The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of power in the contemporary world, there is surprisingly little dialogue between FTS and mainstream cultural anthropology. This review begins by outlining FTS and its concepts and methods. I then turn to the anthropology of technology, which also offers useful conceptual frameworks and methods for exploring gender regimes. Then, to highlight the ideological and methodological contrasts between social and cultural analyses of technology and the implications for gender analysis, I discuss the treatment of technology in two leading theoretical fields in the cultural anthropology of modernity and globalization: the anthropology of technoscience, and material culture studies. I conclude by asking which forms of engagement might be envisaged between the fields.

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Crops are a very special type of human artifact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops suggest ways to embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out the linkages between flows and matrices and thus developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Our focus here is on the movements, or failures to move, of “cropscapes”: the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. As with the landscape, the cropscape as concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing with how to frame our selected cropscapes spatially and chronologically, we develop productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodization, geographical hierarchies, and scale that still prevail within history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history.

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