come to a better understanding of how those spaces have changed over time (Smith 2007). Even researchers’ family photographs have been used for both personal and political analyses, demonstrating, for example, how the ‘entanglement of subject and nation formation emerges in the images that comprise [a] family’s archive’ (Dattatreyan 2018).

Multimodality of this sort is understood as a way of interrogating existing power relationships within anthropology and its representations, even if it is not able to overcome them entirely. While ‘there is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’, they can nonetheless help us attend to ‘that unsettled feeling that we get in our gut’ that something in our practice is reinforcing power differentials (Takaragawa et al. 2019, 520). Multimodal forms of research and representation can help open up potential avenues to make anthropology more inclusive, more expansive, and more subversive of dominant narratives. While photography has been and continues to be a tool of domination and control, it also continues to be a tool, however imperfect, for participating in and supporting social justice movements, allowing us to work ‘as politically engaged makers and scholars’ (Alvarez Astacio, Dattatreyan, and Shankar 2021, 426).

Conclusion

Photography has never been a passive medium, a simple capturing of light that reflects a complete picture of what is ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’. It is, and has always been, a series of choices, made by situated social subjects under particular conditions of power, about how to depict their world and how to use those depictions to make substantive changes to it. People use photography to gain knowledge and mastery over their environments and the people around them. They use photography to push back against accepted social realities, to re-invent themselves and transform their social identities. They also use photography to just have fun, playfully reinterpreting their lives in ways that may read as frivolous or superficial to outside observers.

Studying the uses of photography by different populations in specific places and specific moments in time, anthropologists have long taken photography seriously, not just as a popular practice, but also as a social and political project with real-world consequences. Photography, anthropologists’ work shows, reframes and reshapes reality as we understand and experience it. It is a practice of world-making, not just world-representing. Moreover, it is a practice that different populations around the world use differently, for their own personal and political ends. Photography thus always has to be understood within a specific social, historical, and political context.

This does not mean, however, that photography is always available for understanding. If we recognise the inherent ambiguity of photographs, we become attuned to the fact that they depict more than what their producers purport them to show. Instead, they provide a complex, contradictory, and irreducible vantage point on reality. Anthropologists increasingly recognise this aspect of photography to be an asset in their own work, and they are exploring ways to use photography to create a more open-ended, inclusive, and collaborative vision of their discipline.

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Note on contributor

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Drexel University. A visual anthropologist and avid photographer, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street style: An ethnography of fashion blogging (2016, Bloomsbury) and DIY style: Fashion, music, and global digital cultures (2012, Berg).

Brent Luvaas, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, US. luvaas@drexel.edu

Cash transfers

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 04:36:20 +0000

Demoh Contel (left) receives a cash transfer payment from Patrick Lamboi (far right) and David A. Kargbo (center left), who work for Splash in Freetown, Sierra Leone on June 21, 2015. Photo: Dominic Chavez/World Bank

Martin Fotta Mario Schmidt

Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22cashtransfer

Abstract:

Cash transfers—direct regular and non-contributory payments to eligible individuals—are one of the most discussed, celebrated, and contested social assistance innovations of the twenty-first century. They have helped alleviate poverty and provide quick relief during economic crises such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. They are heralded for improving the position of women, increasing community resilience, making development aid interventions more efficient, and achieving a more just distribution of wealth. This entry outlines the history of cash transfers and discusses some of their key features. It shows that cash transfers’ variability and ultimate indeterminacy allows scholars, practitioners, and recipients alike to approach them in a multitude of ways. Cash transfers can be used to mould recipients into neoliberal subjects; they can be seen as vehicles to revolutionise the global capitalist economy; and they may be considered as reparations for historical injustices. The entry focuses on three distinctly anthropological approaches applied to the study of cash transfers: Their infrastructures, the human relations that they presuppose and forge, and questions as to what kind of transaction they really are. It shows that cash transfer programmes rely on, transform, and build infrastructures such as digital payment technologies. They also impact gender relations, state-citizens relations and local power relations, and affect the lives of marginalised social groups. Lastly, cash transfers encounter already-existing transactional orders, types of exchange, and categorisations of money which shape their local interpretations. In these and other ways, cash transfers reveal contradictions of an increasingly financialised global capitalist economy that depends on particular infrastructures, bureaucratised state power, patriarchy, and specific understandings of what an economic transaction is. The entry concludes with a call for further, ethnographically nuanced studies of cash transfers.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, scholars, politicians, development aid practitioners, and increasingly also the general public have come to see the regular provision of relatively small sums to eligible recipients as one of the most promising social assistance and welfare state innovations. Cash transfers (CTs), also known as social (assistance) transfers or social (assistance) payments, are promoted for their potential to reduce poverty, revolutionise the relation between citizens and states, change gender hierarchies and household dynamics, streamline inefficient development aid interventions, and cushion the economic effects of ecological and other crises. Echoing these sentiments, a statement released by several UN agencies in 2018 described ‘cash-based assistance as one of the most significant reforms in humanitarian assistance in recent years’ (OCHA et al. 2018).

When advocating in favour of CT programmes, proponents point to experiences with and insights from existing governmental programmes and small-scale interventions. An article published in the New York Times, for instance, presents the activities of the NGO GiveDirectly that distributes unconditional cash transfers to, among other populations, Western Kenya’s rural poor as a potential blueprint for handling a global economy characterised by increasing unemployment, technological revolution, and an unequal distribution of economic assets. In this and similar accounts, CTs appear straightforward and ‘plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (Star & Griesemer 1989, 393).

With 95,000 CT-related publications in different languages in 2021 alone (Gentilini 2022, 7), CT programmes are also possibly the most studied of all social programmes. Research protocols have been built into them and experts continuously evaluate their impact, especially when they are framed as experiments (Howard 2022). Governments, NGOs, and inter-governmental organisations frequently publish reports about individual programmes or analyses comparing several of them, usually confirming CTs’ success in reaching the stated goals or suggesting improvements. Indeed, through research, evaluation, and reporting funded by multilateral agencies or Silicon Valley’s tech sector, CTs gain persuasiveness as a global, rather than local, technocratic policy innovation (Peck & Theodore 2015).

Economists, political scientists, sociologists, and other academics have also been intrigued by CTs. They have assessed claims made as to their efficacy, identified their shortcomings and contradictions, or deconstructed their ideological underpinnings. Along with human geographers, social and cultural anthropologists have demonstrated the power of long-term ethnographic research to generate insights into the workings of state and development CT policies. They have shown how local contexts mould these seemingly objective and technocratic interventions, described their unintended effects, and nuanced some of the claims made in favour of CT policies. Equipped with methods such as multi-sited ethnography, anthropologists have revealed why CTs are exemplary ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer 1989), able to jump across scales and geographical borders.

This entry does not provide an exhaustive overview of CT programmes and policies or assess their reformist potential. Rather, it draws on three distinctly anthropological conceptual repertoires—infrastructures, relations, and transactions—to capture the diverse ways CTs operate on the ground and reshape social relationships. Each section provides ethnographic examples that highlight the major insights anthropologists have contributed to a refined understanding of CTs and illustrates diverse ways in which ethnography reveals how these programmes that firmly belong to the contemporary global development repertoire interact with local contexts and shape social relationships.

Cash transfers: A preliminary classification

The COVID-19 pandemic revived the appeal of CT policies. Over 2020 and 2021, in ‘the largest scale-up in history’, three-quarters of all countries across the world expanded or adapted existing CT programmes, or created new ones, as a way to protect livelihoods in the context of increasing economic meltdown (Gentilini 2022). CTs—of different scope, generosity, and duration—represented one-third of total COVID-related social protection programmes and reached 1.36 billion individuals. Put otherwise: one out of six people received at least one CT payment during this period. Two years later, giving cash to people remains widely presented as a tool of pandemic recovery in the face of slow economic growth. Debates, however, continue on what these policies should look like. To some, the pandemic has strengthened the case for a universal basic income (UBI)—regular unconditional payments to all citizens. Others see CTs as a replacement of lost income or maintain that they should only target certain vulnerable population groups. Still others propose to tie these transfers to specific conditions that recipients must fulfil or suggest connecting them with diverse financial services, such as insurance and credit. Despite these differences, the basics of CT programmes are often framed as similar across contexts which allows commentators to characterise CTs as a ‘traveling model’ (Olivier de Sardan 2018), or a form of ‘fast policy’ (Peck & Theodore 2015)—a set of globally-circulating ‘ideas that work’. The appeal of CTs lies in part in their ability to be standardised and implemented across various settings with the help of infrastructural inventions. Anthropological approaches to such debates tend to highlight that CTs are not only technical but also moral and political. The development and character of CT programmes are shaped by who, where, and when they are implemented.

The history of CTs’ adoption and their development is reflected in both their character and geographic distribution. Following the failure of 1980s structural adjustment policies across Latin America and their detrimental consequences on social protection and people’s livelihoods, many of the region’s governments adopted conditional cash transfer programmes (CCTs). Mexico’s Progresa (later reformed as Oportunidades, today Prospera) was among the first and became a prototype for other similar programmes. The goal of Latin American programmes was not only to alleviate poverty or improve food security, but also to break intergenerational poverty cycles and to ensure socioeconomic development. This was to be achieved through ‘investment in human capital’, by making cash transfers dependent on beneficiaries’ fulfilment of conditionalities, or ‘co-responsibilities’, such as attending compulsory workshops, participating in public works, or ensuring that children attend school.

The wealth of evaluations attesting that CCT programmes have positive social or economic impacts then led to their promotion by the World Bank, various national governments, and international development agencies. But CCTs’ implementation in countries with lower administrative capacities proved challenging. As a consequence, biometric and digital solutions became increasingly intertwined with these programmes. Moreover, a series of randomised control trials showed that conditionalities do not play a significant role in achieving their desired effects (e.g., Banerjee & Duflo 2011, 155). For these reasons, programmes adopted especially in countries of sub-Saharan Africa are often unconditional (UCTs), or impose only ‘soft’ conditions (e.g., awareness-raising seminars). Unlike in Latin America where CCTs are government-run, in sub-Saharan Africa small as well as large NGOs also implement highly localized UCT programmes which can be quickly evaluated in line with the current trend for evidence-based aid interventions (Scarlato; d’Agostino 2016; Simpson 2018).

Today, CT programmes exist in countries as varied as Lebanon, Indonesia, Ecuador, Finland, and Tanzania. They deliver physical banknotes, e-money, mobile money, debit cards, or value vouchers to eligible beneficiaries. Programmes can be further distinguished according to other dimensions: 1) their organising and financing entities (e.g. governments, NGOs, UN agencies); 2) their eligibility criteria (e.g. are they universal, means-tested or aimed at specific categories); 3) their modality (e.g. are they unconditional or conditional, and in what ways and to what degree); 4) the sums they transfer (e.g. do they provide people with a minimum income to cover basic needs or are they restricted to providing minor income supplements); 5) their regularity (e.g. lump sums versus regular payments); 6) their policy goals (e.g. do they aim to alleviate poverty, provide humanitarian crisis relief, or stimulate the economy); 7) their modes of legitimation (e.g., do they appeal to citizens’ rights, universal rights, or are they a form of reparations).

Given this diversity, there is a danger of asserting a ‘common identity’ across programmes and their correspondence to some overarching model. The immense variability and mutability of CTs further raises questions about the value of comparing, for instance, a state-led programme targeting millions of people that is conditional (Mexico) or unconditional (South Africa), with a project run by a Western NGO that facilitates direct digital money transfers from individual donors in rich countries to a few dozen recipients in Sierra Leone. At the same time, their complexity and the possibility of combining various elements make CTs easily adaptable to local circumstances and appealing from various political viewpoints. CTs can therefore be legitimised by different theories, narratives, and agendas. For instance, CCTs often try to exert Foucauldian bio-political control over people, aimed at moulding citizens’ daily lives or even affecting their reproductive strategies (e.g. Smith-Oka, 2013). Proponents of UCTs, on the other hand, frequently emphasise individuals’ ability to behave in economically rational ways, arguing that anyone can be trusted to use money wisely (Haushofer; Shapiro 2016). While citizenship-based interventions have the potential to raise xenophobic tendencies, means-tested CTs, which scrutinise people’s financial states to determine their eligibility, can reinforce middle-class sentiments about the ‘lazy poor’ (Jeske 2020). Taking a closer look at CTs from an anthropological angle reveals, however, that these interventions are far from simple and easily scalable or replicable. Their implementation depends on local infrastructures and is shaped by social relations and values.

Cash transfer infrastructures

The base mechanism of CT programmes is straightforward and already captured in the name: transferring cash. However, any regular and predictable movement of money depends on other exchanges. Information on the eligibility of beneficiaries must be delivered in specific intervals, targeting and registering recipients requires identity checks, and local agents have to ensure that beneficiaries meet programme conditions set by developers in the state capital or abroad. Moreover, cash needs to be deposited, stored, and withdrawn somewhere. The infrastructures enabling such varied movements of cash, information, ideas, and people across space and time are central. The dependence of CT programmes on functioning infrastructures became salient when, in a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries attempted to ‘scale-up’ their social assistance programmes to deliver aid quickly (World Bank 2020). Given lockdowns and social distancing measures, this had to be done preferably without physical contact. Countries relied on already existing databases or pushed new and innovative digital solutions for registration. The government of Togo, for instance, utilised a biometric voter registration database updated in February 2020 to identify and contact payment beneficiaries. Guatemala’s government, on the other hand, determined eligible households according to electricity consumption levels, and provided emergency cash to those consuming less than 200 kilowatt hours per month or lacking electric connection completely (Grosh et al. 2022, 232). In expanding CT programmes to cover new categories of populations, governments thus relied on existing infrastructural systems, sometimes giving rise to new and heterogenous infrastructural assemblages.

In light of these experiences, there have been calls to strengthen, expand, or outright build money ‘delivery systems’ and to use alternative data sources and digital delivery technology (e.g. mobile phones) (World Bank 2020). The social sciences provide a critical view of this fascination with databases and other infrastructural techno-fixes. As part of this, the anthropological theorisation of infrastructures has become particularly useful (Larkin 2013), as it helps describe the nature of such infrastructural systems and the processes that go into their construction. It makes visible that CT infrastructures are not mere technical solutions. Rather, they are hybrid networks that consist of diverse elements that are: technological, such as bank cards, bank accounts, mobile money wallets; administrative, as they depend on laws and existing databases; social, since money transfers rely on the identities and relations of recipients, local politicians, bureaucrats, and social workers; and material, since they might require physical offices of governments or NGOs, or other places with computers to register recipients. Such CT infrastructures undergird the circulation of cash, information, and people, organise territories and populations, create an often-invisible environment for other interactions, and shape individual behaviour. Understanding diverse political and social effects of CT infrastructures therefore requires conducting ethnographic fieldwork across different levels, including in governmental centres or at meetings of transnational organisations, and considering the work of technicians and bureaucrats of various kinds (e.g. Dapuez 2016).

The role of infrastructure becomes particularly visible during the process of targeting and registering eligible individuals. Large state-run CT programmes, in particular, often face the problem of how to be implemented in rural areas and to deliver aid across large geographical distances (Donovan 2015a). One standard solution has been to create a sort of ‘human infrastructure’, a network of local intermediaries or consultants who report to others, such as district state officers or local NGO branches, and organise intermediaries from among recipients. Such a chain of intermediaries is central to mediating across scales by, for instance, translating and standardising information on persons’ poverty into a language that can be processed by a programme’s bureaucracy or database. Local managers often work in the context of under-invested social services and welfare state roll back. As a consequence, they might resort to imposing additional conditions on recipients. For example, in the context of the Peruvian CCT programme Juntos, Tara Cookson found that local managers and health and school staff require recipients to engage in ‘voluntary’ work, such as cooking for the school lunch programme or registering participants (Cookson 2018). Geographical distance and meagreness of the built infrastructure might be resolved by temporal exploitation: recipients may be expected to walk large distances, to be able to wait for long hours or even days, and to have time for other activities demanded by the intervention. Maria Elisa Balen (2018) provides an empathetic analysis of the centrality of queues in the context of the CCT programme Familias en Acción in Colombia. Beneficiaries queued up to have their identity verified by a clerk who also checked on the computer how much money they would receive. Receiving a slip of paper, recipients queued up again to receive their money from another bank functionary. Potential beneficiaries were also forced to queue up at schools (to receive attendance certificates of their children), in hospitals (to receive compulsory medical checks), and at programme registration offices. Many came from far away and were expected to queue in front of banks and registration offices for hours and even for days in the scorching heat, sometimes only to find out that due to computer failure they could not submit their documentation.

CT programmes’ infrastructures are expected to be value-neutral and standardised, to provide aid more effectively, reduce bureaucracy, bypass politics, avoid fraud and create a more direct link between donors and recipients (e.g Donovan 2015b). Technological innovations are promoted as a way to overcome problems related to infrastructural and administrative inadequacy. CT ‘techno-politics’ frequently imagines a lean state or lean aid organisation that heavily rely on technology to deliver services even when administrative and institutional capacities are limited (Ferguson 2015), thereby promising to depoliticise poverty and development. The possibilities of ‘digital payment ecosystems’ such as payment and loan apps, electronic money transfer, and mobile money wallets have further bolstered this core promise.

