Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Labour

Technology

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

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

Wageningen University

Initially published 21 Jul 2025

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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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

Commodity and supply chains

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:31:24 +0000

Dried chillies are loaded on a truck to send them to further processing in Sindhanur, Raichur district, Karnataka, India. Picture by Rakesh Sahai, Asian Development Bank, 2015.

Dagna Rams

London School of Economics

Initially published 19 Dec 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24commoditychains

Abstract:

The global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity means that cultures and places around the world have become interdependent. People’s desires in one place organise work and landscapes elsewhere; seamless flows of goods create new infrastructures; and places become united by an exchange of commodities and differentiated by the unequal distribution of profit and power. Anthropologists have traced these connections by following commodities along their international journeys, conducting fieldwork at crucial nodes like international ports. They have examined how global forces interact with local economies and vice versa. Through elaborating concepts like ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘global networks’ or ‘the social life of things’, they have revealed legacies of global inequality, cultural exchange, trade infrastructures, and their impacts on environments and lives. Anthropologists have shown that global flows of goods and services are more than a simple correlation of supply and demand or a mere opportunity for economies to grow. Rather, they represent rich sites in which values of people, places, and things are negotiated, and where relationships of inequality are created, maintained, or undermined.

Introduction

The global circulation of goods weaves local work and raw materials together into the vast tapestry of the global economy. Food grown in one place may feed a stomach many kilometres away. Producers of consumer goods cater to the tastes of people they have never met. Any sudden local process—an ecological disruption, a change in state regulation, skyrocketing demand—can have effects far beyond its locality. Yet, people joined by this global exchange rarely share the same political institutions, landscapes, or the power to define how profits get distributed. As geographic distance and socio-cultural differences hide actors from one another, anthropological research uncovers the interdependencies between capital, labour, and consumers. It shows how the global economy creates room for unchecked accumulation, exploitation, misrepresentation, and delusion about planetary futures.

To represent these global webs, anthropologists and other social sciences have used different terms: ‘commodity chains’, ‘supply chains’, ‘commodity ecumene’, ‘the social life of things’. Each builds on a different intellectual tradition. ‘Commodity chains’ describe a sequential transformation of raw materials into consumer products through the stages of extraction, refinement, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. Such chains, once mapped onto the world, represent a regional division of labour, often derived from colonial legacies in which (former) colonies supply raw materials to the metropoles (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986). Meanwhile, economic fluctuations—expansions or contractions— are due to the interdependence between various locales, rather than isolated state-level reforms. ‘Supply chain’ in turn is a management term to describe networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distance to increase efficiency and reduce cost. Focusing on supply chains foregrounds developments in logistics such as tracking systems and legal arrangements such as contracts between business partners. They enable economies of scale. The terms ‘commodity ecumene’ and ‘the social life of things’ are anthropological concepts that emphasise the rich cultural life of economic exchanges, where value attached to things is not solely an expression of economic laws but of cultures of valuation (Appadurai 1986). Sometimes used interchangeably, all of these terms draw attention to various qualities brought by the exchange of things across distance and difference. In using any one of them, researchers might emphasise the sequential nature of commodity exchange from extraction to consumption and the unequal distribution of power and capital across the commodity chains, the infrastructures that facilitate global flows and create profits out of ‘location advantage’ within supply chains, or the emergence of value and meanings as objects and social practices lead their social lives.^{^[1]}

Anthropologists are not the only social scientists to take interest in the circulation of goods. Other disciplines have been interested in mapping global commodity and supply chains in order to compare different forms of their governance (Bair 2005). Likewise, they asked questions about the relative importance of national policy vis-a-vis the country’s position in the commodity chain (Gereffi 1996; Bair 2005; Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon 2005). Compared to these approaches, anthropology’s distinct method of fieldwork has allowed us to observe global exchanges as rich sites of human encounters. Anthropologists have worked in locations consequential to the global circulation of goods such as borders or ports (Chalfin 2010), places marked by global economic connections such as American towns where pigs are slaughtered to meet mass demand (Blanchette 2020) or in the Congolese rainforest where labourers search for cobalt to power electronics (Smith 2022). Anthropologists have also followed commodities like coffee or mushrooms around the world to understand how far these exchanges connect or disconnect people and places (West 2012; Tsing 2015).

Power and inequality

Classical and neoclassical economic theories consider global trade to be a driver of prosperity and the efficient allocation of resources. They foreground how trade overcomes the whims of seasons, the limitations of regional soils, and differences in talent to meet needs and desires at an unprecedented scale. Seminal economic theorists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo in the late eighteenth century, and Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in the early twentieth, formulated such laudatory views of global trade during various phases of imperial and colonial expansion and yet their works paid little attention to the resource exploitation and purposeful underdevelopment of the colonies.

Contrastingly, critical perspectives in history, political economy, and anthropology sought to centre the (post-)colonial experience, challenging the notion that the global marketplace is a realm of nations trading their advantages and surpluses according to free and equal exchange. These genealogies highlight the violent histories of extraction, compelled labour, and landscape devastation. With key references like The Black Jacobins (James 1938), Capitalism and slavery (Williams 1944) and The Negro in the French Revolution (DuBois 1962), this intellectual lineage locates the origins of global capitalism not in Western Europe but in its colonies, notably the Caribbean islands—conquered and settled for cash crops and worked by slave labour. These authors focus on how profits from plantations in the Caribbean fuelled wealth in the metropoles, establishing fortunes that developed Britain’s ports and factories, for example. They emphasise that development in one place and under-development in another, and the wealth of some and deprivation of others, are concurrent processes. And, moreover, the reason why they had not been viewed as such is due to racialising ideologies that see underdevelopment as a mostly inherent failure to advance rather than an exogenous effect of political intentions and structures.

One of the texts that inaugurated anthropological interest in commodity and supply chains is Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and power: The place of sugar in modern history (1985), a historical study of the sugar trade from the Caribbean to the European metropoles—linking ‘the Enslaved Africans who produced [sugar]’ and ‘the British labouring people who were learning to eat it’ (175). Sugar gave rise to radically different political economies and social lives—plantations and toil versus a consumer good providing a moment of sweetness at the end of a long workday. Rather than being an abstract phenomenon, Mintz shows that the sugar trade shapes bodies and tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. His study was not only a proposition about how commodities connect places whilst disconnecting economic regimes and human experience; it also suggested a new disciplinary approach. The anthropological interlocutor was no longer someone leading a remote and culturally particular life, but rather an actor from whose labour anthropologists and audiences of their work had long been profiting. Through existing commodity and supply chains, the researchers and interlocutors are already in a relationship—a relationship often premised on a fundamental inequality in which one side gets the short end of the stick.

Further inquiries sprang out of this early work. Some of them asked whether imperial and colonial divisions of the world into zones of production in the ‘peripheries’, and zones of consumption in the ‘metropoles’, still mattered. A crucial reminder of this past is that not all economic actors today have the same power to benefit from the global marketplace, possess enough capital to direct the flows of goods, or indeed even perceive the market’s actual breath and width: not least because not all people have the same power to move around the world or access basic banking services, or make use of credit. Addressing this gap, anthropologists have positioned their fieldwork at different ends of the hierarchy of economic power and profit—fleshing out the processes that create a ‘divide’ between the Global South and North (Hickel 2017). They have followed both multinational companies with international presence and influence, as well as small-scale producers and labourers in plantations and industries who, while connected to global flows, have little power to negotiate prices or work conditions.

Some works have looked at the enduring nature of global divisions into producers and consumers, noting that people in the Global South rarely get to be considered consumers in the first place (Freidberg 2004). What’s more, it is often consumers and distributors in the Global North that define the terms of producers’ inclusion in global capitalism. Susanne Freidberg (2004), for example, compares Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial commodity and supply chains in green beans. She focuses on connections between Zambia and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Burkina Faso and France, on the other. British supermarkets required their Zambian partners to follow auditing and certification standards that effectively advantage white entrepreneurs who are familiar with British norms and able to pay for audits. In comparison, French buyers were more appreciative of the skills of Burkinabe farmers, yet their appreciation was not reflected in price, as Burkinabe farmers, just like their Zambian counterparts, had lower profit margins than distributors in Europe.

