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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Stephen J. Collier is a faculty member at the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School University.

Review :
“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