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Global Assemblages
Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Aihwa Ong (Edited by), A Ong (Author), Stephen J. Collier (Edited by)

9781405123587, Wiley

Paperback / softback, published 31 August 2004

512 pages
24.6 x 17.3 x 2.8 cm, 0.871 kg

“This compelling book demonstrates how a very sophisticated anthropological perspective can transform ‘globalization’ into a useful tool for investigating emerging social forms and ways of ruling and living. Certainly this non-structural approach is needed—one that attends to the specificity of combinations, interactions, sites, and effects associated with the spread of technology and risk.”

Ulrich Beck, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München


“Global Assemblages provides excellent and rich insight into a developing anthropology of the contemporary world. The intertwining of violence, capital flows, political fragmentation, and regimes of social and moral control are investigated here in what must be recognized as a major contribution to anthropological scholarship.”

Jonathan Friedman, L’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and Lund University, Sweden


“This volume will give assemblages of many types a good name—the authors are astute, varied, and at the top of their game; the geographies do justice to the notion of global; and the book has a core intellectual inquiry about reflexive practices that holds together its wide-ranging essays. From transplanted kidneys to research audit protocols, the uneasy interrelationships of global assemblages emerge in the fleshy details of a knotted world.”

Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention.

  • Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.
  • Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values.
  • Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose.
  • Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe.
  • Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

Notes on Contributors viii

Acknowledgments xiii

Part I Introduction 1

1 Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems 3
Stephen J. Collier and Aihwa Ong

2 On Regimes of Living 22
Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff

3 Midst Anthropology’s Problems 40
Paul Rabinow

Part II Bioscience and Biological Life 55

Ethics of Technoscientific Objects 57

4 Stem Cells R Us: Emergent Life Forms and the Global Biological 59
Sarah Franklin

5 Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception 79
Lawrence Cohen

6 The Iceland Controversy: Reflections on the Transnational Market of Civic Virtue 91
Gísli Pálsson and Paul Rabinow

Value and Values 105

7 Time, Money, and Biodiversity 107
Geoffrey C. Bowker

8 Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship 124
Vinh-kim Nguyen

9 The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘‘Fresh’’ Organs 145
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Part III Social Technologies and Disciplines 169

Standards 171

10 Standards and Person-Making in East Central Europe 173
Elizabeth C. Dunn

11 The Private Life of Numbers: Pharmaceutical Marketing in Post-Welfare Argentina 194
Andrew Lakoff

12 Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy 214
Bill Maurer

Practices of Calculating Selves 233

13 Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography 235
Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus

14 The Discipline of Speculators 253
Caitlin Zaloom

15 Cultures on the Brink: Reengineering the Soul of Capitalism – On a Global Scale 270
Kris Olds and Nigel Thrift

Managing Uncertainty 291

16 Heterarchies of Value: Distributing Intelligence and Organizing Diversity in a New Media Startup 293
Monique Girard and David Stark

17 Failure as an Endpoint 320
Hirokazu Miyazaki and Annelise Riles

Part IV Governmentality and Politics 333

Governing Populations 335

18 Ecologies of Expertise: Assembling Flows, Managing Citizenship 337
Aihwa Ong

19 Globalization and Population Governance in China 354
Susan Greenhalgh

20 Budgets and Biopolitics 373
Stephen J. Collier

Security, Legitimacy, Justice 391

21 State and Urban Space in Brazil: From Modernist Planning to Democratic Interventions 393
Teresa Caldeira and James Holston

22 The Garrison–Entrepôt: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin 417
Janet Roitman

Citizenship and Ethics 437

23 Biological Citizenship 439
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas

24 Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures 464
Marilyn Strathern

Index 482

Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD]
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