Typically, states positioned in the first node of commodity and supply chains—that is, specialising in natural resource extraction and agriculture—struggle to ‘add value’ to their production, remaining dependent on slim profit margins and precarious terms of trade. Anthropologists bring attention to the various mechanisms that maintain such a state of affairs. Following metals across commodity and supply chains, for example, highlights the importance of places like Switzerland where favourable tax regimes, lax corporate regulations, and the power of banks and investment companies enable trading companies to buy and sell commodities around the world (Dobler and Kesselring 2019). Outwardly, they connect global demand and supply, yet in doing so they also render specific places substitutable and disposable. Thus, for example, when Zambia increased electricity rates for its foreign-owned copper mines, Swiss trading companies temporarily stopped operations, substituting their quotas with copper sourced elsewhere (Kesselring 2017).

This economic inequality pokes holes in capitalist notions of economic exchange as being voluntary or equal. Markets do not only deepen colonial inequality, but rather ‘they are made by that inequality’ (Appel 2020, 2). US oil companies, for example, are able to make substantial profits in Equatorial Guinea, a country run by an authoritarian government where the majority of the population lives in poverty. Arrangements that sell raw materials at marked-down prices are sealed by contracts between ‘states’ and ‘companies’— abstract concepts that ‘[mask] the “specific” parties who, in fact, sign the contract’ (Appel 2020, 145). Symbolising legality, such contracts are invoked to halt debates about whether or not profits are shared equitably. They obfuscate that the involved parties are fundamentally different: while states answer to citizens to meet their fundamental needs, many companies work for shareholders to increase their wealth. Power differentials between underfunded states and much wealthier companies can be staggering. In such situations, government workers, though supposedly representing their citizens, can see their job as ‘making things easy’ for the company in order to provide a ‘better business environment’ than other countries in the region (Appel 2020, 157).

Scholarship has questioned the extent to which the colonial and postcolonial structures limit entrepreneurial agency. Openings for breaking free from economic constraints have been described as ‘motion in the system’ (Trouillot 1982). Such motion may mean the relative ability to choose business partners and negotiate prices, acquire reliable market information, and accumulate enough capital to invest into projects that shape political and social institutions. ‘Motion in the system’ could be found in both colonial and postcolonial circumstances. For example, gens de colour, descendants of interracial couplings in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), were able to corner the market for coffee by growing it in mountainous and inaccessible areas that white settlers shied away from (Trouillot 1982). Whilst initially a niche product, coffee grew in importance amid the eighteenth century anti-British sentiment in North America which affected sales of British-controlled tea. These climatic and geopolitical circumstances created openings for new mixed-raced entrepreneurs. In a different historical moment and geographic place, the bifurcation of the shea market in postcolonial Ghana into export and domestic markets meant that female shea producers and market women in the West African country’s savannah were less beholden to exporters’ expectations as they could rely on domestic demand to sell their produce (Chalfin 2003; 2004). What’s more, they could off-load lower quality shea onto exporters, leaving better nuts for their local base and greater certainty in negotiating prices.

Important recent interventions in commodity and supply chains that anthropologists are following are fair trade schemes promising to improve labour conditions. Fair trade schemes principally imagine change as occurring on the level of contracts between individual producers and buyers, rather than on the level of international terms of trade, treaties, or international producer alliances (Besky 2014; West 2012). In consequence, they have been criticised for favouring established and richer producers, who have the financial and cultural capital to enter fair trade certification schemes (Besky 2014; Fischer 2022). Fair trade schemes also rely on a generalised context of unsustainable and exploitative modes of production from which fair trade participants are the honourable exception (West 2012). Sometimes, fair trade schemes even obfuscate larger socio-political structures that influence the lives of labourers. For example, Darjeeling tea plantations in India are certified as ‘fair trade’ based on small-scale interventions that aim to ‘empower’ workers through micro-loans (Besky 2014). Such interventions aim to soften the otherwise tough and unequal reality of plantation work as a largely immutable economic form, complete with impermeable social hierarchies. Plantations are here recast as a way of life, rather than a system of exploitation, and workers’ identities are fetishised with romantic images of working hands obfuscating injurious conditions of bonded labour. The grinding aspects of this labour are put on display in the photography collection Dark garden by Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq, for example, where the artist documents the influence of pesticides on workers’ eyes and the disfigurement of hands from the work of plucking leaves.^{^[2]}

Infrastructures of connection

The focus on commodity and supply chains may strike some readers as limiting. It tends to privilege a sequential transformation of commodities, and presumes a linear accruement of value along postcolonial economic divides. Others also critique some of the scholarship for not paying attention to the actual processes of chain-making (Caliskan 2011). Therefore, researchers have also studied international economic exchange beyond colonial and postcolonial geographies and frameworks. They have followed, for example, trade between Asia and the rest of the world and exchanges in the context of South-South relations (Dirlik 2007). They also have looked at the multitude of actors such as distributors, brokers, and exchanges that weave the global web of production, consumption, and discarding. Such new approaches build on the basic insights of the previous literature, namely that the global economy is interdependent, but they equally show that global connections are non-linear, multi-directional, actively constructed, and reconstructed.

The recent anthropological theorising along these lines has emerged from closer scrutiny of the term ‘supply chain’, which describes networks of suppliers and distributors working together across distances with the aim of increasing the efficiency of production while reducing its costs. Two types of supply chains are common—buyer-driven or supplier-driven—in which firms with superior capital and power organise traffic in commodities through buying components from suppliers or supplying goods and services to a range of distributors. These byzantine arrangements mean that identifying ‘lead firms’ and understanding the nature of relations between actors in these chains can be akin to detective work. A vivid example of this is the production of seatbelts for American cars with ‘fibres manufactured in Mexico, woven and dyed in Canada to take advantage of the abundance of water, sent back to Mexico to be sewn up, and then installed somewhere at a plant in the United States’ (Klein and Pettis 2020, 28).

Commodity and supply chains embody the ‘bigness’ of global capitalism (Tsing 2008). Through ‘outsourcing’ (i.e. contracting suppliers for goods and services) and ‘vertical integration’ (i.e. taking ownership of key stages of a supply chain), they incorporate heterogeneity. These chains are instrumental in understanding the simultaneous increase in global standardisation and the growing inequalities of contemporary capitalism. Lead firms ensure that commodities meet uniform health and safety standards enforced through auditing checks. While outsourcing is justified by economies of scale and specialisation, it often relies on differences in regulation and labour conditions to make goods cheaper. This can maintain or exacerbate inequalities between people across the difference of class, race, culture, and the North-South divide. A key process here is ‘salvage accumulation’ (Tsing 2008); that is, profiting from skills, competences, and forces existing outside capitalist exchange, for example a company making profits from cheap labour motivated by an appeal to Christian work ethics (Tsing 2008). While primarily serving as a basis for exploitation, heterogeneity within supply chains can also function as a source of contestation. Encounters within supply chains may generate or maintain different values, ideas of utility, or philosophies of labour (Bear et al. 2015). For example, Asian refugees scavenging for mushrooms in US forests may choose such a livelihood because it provides them with a sense of freedom and a connection to nature (Tsing 2015).

Outsourcing is a crucial mechanism for extending the global economy. International companies strategically locate their factories across Asia and Latin America, capitalising on cheap labour and lax regulations. The global supply chains have intensified due to trade developments, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, and India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s. Anthropological studies conducted in factories across India, Mexico, and East Asia illuminate the human costs associated with these regions' transformations into global hubs of cheap and flexible labour. Indian consultancies, for example, now recruit and ‘bench’ labour on a short-term project basis, effectively relying on workers' rural kin to sustain them during periods of unemployment (Xiang 2007). Anthropologists have also traced the psychic imprint of trade liberalisation, which cast some regions as powerhouses of efficient and just-in-time production. Malay women who are employed in factories serving the global market, for example, are trapped between patriarchal management and demanding production quotas (Ong 1987). One ethnographic study showed that in the 1980s, these women frequently suffered from spirit possessions, which could be seen as a form of resistance, allowing women to channel rage and secure time off (Ong 1987). Such spirit possessions can be seen to reveal workers' contestations of oppressive outsourcing structures.