While biometric enrolment or electronic payments often improve the situation for recipients, however, the fetishization of biometric, digital, and electronic solutions often obscures their continued dependence on human labour, and hides the fact that technology is often unable to do justice to bodies that do not fit the required norm. As shown by Natasha Thandiwe Vally, for instance, fingerprints worn out by manual labour could not be recognized in a South African social grant programme (2016, 972). Despite the appeal that technological solutions possess in development circles, donors, recipients, technocrats, and local administrators alike might resist power entrenchment that comes through digital control and the accompanying rollback of service delivery. As shown by Ruth Castel-Branco, for instance, local leaders in Mozambique circumvented a complex digital selection method by introducing a rotating system that assured everyone would benefit from the state’s Productive Social Action Programme. In this case, however, the techno-politics of ‘non-politics’ had consequences beyond distribution. In contrast to the estimation of the World Bank, the introduction of a hybrid payment system relying on digital money transfers in urban centres and cash transfers in rural areas actually increased the costs of the CT programme (Castel-Branco 2021).

Like other infrastructural systems, CT infrastructures become most visible in their failure: when people cannot access their money, when money is deducted wrongly, or when benefits are cancelled. Increasingly these issues arise because of the uncontrollability of how registries are used or combined with other datasets. In Guatemala, for instance, the names and addresses of recipients of the state’s CCT programme Mi Familia Progresa were published online in 2010 after a two-year long legal battle. Fuelled by a discourse demanding more government transparency, this conflict shows how CT programmes are influenced by wider debates about the use of digital data. In this case, the publication of recipients’ personal information solidified a dichotomy differentiating between taxpaying citizens possessing the right to scrutinise and audit the government, and welfare beneficiaries who were turned into ‘legitimate objects of public scrutiny’ (Dotson 2014, 351), a bifurcation that simultaneously reinforced the exclusion of Indigenous communities from national citizenship.

Creating registries and digitalising information on individuals also enables states or other entities to transfer this data, for instance, to financial institutions which then attempt to capitalise on the regularity and surety of transfers. Thus, welfare programmes were central to India’s project of financial inclusion and push for a cashless society (Kar 2020). While politically transferring cash from the central government through banks was justified as a means to stop corruption and ‘leakages’ (as governmental funds would make their way to the poor) as well as to encourage saving, developing adequate infrastructure was only appealing for banks when they could produce debt and further income in the form of fees, overdrafts, and loans. In one of the most paradigmatic cases, the South African Social Security Agency hired the private company Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to register over 15 million beneficiaries and open bank accounts for around 10 million recipients. Several other subsidiaries of CPS’s parent company, Net1 UEPS Technologies, then used the gathered data to approach recipients to sell them loans, insurances, and other services (Torkelson 2020; 2021). Bundling CTs with loans in this way might lead to deductions and cancellations of cash transfers of which people might not or only partially be aware. In all these ways, CTs’ involvement and dependency on ‘fintech’ experiments and infrastructures turn welfare into a collateral (i.e. a sum against which debt can be issued) which can enable new forms of capitalist accumulation by dispossession to emerge (Lavinas 2018).

Cash transfers and social relationships

Cash transfers are an aspect of contemporary regimes of distribution and redistribution, and as such they reconfigure sociality (Bähre 2011). Anthropological research on CT programmes has traced these ‘rearticulations’ of social life (Fotta & Balen 2019) through examining the ways in which CTs shape relationships of dependency and power, of race and class, within households, or in local politics. Of particular prominence has been a focus on how CT programmes affect gender relations and women’s lives. Issues of gender have been especially pronounced in the case of CCTs in Latin America, where women serve as prime conduits of social policies and of development interventions (e.g. Molyneux 2006; Tabbush 2010). Although evaluations show the overall improvement of women’s position and decision-making powers thanks to CTs, feminist critiques argue that sex-disaggregated data must be complemented by a more thorough analysis of gender impacts (Cookson 2018, 33). Since women are normally the recipients and are responsible for fulfilling the conditionalities and for enhancing the ‘human capital’ of their children, CT programmes might lead to an increase of women’s responsibilities, weaken their social position within communities, and reinforce patriarchal ideals (Dygart 2016; Schmook et al. 2019).

Even when a CT programme does not explicitly target women, local gender relations, moral economies, and divisions of care labour play a role in how they are perceived and legitimised. In sub-Saharan Africa, actors invariably interpret who is included in a programme through gendered ideologies regarding work, dependency, deservingness, or agency (Jeske 2020; Ferguson 2015, 17). In a study based upon interviews and participant fieldwork with young unemployed men in South Africa, Hannah Dawson and Liz Fouksman, for instance, observed that the inclusion of young able-bodied men into CT programmes was viewed with ambivalence. In the eyes of many respondents, giving money unconditionally to young able-bodied men threatened to corrupt them and to turn them into lazy beneficiaries. Instead, young unemployed men were expected to be able to provide for themselves and others and, consequently, preferred that the ‘government provide jobs, skills training or free tertiary education’ (Dawson & Fouksman 2020, 234).

At the core of anthropological analyses of gender impacts are tensions between the declared ideals behind CT programmes—of fostering people’s empowerment, social justice, rational financial planning, and inclusive citizenship—and the programmes’ contradictory and unintended consequences. These tensions are frequently analysed in the context of broader changes in economy and governance. In Uruguay, the ‘risk reduction’ and poverty alleviation governance by an ‘enabling’, rather than a welfare, state was framed as stimulating ‘self-help’, ‘empowerment’, and ‘civic participation’ (Corboz 2013). These qualities were built into the governmental CCT programme PANES, which was implemented in 2005 and lasted for 34 months. Women who could draw support from extended families, particularly from other female kin, often profited from the programme and managed to invest the money in productive activities such as reconstructing houses and starting small businesses. Many also used the money to get out of abusive relationships. Yet, in the case of single mothers living in urban squatter settlements, outcomes were different. Unable to leave their houses and children unattended due to increasing crime, but depending on cash from PANES, many felt forced to remain in abusive relationships. Instead of allowing these women to become more autonomous, the CT programme solidified problematic relationships as women depended on ‘bad men’ in order to be able to search for employment or participate in workfare activities required by the programme without leaving their children unattended. Ethnographies thus help reveal that effects of a CT programme on women’s autonomy and position within households vary and are mediated by household income levels, local gender ideologies, and patterns of labour control (Morton 2018; Radel et al. 2017).

Another strand of anthropological analysis focuses on how programmes reshape local politics (Castellanos & Erazo 2021; Eiró & Koster 2019). New power dynamics, inequalities, and hierarchies emerge from the very structure of CT programmes, particularly CCTs, as they give some people power to police the behaviour of others and to influence their enrolment. In some Mexican villages, for instance, Prospera created new affective and financial links between the state and (female) beneficiaries, but it also gave rise to new forms of power relations. Local programme mediators and monitors from among beneficiaries could demand other beneficiaries to provide them with unofficial additional labour, such as participating in community works. These new power relations undermined already existing forms of communal organising and cooperation, and ultimately led to a fragmentation of community belonging (Crucifix and Morvant-Roux 2019).

Even when a programme is NGO-run and unconditional, field officers and intermediaries take interest in monitoring the behaviour of the poor. Street-level bureaucrats organising a CT programme in an informal settlement in Kenya, for example, constantly attempted to make proper behaviour of recipients visible and to hide what they considered improper activities, even when such supervising work was not part of their official role. In this instance, bureaucratic activity did not just reflect changing power dynamics, but it also represented an ethical form of care (Neumark 2020) in a context of unequal and asymmetric relationships between foreign donors and local recipients. Conscious of the importance of programme evaluations, street-level bureaucrats tried to ensure that recipients used the money in exemplary fashion. A related theme that repeatedly emerges in ethnographies of CTs relates to the ways agents responsible for implementing and translating programmes into local practice, who are often middle-class professionals, see themselves as responsible for teaching the beneficiaries. They may feel the need to educate them about the value of hard work, entrepreneurship, and self-help, as well as distinct ideas about the state, modernity, and development. Such teaching can be done through mobilisation, mentoring and public works, and it frequently targets older persons and women (Ansell 2014; Green 2021).

When additional ‘shadow’ conditions are imposed upon female beneficiaries by intermediary actors, this can exacerbate power inequalities. One example for this is the CCT programme Juntos, which started operating in highland Peru in 2005 and is oriented exclusively at poor rural households (Cookson 2018). Gaps in its implementation and underfunded infrastructure were not, as discussed above, the only reasons that led local programme managers to impose additional conditions. Local managers were also guided by good intentions and their preconceptions about women beneficiaries and their skills. Just like official co-responsibilities designed in the capital by urban middle-class professionals, the ‘shadow’ conditions imposed here revealed existing doubts about women’s capacities to be ‘responsible’ mothers while simultaneously hiding the extent and character of their care work.

Such ‘making of good mothers’ (Piccoli and Gillespie 2018), whether through official or shadow CT conditions, is often racialised. Oportunidades enabled the Mexican state to intervene in reproductive and mothering practices of indigenous women (Smith-Oka 2013). In the name of empowerment, the aim of the programme was to turn women into ‘good mothers’ by making them participate in medical checks, educational consultations, activities, lectures, and so on. By merging concerns regarding population management (including ideas about family planning, reproductive behaviour, and mothering) and national development, the programme can be seen as a continuation of early twentieth-century attempts to convert Indigenous peoples into modern mestizo Mexicans who follow Western health, education, and family practices.

Despite the appeal of CTs as an ‘idea that works’, transferring and translating CT programmes thus invariably leads to friction with local cultural models, forms of sociability, and economic ideologies. It is also mediated by recipients’ previous experiences with development and welfare programmes (Murray & Cabaña 2019). Though this might sound like a truism for anthropologists, actors implementing CT programmes tend to underestimate or ignore local contexts, which often leads to what Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Emmanuelle Picolli (2018, 4) aptly call the ‘revenge of contexts’ giving rise to local mutations, forms of ‘corruption’, circumventions, and adaptations. CT programmes are thus not simply assimilated into people’s realities in ways imagined by planners, but are influenced by local politics, discourses, and narratives.

The very design of many programmes, in other words, reflects context-dependent ideas about human nature (e.g. in their use of behavioural nudges) and the ways in which these can be utilised to shape the future through, for instance, increasing education rates, stimulating investment, or otherwise aiding development. Such mechanisms generative of appropriate futures can, however, come into conflict with popular ideas. Andrés Dapuez (2019), who conducted research with economists from the Inter-American Development Bank and other policy makers as well as beneficiaries in Indigenous villages in Yucatán, describes tensions over what kind of futures these programmes are meant to generate. While for policy designers and for the Mexican middle classes it was important to transfer appropriate amounts of cash that would result in a decrease of the fertility rate and generate economic value through accumulation of ‘human capital’, to beneficiaries these goals appeared to undermine sociability and, more dramatically, were viewed as a drain of bodily vitality.

It is therefore important that any claims about or criticisms of the effects of CT programmes—both of which tend to argue through generalisations—are ethnographically nuanced and related to other social processes. In northeast Brazil, for example, the state’s CCT programme Bolsa Família did not only alleviate poverty, but, as UBI proponents have often suggested (e.g. Graeber 2018), also led to the decommodification of labour through increasing people’s autonomy from wage labour and making space for economic activities outside the labour market. It enabled beneficiaries to decline work in precarious and exploitative sectors and try to become self-employed as small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs (Morton 2019). Ethnographic research thus has the potential to reveal different autonomy-enhancing and autonomy-constraining effects of CTs, which emerge in the process of their assimilation into local ideologies and practices related to community belonging, the responsibilities of men and women, or wealth creation.

Cash transfers and the meanings of exchange

Anthropology has a rich history of recognising different modes of transferring wealth between people according to how the transfer takes place (i.e. its modality), which objects are being exchanged, and how the transactional partners relate. Going back to Marcel Mauss’ The gift (2016) and Karl Polanyi’s distinction between reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange (1957), anthropologists have, time and again, debated how people exchange goods, money, or favours, and how these exchanges are embedded in and reflect wider transactional logics, politics, and cultures (e.g., Bloch & Parry 1989). As recently argued by Anthony Pickles (2022), anthropology, however, has one-sidedly focused on reciprocal transactions at the expense of ‘one-way economic transfers’ (Hunt 2005) such as charity, gambling, inheritance, theft, and CTs. Drawing on and expanding this disciplinary tradition, anthropologists have interpreted the transactional logic of CTs in various ways and thereby revealed that often-contradictory views of CTs can be held in parallel in a single CT programme. CTs may be perceived as simple techno-fixes, or as reparations for past misdeeds, as baits into neoliberal or even satanic debt bondage (Schmidt 2022), as gifts from the state, as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019), as income replacement, as a way to move away from a wage labour system, or as tools to buy political favours.

The discussion surrounding means-tested unconditional ‘social transfers’ and ‘grants’ in the Southern Africa region—especially South Africa, but also Namibia and Botswana—are particularly revealing. Most famously, in Give a man a fish: Reflections on the new politics of distribution (2015), James Ferguson reflects on the region’s experiences with these programmes to outline a ‘new politics of distribution’. Ferguson follows Mauss by understanding the whole society, rather than just workers, to be involved in producing value (Mauss 2016). Based on this, he argues that a mere membership in a society should make people eligible for unconditional ‘basic income grants’. Ferguson frames UCTs as ‘rightful shares’ in a nation’s wealth and explicitly challenges the contributory understandings of social assistance and century-old assumptions about money being the fruit of an actor’s (wage) labour (Ferguson & Li 2018, Fouksman 2020).

Erin Torkelson (2021) has argued that Ferguson’s analysis does not consider the existence of ‘racial capitalism’. In South Africa, cash grants were turned into collateral for debts and financial companies predated on social grant recipients. This effectively undermined CTs’ efficacy and continued the dispossession and indebtedness of poor black South Africans who remained in particularly vulnerable and economically disadvantaged positions. For Jonathan DeVore (2019), even unconditional basic income grant schemes are merely ameliorative and do not give people control over their means of life. Elise Klein and Liz Fouksman (2022) argue for the need to recognise contextual differences with regard to who benefited from a society’s wealth in the past and to take into account that CT programmes often ignore underlying (post)colonial power relations. They therefore consider it fruitful to reframe UCTs as a form of reparations that pay for historical injustices such as settler colonialism, slavery, and other forms of capitalist racism, the effects of which continue to structure contemporary societies.

The meaning of CTs as transactions is profoundly shaped by how recipients perceive their characteristics, such as their pay-out rhythms, legal groundings, or the ways in which the monetary values of transfers are established. Uncertainty about the CTs’ modality or their origins causes their meanings to oscillate drastically. Gregory Duff Morton (2014) shows what is at stake at this interpretational interface. Because Brazil’s CT programme Bolsa Família (2003-21), like most CT programmes, was conceived as a social programme or intervention of limited durability and legitimacy, merely aimed at addressing pressing problems and not as a (universal) social right, recipients ended up viewing it as a gift from the government, president, or local politicians (also Eiró & Koster 2019; cf. Diz 2019). The ‘gift’ of Bolsa Familia, however, remained unstable, because there were no guarantees that it would continue or what its future value would be, even though it was reciprocated by the counter-gift of beneficiaries’ co-responsibilities. This dynamic fostered only an incomplete sense of citizenship against the background of an unpredictable state and made it impossible for recipients to imagine the programme’s future. Consequently, when the sums were increased it led to a panic as this was interpreted by beneficiaries as a sign of its imminent cancellation.

While CCTs are generally framed as an exchange, whereby money is dependent on people’s behaviour which therefore needs to be monitored, UCTs are, from the perspective of most emitting entities, understood simply as one-way, non-reciprocal transfers of money. As external and often locally unheard-of transactional interventions that are ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007), they are prime examples for indeterminate transfers that lend themselves to be reintegrated into locally predominant understandings of money and transactional logics by recipients, politicians, or scholars. Even UCTs are thus far from innocent and simple ‘techno-fixes’, or mere ‘social interventions’, as the main development aid discourse suggests by highlighting their easy-to-implement nature. Instead, their local transactional interpretations can be surprising. In rural Niger, the smooth implementation of an NGO UCT programme was obstructed by complex political patronage relations and social networks characterised by antagonism and potential conflicts (Olivier de Sardan and Hamani 2018). When women received cash, for instance, they immediately handed it over to their husbands, i.e., their ‘providers’, and recipients sometimes decided to pool their UCTs, redistributing them according to local notions of deservingness and need. In these and other ways, UCTs were immediately integrated into local and frequently more encompassing notions and networks of exchange and redistribution.

Along similar lines, cash provided by the US-American NGO GiveDirectly was interpreted in contradictory ways by local actors in Homa Bay County, Western Kenya (Schmidt 2022). Most surprisingly, roughly 50% of the eligible population rejected the benefit of US$1,100 paid out in three instalments. Many of those who rejected the payments argued that they were part of a satanic barter trade whereby a sinister cult group would later demand the sacrifice of a child. Some of those who accepted the CTs framed the programme, which was actually a one-time intervention, as an on-going gift relation between themselves and individual anonymous donors in the US. According to these recipients, the continuity of the gift relation depended on the fulfilment of specific conditions such as a renovation of their houses, which they thought US donors expected of them due to the fact that they felt they were partly chosen because of the condition of their houses. Several politicians, on the other hand, attempted to channel the UCTs into their own political campaigns, thereby (re)politicising the transfer as part of local networks of political patronage—a move that for the NGO would have represented a clear case of corruption.

