Failure as an Endpoint

Miyazaki, Hirokazu; Riles, Annelise

doi:10.1002/9780470696569.ch17

Cited by 45 publications

(58 citation statements)

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“…Other anthropologists of experts, I should note, have read into parallel situations in their own field research the threat of an epistemo-logical end point for anthropology in the potential doubling, collapse and/or cancellation of analytical knowledge forms-for example, what happens to anthropological theory in the situation where the expert subject has already decided that theory has failed (e.g., Miyazaki and Riles 2005)? Is it fair or even possible to theorise the failure of theory?…”

Section: Contingent Jurisdictions Anxious Analystsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts

Boyer¹

2008

Anthropology in Action

170

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This article offers a synthetic overview of the major opportunities and impasses of an emergent anthropology of experts and expertise. In the wake of the boom in anthropological science and technology studies since the 1980s, the anthropology of experts has become one of the most vibrant and promising enterprises in socialcultural anthropology today. And, yet, I argue that the theorisation and ethnography of experts and cultures of expertise remains underdeveloped in some crucial respects. The body of the article defines expertise as a relation of epistemic jurisdiction and explores the sociological and epistemological dilemmas emerging from research, that poises one expert (the anthropologist) in the situation of trying to absorb another regime of expertise into his/her own. With due appreciation for what the anthropology of experts has achieved thus far, I close with a manifesto designed to prompt a reassessment of where this research enterprise should go from here. I urge that we treat experts not solely as rational(ist) creatures of expertise but rather as desiring, relating, doubting, anxious, contentious, affective-in other words as human-subjects.

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Section: Contingent Jurisdictions Anxious Analystsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts

Boyer¹

2008

Anthropology in Action

170

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“…It also implies more than a simple attention to 'durability' or to 'form' in which the question of failure is posed as a determinative or narrative 'endpoint'. 24 Richard's practice would lead to conflict management or what Andrew Barry calls anti-politics were it not for the reciprocal relationship involved, that is, the mutuallyconstitutive normativity elaborated through activists' and managers' labour on each other. Dialogue with activists, especially when they monitor the environmental and social contingencies of the dam, provides important information feedback to the managers.…”

Section: Operationalizing the Relationmentioning

confidence: 98%

Intervention, Management, Technological Error

Whitington¹

2008

Parallax

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“…Indeed, what an ethnography of legal knowledge that sustains the market elucidates is the personal toll of a form of knowledge that proceeds from an awareness of its limitations (Miyazaki and Riles 2005) and of the hierarchies that result. My own work among lawyers in a variety of other market settings, from the bureaucracy to the law firm to the academy (Riles 2011 ), suggests that this ethnographic observation has some generalizability: the constant awareness of the fact that one must act without knowing finance, without knowing trading, without even fully knowing law, is the burden (as well as the condition of empowerment) of the legal expert in the financial market.…”

Section: Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collateral Expertise

Riles¹

2010

Current Anthropology

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This essay offers an ethnographically grounded critique of and an alternative to science-studiesinflected approaches to the social studies of finance. The focus on trading as the core of finance and the analysis of trading as an analog of technoscientific practice unwittingly substantiate one of the core ideological claims of finance, that it is a discrete world whose activities are protoscientific. A focus on the legal, regulatory, and documentary practices that instantiate the world of traders, in contrast, presents a very different conception of finance. Finance, in this view, is an explicit politics (not a hidden politics masked as epistemological practice), a purposeful and stated compulsion of self and others, a realm of must, shall, and will, albeit one always defined by certain temporal limits. Attention to the temporal politics of finance requires an analytical approach that does more than uncover the politics of expertise. The promise of such an approach is that it might help us to apprehend already thriving forms of political response to global capitalism: arrangements of human and nonhuman legal instruments beyond critiques of global capitalism on the one hand and alternatives to global capitalism on the other. One such arrangement is what I term the placeholder.

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Failure as an Endpoint

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts

Thinking through the Anthropology of Experts

Intervention, Management, Technological Error

Collateral Expertise

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