While the differentiation of labour can be grounded in outwardly racist or sexist ideologies (see Robinson 1983; Wynter 2003), contemporary managerial thought and practice tends to hold that a differentiated valuation of labour in global supply chains is the an outcome of economic policy, education, skills, and aptitude. As anthropologist Anna Tsing emphasises, ‘no firm has to personally invent patriarchy, colonialism, war, racism or imprisonment, yet each of these is privileged in supply chain labour mobilisation’ (2009, 151). In tune with this insight, anthropologists frequently reveal that differences between people are in fact the building blocks of profitability. Practices like ‘outsourcing in place’, whereby companies such as food delivery apps or hotels rely principally on migrants (Terray 1999) and ‘global care chains’, which stretch care work across national boundaries (Perreñas 2001), rely on precarious migrant workers to make up for the fact that in some sectors simply moving jobs abroad is not possible. The qualities of these workers—their gender, dependence on host families, having constraint options on the labour market, perceived docility, etc.—make them akin to the housewives and servants they have come to replace (see Ehrenreich and Hochchild 2004). Meanwhile, a common justification used by managers in Asian factories for underpaying female workforce is that the women are supplementary, and not primary, household earners. In this way, households are exploited for their kinship resources and their ability to provide psychological support to members (Dunaway 2001).

Anthropologists also examine the infrastructures that hold commodity and supply chains together. Commodity and supply chains can also be seen as infrastructures in their own right, often painstakingly created to ensure a smooth circulation of goods and services. Recently, anthropologists have scrutinised their global architecture by focusing on the actual material pathways taken and created by ships, containers, ports, and technologies that track the passage of goods (Chalfin 2010; Chu et al. 2020; Leivestad and Schober 2021). Such research also looks at how this global architecture creates inflection points around the world, such as at the Suez Canal, which has an outsized influence on global trade with any risks contained by militarised infrastructure (Cowen 2014). This shifts a conversation from commodity and supply chains as markets for the satisfaction of consumer needs and desires to considerations about supply chains as linked to survival, security, and military power.

People, exchange, and value

Global exchanges are rich sites of valuation. They can be teased apart not solely on the macro scale of global processes but also the micro scale of cross-cultural encounters between individuals and communities. To explore how exchange relates to value, anthropological researchers have drawn attention to the work of brokers, distributors, tastemakers, and experts; that is, all sorts of people who do not strictly produce commodities but rather make them accessible, meaningful, and valuable to consumers. Such intermediaries impart value on the exchange because of their social and cultural capital. For example, American mineral traders are able to negotiate higher prices compared to their Mexican counterparts as their expertise is more trusted and they are able to access markets in the US from which the others are excluded (Ferry 2013).

As global markets promote standardisation of commodities to make them commensurable, that very standardisation can also increase the power of middlemen. Coffee beans from Papua New Guinea, for example, were sold for $12.95 USD per pound in 2000s and yet the labour involved in producing them was remunerated at 0.33 USD per pound (West 2012, 16). Though there is no coffee without farmers, the standardisation of beans makes coffees from around the world substitutable for each other which in turn increases the value of creating distinction through branding, including storytelling. Coffee producers compete with each other on a market in which tastemakers, marketing agencies, and designers take the greater cut. What’s more, it is precisely the narrative of Papuans’ poverty and assumed ‘primitiveness’ that casts buying Papuan coffee as an aide to its growers, implying that ‘any money [the farmers] make is a vast improvement over their prior-to-capital lives’ (West 2012, 248). In a similar manner, the so-called Third Wave coffee—a coffee movement that emphasises quality, sourcing beans from individual farmers, and roasting to obtain distinct flavours—rewards those growers that are capable of ‘setting the terms for cultural narratives of [coffee’s] worth’ (Fischer 2022, 204).

Non-corporate middlemen and brokers act as agents of globalisation, connecting actors and places and exchanging across difference. Their work can be seen as enacting globalisation from ‘below’ as they extend distribution or source goods in a wide variety of places outside established networks that are already controlled by corporations and their licensed business partners (Matthews, Ribeiro and Alba Vega 2012). Because of the informal nature of such nascent networks, they become grounds for innovating cultures of trust, relations of credit and debt, and new technologies of pricing (Curtin 1984; Trivellato 2009). Such emerging commodity and supply chains include Chinese and Indigenous traders distributing cheap goods across Latin America (Pinheiro-Machado 2017). Here, brokers act as translators who appropriate foreign commodities for local markets, accessing places off-the-beaten infrastructure that companies may not have any proprietary market research about (Müller 2024).

These connections forge new models of creativity and partaking in the global economy. Asian manufacturing industries, for example, are contracted by African entrepreneurs to produce consumer goods responding to African tastes. In fact, much of the traditional West African wax cloth is now produced in China. Such trade connections are powered by, among others, the so-called Nanettes in Togo, a younger generation of women who hitherto lacked the capital to trade with companies located in Europe but are able to pioneer new exchanges with Asia (Sylvanus 2016). In a similar context, Igbo importers of foreign goods to Nigeria move between their home country, China, and the Middle East to source commodities and ship them to customers in West Africa. Every step of this inter-regional value chain has its own risks. Unlike multinational companies that rely on market research, established legal frameworks, or a regulated banking systems, Igbo entrepreneurs have to rely on mostly self-organised traders’ associations. To minimise risk, Nigerian traders curate containers sent from Asai, filling them with a great variety of goods. Once in Nigeria, they fight to seal their distribution networks from foreign competitors—especially as the latter have market advantages, such as access to foreign low-interest credit (Lu 2022).

Distributors not only reach consumers, but they are also powerful agents in the sourcing of commodities outside formal networks or the purview of corporations. People can forge connections to the global economy in the ruins of old commodity and supply chains or under the radar of the law as is the case for all sorts of pirates. Interrogating livelihoods forged in the ruins or in ‘grey zones’, as anthropologists have done, is a crucial counterpoint to the tropes of capitalist promise-making or state planning. In South Africa, for example, men searching for gold inside disused mines are known as zama zamas. They are often migrants and considered particularly ‘tough’ due to a lack of other economic options (Morris 2022). They descend into the mines to search for remaining sparse gold deposits. With death underground being a perceptible threat, days can go by until a sufficient amount of the ore is gathered. Shadowy middlemen then buy these finds, paying in cash, with zama zamas knowing as little about the buyers as their phone numbers. Here, migration, mining, and international commodity and supply chains work together, to create both a vague sense of opportunity and violent actual precarity.

Disembedding the environment

Similar to market economies becoming disembedded from social relations (Polyani 1944), the global circulation of goods and services arguably disembeds economic activities from local environments and labour. Commodity and supply chains hide consumers and producers from one another, heightening commodity fetishism, i.e. the mistaken belief that commodities exist independently of social relations. Relocating production to other regions means that consumers and investors may not experience or appreciate how their consumption affects natural environments. Urban economies in the Global North tend to specialise in research and development, finance, technology, and creative industries. Such ‘third sectors’ are heavily reliant on raw materials and invisibilised labour, but actors within them might see the global economy as a space of immaterial ideas, creativity, and innovation. This has psychic consequences: their ideas take shape in the material world, while they themselves do not have to attend to the material conditions and consequences of those ideas. Awareness about global commodity and supply chains corrects such anti-material bias. For example, the extraction of cobalt in the Congo is a crucial ingredient of cutting-edge electronics. Being blind to the inconvenient fact of cobalt mining’s pressure on the environment risks third sector actors sliding into a ‘self-congratulatory techno-utopianism’ of Silicon Valley, which often casts itself as singularly responsible for technological advances whilst remaining oblivious to its ecological consequences (Smith 2021).

Ecological considerations also matter when given that global commodity and supply chains have been crucial for realising economies of scale. As such, they raise questions about the ‘politics of scale’, i.e. the choices needed to achieve economies of scale (Blanchette 2020) and about ‘de-growth’, which is a broad proposition to create economies that are mindful of nature’s limits (Livingston 2019; Hickel 2021). While economies of scale have enabled cheapness, they rely on things, labour, and land that are not straightforwardly scalable. As such, economies of scale are experiments with profound environmental consequences. Producing cheap pork (as well as by-products such as pet food, methane gas, and gelatine) in a town in the US Midwest, for example, requires killing a pig every three seconds (Blanchette 2020). The companies that produce pork at scale replace individual pigs, capricious animals marked by idiosyncrasies, into ‘the pig’: a predictable commodity that enables calculating costs and profits. The latter requires interfering with pigs’ bodies, including adjusting sows’ reproductive drive and fertility through hormone therapy. Meanwhile, dealing with extraordinary events, such as a sudden death of thusly modified sows and their piglets, falls onto the shoulders of an undervalued workforce, who may find themselves needing to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on dying piglets (Blanchette 2020, 153).