As anthropologists have long argued, money is far more complex than the orthodox understanding of it as the prime medium of exchange and store of value suggests (Maurer 2006; Zelizer 2017). CT programmes differ not only with regard to the question if money is distributed via new digital technologies (such as the Kenyan mobile money wallet M-Pesa), via banking accounts, or in the form of banknotes. Actors also ascribe a plurality of meanings to money that comes from CT programmes and contrast it with other forms of money. CT money is used in a myriad of different ways as a consequence of its entanglement with social practices, moral hierarchies, and political narratives (Wilkis 2018; Green 2021). ‘Money from above’ as Guaraní in the Argentine Chaco have called CTs (Diz 2019) thus acquires a different meaning compared to money earned in the form of salaries or as a result of one’s entrepreneurial activity. Neither being earned through wage labour nor business activity, Agustin Diz’s Argentinian interlocutors described ‘money from above’ also as ‘women’s money’ (Diz 2019). Along similar lines, money from CT programmes as well as the recipients themselves are often marked as morally suspicious and beneficiaries are asked to justify their deservingness and prove that they act in accordance with both local and international moral standards (DuBois 2021)

Towards a sceptical anthropology of cash transfers

Cash transfers have come a long way since their first implementation in the early 1990s. Fuelled by recent developments in digital payments and their scaling up during the COVID-19 pandemic, they will likely remain a go-to social policy in the near future. It is therefore appropriate to ask if CTs should become the cornerstone of a ‘new regime of distribution’ as argued by, among others, James Ferguson (2015), or if we should be more sceptical about CT programme’s multiple promises. On the surface, and in contrast to structural adjustment reforms or calls for increasing austerity, CT programmes—especially in the form of UCT or UBI programmes—satisfy a demand for a more just distribution of wealth and align with Mauss’ call that ‘the rich must return - freely and also necessarily - to considering themselves as kinds of treasurers for their fellow citizens’ (2016, 181).

A closer look at both the narrative about CTs and their implementation suggests, however, that they might fall short of such a promise. The ways in which they hide the role of intermediary actors downplays the collective nature of economic value creation (Mauss 1985) and threatens to produce new forms of control by the state or other institutions with access to proprietary data. CTs are also often accompanied by a deterioration of social services, thereby putting more pressure on individuals and their close kin. As is often the case with such projects, detailed ethnographic observation risks producing some disillusionment, despite the fact that CTs have undoubtedly helped millions. Yet, without engaging in anthropological fieldwork that connect CTs to their historical and social context, we are left with evaluating promises and assessments produced by the global network of NGOs, think tanks, fintech companies, as well as international institutions who tend to have vested interests in the matter, and who have neither the time, methodological qualifications, nor the will to study in-depth how CTs change peoples’ lives.

Being conscious of the fact that, within the assemblage of market-friendly approaches to development and social assistance, critical evaluations are continuously turned into consulting advice to design better products and interventions (Schuster and Kar 2021, 392), we consider it irresponsible not to conclude without explicitly mentioning a few applied insights into CTs gained through our reading of ethnographies on the subject. Firstly, payments should not be bundled up with other political measures or technological instruments if these are not necessary for the distribution of cash. Imposing conditionalities and introducing new tools of financialisation have frequently given rise to unforeseen and harmful power relations or have reproduced existing inequalities. Secondly, a fascination with ‘non-politics’ and ‘technological solutions’ hides the extent to which CT infrastructures risk being used by government or non-governmental actors in ways that threaten to undermine their positive impacts. New digital and financial infrastructures, for example, can be used for surveillance or to draw people into debt. Thirdly, when poverty thresholds and amounts transferred are set too low, programmes fail to have transformative effects. It is often slightly better-off recipients, and not the extremely poor, who manage to use the money creatively and productively, since these recipients are not forced to spend all of it on basic necessities. Fourthly, it is impossible to predict and control local meanings of CT programmes. Because their source and durability are often questioned and because even the most digitised programmes depend on some sort of intermediaries, both CCTs and UCTs can lead to the emergence of unforeseen ‘shadow’ conditions and be drawn into local power relations. Lastly, presenting the Global South as a ‘laboratory’ for a series of ‘experiments’ in order to provide arguments for testing fintech products or for justifying the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs about UBI is problematic and should be abandoned (Hoffmann 2020). CTs can have dramatic positive effects. Rather than treating them as simple top-down or experimental ‘interventions’, however, they should be implemented as a ‘social right’ and be backed up by democratic consensus.

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Note on contributors

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. He is a co-editor, with Maria Elisa Balen, of Money from the government in Latin America: Conditional cash transfer programs and rural lives (Routledge, 2018). His current work on resilience through cash transfers is part of the Systems of resilience project (‘Systemic Risk Institute’, Project NPO No. LX22NPO5101).

Dr Martin Fotta, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Na Florenci 3,110 00 Prague, Czechia. Fotta@eu.cas.cz. orcid.org/0000-0002-3037-317X

Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). He has published on a wide range of topics in distinguished academic journals such as Africa, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Journal of Cultural Economy. Currently, he is finalising a manuscript exploring the economic and social challenges of men who migrated to Nairobi from rural Western Kenya tentatively entitled, “Under pressure in high-rise Nairobi: Migrants, masculinity and expectations of success in an African capital”.

Dr Mario Schmidt, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale). Advokatenweg 36 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany. marioatschmidt@gmail.com.

Note on license

The license for this text has been changed from our usual Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY NC 4.0) to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Transhumanism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 02:55:58 +0000

A brain-computer interface. Photo: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber, 2009

Abou Farman

The New School for Social Research

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22transhumanism

Abstract:

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

Introduction

Transhumanism is a recent set of common ideals, or ideology, with the stated aim of transcending the current physical and mental limitations of the human by technological means. It has primarily taken shape as an American secular scientific project, albeit with growing international reach. Proponents of transhumanism explicitly state that the current form of our species is not its final one, and that a technologically enhanced computational form—transcending the human—will emerge through what they see as the inevitable and exponential acceleration of technoscience, especially in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the informatic and cognitive sciences (NBIC).

Because of its unwavering espousal of these technologies as the only and ideal route to transcending human limits, transhumanism has grown in reach, appeal, and power alongside the twenty-first century rise of Silicon Valley and the digital tech and biotech sectors more generally. Many of the tech sector’s power players at companies such as Google, Paypal, and Space X are associated with transhumanism. What’s more, ideas that have circulated amongst transhumanists have entered a broader social milieu: for instance, as anthropologist and media scholar Tamara Kneese (forthcoming) has documented, digital and cybernetic immortality (the maintenance of avatars, profiles, and conversations after death) are now part of the discourse and concerns of many tech companies and start-ups.

Transhumanism is part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’, a series of ideas and social and technological developments that have put under question the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. Scholars trace humanism’s roots to currents in Greek and Roman thought, and later to the European Renaissance where writers and thinkers began to focus their concerns on human affairs, human thought, and the human condition, rather than on theological (pertaining to a transcendent God) or parochial (pertaining only to their own group delimited by religion, ethnicity, or geography) concerns. But as a specific intellectual tradition and social ideology bearing the name, humanism took form starting in the early nineteenth century. The central tenets held that humans, unlike other parts of nature, are endowed with reason and the capacity for thought and self-awareness; that humans are undetermined and free to make their own laws, and shape their own environment with tools and imagination; and that there is no pre-determined future, fixed destiny, or a transcendent and otherworldly destination, meaning that humans were entirely responsible for making their own history and hence their own future in this earthly world (Janicaud 2005; Sartre [1946] 2007 Chakrabarty 1997; Taylor 2005). This set of claims outlined at once the nature of humanity as a whole and built an idea of humans in contrast to other beings to which the same attributes did not apply and hence the same set of political and legal rights did not extend.

Critics of humanism have pointed out that the supposedly universal figure of the human was at the same time an exclusionary device, erasing or even explicitly justifying the on-going exploitations of non-European people through slavery and colonialism. Along with colonial expansion, the rise of scientific thought, and the gradual advance of secularism, a supposedly universal humanism was marshalled to exclude a vast range of non-European peoples from full participation in modern politics and power. Thus, for example, women were barred from political participation because they were said to not be as fully endowed with reason as men. People of African descent, as well as Indigenous, Aboriginal, and tribal people, were not included in the Euro-American image of humanity (Wynter 2003) and were rendered morally and legally subject to enslavement, extermination, and exploitation.

In another vein, there has been a critique of humanism as a form of unwarranted and destructive exceptionalism. That is, by imagining human thought and action as categorically different from the way the rest of the universe operates (the universe being biologically or physically determined, without thought or self-awareness), humanism rendered the human an exception to nature, with tragic consequences. For example, this exceptionalism has led to the over-exploitation of nature and the hubristic use of technology to harness unlimited but destructive power beyond the control of humans such as with nuclear bombs or the use of fossil fuels, causing climate change.

These critiques gave rise to a range of posthumanist positions, such as new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), vitalist materialism (Braidotti 2013), multispecies ethnographies (Helmreich and Kirksey 2010), new animism (Harvey 2006) and animacies (Chen 2012), cyborg studies (Downey and Dumit 2006) and critical posthumanism (Roden 2015). These attempt to dissolve the figure of the exceptional human into a broader context wherein the human is neither master of its environment nor maker of its own future; rather, the human appears as part of (indeed, as an effect of) a wide array of forces, agents, and relations over which it cannot have proper and predictable control.

On one level, transhumanism has emerged as one of the many symptoms of the exhaustion of humanism, breaking down and transcending ideas of human exceptionalism in the way that other posthumanisms purport to, for example by merging humans with the technology that they have created. Some analysts, however, describe transhumanism as simply humanism on steroids (Wolfe 2010, Fuller and Lipinska 2015); that is, as a set of goals and practices that merely extend Enlightenment notions of a human essence set apart from the world by language, reason, culture, emotions, and so on (Pickering 2011).

Transhumanist arguments and narratives themselves often claim both: on the one hand, they claim humanism and the Enlightenment as their true heritage (Bostrom 2005, Hughes 2012) and argue that humans have always used tools and have co-evolved with their technologies, so that contemporary versions such as cyborgs or other human-machine hybrids are not new but only a more complex and more intelligent aspect of this history (Bostrom 2014); on the other, they project a radical break from humanity and human history, such that superior forms of machine intelligence will take over and be an independent force in the universe, transcending the human condition, including the evolutionary inheritance of a biological body, and making humans obsolete (Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom 2014). What’s more, this process of technological advancement towards a superintelligent computational civilisation, started off by human projects of mind uploading, is regarded as part of a universal telos (or ultimate purpose) of existence beyond the human, where the emergence of humans is only an instance of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe. Thus, human intelligence, which results in control over and the modification of nature via science and technology, becomes part of a nonhuman destiny. In these instances, transhumanism breaks with its humanist roots.

If transhumanism’s speculative ideology of posthuman intelligence and destiny is often disregarded by anthropologists and other social theorists, it may be due in part to the focus on more immediate social concerns regarding the body, technological enhancement, and genetic manipulation. It also may be due in part to the fact that transhumanism’s projection of nonhuman intelligence and destiny in the universe are difficult to place within a recognisable political philosophy or genealogy. This division between the enhancement projects of transhumanism, which may well fit the limits of a secular humanism, and the speculative focus on mind, consciousness, and eventually superintelligence, is sometimes characterised as carbon-based versus silicon-based transhumanism (Sorgner 2021). Regardless, given the centrality of the figure of the human (anthropos) for anthropology, these debates coincide with long-standing core concerns in the discipline on the nature of human nature. Ironically, transhumanism’s position that there is nothing either fixed or sacred about human nature overlaps with a strong trend in anthropology that challenges unitary theories of the human (Fuentes et al. 2010).

This entry first traces the formation of transhumanism in relation to relevant histories of humanism. It then highlights people and ideas that speculate on and project futures reflective of transhumanism’s specific stripe of posthumanism. It will review some of the anthropological studies of transhumanism and conclude by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of posthumanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

The emergence of transhumanism

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist with eugenicist visions of a future scientific utopia honed through a strange mid-twentieth century marriage of socialism and evolutionary biology, of social equality and eugenicist reform. By the time he published the now-famous essay titled plainly ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley had already written on humanism, biology, and evolution, including a seminal text on the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was an atheist and, in his own terms, a ‘scientific humanist’, serving as the first president of the British Humanist Association (Weindling 2012), and later as first director of UNESCO. Importantly, Huxley begins the essay not with humans but with the cosmos and specifically ‘cosmic self-awareness’. That is, he begins by applying evolutionary schemas not just to biology on earth, but to consciousness in the universe: ‘As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself’. The emergence of self-awareness, he continues, ‘is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe - in a few of us human beings’. (2015, 12) The formulation is striking as much for its teleological vision (some latent potential is being realised in the cosmos) as for the odd place it assigns humans in that realisation. For humans appear at once as central actors and incidental vectors: ‘man’s responsibility and destiny’, Huxley writes, is to ‘be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible’. Humans are appointed to take charge in this new version of evolution, driving the universe towards its self-awareness, yet they are mere vehicles for the fulfilment of a destiny beyond the human. Later, transhumanists would push this logic to its end in imagining a future yielded by humanity to superior computational forms of intelligence.

It is noteworthy that Huxley, along with a cohort of fellow scientists and eugenicists such as J.B.S. Haldane, was very much engaged in technological prediction, speculating on space travel, reproductive technologies, and mechanical and industrial prowess (Farman 2015), and yet his essay on transhumanism does not mention any of that. Rather, its vision is centred on ‘the most ultimate satisfaction’ which he describes as the ‘depth and wholeness of the inner life’ for which we need ‘techniques of spiritual development’. In proper pursuit of this dimension,

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity (2015, 15).

Two main tensions in these passages remain coiled in transhumanism’s practical, ideological, and anthropological features. The first is the tension between a humanist (i.e. non-theistic) sense of responsibility for humanity’s own future and the fulfilment of a larger non-human potential: a notion of a human destiny beyond the human that characterises the strongest posthumanist vision in transhumanism. The second is the tension between a scientific, materialist notion of consciousness and a non-reductive one, often glossed as spiritual.

The focus on consciousness and an awakening universe would be taken up by later transhumanists, notably Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt, but the first re-uptake of the term ‘transhuman’ comes via the ‘father of cryonics’ (that is, the low temperature freezing and storage of human bodies), Robert Ettinger. A physics teacher, Ettinger began ruminations on death and the power of science in hospital beds after being wounded in World War II, publishing his own science fiction story about freezing and immortality in 1948. He shifted to non-fiction, describing the technical possibility of storing humans in cold freeze. Initially self-published, his first book, The prospect of immortality (1965), was eventually distributed by the publishing company Doubleday after the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave Ettinger a thumbs up. The idea garnered some attention in the United States at the time, with Ettinger securing an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and the book getting translated into 11 languages. But none of that translated into a large following or a proper movement nor into volunteers who wanted to get frozen.

Cryonics attracted a small, motley crew of dedicated people who wanted to push the limits and utopian possibilities of science in remaking humans and society. With a set of actual practices (storing bodies for the future), and the prospect of defeating death—the hardest of human and humanist limits—cryonics became transhumanism’s catchment site (Farman 2020), attracting space enthusiasts, biologists, cryobiologists, physicists, writers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and, crucially, computer scientists. This assemblage, navigating the space between science and science fiction, a space that later came to be known as futurism, became the core of the transhumanist movement, though it did not yet bear that name.

The term ‘transhuman’ does not appear in The prospect of immortality, but the book does set out to explore the key notion of non-human intelligence:

Modes and standards of conduct and intercourse may have to be developed with respect to intelligent creatures other than human. The three outstanding possibilities seem to concern the dolphins, robots, and extraterrestrial life forms. (1965, 152)

The anti-exceptionalist move to shift intelligence away from an exclusively human attribute to one shared by aquatic creatures, aliens, and robots had roots in the emerging post-war theories of cybernetics. Without distinguishing between the organic and non-organic, cybernetics examined the behaviour of complex systems in terms of feedback loops, wherein all behaviour could be gauged based on input and output signals which would then modify the system. The simplest example was a thermostat which could be thought of as self-aware, on some level, because it would constantly gauge and modify its behaviour based on information it received from the environment. All behaviour and communication, according to cybernetics (Wiener 1954), was based on this kind of loop, whether the system in question be biological or machinic. Here information and feedback loops became merged with behaviour and intelligence, blurring the boundaries that separated humans from other animals, animals from machines, and inanimate matter from animate beings.

Whilst many secular humanists recoiled from the prospect of the computational reductionism of mind and machine, Ettinger, following cybernetics, tapped into the potential offered by this line of thinking, suggesting the continuation of personal identity beyond biological death through some version of non-organic or artificial intelligence (AI) where a human mind/self would be instantiated on non-biological platforms (1965, 129-33). This was, as Ettinger himself acknowledges, an older trope in science fiction, but from early on, cryonics and immortalism moved beyond simple biological survival to imagine and claim such a post-human future.

