Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff and a few others have just launched a new project on the Anthropology of Biosecurity as part of their “anthropology of the contemporary” project. A recent article from Anthropology Today is available on the site for download; it is part grant proposal part theoretical justification, part groovy photo essay.
If they’re so contemporary why is their code still lousy with frame tags? Grumble grumble…
One would not want to belittle the importance of the Rabinowians and their ongoing creative work, but I am perpetually disturbed by the way in which “contemporary” for them seems always and only to include questions of a ‘scientistic’ nature, viz. biomedicine, technology, the genetic, and so on. By contrast, the Strathernians at Cambridge seem clearly to frame questions related to contemporary enterprise (new forms of property *across* social domains such as ‘science’ and ‘culture’) in terms that both honor and allow the importance of human inventions outside places like laboratories on the campus of UC Berkeley. I mean: doesn’t *this* usage of ‘contemporary’ partake of all the othering techniques that anthropology has so assiduously critiqued since the 1980s (Fabian) and before??
strongthomas — interesting contrast. I wonder if we could figure out part of what’s at stake by cherchezing the moolah: “the biopolitics of global security” (and the blurb describing the same on the website referenced in Chris’s original post) sounds — for an anthropological research agenda — slam-dunkably fundable.
my bad — that should read “global biopolitics of security”. sort of like poetry magnets, no?
Yeah! Strongthomas in the house!
Re: fundability. I do think that right now in the U.S., anyone who engages in talk of ‘security’ (e.g., biosecurity) risks participating in and potentially reproducing an ideological circumstance that interpellates all of us as subjects of ‘terror,’ that understands all contemporary politics as ‘war,’ and that has been instrumental in creating a pathetically (and apathetically) docile American public that seems to be *enjoying* the systematic dismantling of the premises on which it was founded.
right on, bro.
Of course, Rabinow et al are not unaware of that and in fact their project ostensibly hopes to make explicit and thereby understand the various forms (technological, practical, discursive) through which ‘security’ has been made a problem via ‘terror.’ I’m torn right now as to how intellectuals, and anthropologists in particular, can address the ideology of ‘terror’ whilst not taking part in it. I mean: when I watch headline news, it is simply a steady drumbeat of ‘possible risks.’ For example, yesterday a story about tugboat operators on the Mississippi and how afraid they are of an attack (followed by a story on “the runaway bride”). LAC and its emphasis on biosecurity would seem to be another piece of semiotic flotsam floating in the progandistic river of ‘terror.’
What am I on about? Rabinow, Collier and Lakoff refer to Mary Douglas’s work on risk and on the politics of risk perception. Our much-missed friend Mary argued quite convincingly I think that since not all risks can possibly be known, the risks (read: dangers) that a society chooses to focus on reveal a ‘cultural bias’ that relates political and social organization to cosmological circumstance. Societies project into nature (or other societies) dangers that are central to reproducing particular sorts of social form internally.
What interests me then is the politics of the subjects that *anthropologists* select for study (the cultural bias revealed in what they select as worthy of study), and particularly, given my comment above, what anthropologists like these three deem worth of the label ‘contemporary.’ My gut feeling is that even if they would want to stand slightly askew the ‘power discourse’ of war/science that comprises contemporary poltics, their critique probably joins forces with the very discourse they might hope to resist.
Oddly, my impulse then is that intellectuals, and anthropologists in particular, have an obligation not to cede thought to the ideological imperatives of neverending war. I do think that *we* have a special obligation to bring to attention what’s happening in places that people in the U.S. might not have much use for, e.g., say, the Asaro valley of Papua New Guinea. It *really* irks me that Rabinow thinks that “anthropos” is being re-defined — but not by peoples all over the world, rather by molecular scientists.
If they’re so contemporary why is their code still lousy with frame tags? Grumble grumble…
One would not want to belittle the importance of the Rabinowians and their ongoing creative work, but I am perpetually disturbed by the way in which “contemporary” for them seems always and only to include questions of a ‘scientistic’ nature, viz. biomedicine, technology, the genetic, and so on. By contrast, the Strathernians at Cambridge seem clearly to frame questions related to contemporary enterprise (new forms of property *across* social domains such as ‘science’ and ‘culture’) in terms that both honor and allow the importance of human inventions outside places like laboratories on the campus of UC Berkeley. I mean: doesn’t *this* usage of ‘contemporary’ partake of all the othering techniques that anthropology has so assiduously critiqued since the 1980s (Fabian) and before??
strongthomas — interesting contrast. I wonder if we could figure out part of what’s at stake by cherchezing the moolah: “the biopolitics of global security” (and the blurb describing the same on the website referenced in Chris’s original post) sounds — for an anthropological research agenda — slam-dunkably fundable.
my bad — that should read “global biopolitics of security”. sort of like poetry magnets, no?
Yeah! Strongthomas in the house!
Re: fundability. I do think that right now in the U.S., anyone who engages in talk of ‘security’ (e.g., biosecurity) risks participating in and potentially reproducing an ideological circumstance that interpellates all of us as subjects of ‘terror,’ that understands all contemporary politics as ‘war,’ and that has been instrumental in creating a pathetically (and apathetically) docile American public that seems to be *enjoying* the systematic dismantling of the premises on which it was founded.
right on, bro.
Of course, Rabinow et al are not unaware of that and in fact their project ostensibly hopes to make explicit and thereby understand the various forms (technological, practical, discursive) through which ‘security’ has been made a problem via ‘terror.’ I’m torn right now as to how intellectuals, and anthropologists in particular, can address the ideology of ‘terror’ whilst not taking part in it. I mean: when I watch headline news, it is simply a steady drumbeat of ‘possible risks.’ For example, yesterday a story about tugboat operators on the Mississippi and how afraid they are of an attack (followed by a story on “the runaway bride”). LAC and its emphasis on biosecurity would seem to be another piece of semiotic flotsam floating in the progandistic river of ‘terror.’
What am I on about? Rabinow, Collier and Lakoff refer to Mary Douglas’s work on risk and on the politics of risk perception. Our much-missed friend Mary argued quite convincingly I think that since not all risks can possibly be known, the risks (read: dangers) that a society chooses to focus on reveal a ‘cultural bias’ that relates political and social organization to cosmological circumstance. Societies project into nature (or other societies) dangers that are central to reproducing particular sorts of social form internally.
What interests me then is the politics of the subjects that *anthropologists* select for study (the cultural bias revealed in what they select as worthy of study), and particularly, given my comment above, what anthropologists like these three deem worth of the label ‘contemporary.’ My gut feeling is that even if they would want to stand slightly askew the ‘power discourse’ of war/science that comprises contemporary poltics, their critique probably joins forces with the very discourse they might hope to resist.
Oddly, my impulse then is that intellectuals, and anthropologists in particular, have an obligation not to cede thought to the ideological imperatives of neverending war. I do think that *we* have a special obligation to bring to attention what’s happening in places that people in the U.S. might not have much use for, e.g., say, the Asaro valley of Papua New Guinea. It *really* irks me that Rabinow thinks that “anthropos” is being re-defined — but not by peoples all over the world, rather by molecular scientists.