Economies of scale are not just corporate policy; they are also promoted by states as ways to attain economic growth. They represent a ‘self-devouring’ drive to produce evermore while in the long term undermining the very conditions of production, like access to clean water and fertile land (Livingston 2019). In Botswana, for example, cattle, which used to be appreciated in poetry, prayer, and ritual, are turned into a mere ‘techno-economic’ objects as part of mass beef production. Among the Tswana people of Botswana, cattle used to represent the family, was only killed towards the end of its life, and the resultant beef was ritually divided between its members. Industrial beef production, on the other hand, calls for higher levels of consumption to perpetuate higher levels of production and evacuates questions about nature into the future.

The study of commodity and supply chains has recently been complemented by anthropologists’ increased attention to more-than-human worlds. The production and consumption regimes that commodity and supply chains enable are not just violent to the environment, but also such violence can be displayed by the physical matter, such as oil palm trees, that they unleash onto the world. In villages of the Papua province of Indonesia, for example, Marind people witness how oil palms ravage biodiversity and landscapes (Chao 2022). They see their world become hostage to a quickly spreading plant that ‘kills the sago, murders their kin, chokes the rivers, and bleeds their land’ (Chao 2022, 11). Palm in these cosmologies has its own distinct, more-than-human agency and becomes a target of resistance. Here, the plantations are contact zones between the locals’ lifeworlds, based on the cultivation of sago, and agro-industrial capitalism which relies on palm as a plant suitable for economies of scale and useable across different foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, economies of scale create waste at a level that may be reaching its global ‘apotheosis’ (Hecht 2018). Landfills and dumpsites can be thought of as nodes in supply chains, even more so in the context of emerging circular economies that promise to recast waste as a raw material for production (O’Hare and Rams 2024). Acting as places in which waste is temporarily stored away and managed, they contribute to the status quo of overproduction (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022). Beyond these localised waste sites, research also points to substantive movements of waste to the Global South as second-hand products. As such, consumers in these parts of the world both rely on and are inundated by waste-laden second-hand imports of electronics, clothes, cars, and other consumer products from Western countries. Such second-hand economies contribute to local environmental damage as they surpass the capacity of local waste infrastructures. While second-hand markets create economic opportunities for traders and provide choices to consumers, these benefits are complicated by the way second-hand buyers may feel lesser than consumers in the Global North who can afford new goods (Burrell 2012).^[3]

Economies of scale and their impact on the environment have met resistance. Anthropologists document the ways in which people practice opposition to what some have called ‘plantationocene’ or ‘capitalocene’, terms proposed as historically and contextually situated modifications of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to emphasise that the responsibility for planetary damage is unevenly distributed (Haraway 2016; Sapp Moore and Arosoaie 2022). They have explored histories of cooperative farming adhering to notions of wellness and self-reliance and thus away from capitalist models that promote reliance on food produced elsewhere (Reese 2019; White 2018). Anthropologists have also focused on examples of human and more-than-human resistance to mono-crops and their scalar logic (Beilin and Suryanarayanan 2017). Such works also document human resistance to projects of extraction in which ordinary people can be seen to disrupt extractive infrastructures such as pipes and expose their fragility (Mitchell 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropological scholarship explains some of the confusing and uneasy aspects of global commodity and supply chains: how they connect people as commodities pass from one hand to another and yet disconnect them when it comes to distributing the resultant power, profit, and hazard; how they mobilise people across difference—speaking different languages, living across economic divides, perhaps espousing different values—whilst exploiting that very difference for profit-making; and how all this worldly architecture sinks into the background, seamlessly rearranging what people come to expect as their economies get divorced from the local soils and workforce. This is a crucial effort because some of the most common ways of thinking about global trade—in economic theories or policies of international organisations—see the trade as happening between nations that are free to choose policy or specialise economies to their advantage. Anthropologists show how this economic calculus makes assumptions about the worth of other humans and cultural beliefs that reflect long and on-going legacies of global inequality. The study of global circulation allows us to interrogate the connection between growth and ecological and cultural devastation, accumulation and dispossession, and profit and exploitation.

As we look into the future, a multitude of new perspectives and potential areas for research emerge, especially when it comes to integrating global commerce within environmental limits. The integration of a circular economy could fundamentally reshape geographies of resource circulation, possibly creating new relationships between waste and production. Elsewhere, some view the advent of blockchain and other digital technologies as having promise for transforming transparency and trust within global networks whilst creating new forms of value, for example by tying the labour of farmers to carbon trading (Barbato and Strong 2023). Simultaneously, there's a growing interest in localising production and shortening commodity and supply chains, a trend that might have profound implications for global markets as it spurs new communities organised around principles of relative self-sufficiency. Such interventions could entail redesigning commodity and supply chains in dialogue with the environment. Rich existing anthropological research already draws insights from Indigenous knowledge systems about, for example, mining traditions aware of ‘sharing’ resources with nature (D’Avignon 2023) or approaches to food that promote diversified cultivation and food access (Reese 2019). These approaches suggest multiple pathways forward for reimagining resource flows and human-environment relationships.

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Note on contributor

Dagna Rams is a Visiting Research Fellow based at London School of Economics (Department of Anthropology). Her research is sponsored by the post-doctoral mobility scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She has completed her doctoral fieldwork in scrapyards, e-waste sites, smelters, and metal buying companies in Ghana. Her post-doctoral fieldwork investigates how metal markets and technological companies conceive of metal supply and its sustainability, and factor those considerations into their operations. The research speaks to her interest in the resource limitations to economic, environmental, and technological future-making.

^{^[1]} For reasons of simplicity, this entry will use the term ‘commodity and supply chains’ throughout.

^{^[2]} Fatiq, Md Fazla Rabbi. 2023. Dark garden. https://mdfazlarabbifatiq.com/dark-garden/

^{^[3]} See also Kolade, Bobby, and Nikissi Serumaga. 2021. Vintage or Violence Podcast. https://www.vintageorviolence.com/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Surveillance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 12:21:46 +0000

Activists from No CCTV stage a 2013 anti-surveillance protest in Birmingham. Photo by Brett Wilde.

Vita Peacock Mikkel Kenni Bruun Claire Elisabeth Dungey Matan Shapiro

King's College London

Initially published 5 Dec 2023

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

Abstract:

Surveillance—watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose—can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Anthropology has explored and complexified this picture. While surveillance can enable intensive control over space, social categorisation, and the affective states of large societies, among other things, such asymmetries can also be evaded, refashioned, or reversed. Surveillance can take place from above (‘panoptic’) but also laterally (‘synoptic’), or from below (‘sousveillance’). Indeed, in the field of human relationships it is not always apparent who is watching who. Because of the vast range of human response to being monitored, surveillance infrastructures—particularly when implemented at scale—often do so within moral discourses that are regionally specific, and vital to their legitimacy.

The field of surveillance studies has extensively explored surveillance as a mode of security and policing, and this emphasis has shaped early anthropological engagements with the subject. With the growth of computerisation, surveillance has become more relevant to a variety of other ethnographic contexts. Digital monitoring now plays an expanding role in forms of care, public and private health, communication, and the management of work, in which the harvesting of data for profit always remains a near or distant possibility. An emerging ‘anthropology of surveillance’ invites us to consider not only conditions of visibility, but also their perpetual relation to what is not seen. Here the moral question is not whether surveillance itself is good or bad, but how and why are human beings rendered visible through technology, and under which circumstances do they seek to remain opaque?

Introduction

In its popular form, surveillance often connotes a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze. Significantly inflected by George Orwell’s parable of totalitarianism, 1984 ([1949] 1990), in which citizens are watched and listened to at all times through telescreens, this imaginary surfaces at moments of social tension around new intersections between power and information collection. In scholarship, this connotation was given a paradigmatic and enduring shape by Michel Foucault’s influential text Discipline and punish ([1975] 2019). In it, Foucault introduces the image of the Panopticon: a series of architectural designs by English reformer Jeremy Bentham for controlling the behaviour of their occupants through the suggestion that they were being observed (Galič, Timan and Koops 2016). The Panopticon was at once an actual historical phenomenon as well as a theory for the coercive effects that could be exerted over human beings through practices of unequal exposure, and it was in the latter sense that the image shaped the field of surveillance studies. The ‘panoptic’ paradigm of the 1980s and 90s theorised how new technologies were reinscribing old asymmetrical relationships between observer and observed, while a subsequent ‘post-panoptic’ paradigm (Deleuze 1992) explored how surveillance has become multi-directional and mobile, with overlapping state and capitalist incentives (Bauman and Lyon 2013; Zuboff 2019).