It is in Ettinger’s next book, first published in 1972 and provocatively titled Man into super man, that the terms transhuman and transhumanity begin to find a place in the vocabulary of immortality and technological futurism for the first time. Without referencing Julian Huxley (even though he writes several pages on his anti-utopian brother Aldous), Ettinger discusses the achievement of transhumanity as a human goal, with prospects for greater intra-human warmth (110) as well as ‘the storage of personalities in electronic data banks’ (35), an idea he takes, like many others, from science fiction, where disembodied brains had been present at least since 1929 when Huxley’s colleague, another socialist scientist, J.D. Bernal proposed the possibility in his well-known work of speculation The world, the flesh and the devil. Like Huxley, Bernal is amongst the figures claimed today by transhumanists as a predecessor.

Attempts to move away from humanism feature in Ettinger’s earlier edition of the book, in which he counts ‘Eastern Communism and Western humanism’ as ‘the flakiest forms of the traditional insanity – idealism’, and calls them ‘principal secular religions’ (120). However, it’s in the preface for the 1989 edition that he clearly marks a division with humanism: ‘What is happening is a discontinuity in history, with mortality and humanity on one side - on the other immortality and transhumanity’ (5). This position becomes a call that continues to echo in the transhuman world in many ways: humanity must choose transhumanism or fall behind and possibly keep on dying, for, as Ettinger writes, ‘Human stupidity is formidable’ (162).

Transhumanism as a term and an ideology gained additional traction through an Iranian-born populariser and author, Fereidoun Esfandiary, known by his transhumanist name FM-2030. Wanting a better world but disillusioned with cold war politics, nationalism, and the framework of human rights, Esfandiary moved from earthly to cosmic politics with Upwingers, a book he published in 1973. His futuristic predictions and plans got him TV appearances and teaching contracts at the New School and then at UCLA where he became another nucleus around which the futurist movement would cluster. In 1989, having formally renamed himself, FM-2030 published Are you a transhuman?, a manifesto challenging the status quo and envisioning a utopian world of limitless energy, food, and joy. After his medical death, FM-2030 entered cryopreservation at Alcor on July 8, 2000.

It was in the California of the 1980s that transhumanism began to take shape as a movement, and would later continue its growth. FM-2030’s early collaborator in West Coast futurism was Natasha Vita-More, now a leading transhumanist artist and writer married to Max More, a transhumanist philosopher and president and CEO of Alcor, the main cryonics company in the United States. Born Max T. O’Connor in the United Kingdom, More changed his name a year after he moved across the Atlantic to the University of Southern California in 1988 to complete a Ph.D. With Tom Morrow, another man with a signifying name, they launched a journal and an institute called Extropy, named to counter the pessimistic destiny promised by entropy. The Extropy Institute, joined by many who had recently gathered around a space exploration group called L-5, became the new hub of West Coast futurism, focusing on enhancement technologies that, in the early 1990s, were beginning to hold up a new set of promises: control over biology, control over the brain, control over the size and speed of computational processes, control over all matter in the universe. Many current futurists and immortalists trace their roots and early sense of transhumanist excitement back to the Extropian gatherings. The dissolution of the Extropy Institute would lead, in 1998, to the formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), the first of its kind, co-founded by philosophers David Pearce and Nick Bostrom, who later set up the Future of Humanity Institute, a transhumanist think tank at Oxford University advocating strongly for technofuturistic solutions to human problems.

With a representative body also came conferences (Transvision) and publications (Journal of Transhumanism), declarations, mission statements, as well as internal conflicts. Although transhumanists generally see themselves as iconoclasts eschewing doctrine and imagine technology as an independent force apart from, even transcending, politics, transhumanism was never free of ideology. From the early years, social regulations and religious congregations were feared as threats to technological advancement. With its emphasis on the individual body as well as on individualism as an accompanying ethical stance, transhumanism moved in step with libertarianism. Libertarianism had and continues to have two strands: a left anarchist one and a capitalist, free-market individualist one, the latter where Ayn Rand is a common influence and innovation through the market is assumed to be the only way forward with no regard for historical and structural forms of inequality. Whilst some transhumanists have espoused a more liberal democratic ethic based on a regulated civil libertarianism (Hughes 2004), the dominant Silicon Valley tendency has been marked by strong anti-government individualism and free-market ideology.

Even as the link to the power and capital of Silicon Valley has made the souped-up capitalism of Randian techno-libertarians dominant, transhumanism is not a uniform project. For example, former WTA president and sociologist James Hughes (2004, 2012) has tried to underline the distance between the Silicon Valley billionaires and socially progressive transhumanism. Additionally, there are other variations in transhumanism besides: the transgender transhumanism of inventor Martine Rothblatt (2013); AI guru Ben Goertzel’s cosmism (2010); propositions for a Black transhuman liberation theology (Butler 2020); and budding anarchist attempts to reshape the propositions of transhumanism.

If Silicon Valley has influenced transhumanism, so transhumanism has transformed Silicon Valley. As transhumanists gained ground and moved into powerful positions, their propositions for immortality, mind uploading, nanotechnology, space colonisation, and the expansion of consciousness into the cosmos have gained ground in the tech world. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, known for his theory of the singularity, helped set up the Singularity University at NASA and was hired as an adviser by Google. In turn, Google would start its own company to do research into extending lives – the California Life Company (CALICO). Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, took on the mantle of transhumanism and has funded biotech projects aimed at defeating death, or advancing brain mapping and mind uploading options. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has also espoused transhumanism, whilst anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey transplanted his research organisation, the SENS Foundation, to Mountain View, California.

Due in part to its espousal of right-wing libertarianism and heroic individualism, its ideological linkages to eugenics, and calls for the maximisation of ‘personal autonomy’ (Anders 2001, 3) over an analysis of social forces, transhumanism as a movement has remained overwhelmingly white and mostly Anglo-American in membership. Racism, colonialism, imperialism, or class inequality are almost never taken up as issues of importance for thinking about the past or future of humanity, with some key actors promoting far-right ideologies. For example, Thiel has also co-authored a nativist book called The diversity myth, reportedly donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, and backed the Donald Trump presidency.

Although the membership continues to skew male, gender has become an important point of inflection within transhumanist thinking in part because of the presence of inventor, CEO, and writer Martine Rothblatt who has seen gender as the paradigmatic site for jettisoning biological heritage. Rothblatt, who herself transitioned in the 90s and has advocated for transgender rights, has written about The apartheid of sex (1995) and the creative freedom and technological power to determine one’s own form (2011), what transhumanist philosopher Anders Sandberg has called ‘morphological freedom’ (2013).

**Consciousness, telos, and cosmic utopianism**

When today’s transhumanists trace their history back to the Enlightenment, it is to a particular strain of science-based utopian humanism that focuses on the human power to determine its own future. This largely eschews the tragic strain of humanism (Eagleton 2009), in which the human condition is thought to be locked into insurmountable contradictions and the inevitability of death. Of course, the very basic notion of progress at the centre of the Enlightenment and modern thought is inseparable from European utopianism and scientific advancement. Science and technological advances, for example, were already part of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, with its vision of a future state in which humans live long and can use technology to satisfy their needs. Transhumanists have been most attracted to the stadial framework of progress and utopia, such as the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1792 Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind which presents an atheistic telos moving through ten epochs of development to arrive at the ‘epoch of the future progress of mankind’ when the growth of scientific knowledge would put an end to inequality, and human moral progress would start on its final path. Whereas European thinkers such as Condorcet are mentioned as ‘proto-transhumanists’ by the WTA (now called ‘Humanity+’) and by thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, it is important to note that the original European Enlightenment project was to create a better world through the proper rearrangement of social units. Transhumanism, on the other hand, hinges its utopian vision on the rearrangement of molecular, even atomic, units as per nanotechnology, or the ‘informatisation’ of the universe. In this sense, it fits the neoliberal paradigm where state and society are pushed aside in favour of individual responsibility for health and advancement.

The informatic approach, influenced by cybernetics, was popularised by Ray Kurzweil in The singularity is near (2005), a widely-read book on the emergence of an intelligent universe. In this view, the rise of intelligence is the telos of the universe, and technology is the means and the index of this evolution. From its origins in flint-knapping to the current digital platforms whose power and speed are rising exponentially, human intelligence has brought the world to the brink of a vast machinic, nonhuman ‘intelligence explosion’ coming upon us so fast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will soon no longer apply. That event-horizon is called ‘the singularity’, a concept originated in 1993 with computer scientist, mathematician, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and institutionalised by AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Tyler Emerson, who set up the Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) in 2000.

The key aspects of the informatic theory of the universe are that A) all matter is constituted, or at least can be captured and encoded, by information and complexity; since all matter, including the human brain, is constituted by and legible as patterns of information, there must be a continuum between not only human and nonhuman animals but also biological and nonbiological matter. Thus, B) humans may be regarded as one instance of the evolution of the universe from simple to complex informatic formations, bound to be superseded by super-intelligence. And since computation can capture and modify information, so C) information in the informatic cosmos may be translated from one medium to another, making all mental states potentially transferrable across matter. Minds may be downloaded and uploaded, migrating from the electrochemistry of the brain to a computational platform, rendering the biological body obsolete. This latter is the task and promise of AI. After humans create real AI, Kurzweil writes,

the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. (2005, 389)

This progression of intelligence over time and into all matter in the universe has also been called a ‘telos of rationality’ (Bostrom 2008).

A number of philosophical objections have been raised regarding the informatic view. Scholars like Katherine Hayles (1999) have argued that the informatic approach, in which any mind may be transferred to other substrates (i.e. downloaded and uploaded) because it is reducible to information, mistakenly reinscribes a Cartesian dualism of mind that presumes the separation of mind from the matter in which it arises. In this way, it is actually undermining its own materialist assumptions. The transhumanist goal of reproducing consciousness in silicon-based substrates will fail because a state in silicon can simply not be the same as a state in the synaptic and neuronal assemblage that is the biological brain. As David Roden (2015, 56) points out, however, this does not preclude the development of other kinds of powerful if unpredictable mental states (and thus versions of personhood) in computational agents, in which case a kind of posthuman being, ‘Human 2.0’ as he calls it, would emerge. A thornier distinction between consciousness and computation may make that debate moot. Reviewing Kurzweil’s work in The New York Review of Books, for example, the philosopher John Searle (2002) argued that ‘increased computational power’ is a different order of thing from ‘consciousness in computers’. In that case, there would be no posthuman case to make, as human consciousness will not have been broached at all.

Either way, as most scholars agree, consciousness is a hard problem to crack (Chalmers 2002, Nagel 2012), and no view regarding it is settled. Anthropologically, it is just the absence of convincing accounts of what it is that opens up an undetermined realm in which speculative ideas grow, giving shape to current transhuman practices and subjectivities. These in turn shift the function and valence of important, though unstable, categories such as ‘consciousness’ itself, and challenge established notions of ‘personhood’ and ‘human’, two categories whose distinct coherence relies on the kind of self-awareness associated with human consciousness.

Transhumanism as subject of scholarly inquiry

Much of the scholarship on transhumanism has moved along two paths. The first is in relation to the enhancement and modification of the body (brains included) and, ultimately, of the nature of being human. In these debates, transhumanism becomes a bellwether for technology’s dangers and possibilities. It has been termed as one of the greatest threats to humanity by its detractors (Fukuyama 2002) and heralded as the best way to save humanity by its proponents (Bostrom 2014). Susan Levin (2022) has made a convincing argument that the empirical bases of transhumanist speculation are too often erroneous, especially with regards to the components of intelligence and rational decision-making. For example, whereas transhumanists tend to dismiss emotions as irrational, cognitive neuroscience has shown the importance of emotions in good decision-making and creative thinking. Similarly, the individualism of some transhumanist visions belies the fact that intelligence is distributed and contextual. Critics also liken the enhancement fantasies of transhumanists to eugenicist fantasies that reek of racism and will lead to the abandonment of fellow humans who are not enhanced or on their way to technological posthumanity (Levin 2018, Farman 2020). In response, transhumanists tend to flatten all medical and technological intervention as proto-transhumanist, arguing that you cannot coherently accept hearing aids whilst rejecting neural implants, or promote lifesaving medicine in one instance whilst rejecting the technological quest to eliminate death. Either way, the discussion about transforming human nature via technology and the control of biology is not unique to transhumanism; it has been part of an older general debate about the power of science, especially since the emergence of genetic biology, the identification of DNA, and the manipulation of species genomes gave humans a vision of ‘limitless self-modification’, to use ethicist Paul Ramsey’s (2009) words from the 1970s.

A second path has run along attempts to identify transhumanism as essentially a kind of religion. Some (Geraci 2010) have read visions of a machinic future in which the human species must be superseded in order for a better world to emerge as an extension, not of secular humanism, but of the Christian dialectics of apocalypse and salvation. However, this approach does not account for the new forms, subjectivities, technologies, and philosophies that emerge through transhumanism. Jon Bialecki (2022) takes a nuanced approach in his ethnography of Mormon transhumanists, suggesting that Mormonism and transhumanism ‘rhyme’; that is, they have affinities that resonate with each other, and a group of Mormons recognising this have been building on the resonance. Such resonances between Mormonism and transhumanism include attempts to resurrect the dead, the conviction that man can become god, and the possibility that humans live in infinitely simulated worlds. One might point equally to affinities between transhumanism and an unlikely mix of emerging intellectual trends, such as the growing interest in panpsychism (Klinge 2020), the mixture of animism and technology in ‘techno-animist’ perspectives (Richardson 2016), or the emergence of informatic selves (Farman 2014), in which selves are increasingly understood and enacted through informational or algorithmic platforms that record one’s movements, choices, desires, or physiology as informational patterns.

Despite its engagement with the core figure of anthropology—anthropos—transhumanism has yielded only a handful of sustained studies in anthropology. The overall anthropological question turns around subject formation: what kinds of subjects are made through the ideals, technologies, practices, and social formations of transhumanism? Bialecki’s (2019, 2022) aforementioned work on Mormon transhumanists examines how these two sets of ideas have come together in shaping the new subjectivity of Mormon transhumanism. Anya Bernstein (2015, 2019) studied Russian transhumanists, tracing their history through Russian cosmism, pre-revolutionary esoteric futurist movements, and the Soviet scientific and utopian secularist project, showing how Russian transhumanists disagree amongst themselves over the relationship of mind to body, over notions of personhood, and over the spiritual ideas and practices as opposed to mechanical approaches to body and mind. In either case, Bernstein argues, their approach is quite different from the American libertarian hyper-individualist vein, embracing a more collective, kin-based approach. Nevertheless, she identifies a tension that echoes the North American version of transhumanism: seeking life beyond mortality under the constant shadow of and obsession with extermination and other world-ending scenarios. Jenny Huberman (2021) brings a comparative approach to suggest that within transhumanism, kinship and personhood are being reconfigured. Drawing on Irving Hallowell, for instance, she argues that transhumanists are envisaging an Ojibwa-like world in which personhood is distributed among an array of other-than-human powerful beings, and relations with robots and software-based kin are already changing what the future family may look like. I have examined the development of algorithmic subjectivities (Farman 2014), transhuman spiritualities (Farman 2019), and suspended personhood, produced by transhumanism’s quest for immortality, specifically via cryonics, and the challenges to the category of personhood in secular law (Farman 2013, 2020). The Technoscientific Immortality project at the University of Bergen, led by anthropologist Annelin Eriksen, is researching changes in social relations and notions of the human through six transhumanist case studies between the US and Russia that are radically transforming practices and awareness around death, long considered as one of the central markers of humanity. Together, these studies underline the ways in which transhumanism is unstable and destabilising, not fitting neatly into categorical divides, becoming a contested but flexible site for further thinking and rethinking of what it is to be human and to be conscious.

This may be one reason why some social theorists have found it hard to simply brush transhumanism aside, even if they disagree with its libertarian tendencies (Hayles 2011). Andrew Pickering (2011) has made the argument that transhumanist cyborgs are interesting in their human-nonhuman ‘mangle’, but overall transhumanism starts from a very narrow premise regarding the kinds of possible mind-body capacities that exist and may be imagined for the future. As powerful as a human-machine cyborg may be in some respects (for example, in knowing what you should buy!), computationalism only cultivates one aspect of possible powers in what Pickering (2009) calls the ‘performative brain’, many others of which may be cultivated through other modalities, from psychedelic experiments to meditation. The machinic, in other words, is not attentive to other emergent selves and ‘the continual bubbling up of irreducible novelty in the world’. Thus, the problem is not that transhumanism is essentialist with respect to human nature—indeed, transhumanists see humans as a species whose nature is to change its nature, and breaking up the category ‘human’ presents the opportunity to transcend our ‘natural heritage’ and its limits (Bailey 2005; Kurzweil 2005). Rather, the problem is that transhumanism values only a specific form of intelligence or life, one that is translatable and shapeable via computation (Farman 2020). In this mode, the machinic and the computational are turned into their own reified nonbiological value—that is, they are valued in and of themselves as though they were meaningful aside from the human social contexts in which they exist. To transhumanists, the value of nonhuman superintelligence overrides human interests, and is encoded in efforts to achieve the vaunted telos of a posthuman techno-civilisation. For example, in transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom’s (2002, 5) influential analysis, one of the existential risks to humanity is argued, paradoxically, to be when ‘the potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted’ by human societies, even if ‘human life continues in some form’. What is valued over humanness in this informatic cosmology is the perpetuation of a posthuman form of life—in which the power, accuracy, and speed of computational technologies become the utmost measures of worth, mainly because these are also supposed to lead to the rise of conscious beings who, as one famous blog has it, are ‘less wrong’.

