Aihwa Ong, Stephen J. Collier (eds.): Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, bioethics, biopolitics, ethnography
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.
Published by Wiley-Blackwell, 2005
ISBN 1405123583, 9781405123587
494 pages
Key terms:
biopolitics, neoliberal, Singapore, Belaya Kalitva, anthropology, Heterarchies, Michel Foucault, Paul Rabinow, Icelandic, Marilyn Strathern, Islamic banking, ethnography, Cameroon, David Stark, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, deCode Genetics, bioavailability, bioethics
Sherry Turkle (ed.): The Inner History of Devices (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · ethnography, internet, new media, psychoanalysis, psychology, technology
For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening—that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines.
In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an “intimate ethnography” that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: “This computer means everything to me. It’s where I put my hope.” Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: “What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?” The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer.
In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan (“Tokyo sat trapped inside it”); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262201763, 9780262201766
208 pages
PDF (updated 2012-11-4)
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