‘Surveillance’ is a modern word that has been increasingly used in English from the nineteenth century onwards. An anglicisation of the French surveiller—to watch (veiller) over (sur)—both the English and the French derive from the Latin verb vigilare, to keep watch. As a concept, surveillance has been defined many times with different connotations in different scholarly traditions. A particularly influential definition describes surveillance as ‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon 2007, 14). In anthropology, however, a focus on the ‘personal’ is problematised by how the very concept of the person varies historically and culturally (Carrithers 1985; Strathern 2018). Therefore, in anthropology, another definition of surveillance is worth pursuing: watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose. This lays more emphasis on an understanding of ‘technology’ which, following the French tradition in which Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze were operating (Behrent 2013), derives from the French techniques. Conceived broadly as a set of practices, techniques include material culture but are not limited to it. These encompass social activities like guarding, spying, or undercover policing, as well as the use of analogue or digital devices to collect, store, or process information.

Anthropology has been a relative latecomer to the study of surveillance. This may be partly because it entails naming a relationship as surveillance, while anthropologists may prioritise other definitions. In this growing body of work, however, anthropologists have analysed surveillance as a technology of state security, policing, and capitalist accumulation. They have also shown that within these instantiations lie possibilities for political reciprocity and reversal, for dynamics of care, and for a reappropriation of technology (known as ‘function creep’) from above and beneath. As a way of making visible, surveillance is also in continual conversation with non-surveillance: whether through invisibility, anonymity, or concealment. In general, an emerging anthropology of surveillance considers the unfolding of relationships among and between ‘surveillors’ and ‘surveillands’ as a situated encounter. This encounter draws on historically constituted categories, relationships, and moral orders, in which it finds—or fails to find—its own legitimacy. As the proliferation of computing continues to enable the expansion of surveillance, anthropology invites attention to the conditions of visibility, and the purposes to which rendering subjects visible through technology is put.

Security, policing, and morality

A conversation across the social sciences began to take shape in the 1980s and 90s in response to the growing use of electronic monitoring in Europe and North America (Bogard 1996; Gandy 1993; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 1994; Marx 1988; Norris and Armstrong 1999; Whitaker 1999). Scholars in the emerging field of surveillance studies were concerned with how new forms of information-gathering were transforming existing social institutions, particularly the police. Anthropologists entered this field from the side sometime later by way of a burgeoning interest in security (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Goldstein 2010; Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014; Maguire and Low 2019).

Seen broadly as the promise of protection against some real or imagined existential threat, surveillance has been observed as an outcome of wider dynamics of securitisation that have intensified since the events of 9/11. In European airports, for example, increasing counter-terrorism measures have entailed new intersections between human and machine surveillance (Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014). Assessing the threat of would-be passengers, machine-screening of physiological clues operates alongside the ‘skilled vision’ of security personnel—an intuitive technique gained through experience (Grasseni 2007, cited in Maguire, Frois and Zurawski 2014, 127). The surveillance that is justified by a logic of security can be prone to a function creep that goes well beyond its overt purpose (Frois 2019; Maguire 2009). In Egyptian-ruled Gaza between 1948-67, police surveillance served not only to protect the Palestinian population from threat, but also to enforce its own standards of propriety in gender relations, or to inhibit residents from joining dissident organisations (Feldman 2015).

In the context of security, surveillance is often intended to produce effects on the affective and mental life of the surveilled. Foucault emphasised the capacity of surveillance to render a self-regulated conformity to established rules, a phenomenon now referred to by journalists and privacy activists as ‘chilling effects’. Yet self-regulation is one of a panoply of responses that the idea of being watched may yield. Among the most common is a generalised suspicion of others, bred by the uncertainty of whether one is really being watched or not, which can spiral into paranoia (Masco 2017; Verdery 2018). For instance, in left-wing radical activism, the potential for undercover police surveillance can produce distrust of fellow activists that can inhibit the development of solidarity (Krøijer 2015). Sometimes cause-and-effect happens in an inverse way, as when certain affects, particularly fear, are mobilised at scale by media producers to justify the need for more surveillance (Masco 2014; Massumi 2015). But not all experienced affects are negative, and, in some contexts, surveillance may indeed deliver the feeling of security that it promises (Feldman 2015).

As a modality of security and policing, surveillance enables control over a bounded space (Levin, Frohne and Weibel 2002; Frois 2013; Maguire and Low 2019). Often this is commensurate with the territoriality of the state, in which national borders become sites of heightened surveillance, historically through an alliance of sensory and documentary forms (Baĭburin 2021; Breckenridge and Szreter 2012), which are increasingly automated through cameras, scanners, and biometric databases (Breckenridge 2014; Boe and Mainsah 2021). Sometimes it is internal boundaries within states that matter. In predominantly Alevi working-class neighbourhoods in Turkey, spatial control is achieved through a mixture of identity checks and interrogations at entrances, alongside the perambulation of armoured vehicles and undercover police inside the neighbourhood (Yonucu 2022). Here, surveillance becomes a tool of spatial isolation to keep outsiders out and residents in. As surveillance becomes increasingly digitalised, the question arises over whether its traditional production of spatial enclosure is substituted for a diffuse ‘digital enclosure’ (Andrejevic 2007), where access is mediated through data stored in distributed drives. In the Xinjiang province of China, interoperability between facial recognition systems at security checkpoints with other forms of data collection segregates speed and access to space in real time, as Han residents move frictionlessly while Uyghur residents may be detained and diverted (Byler 2021). Yet even in the digital enclosure the question of spatiality never completely disappears.

Surveillance may be less a matter of observation than of ‘sorting’ populations (Gandy 1993; Bowker and Star 1999). In the context of security and policing, though the effects may be experienced individually, it may not be specific people but rather categories of people who are placed under suspicion. Among CCTV operatives in Britain in the 1990s and 2000s, subjects of interest frequently fell into raced, gendered, classed, aged, and other demographic categories (Goold 2004; Norris and Armstrong 1999). In Kenya, China, or the US, falling into the category of ‘Muslim’ may be sufficient to constitute a police suspect (Al-Bulushi 2021; Ali 2018; Byler 2021). This association between surveillance and sorting is deeply rooted in the colonial past and is carried into the present through digital media (Jefferson 2020; Udupa and Dattatreyan 2023). The institution of the census across the former British Empire is a case in point (Breckenridge 2014; S. Browne 2015; Rao and Nair 2019). Processes of registering and categorising were normally linked to forms of identification that determined the ambit of a person’s movement. Among these was the slave pass of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, which combined with differently mediated forms of surveillance to racialise certain bodies and render them legible as property (S. Browne 2015). These categories do not necessarily fall, however, along religious or racial lines. Anthropologists themselves have fallen into categories of suspicion throughout the discipline’s history (Sökefeld and Strasser 2016): whether as communists in the US (Price 2004), or as foreign agents in the former Socialist states (Sampson 2022; Verdery 2012, 2018).

Although the surveillance performed by human and machine agents of the state continually seeks to solve the problem of large datasets by classification and sorting (Bowker and Star 1999), there is normally a much messier and more complex picture that exists on the ground or behind the scenes of any state surveillance project (Frois 2013; Jacobsen and Rao 2018). On the ‘friendly’ border between India and Bangladesh, curious political reversals occur between the Indian border soldiers, lonely and far from home, and the women and men seeking to carry contraband across the border. While the military officers enact the authority of the state’s surveilling gaze, they are also subject to a ‘counter-gaze’ by these travellers, scanning for vulnerabilities or openness to illicit transactions (Ghosh 2019, 447). Not only might the gaze be met and even directed by a possible counter-gaze, but the act of being surveilled by the state may in some contexts be a conduit through which the state becomes aware of political grievances and acts on them. This happened routinely in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, when grassroots complaints about the lack of currency in circulation led to behind-the-scenes instructions for banks to produce more (Feldman 2015) .

This leads to an aspect of surveillance that anthropology is well placed to address: namely, the ways in which monitoring technologies are introduced within moral discourses essential to their appropriation and acceptance. When video surveillance was installed in public areas in Portugal, it was driven by an apparent need to modernise the country to become more like its northern European counterparts (Frois 2013). In this discourse, surveillance becomes commensurate with development, an association that can be witnessed more widely. The most prominent example of this is India’s Aadhaar system, the largest biometric identity project in human history (Nair 2021; Rao and Nair 2019). Fingerprints, iris scans, and other physiological information are collected alongside demographic details, which are matched to the holy grail of any mass surveillance project: the unique identifier (Clarke 1988), in this case a twelve-digit number. From its inception, Aadhaar has been rationalised through its provision of multiple goods (access to welfare, financial inclusion, digital literacy, and accessibility among others) and its elimination of undesirable phenomena such as poverty, corruption, and fraud. Yet for critics, Aadhaar constitutes the infrastructure for the biggest surveillance apparatus ever implemented. This antithesis touches on a paradox of modernity itself, that the history of surveillance is entwined with the history of the state and its capacity to institutionalise care on a very large scale (Dandeker 1990; Higgs 2003). In the UK, for example, the foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) was also the foundation of an information apparatus that could serve other ends (Rule 1973). The question, for any citizen, is that of reward for their enforced visibility. Are Indian citizens really being compensated by Aadhaar, or is this the final frontier in the state’s appropriation of the citizen’s body (Kapila 2022)?