Transhumanism then may be properly understood as a social project for claiming particular techno-libertarian futures, imagined as part of an inevitable and universal trajectory of intelligence and informatic complexity. Whereas these futures promise emancipation from the limitations of human biology and embodiment, including those of race, gender, and even labour, they keep erasing and so in practice reproducing the racial and settler colonial histories and on-going structural inequalities that undergird the development of such technologies and the accrual of power and wealth to a few. In this way, they follow the white mythos of the autonomous subject ‘whose freedom is in actuality possible only because of the surrogate effect of servants, slaves, wives, and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor’ (Atanasoki and Vorna 2019, 17-9). In other words, whatever is invoked in the name of humanity or transhumanity, the futures idealised by transhumanists cannot be valued universally.

Indeed, transhumanist forms of life represent a danger, especially to those in already structurally precarious situations (racially, geopolitically, by class, by status, by physical ability) as well as those engaged in political struggles that aim against the wider contemporary socioeconomic and civilisational formations. As others have remarked, America’s soldiers are the most advanced transhumanist prototypes,

with their smart weapons, their body armor, their night-vision goggles, their special diets, their training in and integration into remote robotic combat systems, and, we would suspect, their ingestion of neuropharmaceuticals such as Modafinil to keep them alert even when deprived of sleep for 36 hours (Allenby and Sarewitz 2011, 24).

This is no accident. The projected transhumanist technologies often emerge from military research and are fed back into the military. Despite their libertarian gestures against the state, high-powered transhumanists are enmeshed with the American state and the military: for example, Ray Kurzweil has worked closely with DARPA and NASA, whilst Peter Thiel owns a policing and surveillance company called Palantir (closely linked to Cambridge Analytica).

Conclusion

Transhumanism is part of the wider set of posthumanisms that have ripped apart the common Enlightenment-era conjunction of person and human—that is, of an entity whose dignity and rights were premised on a notion of special consciousness that emphasised self-awareness, reason, and the ability to speak and act freely. If, as transhumanists claim, those features are not exclusively based in biological forms, and may be attributes of computational devices, then personhood is decoupled from exclusive humanism, and even multi-specieism, and its attributes and pursuant rights may be extended to what was previously thought of as inert or disenchanted matter.

Transhumanism will likely raise questions of personhood in anthropology, forcing us to rethink its relations to nature and technology: is it enough to be able to attribute agency or consciousness to mountains or avatars in order to make them count as persons? Do agency and consciousness only arise relationally, as an effect of interactions between beings? Or is there some metaphysical or subjective essence that agency or consciousness refer to and which may or may not be discerned in entities such as mountains or avatars? Is ‘personhood’ a more inclusive category than ‘human’? Or are these questions moot, because they are effects of formations of power that constantly work to render certain people’s claims to rights and power impossible, regardless of the categories used, and despite the struggles of people to expand the embrace of those categories?

Whilst the informatic cosmology of mind and cosmos allows transhumanists to move beyond the secular humanist disenchantment of matter and argue for such things as robot rights or intelligent matter in the universe, it also narrows the possibilities of mind by fetishising algorithmic intelligence (Ziewitz 2016). For in the name of expanding human capacities and transcending human limits, algorithmic modalities are narrowing the range of valued forms of life in ways often reminiscent of the colonial divides that separated ‘primitive’ from ‘civilised’—in this case, separating the technologically enhanced forms of life from regular old Homo sapiens, and without acknowledging the social and historical conditions that enable enhancement. Thus the populations overvalued and undervalued in these imaginaries have been de facto racially and geopolitically defined; that is, white Americans, or Western-educated urban denizens more generally, are the main proponents as well as the assumed subjects of that future. Other human socialities and possible lifeways are erased from that future, and quite likely a particular human subjectivity is being produced by the mediation of computational devices that makes for a recursive loop of algorithmic affirmation: we learn with computers how to behave computationally and so we value computational behaviour. What is noticeable in the meantime is that as transhumanism has gotten increasingly entrenched in the tech world’s networks of power, its discourse, anxieties, and projects have become harder to distinguish from those of the military, scientific, technological, and financial institutions of late capitalism: existential risk, space colonies, neural implants, robotic automation, avatar selves, and mind uploading have moved from being the maligned concerns of a few technofuturists to more common, popular goals of a post-human future.

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to those whose comments helped me think through these matters more deeply, especially the editor of the encyclopedia Felix Stein, two anonymous reviewers, and Noreen Khawaja.

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Note on contributor

An anthropologist, writer, and artist, Abou Farman is author of the books On not dying: Secular immortality in the age of technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.

Abou Farman, The New School for Social Research. farmanfa@newschool.edu

Pandemics

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 17:15:36 +0000

Frédéric Keck

Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS)

Initially published 2 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22pandemics

Abstract:

Pandemics tend to be defined as large epidemics, i.e. as sudden and widespread rises in disease incidence that occur over a very wide area, cross international boundaries, and affect a great number of people. However, this conventional definition neglects the fact that some diseases that reach a global scale, such as influenza or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), are usually considered to be pandemics while other diseases that are similarly widespread, such as tuberculosis, are not. It is therefore necessary to investigate how scientific and medical knowledge led experts to frame only some pathogens as actually or potentially pandemic. The history of past pandemics shows the extension of both the human species and its parasitic microbes over the globe, foregrounding that humans and pathogens co-evolved and that immunity is as much a process as it is a state of being. As the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism have accelerated environmental change and caused the emergence of new pathogenic microbes, the medical concept of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ was developed in the 1970s. It relied on the technical possibility to track microbes as they cross borders between species and territories, turning microbes into objects of surveillance under a logic of security and emergency. Preparing for and responding to pandemics has since transferred technologies of anticipation from civil defence to public health, and the collective management of uncertainty associated with pandemic preparedness and response redefined the publics of medical care. Social anthropology improves our understanding of these publics and processes by enlightening the entanglements between species, the co-infections between diseases, and the structural violence of inequalities that drive pandemics, particularly in the Global South. Studying pandemics as fundamentally social phenomena also allows anthropologists to investigate figures such as the prophetic expert or the virus hunter, who question the efficacy of science at a time when infectious diseases become more and more commonplace.

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently defined a pandemic as ‘the spread of an infectious disease over three continents’ (Doshi 2011). This definition was implemented to anticipate the emergence of influenza viruses by global warning systems, and to control their spread through public health measures in nation-states. Since December 2019, the WHO has faced a respiratory disease pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, and the number of victims has rapidly and dramatically increased despite strong measures such as population lockdowns and mass vaccination applied worldwide. Anthropologists have been engaged in this and previous pandemic emergencies on both applied and more theoretical levels, trying to understand which public health measures work best, what such measures mean for populations, what long-term conditions enable the emergence and severity of pandemics, and what pandemics themselves can teach us about the human condition (Abramowitz 2017; Higgins, Martin and Vesperi 2020).

Past pandemics have shown that an infectious disease does not just limit itself to a series of individual cases on human bodies but instead questions the very foundations of social life. Pandemic pathogens raise fears about the effects of human contact and contagion because they cross the boundaries of social groups, which tend to define people in terms of immunity as well as purity and even moral decency (Farmer 1992). Pandemics also show that the human species does not control its autonomous development in the domestication of nature, but is entangled with other species in unstable ecosystems. This makes pandemics one of the most pressing challenges for the human species, because they reveal the fragile conditions in which we co-evolve with microbes that can become pathogenic (Latour 2020). Investigating the human fabric of pandemics leads anthropologists not only to question how pandemics are configured as global threats but also to study how they emerge at the ecological scale of the planet.

Since anthropology studies the relations between humans and non-humans in local sites (Descola 2013), it can ask how these relations produce pandemics at a global scale, but also how some aspects of these relations are ignored or left aside through, for example, models of calculation and techniques of anticipation. How is an infectious disease configured as a pandemic, and can the notion be extended to non-infectious diseases? What kinds of vulnerabilities do pandemics reveal in the globalised infrastructures of human societies? How does the scale of ‘totality’ (pan-) that pandemics rely on transform what we understand society to be? Are societies defined by the immune protection of different human groups exposed to a disease?

This entry will describe four aspects of pandemics that have been covered in some depth by social anthropology. Pandemics expose vulnerabilities in global connections, they amplify existing social inequalities, they serve as horizons in that they force us to anticipate the future, and they foreground entanglements of relations between human and non-human species.

Vulnerabilities in global connections

The term ‘pandemic’ was first used to describe the effect of climate at the scale of the planet. In 1862, the British army doctor Robert Lawson invoked ‘pandemic waves’ to account for global fluctuations in the spread of infectious diseases by a mix of social, hygienic, and meteorological forces (Harrison 2016: 131). When the Ancient Greeks coined the term epidemic to describe how diseases moved from one body to another, they did not think that it could spread to the whole human species. The term pandemos was used by Plato for a vulgar and pathological form of love extended to all human bodies, in contrast to the intellectual love of ideas, and referred to self-government rather than to the government of the human species (Foucault 2005). Epidemics such as bubonic plague moved from the East to the West, following the movements of persons and commodities across burgeoning cities and spreading empires, and were most often interpreted as divine punishments (McNeill 1976). When humans, animals, and plants circulated massively between the Old World and the New World, smallpox and tuberculosis ravaged the Amerindian population while syphilis came to Europe (Crosby 1976). As epidemics were increasingly related to global trade, discussions on how to control the contagious transmission of diseases were linked to debates on how to regulate flows of commodities and persons (Delaporte 1986).

The development of microbiology as a laboratory science in the nineteenth century led to the replacement of climate as a vague causality for epidemics with a more precise causality: the infection of human bodies by invisible microbes. While Robert Koch discovered the bacteria causing tuberculosis and cholera in land fields and water sources, Louis Pasteur showed that pathogens could be modified in the laboratory and be used to cure diseases. Following Bruno Latour (1993), the strength of Pasteurian medicine, by contrast with public hygiene, was its capacity to displace relations between humans and microbes from the laboratory to another site, the countryside or the colonies. If pandemics are diseases of globalisation, the microbiological response to pandemics is the globalisation of the laboratory as a space where serums and vaccines are made to mitigate their effects (Latour 1983). Society itself was defined by the study of the mechanisms of immunity, separating good microbes from pathogens in their encounter with the human body. Thus, Emile Durkheim (1916) compared what it feels like to live and think in a society to the inoculation of a small amount of pathogens through vaccines, since they allow the body to know what is proper and not proper under a collective form of memory (Esposito 2011). The organisation of public health relied on maps of distribution of infectious diseases and on access to vaccines and drugs, following the principle of solidarity between all participants of a social group.

The First World War confirmed the microbiological revolution while challenging it at the same time. The globalisation of war multiplied contacts between bodies but also standardised military forms of control, leading to the decrease of cholera or yellow fever by simple techniques of hygiene and social distancing. Yet new pandemics appeared with this accelerated form of globalisation. The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more humans than the war itself, and apparently caused diseases independently from social classes or climates (Crosby 1989). As the search for the microbe that caused it failed, despite the discovery of an associated bacteria by Richard Pfeiffer in Germany, no vaccine could be made (Honigsbaum 2020). While the influenza pandemic moved from America to Europe and Africa through the circulation of soldiers, pandemics of plague moved from Asia to Europe through steamship and railway, revealing the acceleration of global transportation by war and colonialism. The use of surgical masks against pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910 was extended to the United States against influenza in 1918, which shows that prophylactic measures could be invented against pathogens for which no vaccine or treatment was available or effective (Lynteris 2016).

It took a century after two global wars to redefine how we understand the relations between humans and microbes in the sociological notion of immunity. If ecosystems in which humans co-evolve with microbes are constantly changing, immunity must be remade by adapting treatments and vaccines to new pathogens and being attentive to their conditions of emergence. This was the foundation of the ecology of infectious diseases, a medical form of thinking illustrated by immunologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet in Australia and bacteriologist René Dubos in the United States, who argued that medical intervention should ‘run’ to keep nature in a state of balance (Anderson 2004). These two prophetic voices were confirmed with the emergence of new pathogens in the 1970s, such as Ebola or Lassa, which could spread rapidly through accelerated means of transportation. In 1996, microbiologist Joshua Lederberg declared,

we come then to social intelligence as our remaining option to counter the evolutionary drive of the microbial world. That intelligence must include a profound respect for the ecological factors that enhance our vulnerabilitity. From this perspective, we have never been more vulnerable (King 2002, 768).

Ledeberg encouraged biologists to ‘think from the microbe’s perspective’ and saw globalisation, with its increasingly rapid connections between distant points of the world, as multiplying opportunities for microbes to thrive. Latour, following the works of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, has described relations between humans and microbes through the concept of Gaia, a symbiotic entity conceived at the scale of the planet and its atmosphere. He asks how it is possible to reassemble the social in the ‘critical zones’ where pathogens signal disruptions and call for attention (Latour and Weibel 2020). Relations between humans and microbes, in that perspective, are sites of vulnerability which require local forms of investigation, rather than a rigid sociological definition of immunity as a kind of border.

Social inequalities, from local causes to global amplifications

If pandemics are caused by microbes spreading globally through human means of transportation, they are also caused by social inequalities, which they amplify. Epidemics are often ‘syndemics’, as the effects of one pathogenic microbe are added to other social factors of vulnerability, including other infections (Singer 2009). Unequal access to health care is caused by poverty, racism, hierarchy, discrimination, and violence, thus contributing to the emergence and spread of infectious diseases (Nguyen and Peschard 2003). Pandemics produce global inequalities and prejudices, between populations in the Global North who are often protected from these diseases by their governments, and populations in the Global South who are predominantly affected by them and tend to be depicted as the origins of emerging pathogens (Wald 2008). Anthropologists have questioned global health interventions by the WHO or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for example, because when focusing on pandemic pathogens that they want to anticipate, mitigate, or eradicate, they tend to ignore or simplify the social distribution of pandemic pathogens. Here, microbiology must be connected to epidemiology, which studies the differential exposure to infectious diseases, and to social anthropology, which reflects patients’ vulnerabilities as well as feelings of suffering and injustice.

The virus causing AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), identified in the United States in 1981, spread to a slow pandemic, killing around 30 million people. While it first affected gay urban communities who could mobilise to promote research on medical treatments, it reached poor communities through sexual relations or blood transfusion with little access to a cure (Epstein 1996). Paul Farmer, as a physician and anthropologist, studied the transmission of infectious diseases in Haiti and the local idioms in which people made sense of their suffering, such as through accusations of sorcery. Refusing to oppose the cultural explanations rooted in belief and the biological causality of the microbe, Farmer followed narratives of illnesses in which AIDS occurred in long-term infections such as tuberculosis (Farmer 1999). For him, the global narrative of AIDS connected places where different and sometimes contradictory idioms to make sense of illness were used. ‘The AIDS pandemic is a striking reminder that even a village as “remote” as Do Kay is linked to a network that includes Port-au-Prince and Brooklyn: voodoo and chemotherapy, divination and serology, poverty and plenty’ (Farmer 1992, 8). Indeed, these different idioms can enter in tension when a migrant worker from Haiti arrives in New York with AIDS, and seeks medical treatment at hospitals while making sense of the disease in his own concepts.

The contradictions between idioms of illness produce what Paul Farmer calls a ‘geography of blame’, which traces pandemics to poor territories where they are considered to emerge. AIDS became a target of global health measures a few years after the Ebola virus was detected in Central Africa after 1976. This coincidence raised concerns that Ebola could infect North Americans, thus reinforcing security measures to control its spread on the African continent. Some anthropologists, such as João Biehl and Adryana Petryna, want social anthropology to enter into a critical dialogue with global health. They show that the technologies to detect pandemic emergencies predominantly as a security concern tend to forget the people who are affected and the narratives by which they make sense of their suffering. These aspects should play a role in the mitigation of pandemics:

Global health players can become impervious to critique as they identify emergencies, cite dire statistics, and act on their essential duty of promoting health in the name of “humanitarian reason” or as an instrument of economic development, diplomacy or national security (Petryna and Biehl 2013, 7)

In his ethnography of AIDS in South Africa, Didier Fassin (2007) analysed the accusations launched by president Thabo Mbeki that the disease was caused by poverty and not by a virus, and that treatments proposed by Northern countries were too costly and non-effective. These claims, portrayed as heresy in the language of global health, were accepted by many South African citizens because the context of the post-apartheid regime made sense of experiences of suffering and inequality. For Fassin, the national accusations of a president captured local experiences of disease in a long history of colonisation and racism, which became public with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

When they emerged in China in 1997 and 2003, H5N1 avian influenza and SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) were described as potentially the first pandemics of the twenty-first century, as they revealed the increasing connections between China and the global economy. They were also understood as epidemics of information, because a ‘viral network’ coordinated by the WHO followed the mutations of respiratory pathogens in real-time as they circulated from one country to another, which raised the question of how to distinguish true information from fake news in social networks (MacPhail 2014). Arthur Kleinman and others analysed these diseases with a biosocial approach of inequalities between humans faced with emerging pathogens. In the US, members of the Chinese diaspora were stigmatised by prejudices about wet markets as sites of contagion (Kleinman and Watson 2003). In Southeast Asia, small poultry breeders were replaced by big industrial farms which could implement biosecurity measures (Kleinman et al. 2008). While biological approaches in global health tend to correlate target and response, biosocial approaches take into account the local, national, and global scales that shape the context of the response.

