Social Analysis

While industrial closures in past decades were legitimized through an emphasis on economic motives, current closures are often framed within an emphasis on ‘green transition’, that is, through prefigurative discourses about post-carbon futures. This article discusses how the prefigurative transition framework reshapes the industrialization narrative, seeking to bridge the anthropology of energy and theories of performance. By paying attention to how ‘proclaimed transition’ is envisioned, narrated, and performed, the article explores the ways in which transition in Svalbard is spectacularly dramatized by the dismantling of the Svea coal mines, accompanied by the ‘returning to nature’ of the area. The article analyzes this ‘returning’ as a social drama of our anthropogenic times, demonstrating how landscape and nature are made key entities in performances of post-carbon utopia(s).

Inspired by recent discussions of ‘traps’ among STS and anthropology scholars, this article explores how Japanese scientists capture iPS (induced pluripotent stem) cells to take advantage of their potentialities. Since iPS cells are tiny, unstable, and permeable, humans cannot intervene directly to transform their morphology and nature. Making a proper environment for their thriving—in other words, creating a trap—is the only way for humans to successfully harness and direct the cells’ potentiality. Based on long-term fieldwork in one laboratory, I suggest that the technologies, institutions, and laws that mediate between humans and cells can be understood as a series of ‘ecological traps’. Ultimately, iPS cells resist unilateral standardization and commercialization, forcing humans to adapt their own behaviors and governing systems to accommodate cells.

Among the Luo of Kenya, blood carries potencies that make life. The common saying ‘blood follows blood’ embodies this flow of potencies between different entities (human and non-human) that creates life and changes life-courses. The materiality of blood is agentive here, in the sense that it produces diverse human conditions. Examples are given specifically from life-cycle rituals, prayers, and healing practices of a Luo community in western Kenya. Ultimately, the sentient agency of blood defines the essence and dimensions of life in this case. Our focus on the conditions and processes that make life is contrasted with culturalist approaches, which misrecognize life plurality.

By installing fog catchers in the hills around Lima, Peru, conservationists seek to transform fog into water for use in infrastructures of fog oasis reforestation. This article describes the devices and techniques of inquiry through which fog was gradually rendered catchable. These relational engagements with the atmosphere, and the multifarious forms that fog assumed along the way, will be used to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of speculative realism for more-than-human ethnography. Particularly relevant is Graham Harman's notion of ‘vicarious causation’, which denotes how things located outside thought can be accessed vicariously and partially, for example, through allusion. My contention is that this concept may be productively adapted for ethnographic inquiry if repurposed to fit with an open-ended and relational understanding of the outside.

What is it to be alien? This article considers the debate concerning alienation/de-alienation launched by Hegel and revisited a half-century ago by Jacques Derrida. It examines the systemic reduction of legal rights of presence that migrants in contemporary Europe regularly encounter. Such experiences lead people to undergo a ‘loss of presence’ in the sense that they question their relationship with the world and the people around them. As Ernesto de Martino proposed, these occurrences constitute a ‘subjective alienation’ brought about by ‘objective alienation’. In this way, they impact one's personal ontogeny, producing what I call a ‘habitus of migrancy’. As a contribution toward ethnographic theory, the article engages the role of long-term self-reflection in anthropological analysis.