Health surveillance and care

Surveillance is often justified through the interests of the common good, such as safeguarding those deemed to be vulnerable, caring for patients, or stopping the spread of disease. While health monitoring, in this logic, may be enacted as a ‘caring’ practice (Mol 2008), it now increasingly involves the collection of data stored on servers that are not always known to those who are being monitored (Sandvik 2020; Lyon 2021). Health surveillance is commonly defined as the systemic collection, analysis, and dissemination of health data for the implementation and evaluation of public health action (Choi 2012).^[1] In more general terms, it can be understood as the practice of watching over health, from the perceived ‘health’ of populations and individuals to that of communities and nations.

Recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated health surveillance as a matter of political and public concern (Kim and Chung 2021). Political responses to the pandemic were shaped by a range of moral rationalities that introduced and justified new modes of public health surveillance (Lyon 2021). Public health interventions across the world sought to control and mitigate the outbreak, such as by responsibilising citizens to act in the interest of the state and to install contact tracing apps to curb infection rates. In places such as Germany and the UK, state-sponsored contact tracing apps received media criticism due to privacy concerns, as well as technical concerns over their ability to act as a public health measure (Laptander and Vitebsky 2021).

Monitoring populations for the purpose of controlling and caring for citizens is not a new phenomenon. It was partly through shifting modes of governance in Europe from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onwards, with the monitoring of populations and publics, that practices of health surveillance took shape. Health surveillance has therefore historically played a key role in constituting not only visible, measurable, and governable spaces, but also governable persons willing to self-monitor in the name of their own health (Foucault 1973; Rose 1989). In many parts of the world, the provision of public health services, including their administration and governance, have become increasingly digitalised through practices of ‘datafication’ in which the mass collection of personal health data informs interventions (Hoeyer, Bauer and Pickersgill 2019; Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017). Surveillance, in this vein, unfolds through a range of monitoring practices that claim to sustain human life in different ways. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, health surveillance can thus be seen to form part of a ‘politics of life itself’ (Rose 2006), in which bodies and minds have become ‘vital’ objects of observation and intervention. Such practices rely on people’s capacity and willingness to engage in forms of everyday self-monitoring in the service of care (Weiner et al. 2020; Kent, Lupton and Zeena 2020).

In surveillance studies, care and control have been described as two entangled interests driving practices of monitoring. Watching over children, for instance, may be intended with their protection in mind but can also be motivated by other intentions, such as direction and control (Lyon 2003; Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). In many contexts, people actively participate in the monitoring of their bodies but in ways that are not always known to them. In rural India, for example, the ‘Khushi baby necklace’, a tracking device presented as a piece of jewellery, was trialled as a digital tool of recording and storing immunisation records (Sandvik 2020). More recently, it was also used to collect other health data such as HIV medication records. Developers attempted to make it locally ‘appropriate’, designing it with a black thread to ward off evil spirits, showing how such technologies are incorporated within cosmological systems (Sandvik 2020). While the necklace can be seen as ‘doing good’—as a caring technology—digital health data also has the potential to be exploited and commodified without people’s consent or knowledge in the service of corporate interests.

Dynamics of care and control were simultaneously at work in the 1950s, when a team of doctors brought an antibiotic to the Navajo population in Arizona to treat tuberculosis (Jones 2001). When patients failed to take their medications, healthcare professionals regarded them as non-compliant, and responded by implementing powerful technologies of surveillance: random tests were performed, such as urine testing or radioactive pill clocks^[2], often without patients being informed about their purposes. These interventions introduced distrust into doctor-patient relationships and many feared participating as the urine sample testing could potentially expose their ceremonial use of the peyote plant, which had been prohibited by the tribal council. In this case, medical surveillance as a tool of control was operating within existing political structures of colonisation and racialisation, and it is unclear what opportunities the Navajo had, if any, to resist these medical interventions.

Health technologies are sometimes welcomed and appropriated in new ways beyond the way they were intended (Stadler 2021). Digital health technologies of surveillance, such as the MERM (‘medication event reminder monitoring’) device, have been introduced to persuade and remind ‘non-compliant’ tuberculosis or HIV patients to take their medications. Some patients referred to the device as ‘the box’, whereas others gave it affectionate nicknames such as ‘my child’, which one user explained was due to the box containing pills that would give her access to a healthy life. Some stored their boxes safely for this reason, or wore clothes that would match the box, hence trying to transform it from an adherence-monitoring device to a person-entity that represented hope.

Health surveillance technologies have often been used as mechanisms of governance, but it is important to emphasise that people might actively use monitoring technologies in the name of improving their own health or in the interest of looking after others. The past two decades have seen an intensive proliferation of, and investment in, digital monitoring technologies that claim to improve our physical and mental health, as well as offer care and support for others (Lupton 2016; Neff and Nafus 2016; Ajana, Braga and Guidi 2022). For example, physical rehabilitation apps can monitor exercises done at home (Schwennesen 2019), and smartphone apps and ‘wearables’ can be used to track children’s locations (Widmer and Albrechtslund 2021). Self-monitoring in the context of health can therefore foreground more intimate and subtler aspects of monitoring effected by everyday acts of self-surveillance. Wearable self-tracking technologies such as Fitbit and Apple Watch enable people to monitor a range of activities and functions associated with their bodies and minds. These practices might include tracking exercise and steps (Brüggen and Schober 2020), menstrual cycles (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021), heart rates, and sleeping patterns (Hardey 2022). Digital wearables also increasingly allow people to report on, quantify, and monitor various ‘mental and emotional’ experiences and sensations, from stress and anxiety to mindful moments and other perceived states of well-being (Gregory and Bowker 2016; Schüll 2016; Davies 2017; Minozzo 2022).

Self-monitoring emerges here as a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, such as in the management and understanding of pain, affects, and medical uncertainties. For example, health monitoring technologies can figure as practices of self-knowledge in the hands of menstruating people, as an ethnography of period tracking apps in the context of the FemTech^[3] wave in the US describes (Ford et al 2021). Yet these health tracking apps can also be situated and critiqued within a political frame of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019) that raises concerns about the ethics of data sharing and its potentially discriminatory ends, such as limited access to healthcare services (e.g., abortion). For example, one user in favour of menstrual tracking but critical of the harvesting of personal data describes her circumstance as a ‘no-exit situation’ wherein one just tries to ‘limit the damage’ of self-tracking in the face of corporate profit-making (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 59). While users are ‘empowered within conditions not of their choosing’ (Ford, De Togni and Miller 2021, 58), Andrea Ford and her colleagues argue that self-monitoring nevertheless offers a way for women to recognise, and in turn exercise, a mode of control over affective and bodily experiences that have been historically, and are still routinely, neglected in healthcare systems.

Within circumstances of what is now commonly termed ‘digital health’, the use of self-monitoring technology constitutes the very body-self it assumes: subjects that are capable of self-checking and self-reporting (Bruun 2023). The notion of the reflexive, measurable, and quantifiable self is in many ways built into the design and operation of health trackers, which in turn shapes users’ experiential realities of what it means to be ‘healthy’, ‘fit’, and ‘well’. Digital self-monitoring can thus be seen to constitute new caring and corporeal capacities that can be extended to self and others (see e.g. Davies 2017; Bergroth 2019; Kent 2023). Yet these new modes of monitoring demand that we constantly ‘watch our selves’ in ways that construe people as objects of self-observation and self-inspection in pursuit of particular health goods.