A biosocial approach may question why some diseases are considered as pandemics while others are not, even if they also spread globally and are caused by social inequalities. Thus, obesity and diabetes have been described by global health authorities as epidemics because they followed the globalisation of sugar and Western modes of consumption. And yet they are not objects of mobilisation with the same urgency as infectious diseases, because they do not jump borders rapidly and cannot be expressed in the language of security. Moreover, their causes in the unequal distribution of food are more complicated to target with a standardised distribution of medical treatments (Moran-Thomas 2019; Sanabria 2016; Yates-Doerr 2015). While the origins of obesity and diabetes are apparently more complex than the emergence of a new pathogen, their outcomes are more difficult to model than infectious diseases. Beyond the opposition between biological and social causes of epidemics, anthropologists can thus ask how the notion of pandemics has become a tool to anticipate the future at a global level.

Horizons to anticipate the future

How are experts led to think that a disease will become a pandemic in the future, and how does this mode of reasoning affect relations between living beings? Pandemics have become one of the horizons to generalise a contingent event, resonating with other forms of anticipation in environmental knowledge, such as climate change or nuclear accidents. They are what Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs called a ‘chronotope, a narrative device for connecting social, biological and spatial elements and ordering them in temporal sequences and interpretive frameworks’ (2003, 276). Thus cholera, one of mankind’s oldest diseases caused by a bacteria that spreads through water, was described by the WHO in 1961 as a pandemic, and retrospectively six pandemics of cholera were traced to Asia as its region of origin. When it reached Venezuela in the 1990s, the state, ruled by Hugo Chavez, tended to under-report cases to avoid quarantine, in such a way that the voices of the Warao people affected by cholera were unheard in the global discourse of pandemics. Such obstacles to making sense of pandemics have led global experts to anticipate them without relying exclusively or even heavily on national statistics but rather by involving populations in the imagination of pandemics as catastrophic events.

According to Andrew Lakoff, the emergence of infectious diseases in the 1970s has been framed in a new form of anticipation of the future. Infectious diseases such as tuberculosis or cholera were managed by public health experts in the last two centuries through techniques of prevention, based on the calculation of risks shaped by territory and the ability of distributing treatment. Infectious diseases after Ebola and AIDS were described by global health experts as ‘events’ whose probability cannot be calculated but whose catastrophic consequences can only be mitigated. Pandemics are now imagined through worst-case scenarios as events for which populations must be prepared, in order to contain panic when they do occur. Pandemic planning regulates the distribution of vaccines and treatments that are being stockpiled and secured to avoid looting. Pandemic preparedness is about creating a constant state of vigilance and readiness produced by techniques of anticipation of the future, such as exercises simulating an outbreak of smallpox in the New York City subway. ‘Preparedness envisions the future not to predict what is going to happen but to generate knowledge about the vulnerabilities in the present’ (Lakoff 2017, 23).

With Stephen Collier (2021), Lakoff has traced the history of techniques of preparedness in the US to the beginning of the Cold War, when civil defence experts identified vulnerabilities in ‘vital systems’, such as public transportation, the food industry, or banking systems, that could be targeted by a nuclear attack. These experts organised exercises or simulations to imagine such improbable events and mitigate their consequences. After the end of the Cold War, this style of reasoning was transferred from civil defence to national security in order to anticipate ‘generic threats’, a range of unpredictable events from terrorist attacks to hurricanes and floods. By shifting from national security to global health, pandemic preparedness has become one of the languages to think and act in a world struck by disasters, be they intentional or not, short-term or long-term, by simulating their effects rather than modifying their causes (Samimian-Darash 2009).

Carlo Caduff has studied how pandemic preparedness has transformed the work of microbiologists, particularly in the domain of influenza viruses. Because these viruses are constantly mutating, public health authorities have to anticipate new influenza viruses when a new strain replaces another, as in the cases of the 1918, 1957, and 1968 pandemics. When virologists study viral mutations in the lab, they have to bet which strain will become pandemic, leaving aside other strains considered as not ‘potentially pandemic’. This leads some of them to make what Caduff calls ‘prophetic claims’ by projecting previous pandemics into the future (2015, 7). When the H5N1 avian influenza virus emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, with a high lethality but a low transmissibility (12 persons were infected, out of whom 8 died), virologist Robert Webster warned of a pandemic more severe than the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ which had killed around 50 million people. These prophetic claims draw on apocalyptic images when they predict disasters at the global level. However, they are not promises of redemption but rather invitations to act in order to mitigate the disaster they announce. ‘At the core of pandemic prophecy is a particular prospect: destruction without purification, death without resurrection - in short, dystopia without utopia’ (Caduff 2015, 7).

Edwin Kilbourne, the founder of the department of microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City where Caduff did his fieldwork, promoted a policy of stockpiling vaccines for future flu pandemics with the motto: ‘better a vaccine without a pandemic than a pandemic without a vaccine’ (Caduff 2015, 61). The US Strategic National Stockpile also included masks and antivirals distributed during exercises to test for the allocation of scarce resources during a pandemic. These simulations of pandemics, based on scenarios similar to those used in novels or films, produce a sense of disaster imminence, and engage participants in a presumably realistic course of action. They blur the distinction between reality and fiction in such a way that a pandemic, when it happens, is taken as a simulation of the next one. Hence the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which killed fewer persons than seasonal flu, could have led to a disengagement in preparedness, but the ‘lessons learned’ in stockpiling masks have been used, for better or worse, during the Covid-19 pandemic. In China, criticisms for the failure to control SARS in 2003 led public health authorities to take the H1N1 pandemic as an exercise, showing their ability to trace contacts and control its spread better than their US counterparts (Mason 2016).

Pandemic preparedness can be criticised as privileging the future over the present, calibrating faith and reason. Caduff analyses precautionary measures as a way to justify action by betting on the future in a competition between truth-claims about viral mutations where the most catastrophic claim wins over others. The logic of pandemic preparedness defers the present for a future that it indicates or signals. It is not regulated by the opposition between true and false, since no false signal can be criticised for failing to anticipate the pandemic.

The fact that this form of preparedness is causing too many signals can also be seen as a sign of its sensitivity: it actually constitutes a part of its functionality. The false alarm is a consequence of the exceptional vigilance that is considered necessary to prepare for the inevitable pandemic (Caduff 2015, 135).

This preference for the future in the logic of preparedness has produced new kinds of ‘publics’ (Prince 2019) in the neoliberal management of uncertainty. Vinh-Kim Nguyen (2010) has studied patient groups anticipating the end of the AIDS pandemic through their participation to clinical research projects. He shows that the possibility to treat HIV/AIDS with antivirals has led global health experts to collect narratives about living with the virus in West Africa, thus operating a triage between those who could receive treatments and those who could not. Although it has colonial antecedents, triage is in part a simulation technique of global health, since it defines priority populations for the administration of treatments in times of pandemics. These populations can become publics, in the sense that they are trained by NGOs and activists to argue reflectively. They institute forms of sovereignty below the nation-state, by referring to themselves as responsible subjects.

If Nguyen is critical of the social boundaries set up by exercises of triage because of the violence they institute, he is more positive about software simulations of pandemics that retrospectively track emerging viruses. These simulations reflect possibilities of social life. Based on pandemic scenarios, they calculate probabilities of new pandemics and imagine modes of ending existing ones, often through the problematic notion of ‘eradication’. Working as a health professional during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Nguyen testifies to the differences between slow epidemics such as AIDS and a fast epidemic such as Ebola: while the origins of HIV/AIDS were traced by phylogenetic analysis to a transmission from apes to humans in Central Africa in the 1920s amplified by human trade, the arrival of Ebola in West Africa by contact between bats and humans in a village in Guinea was much more difficult to prove. Anthropologists are called upon by biologists to speculate on the speed at which viruses travel across global infrastructures, and not only to understand cultural obstacles to public health measures. ‘In effect, an anthropology of infectious diseases must be attentive not only to the social drivers of biological emergence but also to the conditions which allow biological events to be detected and made tangible in situ’ (Nguyen 2019, 166). Participating in debates about the origins of pandemic viruses allows anthropologists to imagine alternative futures based on ethnographic knowledge, and thus question and improve techniques of preparedness.

Entangled relations between human and non-human species

Concepts such as ‘vital systems’ and ‘interspecies contacts’, which play a central role in pandemic preparedness, have led anthropologists to rethink social life not only as shared vulnerabilities in a human collective but also as changing webs of relations in which pathogens emerge. Pandemics are often caused by ‘zoonoses’, diseases transmitted across species by ‘spillover events’ (King 2002; Keck and Lynteris 2018). While some infectious diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes, such as malaria or dengue, and others by water, such as cholera, some pathogenic microbes circulate without symptoms among animals before spreading to humans, such as tuberculosis among badgers, coronaviruses among bats, or influenza among waterfowl. To describe these chains of transmission from ‘animal reservoirs’ to infectious outbreaks, the epidemiological concept of contact is not sufficient, because it presupposes that zoonotic emergence is a unique event. More ethnographic concepts are necessary, such as habit, proximity, and entanglement, to describe long-term relations that condition emergence (Brown and Kelly 2014; Nading 2014; Narat et al. 2017). How humans perceive and treat the animals they live with is a structural factor in the early detection of zoonoses, either in the use of apes and bats as bushmeat, or in the consumption of poultry and pigs as domesticated animals. New modes of human habitat have brought humans closer to mosquitoes and ticks carrying pathogens, whose behaviour has been modified by climate change. Under the concept of ‘One Health’, reframed and extended as ‘planetary health’, environmentalists, veterinarians, and physicians share information on relations between human and non-human animals to prepare for and fight against pandemics. If these associations are driven by demands of biosecurity, they can also be attentive to biodiversity, which increasingly appears as a protection against pathogenic emergence (Hinchliffe 2015).

Here again, the anticipation of an avian influenza pandemic has been a field of experimentation for virologists and anthropologists alike. The massive precautionary killings of poultry suspected of carrying influenza viruses has raised concern regarding the shared immunities that have been lost by the globalisation and commodification of the industrial chicken (Haraway 2007). In the Indonesian archipelago, the dispersion of backyard poultry has led villagers to resist biosecurity measures, which can be related to the mode of existence of viruses as ‘clouds’ of information (Lowe 2010). In Vietnam, the massive vaccination of poultry promoted veterinarians as central actors in a national ‘war’ against influenza viruses, but raised suspicions about the advantages they offered to industrial farms (Porter 2019). In Hong Kong, unvaccinated chickens were placed as sentinels at the entrance of poultry farms, while birdwatchers monitored the health of wild birds (Keck 2020). In mainland China, the recent scaling up of industrial breeding remained compatible with small poultry farms mixing wild and domestic birds (Fearnley 2020). The global scale of a pandemic affecting humans has led anthropologists to study the different scales at which humans perceive the movements of birds, from farms to markets and migratory flyways.

When they are seen from the perspectives of animal reservoirs in which they mutate, emerging pathogens such as influenza viruses and coronaviruses are not only warning signals of future pandemics but also signs of communication between species in disrupted ecosystems. Christos Lynteris (2019) has proposed to take seriously the idea that pandemics should be understood not only as extending epidemics globally but also as reminding of the potential extinction of the human species. While humanity has caused the ‘sixth extinction’ by its impact on other species’ conditions of life, the multiplication of zoonoses in the recent decades has led many observers to interpret pandemics as a ‘revenge of nature’—a popular idea quite different from René Dubos’s evolutionary race between nature and humanity. When pandemics reveal the vulnerabilities of infrastructures of social life, leading to the massive interruption of human activity to stop contagion, they question more generally the claim to autonomy which separates humans from other species. ‘The pandemic is imagined as striking not simply human populations – or even the human species as a whole – but rather at the heart of humanity as a project for mastery’ (Lynteris 2019, 9). Pandemic preparedness can thus be interpreted as a way in which humanity confronts alterity in the process of domesticating nature, either focusing on spillover events on the side of animals or superspreader events on the side of humans. This reversal of apocalyptic time is compared by Lynteris to mythological narratives in Amazonian societies, where humans have been separated from animals by an original conflict which serves to explain the diversity of species (2019).

While the figure of the prophet can be mobilised to understand how experts of pandemics make truth-claims about the future, the figure of the shaman can explain how scientists manipulate past relations between humans, animals, and microbes in new forms of ritual practices. The regular sampling of animals to check if they have potentially pandemic pathogens turns them into allies for global health: if a virus is declared the enemy of humankind, birds or bats carrying this virus offer biologists the possibility to ‘take the enemy’s point of view’ (Viveiros de Castro 1992). While biosecurity interventions separate subjects of care from sacrificial victims when they cull animals or conduct triage, the attention to biodiversity as a limitation of pandemic risks produces more inclusive forms of surveillance and monitoring. Borders between species and territories have become sites of intense production of knowledge under the horizon of future pandemics. The border between China and Russia was a site of rehabilitation of the knowledge of marmot hunters at the time of the pneumonic plague (Lynteris 2016), and the border between China and Hong Kong was constantly monitored by birdwatchers to prevent outbreaks of avian influenza (Keck 2020). Pandemic preparedness has transformed natural sites into reservoirs of signs of the future perceived by ‘virus hunters’, who can read microbial mutations to describe continuities and discontinuities between populations and between species.

Conclusion

Pandemics are among the main drivers of the globalisation of knowledge, as they lead experts to follow a pathogen at the scale of the planet and recommend measures to control it. As such, they have had complex and often contradictory impacts on human-animal relations, global social policy, belief in the efficacy of science, and visions of planetary solidarity. Lessons from the past show that pandemics start and end with environmental changes, but they do not provide models on how to anticipate the next pandemic. The technological capacity to detect potentially pandemic pathogens at their early start and to raise alarm has led global authorities to manage pandemics as security issues by targeting microbes as enemies. But the unfolding of a pandemic as a long-term process reveals an entanglement of relations between social groups, non-pathogenic microbes, and animal species that does not follow the logic of eradication, which requires cleaning animal reservoirs and distributing medical treatment. By reaching the scale of the planet, the notion of pandemics can reduce the work of science to globalised networks of surveillance, or enlarge the understanding of diseases to the complex web of causes that interlaces different forms of trouble, from remembering past illnesses to detecting future pathogens, often producing violence and inequality. Social anthropology can contribute to the redefinition of solidarity at the time of pandemics, because it stands at the borders crossed by pathogens between species, territories, and populations. It can usefully ask what kind of experience and knowledge is produced at these borders, how such knowledge travels, and how it can be translated to speak to everyone. Pandemic preparedness could thus become a new language to think about a disrupted planet and fragile environments.

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Note on contributor

Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS). After working on the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza, he was the head of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018.

Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, 52 rue Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris. frederic.keck@cnrs.fr

Medical pluralism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 18:37:25 +0000

Venera Khalikova

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Initially published 17 Jun 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21medplural

Abstract:

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different medical approaches, treatments, and institutions that people can use while pursuing health: for example, combining biomedicine with so-called traditional medicine or alternative medicine. If we look closely at how people deal with illness, navigating between home remedies, evidence-based medicines, religious healing, and other alternatives, we can notice that some degree of medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. As a concept, medical pluralism lies at the heart of the discipline of medical anthropology, which owes its birth to the study of non-Western medical traditions and their encounters with biomedicine. This entry describes the history of debates in the scholarship on medical pluralism, the search for an appropriate terminology, and current theoretical and methodological developments. In the 1960–1980s, many studies were focused on patients and their strategies of choosing a ‘medical system’ from a plurality of options. In the 1980–1990s, the notions of medical systems and medical traditions came under severe criticism for their inability to describe how medical thought and practice change over time, often being too eclectic to fit single systems or traditions. As a result, anthropologists began investigating patient-doctor negotiations of treatment, their diverse health ideologies, as well as the role of political-economic factors in shaping the hierarchies of medical practice. Additionally, scholars began examining the processes of state regulation and institutionalisation of medical traditions (for example, as ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ [CAM] in Europe and North America). This opened the field of medical anthropology to new debates, terminology, and geographical horizons that are trying to account for the pluralist nature of medicine in the twenty-first century. Transnational migration, the Internet, the rise of alternative medical industries, and the global flow of medical goods and knowledge all serve as catalysts for ever-more pluralistic health-seeking practices and ideologies.

Introduction

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different approaches, treatments, and institutions that people use to maintain health or treat illness. Most commonly, medical pluralism entails the use of Western medicine (or ‘biomedicine’) and what is variously termed as ‘traditional medicine’ and ‘alternative medicine’. For example, cancer patients might complement chemotherapy with acupuncture and religious healing; or women who want to get pregnant might combine hormonal treatment with home remedies and Yoga. Scholars of medical pluralism have used different terms such as traditional, indigenous, folk, local, or alternative medicine, but since they all imply distinction from biomedicine, this entry will refer to them as ‘nonbiomedical’ practices.