Monitoring labour

Labour has always gone hand-in-hand with some form of surveillance—whether understood as such, or in the more benign language of monitoring or supervision. Because employers have legitimate goods to protect, for instance regulatory compliance or productivity, surveillance is often accepted by employees as a ‘taken-for-granted’ element of working life (Ball 2010, 19). How this takes place, however, varies greatly according to historical, regional, and technological conditions. In anthropological terms, there are certain analytical points to consider. The first is whether the surveillance in question is happening through social relationships or is construed as abstract from relationships. Both can occur through old and new forms of mediation. On the former side, overseers, foremen, drivers, or other figures to monitor or coerce workers extend deep into the history of agricultural and industrial economies (R.M. Browne 2024; Thompson 1967), and persist in the present through forms of in-person or camera-enabled visual supervision. On the latter side, technologies of quantification developed in the early twentieth century through Frederick Taylor’s principles of ‘scientific management’ (Taylor [1911] 1993), which incentivised workers to manage themselves, and are evolving in some contexts into what is known as ‘algorithmic management’. In addition, because some form of surveillance is an accepted part of working life, it plays a more-than-usual role in constituting working life, communicating to workers—like a ‘paralanguage’ (Ball 2010, 97)—about what tasks are valued. Lastly, because the workplace is a peculiarly purposeful setting, the increase of digital surveillance in recent years appears to be transforming these domains at the highest pace, as new configurations between work and non-working life are negotiated, new ethical norms around personal information tested, and new working identities made.

In examining the nature of monitoring at work, anthropologists have looked towards their own institutions. Higher education reforms across the world in the 1980s and 90s transformed monitoring in the academy, as part of a wider shift in public institutions more generally, towards external auditing (Born 2004; Harper 1998; Strathern 2000b). Financial concepts were imported to assess academics and their work in terms of ‘outputs’, ‘impact’, and ‘efficiency’—using much of the language developed by Taylor—in ways that supplanted older social and qualitative forms of evaluation. While the new regime of ‘audit culture’ was coercive to the extent that there was no opt-out (Strathern 2000a), and academics became compelled to monitor themselves and each other in quantifiable, ends-orientated, and often labour-intensive ways, it also became constitutive, to some extent, of academic work and workers. Departments and universities were collectivised as subjects of surveillance into the bodies in which they were assessed; meanwhile, some academics learned to refer to themselves using the terminology of the ‘h-index’, the ‘i-index’, or the numerical values of audit criteria, as these became avenues for promotion or job security (Shore and Wright 2000; Lazar 2022). As a form of bureaucratic surveillance, audit or ‘metric culture’ (Ajana 2018) functions like bureaucracy more generally, effacing its own political basis (Ferguson 1994; see also Bear and Mathur 2015). One of the ways in which anthropologists have critiqued these developments is by reinscribing this politics through acts of extra-institutional writing. In this, they dovetail with a wider phenomenon in workplace surveillance, when workers turn to anonymous blogs, forums, Facebook, or WhatsApp groups beyond the surveilled domain, to forge critical identities and find workarounds (Ball 2010; Lazar 2022).

Surveillance scholars have observed the gendering of surveillance relations in some labour contexts, as women perform before a mediated male gaze (Dubrofsky and Magnet 2015; Meulen and Heynen 2016). Anthropologists examining care work, which is disproportionately gendered female, have encountered the increasing use of surveillance technologies (Johnson 2015; Glaser 2021). Here, gender asymmetries frequently intersect with class and ethnic asymmetries, dynamics all being remediated through location tracking and CCTV, among others. In Hong Kong, for example, migrant Filipino women are employed by high- to middle-income families to care for children and perform domestic chores, labour that is increasingly scrutinised through so-called ‘nanny cams’ (Johnson et al 2020). Because of the informal nature of much of this work, the use of surveillance can also be less formal, as workers are not told in advance that they would be filmed, nor where and for how long the data would be stored. In some cases, they report discovering hidden cameras in the process of cleaning, or being called to task for activities that could only have been observed remotely—only realising in hindsight their exposure to a male employer. To avoid these gazes, they might respond tactically by ‘accidentally’ dropping their cleaning cloths on the lens or spending more time in unmonitored areas like the bathroom. In care settings, the presence of surveillance technologies can interrupt or even substitute for care itself and thus jeopardise important wells of trust. On the other hand, they may also manufacture it, as hours of labour that would have otherwise gone unrecorded are captured on camera for their employer to see.

While surveillance happens at work, it can itself be a form of labour and subject to the imperatives that shape labour: namely, a drive towards automation and outsourcing to reduce costs. It is in this context that labour monitoring is increasingly taking place through enhanced forms of datafication and algorithmic management. This can be understood as an extension of scientific management, to the extent that algorithmic management involves a calculation of time and resources needed for tasks (Lazar 2022), such as picking up a box in an Amazon warehouse or delivering meals across a city. However, this form of monitoring also greatly reduces the presence of employed overseers. In these new constellations, surveillance becomes ‘multimodal’, assembling mathematical calculations, customer ratings and reviews, and a small number of human dispatchers or ‘rider captains’ who play a supporting role in the work of overseeing (Newlands 2021, 725). Though these new relations are sometimes represented as replacing ‘bosses’ with algorithms, anthropologically it is more accurate to think of these as ‘human-in-the-loop’ systems that depend much more heavily on computing (Newlands 2021, 724). If a food delivery driver does not have access to a functioning smartphone, not only are they unsupervised, but they cannot work at all (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023). With these techno-orientated systems arrive new technical vulnerabilities, as well as new possibilities for worker reappropriation or resistance. Some Deliveroo drivers in Brussels, for example, found ways to ‘hack’ the employee app to circumvent the performance score system (Duus, Bruun and Dalsgård 2023), while truckers in the US have applied a number of methods to ‘beat the box’ of newly installed Electronic Logging Devices, for instance by covering GPS masts with tinfoil or shattering their interiors with a rubber hammer (Levy 2022). Despite the social and legal risks that emerge from the rise of ‘smart’ surveillance in workplaces, because of the role of capital incentives this area looks set to expand, particularly with the growth of generative AI (Ball 2022; Duke 2023).

Participatory surveillance

Social vigilance, understood in the broadest sense, has long been a subject of anthropological inquiry. During the first half of the twentieth century, some anthropologists construed ritual action as a matter of ‘watching over others’ (Bateson [1936] 1958; Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993; Leach [1964] 1970). For example, the Azande of central Africa conducted divination ceremonies to ‘see’ and expose suspected witches (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1993). Similarly, ‘bewitchment talk’ in the French Bocage, or rural Normandy, included secret malicious spells or even the transfer of ‘power’ through gazes, causing serious misfortune in the lives of those affected (Favret-Saada 1980). Consequently, bewitchment in the Bocage sustained a pervasive sense of fear and suspicion, which intensified and at times escalated the constant monitoring of social rivalries in the village.

Neighbours, spouses, kinsfolk, and peers all frequently and regularly engage in vigilant behaviour as part of ordinary life. For example, self-presentation in different social contexts is often based on the monitoring of others’ behaviour and the ‘alignment’ of one’s own behaviour with the expectations of others (Goffman [1963] 1990). Similarly, the spread of gossip and rumour in an English council estate was used to limit the level of prestige that people could gain in the community (Gluckman 1963). Yet, gossip can also serve to build prestige. Some women in the Polynesian Nukulaelae Atoll, for example, may use gossip to reinstate broken social hierarchies, resist negative stigma, and negotiate power imbalances (Besnier 2019). In all these cases, mundane monitoring is a ubiquitous form of social control involving the relational negotiation of reputation and respectability.

The advent of social media has taken these monitorial negotiations into new territories. Practices of ‘lateral surveillance’ (Andrejevic 2004) are an integral aspect of peer-to-peer monitoring in online social worlds. Lateral surveillance can be imagined as surveillance that is enacted in many directions simultaneously, including ‘sideways’, as opposed to the linear ‘top-down’ monitoring famously associated with the Panopticon.^[4] Contrarily, lateral monitoring sometimes produces an empowering process of identity construction, of which surveillance is an important positive element (Koskela 2018). Since the ability to ‘follow’ others is intrinsic to the exchange of information on social platforms, users actively take part in practices of mutual surveillance (Albrechtslund and Lauritsen 2013). On Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, or TikTok, for example, online users voluntarily enable others to monitor their accounts in different ways, including the ability to download and share their photos, locate them geographically, or track their whereabouts (Trottier 2013). While social media acquires distinctive characteristics in different social contexts, these forms of sharing and mutual exposure are basic communicational features that enable rather than restrict dialogue (Miller 2011; see also Widlok 2021). The term ‘participatory surveillance’ (Albrechtslund 2008) highlights the customary rather than coercive nature of such practices.