As a theoretical framework, medical pluralism was developed in the second half of the twentieth century to examine local medical traditions in their diversity, co-existence, and competition, especially with biomedicine. These studies were central to the establishing of the field of medical anthropology. In the context of today’s globalisation, medical pluralism retains its analytical importance, especially in the examination of people’s search for alternative cures locally and transnationally, the growing consumer market of ‘holistic’, ‘traditional’, and ‘natural’ treatments, and the attempts of many countries to incorporate alternative treatments into national healthcare.

While early anthropologists used to focus on local medical traditions in non-Western societies, contemporary scholars examine the place of plural medicine in all societies, including Europe and North America. This shift expanded the scope and terminology with which we describe medical pluralism, for example, by including ‘integrative medicine’ or ‘alternative and complementary medicine’ (or, ‘CAM’). Although there are differences in the usage of these terms, broadly speaking, integrative medicine means that one medical provider offers both biomedicine and nonbiomedical elements as part of a holistic treatment course, while CAM refers to procedures outside biomedicine.

Anthropological studies examine nonbiomedical practices from multiple perspectives, illuminating the role of patients, doctors, markets, and governments in shaping them. As this entry will show, medical pluralism as a concept enables analyses of medicine beyond the dualism of Western/non-Western, modern/traditional, or local/global, by showing how all medical knowledge and practice, be that biomedicine or some regional tradition, is inherently plural, ever-changing, and culturally porous. Such realisation was a result of scholarly debates that problematised the concepts of a medical ‘system’, ‘tradition’, and ‘pluralism’ themselves, as explained in the first section of this entry. The entry then describes the studies of how medical pluralism is influenced and regulated by the state, followed by the studies of medical pluralism in relation to the discourses on modernity, science, and efficacy; gender; and globalisation.^[1]

Medical ‘system,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘pluralism’

Anthropological interest in non-Western medicine dates to the early twentieth century when W.H.R. Rivers (1924) proposed that medicine should be treated as a separate system of knowledge. However, it was only in the 1950s that medical systems began emerging as a focus of anthropological studies. Although the term ‘medical pluralism’ had not yet been introduced, scholars like George Foster (1953) showed the importance of accounting for the impact of colonial and global processes on local medicine, which can result in the eclecticism of medical concepts and therapies as practiced in people’s everyday lives.

The studies of medical pluralism proper began in the late 1970s–early 1980s, when anthropologists launched a comparative study of Asian medicine, exemplified by an influential volume, Asian medical systems (1976), edited by Charles Leslie. The title and content of this volume, as well as the definition of medical pluralism as ‘differentially designed and conceived medical systems’ in a single society (Janzen 1978: xviii), show that a central concept in these studies was ‘system’ (see also Kleinman 1978; Leslie 1978, 1980; Press 1980). In line with how anthropologists studied kinship systems or religious systems, medical anthropologists sought to understand and classify heterogeneous medical knowledge and practice as holistic ‘systems’. This often entailed the assumption that each medical system is characterised by unique epistemology, disease etiology (origins and causes of diseases), and corresponding diagnostic and healing methods. For example, Unani medicine, which is a Greco-Arabic tradition practised in contemporary South and Central Asia, is a medical system because it has an elaborate understanding of body and bodily processes as affected by four humors (elements) which need to be maintained in certain balance to avoid sickness. If a person falls sick, a trained Unani specialist can employ a variety of techniques to identify the type of abnormality in the balance of humors and prescribe a treatment to restore a healthy humoral state.

In attempts to classify medical systems, scholars used various criteria. Some took a geographical scale to make a distinction between local systems (folk medicine), regional systems (like Unani medicine or traditional Chinese medicine), and cosmopolitan medicine (Dunn 1976). Others used disease etiology, proposing that all medical systems are either ‘personalistic’, when a disease is explained as a result of a purposeful action of a human, god, or other actors, and ‘naturalistic’, when a disease is thought to be caused by non-personal forces such as weather or humors (Foster 1976). Other scholars chose writing as a criterion to distinguish ‘little-tradition medicine’ that did not have written accounts from the ‘great-tradition medicine’ that was based on medical texts (Leslie 1976; Obeyesekere 1976, borrowing from Redfield 1956).

However, the attempt to present medical knowledge as consisting of independent, ‘differentially designed and conceived’ systems was quickly recognised as problematic because it downplayed important mutual developments and influences: for example, so-called folk medicine can borrow ideas and methods from regional medicine like Ayurveda, which itself can be influenced by other regional medicines and cosmopolitan biomedicine. Similar problems arise when medical pluralism is defined through the notion of ‘tradition’, for example, as ‘the coexistence in a single society of divergent medical traditions’ (Durkin-Longley 1984: 867). Without critical reflection, the term ‘tradition’ can inadvertently present medical knowledge and practices as something continuous and unchanged since ancient times. In reality, medical ‘traditions’ are ever-changing and quickly respond to socioeconomic processes, which makes them just as modern as biomedicine. Moreover, the idea of ‘divergent traditions’ can be overly reductionist because it presents medical knowledge and practices as belonging to distinct, separable entities uniform throughout large culture areas, while in fact they are often intertwined, heterogeneous, and varied.

It is therefore not surprising that medical anthropologists have struggled to define medical pluralism itself. How can we write about a plurality of traditions, if traditions are themselves plural? To address this problem, scholars have emphasised that medical ‘systems’ and ‘traditions’ are to be understood as analytical constructs, not as real separable areas of medical knowledge with apparent internal homogeneity and rigid boundaries (Nordstrom 1988; Waxler-Morrison 1988). It has also been argued that the idea of distinct ‘systems’ or ‘traditions’ is divorced from how patients and even doctors themselves understand and use various medicines (Khalikova 2020; Naraindas, Quack & Sax 2014; Mukharji 2016). For example, Marc Nichter documented how healers in South India provided a unique blend of therapies and medicines tailored to patients’ pockets and preferences (Nichter 1980). This phenomenon of mixing and blending different medical approaches is sometimes termed ‘medical syncretism’ (see Baer 2011: 419).

Beside medical syncretism, scholars have experimented with other analytical conceptualisations such as eclecticism and hybridity (Brooks, Cerulli & Sheldon 2020) to highlight how seemingly distinct medical traditions can be practiced in eclectic and entangled ways, where every doctor-patient encounter entails a negotiation of diverse medical ideas and treatments resulting in a unique outcome to the extent of unrecognisable amalgamation. Other scholars prefer the notion of the ‘therapeutic itineraries’, i.e., ‘precise pathways taken by patients’, as well as their reasons for choosing and staying with chosen treatment courses (Orr 2012). Yet other anthropologists use the term ‘medical diversity’ to describe mixtures, borrowings, and intersections of various therapeutic ideas, methods, and attitudes (Krause, Alex & Parkin 2012).

All these examples highlight that the studies of medical pluralism quickly pushed anthropologists to examine how medicine is practiced. Even before postmodern critiques of the notion of culture as a bounded entity, and before the emergence of theoretical frameworks that emphasised practice and agency, some medical anthropologists had already began examining medicine as it unfolds in practice: in doctor-patient relations and patient’s health-seeking strategies. Studies of the ‘hierarchy of medical resort’ (Romanucci-Ross 1969), for example, questioned when and why people choose one therapeutic option over another: Do people ‘shop around’, seeking multiple therapies for a single disease, or do they use different therapies for different kinds of illness? Do patients use various treatments simultaneously or sequentially? As a result of studying such questions, scholars demonstrated the importance of cultural, medical, and socioeconomic factors that lead to various scenarios. People’s choices can depend on a disease type, its folk interpretations, patients’ social status, their worldview, available information, as well as the cost and accessibility of treatment (Gould 1965; Beals 1976).

Another line of studies utilised decision-making models—a term borrowed from cognitive anthropology. These models embody a concern with how people choose a treatment, rather than what they choose and in which order (Garro 1998; Janzen 1978; Young 1981). The emphasis is on cognitive aspects of health-seeking behaviour, conversations about medical options, and the pragmatic aspects of decision-making. For example, people often make medical decisions by consulting their relatives or accepting what is given to them by senior family members: parents choose treatments for children, husbands for wives, and adults for elderly parents. This centrality of kinship in medical pluralism was an important finding of the studies of therapeutic decision-making (Janzen 1978; 1987).

Another milestone in the theorisation of medical pluralism was the recognition that it is present in Western societies too. While traditional medicine was initially mostly studied in non-Western and postcolonial societies in contrast to a single ‘cosmopolitan medicine’, scholars soon demonstrated that even in seemingly homogenous or developed societies like the US, medicine is pluralistic by nature (Leslie & Young 1992; Kleinman 1980). If we look closely at how people deal with illness, alternating between biomedical drugs or home remedies, psychotherapy or religious healing, osteopathy or chiropractic, and other alternatives (Naraindas 2006; Zhang 2007), we can see that medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. Moreover, biomedicine itself is pluralistic: its practitioners ascribe to various conceptions of health and illness, healthcare services differ significantly, including across the private and public sectors, and established and experimental biomedical treatments co-exist and compete with one another.

Thus, rather than juxtaposing Western and non-Western therapies (as was done by Rivers in the early twentieth century), medical anthropologists since the 1970–1980s have been interested in both differences as well as similarities between biomedicine and other medical approaches. Medical pluralism thus provided an important framework that broke away from a reductionist dichotomy of biomedicine versus ethnomedicine, or the West versus the rest. From this perspective, biomedicine could be studied as yet another tradition, one of many options that patients around the world use.

However, biomedicine is not a neutral option at par with other medicines. Scholars of medical pluralism have highlighted its hierarchical nature: nonbiomedical traditions often occupy a subordinate position to hegemonic biomedicine in terms of social prestige, education, employment opportunities, and funding (Baer 1989, 2011). For example, biomedical doctors often secure higher salaries and social respect than alternative medical providers (but not always, see Kim 2009). Critical medical anthropologists have argued that the spread of biomedicine across the world is premised on coercive factors, including the colonial past and biomedicine’s alignment with the state power, rather than on ‘natural development’ or medical superiority of biomedicine (Lock & Nguyen 2010; Young 1981).

Nevertheless, contrary to the logic of modernisers who argue for biomedicine’s technological advantage, local therapies did not die out. Why not? Some scholars suggested that this had to do with people’s dissatisfaction with biomedicine and perceptions that traditional medicine is better suited for local illnesses, safer and does not produce side-effects (Farquhar 1994: 19; Lock 1980: 259). Other scholars emphasised the doctors’ perspectives: alternative and biomedical practitioners occupy different medical niches and catered to distinct clientele (Waxler-Morrison 1988; Leslie 1992).

The above-mentioned questions and answers were shaped by the fact that most theoretical work on medical pluralism was based in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Colonialism had a colossal impact on scholars’ interpretations of local medical knowledge and practice. Both in public health policies and writings of early medical anthropologists, a frequently idealised Western medicine was conceived of as a yardstick against which other healing practices should be evaluated. Today, scholars are increasingly critical about the dichotomies of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ medicine, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ medicine, or even ‘science’ and ‘belief’. Moreover, contemporary medical anthropologists pay attention to the hierarchies that exist among nonbiomedical systems and within biomedicine itself.

Nevertheless, the residue of such dichotomies can still be found in the academic literature and in public discourse, where the new terms of ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ may unwittingly reinforce the subjugated place of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice. Often the subjugated place results from the lack of legitimation of nonbiomedical therapies by the state. How and why the state regulates medical pluralism is, therefore, another prominent area of scholarly inquiry. Studies that focus on global political economic inequalities often do so to disentangle the multiplicities and hierarchies of medical practice, especially as influenced by state ideologies and transnational markets.

The state

Today, most governments take an active role in regulating medical pluralism: they can either ban alternative medicine as ‘quackery’ and ‘pseudoscience’, provide ways to integrate it partially into biomedical infrastructure, or provide it with full support as a standalone institution (Adams & Li 2008; Berger 2013; Kloos 2013; Lock 1990; Scheid 2002). How do governments make such decisions? Why are some medical traditions denied legitimation while others are promoted? What is at stake when a nonbiomedical tradition is officially recognised? What kind of transformations occur in its ontology and epistemology after its legitimation and institutionalisation? What are the implications for practitioners, patients, and society in general? These are some central questions raised in the studies that investigate the relations between medical pluralism and the state.

A government’s support for nonbiomedical treatments can be a strategic move to conform to international directives, especially after the 1970–1980s, when the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted the integration of traditional therapies as ‘a means of accessing gaps in service provision’ (Hampshire & Owusu 2013: 247-8). ‘Filling the gap’ is a common trope in official rhetoric in countries with large rural populations where biomedical services and institutions are limited. Here a standardised, regulated alternative medicine is presented as a necessary means to achieve a common good. However, more critically, the recognition of alternative medicine can also be seen as the government’s failure to provide accessible and affordable biomedical care, pushing people to rely on services of ‘a large, unregulated, unqualified medical cadre of practitioners’, as argued by some scholars in the case of India (Sheehan 2009: 138). Similarly, in post-Soviet Cuba, the government partially incorporated traditional herbal medicine into the healthcare system as a strategy to disguise massive shortages in biomedical pharmaceuticals after the decline in supply from countries of the socialist block (Brotherton 2012: 46).

In multicultural contexts, the legitimation of alternative medicine can be also taken as the government’s responsibility to satisfy popular demand. Often associated with migrant populations, plural and ‘culturally sensitive medicine’ is at times demanded as citizens’ rights. Some scholars have pointed out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease (Chavez 2003). Others go as far as to argue that integrating nonbiomedical healing should be a goal for modern democratic governments as that would recognize the rights and identities of minority groups. For example, the official healthcare system in Israel includes many alternative medical modalities, but not Arab herbal medicine, indicating that the cultural preferences of the Arab minority may remain undermined (Keshet & Popper-Giveon 2013).

An important insight from the literature on the state shows that governments are selective about the degree of legitimacy and support they provide to medical traditions. Thus, medical pluralism can become a mechanism for and the end product of carefully planned and instituted government efforts for managing population and economy. For example, by analysing the New Order government of Indonesia under President Suharto, Steve Ferzacca (2002) proposes to understand medical pluralism as a form of state rule. Ferzacca demonstrates how the Indonesian government manipulated the plurality of medical practices by recognising and promoting only those that fit into the overarching ideology of ‘development’.

Another example of selective legitimation of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice is demonstrated by Helen Lambert (2012). She highlights how medical pluralism is characterised by the ‘hierarchies of legitimacy’ when the government grants support to Ayurveda, Yoga and other text-based medical systems, while the practitioners of local traditions, like bonesetters in India, remain at the ‘margins of government legitimation’, even though they are seen as experts in their local communities.

This is important, because to nonbiomedical doctors, official recognition brings visibility, further societal acceptance, and legal employment (Blaikie 2016). Once a medical tradition is granted official status, its practitioners can demand higher salaries, better facilities, funding, and more opportunities. In contrast, healers who are left outside government legitimation face the danger of losing community respect, losing clientele, and gradually disappearing (Hampshire & Owusu 2013; Kleinman 1980). At the same time, Linda Connor (2004) argues that state legitimation does not necessarily affect people’s medical preferences: in an ethnographic study of residents of Australian suburbs, she demonstrates that people often choose nonbiomedical treatments outside the official healthcare settings for their perceived effectiveness and imagined ‘natural’ qualities in contrast to pharmaceutical drugs.

A related outcome of the professionalisation of traditional medicine is the marginalisation of women’s knowledge. In Ghana, Kate Hampshire and Samuel Owusu (2013) have observed that the government’s efforts to ‘professionalise’ traditional healing have led to the dominance of male practitioners who had means and connections to become ‘professional’ doctors. In contrast, women lacked those means, which created a context for a potential loss of their traditional knowledge, particularly concerning children’s illness.

However, even officially sanctioned and integrated medical traditions face many challenges, including the problem of ‘translation’, when the state, biomedical healthcare, or the market appropriate local medical knowledge by ignoring, undermining, or transforming its value system (Bode 2008; Cho 2000; Craig 2012; Janes 1995; Saks 2008). For example, due to ideological pressures from the Chinese government, certain procedures of Tibetan medicine have been pushed to the periphery of practice as being ‘religious’ and ‘unscientific’ (Adams, Schrempf & Craig 2010). In a similar way, in India, bhūtavidyā — one of the eight branches of Ayurveda, which deals with non-human entities — has been discounted by many contemporary Ayurvedic patients and doctors (Naraindas 2014: 112-3; Hardiman 2009).

Even if institutionalisation does not result in a distortion of meaning and repertoire of traditional medicine, it nevertheless transforms flexible healing practices into coherent units of standardised therapies, imposing therapeutic normativity and orthopraxy. This means that only select medical texts, ideas, and procedures along with their ‘correct’ interpretations get to be included in medical education and training; doctors must follow these normative ways of doing medicine if they wish to remain in institutional settings. For example, the institutionalisation of traditional Chinese medicine in the 1950s was accompanied by measures to ‘define, delimit, name, and “purify”’ select practices to comply with the communist ideology (Farquhar 1994: 14-5). Also, the professionalisation of traditional medicine affects how medical knowledge is transmitted and learned. While traditional medical knowledge is often passed through apprenticeship from a teacher to one or several students, state involvement often brings the introduction of a college system, which may break a vertical structure of teacher-student and elder-younger relations (Farquhar 1994: 15; Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 7).

As various political and social actors have high stakes in promoting a particular medical ideology, medical anthropologists have been careful to show the existence of heterogeneous powers within governments as well as rival groups of citizens, their competing claims about medical traditions, and various ideological positions embedded in those claims (Khan 2006). For example, because of the co-constituted relations between Western imperialism and biomedicine, the ‘revival’ of ‘indigenous’ medical systems is often embedded in anti-colonialist and nationalist discourses (Langford 2002). In other words, postcolonial states articulate their aim to recuperate local medicine as a sign of liberation from structures of colonial rule. This goal becomes particularly complex in the countries with more than one nonbiomedical system, through which nationalist ideologies can be activated (Alter 2015; Khalikova 2018).

Modernity, science, and efficacy

Discourses on nationalism and national medicine are often interlaced with debates about modernity (Croizier 1968; Khan 2006). An important insight from this literature is the problematisation of the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. While twentieth century anthropologists tended not to look at nonbiomedical practice as already modern, by the end of the century, scholars began exploring ways in which the modern and the traditional were co-constructed and fluid.

Based on her research on three medical traditions in Bolivia—cosmopolitan medicine, indigenous Aymara medicine, and home remedies—Libbet Crandon-Malamud (1991) introduced the notion of 'medical ideologies' to show that when people say something about their illness, they are also saying something about themselves and making statements about political and economic realities (1986: 463; 1991: ix, 31). Consequently, people’s beliefs and debates about therapeutic authenticity, efficacy, and legitimacy of a medical tradition can explain a lot about a society in a local and global context.

In many parts of the world—but especially in postcolonial countries struggling with the cultural and political legacies of colonialism—doctors and patients attempt to reconfigure traditional medicine through the notions of modernity, science, and technological progress. Medical practitioners often employ ideologies of both modernity and tradition, in response to demands and expectations from patients, government policies, and other actors. The same holds true for the notion of science. For example, Vincanne Adams has documented how practitioners of Tibetan medicine in China have to use the language of science in order to conform to the science-oriented ideologies of the communist state, while maintaining that Tibetan medicine is efficacious and scientific in its ‘own’ way (i.e., not measurable by biomedical standards). Thereby, they satisfy the aspirations of the local population for culturally appropriate therapy and demands of the international market for a ‘unique’ Tibetan medicine (2002b: 213).

But why do patients seek alternative medicine? Does it work? The problem of efficacy has been important in the study of medical pluralism since its conception (Leslie 1980), but anthropologists still lack a consensus about what ‘efficacy’ means and how it should be analysed (Waldram 2000). If we take efficacy to be a statistically measurable capacity of a drug to produce a desired relief, then in general scholars of medical pluralism tend to avoid making claims about whether or not alternative treatments are efficacious (Ecks 2013: 12; Langford 2002: 200). Instead, scholars have been more interested in understanding the ‘perceived’ efficacy by bringing attention to the feelings, subjective experiences, and views of patients and doctors as they rationalise their use of alternative medicine (Poltorak 2013).

Patients often ‘shop around’, alternating between therapeutic options, until they find what works for them. Here, the concern may be not about whether alternative medicine brings measurable therapeutic relief or not, but what kind of effects it produces. For example, in India many people insist that nonbiomedical treatments such as Ayurveda and homeopathy work but do so gradually and therefore are mild on the body, while biomedicine provides immediate relief but has numerous side-effects (Langford 2002). In other words, both alternative medicine and biomedicine can be seen as efficacious, but in different ways. In North America, patients who are dissatisfied with biomedicine turn to alternative medicine because it is seen as instilling a sense of ‘safety, comfort and well-being’ by appealing to nature, wholeness, and harmony, providing treatments in pleasant surroundings, whereas biomedicine is criticised ‘for its failure to engage the personal and cultural dimensions of suffering’, and for involving ‘painful, disorienting, and disturbing treatments aimed not at comfort but biological efficacy’ (Kirmayer 2014, 38-9). Such juxtaposition of alternative medicine as warm and personal, while biomedicine may be cold and institutional, frames many cultural discourses about how and why different treatments work.

Probing the questions of efficacy of alternative medicine even further, Sienna Craig argues that the very question ‘Does a medicine work?’ is a fabrication of a hegemonic, clinical perspective; instead, one needs to ask, ‘What makes a medicine “work”? How are such assertions made, by whom, and to what ends?’ (2012: 4). Craig argues that the question of efficacy serves as a mechanism for ‘translating’ nonbiomedical knowledge into the language of biomedicine and science, which is itself an outcome of global governance of medicine (such as by the WHO) and neoliberalism. In other words, scholars highlight that the efficacy of biomedicine is embedded in its social and economic power. This means that efficacy is not a neutral objective category, but something that needs to be interrogated with regard to what counts as evidence and who gets to define it.

As reminded by Margaret Lock and Mark Nichter, social claims of efficacy can have actual impact on patient’s health, since the ‘attributions of efficacy, however determined, and be they positive or negative, influence treatment expectations and thus effectiveness in their own right’ (2002: 21). Therefore, anthropological studies often explore various truth claims, the semantics and language of efficacy: how efficacy is spoken about in local terms, how it is invoked by patients and doctors themselves, and how various ideas about efficacy can influence the health outcomes. This includes negative health outcomes too, when claims of the efficacy of alternative treatments can create an atmosphere of distrust towards established biomedical treatments (such as vaccines). Hence, it is important to recognise that the existence of plural medical options can cause confusion and be detrimental to people’s health: while shopping around for a therapy that appears right to them, patients may delay using medicines with proven effects.

Gender

For most of the twentieth century, the studies of medical pluralism contained only scattered references to women—for example, as primary users of alternative medicine or as traditional healers. Today, there is a growing body of literature that critically addresses gender and gender ideologies in the context of medical pluralism (Cameron 2010; Fjeld & Hofer 2011; Flesch 2010; Menjívar 2002; Schrempf 2011; Selby 2005; Zhang 2007). A related area of scholarship is focused on reproduction, traditional birth attendants, and the issues of gender equity in pluralistic medical settings, particularly within the institutions of intercultural medicine in Latin America.

Many medical traditions such as Tibetan medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Unani, and biomedicine used to be the spheres where female doctors, teachers, and authors of medical texts were absent or rare (but see Fjeld & Hofer 2011). In the twenty-first century the situation has started to change, and more women have become practitioners of these previously male-dominated medical traditions. Yet this can also create new inequalities. For example, by examining an increase in female practitioners of Ayurveda in Nepal, Mary Cameron (2010) argues that the ‘feminization of Ayurveda’ has been entangled with the official marginalisation of Ayurveda in the context of biomedicine-dominated healthcare system. In other words, a positive change, such as the increased acceptance of women as alternative practitioners, is negated by the loss of prestige of Ayurveda in Nepal (although this is not the case in India). Another problem is that the increase of female practitioners in alternative medicine can reinforce the stereotypes of women’s ‘innate’ ability to heal and their proximity to nature, as documented in Hannah Flesch’s work (2010) on female students studying Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in the US. Thus, these studies illuminate that the discourses on alternative/traditional medicine are often gendered.

Other scholars have shown how nonbiomedical health-related practices can be linked to ideas of masculinity and socio-political ideologies. By examining traditional male wrestlers in India, Joseph Alter (1992) has discovered that their practices of celibacy, self-control, and dietary regimens are linked to their unique interpretations of modernity, masculinity, and nationhood. While many Indian citizens conceive of biomedicine as a link to modernity and good health, traditional wrestlers engage with nonbiomedical practices to strengthen a national physique and achieve culturally appropriate masculinity by countering the harmful impact of Western consumerism and sexual liberation.

Globalisation

The studies of medical pluralism and globalisation emerged in the early 2000s in an attempt to make sense of medical practices in the face of transnational migration, medical tourism, the global flow of alternative pharmaceuticals, the spread of the Internet, and other processes that have problematised national and cultural boundaries, creating avenues for the global exchange of local and ‘new age’ medical knowledge (Lock & Nichter 2002; Krause 2008; Wujastyk & Smith 2008; Hampshire & Owusu 2012). Certainly, transcultural connections were forged intensively during the colonial era and even earlier; however, the close interconnectedness of the world is a relatively recent phenomenon, which both allows and compels people to render their therapeutic itineraries ever more diverse and geographically dispersed. This complexity has compelled scholars to rethink the concept of medical pluralism as no longer confined to a single society but as spanning national borders (Raffaetà et al. 2017). Rather than being limited by medical options within a certain locality, contemporary health-seekers can avail of pluralistic medical approaches, experts, and institutions by crossing borders physically and virtually.

On the one hand, nonbiomedical practices are taken outside their place of origin, as exemplified by the popularity of German anthroposophic medicine in Brazil, the proliferation of Yoga centres outside India, or the spread of acupuncture outside East Asia (Alter 2005; Kim 2009; Wujastyk & Smith 2008). Unlike many twentieth century studies of the influences between the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ (as per World Systems Theory), contemporary scholars explore South-South and other global connections: for example, the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into pluralistic medicine in Tanzania (Hsu 2002; Langwick 2010). Additionally, there is an emerging literature on the impact of new communication technologies on plural medicine (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008). Such research addresses ‘telemedicine’, self-help Internet blogs, email consultations with overseas nonbiomedical doctors, and other technologies (for example, digital apps on meditation and Yoga) that have significantly shaped the ways in which medical pluralism is conceived and practiced.

At the same time, patients themselves travel around the world in the search of nonbiomedical treatments. Here, some scholars distinguish medical tourism, associated with biomedical treatment, from health tourism or wellness tourism associated with traditional and alternative medicine (Reddy & Qadeer 2010: 69; also Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 2-3). For example, health-seeking tourists may travel to India in pursuit of ‘authentic’ Ayurvedic therapy, Yoga, or spiritual healing (Langford 2002; Spitzer 2009).

Therapeutic trajectories of migrants in host countries is also a particularly fast-growing area of research, especially because migrants carry different medical ideologies and attitudes that might raise concerns in the sphere of public health, health policy, and public discourses (Andrews et al. 2013; Cant & Sharma 1999; Chavez 2003; Green et al. 2006; Krause 2008). Some of these studies examine how minority groups seek satisfactory treatment in biomedicine-dominated contexts. For example, Tracy Andrews and others (2013) examine how adult Hispanic migrants in the US make therapeutic decisions for their children in a pluralistic healthcare setting that includes both biomedical providers and famous Mexican healers in the vicinity. Many studies emphasise that migrants resort to alternative practitioners, particularly from their community, because of language difficulties, cultural preferences, a search for a specific herbal or spiritual treatment, or fear of being looked down on by biomedical practitioners (Green et al. 2006, Andrew et al. 2013; Lock 1980: 260; Chavez 2003: 201, 219). These challenges can motivate migrants to postpone immediate care and instead make trips to their countries of origin to receive medical treatment. Therefore, medical anthropologists often point out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease, and advocate for health policies of ‘integrative’ and ‘culturally-sensitive’ healthcare (Green et al. 2006; Chavez 2003).

In addition to the focus on patients, scholars of globalised healthcare also investigate the transnational mobilities of medical practitioners and material objects. ‘Traditional’ medicines, healing crystals, talismans, and other paraphernalia, which are not exchanged through formal channels of commerce, often follow along the lines of an informal economy of transnational connections (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008; Menjívar 2002). Kristine Krause (2008) provides an example of ‘transnational therapy networks’ that connect Ghanaian migrants in London, their relatives and friends in other European counties, and traditional healers in Ghana who may ‘directly deliver their products’ to owners of Afro-shops in the UK. In these transnational channels, money, drugs, and prayers are sent between members of the African diaspora in Europe and their friends and suppliers in the countries of origin.

Inspired by the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988) and other scholars of materiality, medical anthropologists have expanded their inquiries of medicine as knowledge and practice to the examination of physicality and the ‘agentive properties’ of medical objects: pills, intake forms, ultrasound prints, medical charts, stethoscopes, syringes, and other equipment are not passive objects but active agents in clinical interactions, as they can influence people’s behaviour, compel action, communicate, instil fear or trust, and even heal. For example, contemporary alternative doctors frequently adopt material objects from other medical traditions, especially from biomedicine: in India, some patients who visit an Ayurvedic doctor demand to be examined by a stethoscope, believing that a touch of a stethoscope has a curative outcome (Nichter 1980). Thus, a stethoscope is not a silent object in a doctor’s room but an agent that speaks, calls for action, and brings confidence.

Such studies of materiality provide the crucial insight that medical pluralism is often unmarked: sometimes neither doctors nor patients see their encounters as pluralistic. As shown in Stacey Langwick’s work in Tanzania, a ‘traditional’ healer may routinely use a syringe and ask to bring an X-ray from biomedical hospitals. The presence of ‘modern’ medical technologies can ‘challenge the self-evidence of boundaries between traditional and modern medicine’ (2008: 429).

Unlike the above research on unauthorised, informal transnational flows of medicines, there is a new scholarship on the commercial flow of ‘alternative’ pharmaceuticals and the operations of alternative industries beyond national borders. Building on previous studies of marketisation of alternative medicine in domestic contexts (Adams 2002a; Banerjee 2009; Bode 2008; Craig 2011, 2012; Kim 2009), this scholarship highlights the transformations under the pressures of a global neoliberal economy, when many nonbiomedical practices can no longer be dismissed as local, marginal, or alternative traditions. It makes the case for recognising them as transnational, mainstream, innovative, and profit-driven industries (Kloos 2017; Kloos et al. 2020; Pordié & Gaudillière 2014; Pordié & Hardon 2015).

Conclusion

Developed in the 1970s–1980s, the concept of medical pluralism offered novel ways of understanding diverse medical practices and their relations with biomedicine. It went beyond the early twentieth century descriptions of indigenous healing beliefs and was a crucial concept for establishing the field of medical anthropology. By attempting to overcome the dualistic representation of Western/modern and non-Western/traditional medicine, scholars of medical pluralism demonstrated that the diversity of medical ideas, approaches, experts, and institutions exists in every complex society, even in the West. Rather than merely focusing on health and healing, medical pluralism highlights the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and competition that permeate medical thought and practice. Although many scholars have challenged the notion of ‘pluralism’ and suggested replacing it with other terms such as eclecticism or diversity, medical pluralism remains a valuable framework.

Many anthropologists have come to criticise the ideas of medical ‘systems’ and medical ‘traditions’ as being overly rigid, even essentialising. Instead, they moved towards the exploration of doctor-patient negotiations, paying attention to whether different actors see therapies as pluralistic, what therapeutic plurality means, who benefits from their promotion, and what kind of inequalities exist between various categories of medicine. Most prominent examples of such inequalities include the hegemonic position of biomedicine supported by science discourses due to which nonbiomedical knowledge and practices are dubbed ‘alternative’ and ‘complementary’, if not entirely fake.

However, the studies of medical pluralism also show that, paradoxically, traditional and alternative medical practices did not disappear under the dominance of biomedicine. Although sometimes lacking official support, they are widely sought out around the world not only by rural populations but also by consumers with wealth and power. The analyses of pluralism as resulting from medical tourism, the spread of the Internet, and the pharmaceuticalisation of indigenous therapies have become important areas of study. This scholarship acknowledges that multiple actors such as medical providers, tourists and migrants, corporations, national leaders, and other categories of citizens—all have their own stake in various medical traditions. Therefore, instead of a narrow focus on colonial and postcolonial situations, researchers explore ‘new’ (Cant & Sharma 1999) and ‘transnational’ (Raffaetà et al. 2017) forms of medical pluralism. The pressing need to account for local and global media, migration, and the rapid growth of medical and other technologies have also forced scholars to change their methods. They moved from studying health practices in a single community to ‘following’ people, objects, and ideas across borders (as per Marcus 1995), showing that people’s therapeutic options have become truly transnational and even more pluralistic. The intensified pluralism is also visible if we account for the ‘virtual’ field in which both biomedicine and nonbiomedical healing is increasingly offered. As a result, scholars have also moved from the descriptions of nonbiomedical practices as small, local, low-cost, marginal alternative traditions to recognising them as large, profit-driven, and mainstream ‘industries’ that occupy substantial market segments domestically, while also rapidly expanding globally. All of this demonstrates that medical pluralism does not just remain an important feature of modern life, but that it is constantly changing in form and content.

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Note on contributor

Venera R. Khalikova is a cultural anthropologist and Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her previous work on medical pluralism and the politics of Ayurveda in North India have appeared in Medical Anthropology, Asian Medicine, and Food, Culture, and Society. Her current interests include the study of migration, race, and gender among Indians in Hong Kong.

Dr Venera R. Khalikova, Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, NAH 322, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. venera.khalikova@cuhk.edu.hk

[1] For additional reviews of this concept in anthropology as well as sociology and history, readers can consult texts by Hans Baer (2011); Sarah Cant & Ursula Sharma (1999), Waltraud Ernst (2002), and Roberta Raffaetà et al. (2017).