One important feature of participatory surveillance is its ‘synoptic’ nature: an inversion of Bentham’s Panopticon, the concept of the ‘synopticon’ refers to surveillance of the few by the many (Mathiesen 1997). Unlike the linear, demarcated, and clearly defined form of control produced in panoptic realities, power in synoptic realities is dispersed across society in multiple directions.^[5] One of the consequences of a synoptic reality is that individuals can profit from the monitoring of their own lives. At the end of the 1990s, ‘everyday surveillance’ became linked to new flows of capital in the emergent online market economy so that, for example, a college student in the US could instal a webcam in her apartment and charge subscription fees from internet users for viewing access (Staples 2013). Over the past two decades, ‘web-camming’ has become a lucrative business in the online sex industry (Van Doorn and Velthuis 2018). While such sites as Only Fans operate under little or no ethical regulation, they continue to thrive (Stegeman 2021). Rather than initiating traditional ‘top-down’ publicity campaigns, which target vast numbers of potential customers through mass visibility, commercial companies increasingly hire social media influencers, YouTubers, or vloggers to recommend products and services to their followers (Lange 2019). In this process, the companies behind these products also gain access to the followers’ data (see Clarke 1988 on ‘dataveillance’), thus complicating the notion of synoptic surveillance as purely lateral.

Participatory surveillance does, however, include a ‘vertical’ dimension, in the sense that people can monitor the authorities ‘bottom up’. For example, civil society ‘watchdogs’, non-military use of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques (wherein civil society actors identify crimes or human rights abuses [see Trottier 2015]), and smartphone apps that enable drivers to detect speeding cameras, all invert the ‘top-down’ monitoring used by those in power. The term ‘sousveillance’ (from French sous, ‘from below’) characterises this form of monitoring (Mann, Nolan and Wellman 2003). While surveillance may convey the idea of the omnipresent, overarching gaze, sousveillance indicates grassroots resistance to state or corporate monitoring powers by which people attempt to defy and deter potential privacy infringements (Garrido 2015). Sousveillance is not antithetical to synoptic surveillance, however. CCTV gadgets, recording devise, and mobile tracking applications can all be used ‘laterally’ to document or monitor peers at work, at home, or in public spaces (Lyon 2007).

Both in its synoptic (lateral) and sousveillant (vertical) manifestations, participatory surveillance now seems commonplace. Depending on the mundane settings in which it is being implemented, this sense of immanent and constant surveillance could blur the distinctions between those who monitor and the subjects of monitoring. In some digital contexts, every person is turned into an observer who must assume that they are simultaneously always being observed. Participatory surveillance thereby prompts fresh discussions about power and sovereignty, visibility and opacity, as well as the role of individual and collective agency, in a world characterised by ubiquitous surveillance.

Non-surveillance

Any anthropology of surveillance must reckon with its inverse and counterpart: non-surveillance. Non-surveillance can be understood as the broad spectrum of individual and collective activities that seek to resist or reimagine visibility before a surveilling authority. This frequently takes on a moral force. In a world where even deserts are technologically monitored, their sands mapped by satellites and scanned by drones, the idea of anonymity has become a value around which new kinds of collectives have gathered (Anon Collective 2021; Coleman 2014; Comité invisible 2009). One of the most renown is the Anonymous movement, in which participants could be identified by the wearing of homogenous Guy Fawkes masks. In Britain, becoming ‘Anonymous’ paradoxically became a strategy of hyper-visible protest, in order to oppose an invisibilisation by the state enacted through the discourse of austerity (Peacock n.d.). Indeed, any reflection on surveillance in relation to the state soon upends any straightforward moral binary between surveillance and non-surveillance (Birchall 2021). If making their citizenry legible is an essential part of the state’s capacity to enable them to live, its obverse allows the state to let others die (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Deliberate forms of ‘looking away’ from people on the margins (Kalir and Schendel 2017), such as migrants and refugees passing through or around national borders, permit these polities to absolve themselves of duties of care (Yarbakhsh 2018).

It can be argued that these dynamics of revelation and concealment lie at the very heart of the anthropological enterprise (Göpfert 2020). Ethnography, anthropology’s flagship method, involves forms of data collection through technologies that can, and have been, compared to surveillance. As she examines the eleven-volume file collected on her by the Romanian Security Services (Securitate) in the 1970s and 80s, Katharine Verdery asks herself, ‘When I read in the file that I “exploit people for informative purposes” can I deny that anthropologists often do just that as Securitate officers do? Isn’t this part of the critique of my discipline that likens it to a colonial practice?’ (2018, 18). These existential doubts about anthropology are important to address^[6] (cf. Boas [1919] 2005; Price 2016), and one response is to return to our opening statements: that what matters are the conditions and purposes in and for which human subjects become visible through ethnography. In the 1930s, Bronislaw Malinowski advocated for the creation of a ‘nation-wide surveillance network’ through forms of mass ethnographic observation (1938), which would address the ills of society. Similarly, for other anthropologists, refusing to collect or include information that could serve structures of domination becomes a political act (Price 2011; Simpson 2014; Yonucu 2022). The questions that anthropologists often ask themselves are those that must also be asked of surveillance: how are human beings becoming visible through monitoring technologies, and why?

Conclusion

The anthropology of surveillance is a relatively new area of inquiry that looks set to expand as relations that can be named as surveillance do. Anthropology has the potential to demonstrate the social and cultural complexity of these relationships as historically constituted ways of seeing interact with new technologies. While public discourses may continue to express alarm at the growth of ‘Orwellian’ societies, it is worth remembering that 1984 was written partly in protest at new forms of identification in Britain that came to underpin the NHS (Higgs 2003). Anthropology shows us that it is the social projects around monitoring, whether large or small, that define what the qualities of these relationships are.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this article draws was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 947867).

Note on contributors

Vita Peacock is an anthropologist in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and PI on the ERC project: Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain (SAMCOM) (2021 – 2025). She is an affiliate member of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5645-3242

Vita Peacock, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. vita.peacock@kcl.ac.uk

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London. He currently researches health surveillance and digital self-monitoring in Britain, as part of the SAMCOM project. He also teaches medical anthropology at Cambridge University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book titled Towards an anthropology of psychology. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1814-294X

Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

Claire Elisabeth Dungey is an anthropologist and research associate at King’s College London and currently researches the relationship between surveillance, care and family life in Germany, as part of the SAMCOM project. Her research interests cover the anthropology of childhood and education, mobility and future aspirations. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1432-9096

Claire Elisabeth Dungey, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. claire.dungey@kcl.ac.uk. Claire is also honorary fellow at Durham University: claire.e.dungey@durham.ac.uk

Matan Shapiro is an anthropologist currently working as a research associate in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, as part of the SAMCOM project. He studies how the practice of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) and related forms of monitoring help shape new online spaces of moral consent. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2655-7467

Matan Shapiro, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. matan.shapiro@kcl.ac.uk

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[1] The World Health Organization (WHO) defines public health surveillance as ‘the continuous, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data.’ World Health Organization. 2023. “Surveillance.” https://www.who.int/emergencies/surveillance. Accessed 23 March 2023.

[2] A radioactive pill clock was a cylindrical block drilled with a number of holes that could hold a daily supply of pills. The pill clock had a cover that allowed the removal of only one set of pills at a time. A patient would rotate the device and remove the daily pills. Yet it was unknown to the patient that the device had a small piece of photographic film and a radioactive emitter embedded in plastic that could determine time intervals and hence a patient’s irregularity.

[3] FemTech, short for ‘female [health] technology’, is a fast-growing women’s health movement in the digital health industry and beyond. The term was coined in 2016 by the Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin, co-founder of the period-tracking app, ‘Clue’.

[4] The term ‘lateral’ should not be taken literally as 'sideways'. Instead, the idea of ‘lateral surveillance’ involves looking around in all directions and being able to survey peers as much as subordinates or superiors. Within this perspective, which is endemic to any form of participatory surveillance, there is little qualified difference between lateral, synoptic and sous-veillance, all of which express the same fluidity as a response to the relative rigidity of Foucault's analysis.

[5] Thomas Mathiesen attributes this to the emergent construction of new moral sensibilities involving three types of synoptic surveillance techniques: 1) the ability to see everything (‘syn-opticism’); 2) the ability to make everything visible (‘syn-omorphism’); and 3) the ability to communicate information (‘syn-noetics’). When these elements are combined, he argued, power can be produced, diffused, and obtained in unexpected ways.

[6] Price, David. 2000. “Anthropologists as spies.” The Nation, November 2. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/anthropologists-spies/

Editor:

Hanna Nieber