Global Discourse Forum on Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (MIT Press, 2019)

Daston, Lorraine

doi:10.1332/204378921x16099483886705

Cited by 7 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The desire for modes of knowledge uncontaminated by politics and subjective judgment is in many ways coterminous with late modernity (see Daston 2007). Today, climate change and biodiversity loss reinvigorate such desire via sophisticated modes of calculation aiming to make mathematical abstractions increasingly precise, auditable, and self‐consistent at planetary scales.…”

Section: The Politics Of Calculational Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Romero Dianderas

2024

Cult. Anthropol.

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Recent years have witnessed the advancement of several technocratic interventions in the context of the global environmental crisis that aim to calculate and track different objects of environmental concern at various scales. In this article, I focus on how such technocratic interventions are transforming the processes by which tropical timber is technically rendered into calculational abstractions known as “volumes” in Peru’s tropical timber supply chains. Drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork following the activities of loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats across Peru’s Amazonian region of Loreto, I show how calculational abstractions can never fully circumvent the frictions of power, history, and bodily experience. Rather, technocratic interventions aiming to standardize tropical timber-calculation procedures ultimately transform volumes into fertile ethnographic terrains from which to appreciate how competing forms of political imagination intersect and collide with each other as Amazonia enters the age of climate change and biodiversity loss. RESUMEN Durante los últimos años, distintas intervenciones tecnocráticas han sido desplegadas en el contexto de la crisis ambiental global con el fin de calcular y trazar distintos objetos de preocupación ambiental a distintas escalas. En este artículo, me centro en cómo estas intervenciones tecnocráticas están transformando los procesos por los cuales la madera tropical es convertida en abstracciones calculacionales llamadas “volúmenes” dentro de las cadenas de suministro de madera tropical del Perú. Sobre la base de veinticuatro meses de trabajo de campo siguiendo las actividades de madereros, industriales y tecnócratas del Estado en la región amazónica de Loreto, muestro cómo las abstracciones calculacionales nunca pueden escapar del todo de las fricciones del poder, la historia y la experiencia corporal. Más bien, las intervenciones tecnocráticas que buscan estandarizar los procedimientos de calculo sobre la madera tropical transforman los volúmenes en terrenos etnográficos fértiles desde los cuales es posible apreciar cómo distintas formas de imaginación política se intersectan y colisionan al tiempo que la Amazonía ingresa a la era del cambio climático y la perdida de biodiversidad.

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Section: The Politics Of Calculational Abstractionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Romero Dianderas

2024

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…As philosopher Michael Marder (2013) contends: “A plant’s growth is the first indication of faithfulness to its milieu” (222). Dahlias are faithful to the process of reproduction—“like reproduces like,” historian of science Lorraine Daston (2019) determines (26, iBook). The dahlia’s fidelity to alien environments is the raison d’être into oblique relations, unexpected findings, and appreciation for new thoughts that are inseparable from Spanish archives and their LatinX impact.…”

Section: Latinx Populusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What does it mean to think alongside the dahlia? What might the plant mean to a human whose body has been tampered with; who asymmetrically became one of Linnaeus’s Latin species; who has been “naturally” passed down to different kinds of nature; whose construction is both native and foreign; who comes “to be” through a rather unnatural classificatory order; and who is exclusively known in a “world of only proper nouns” (Daston, 2019: 25, iBook)? The RBG is an archive for how the LatinX subject—and what turns to flower X, dahlia X, or dahliX—are works “against nature,” as Daston might call them, a lower form of being under the scala naturae ’s hierarchical structuring of life.…”

Section: Latinx Populusmentioning

confidence: 99%

LatinX genesis: On the origins of a mongrel species

Milian

2024

Cultural Dynamics

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This essay focuses its attention on Madrid, the Royal Botanical Garden (RBG), and the LatinX presence just as they were all coming into existence in the Spanish and European world. Pursuing a LatinX origin that exceeds humanness, this thought exploration tracks the Mesoamerican dahlia, transplanted to Spain in 1789. Acocoxochitl—what we now know as the dahlia, named after Swedish naturalist Andreas Dahl (1751–1789)—was one of the first plants to arrive at Madrid’s RBG when it opened nearly three centuries ago. The flower was tested on, domesticated, and acclimated, making its botanical debut as the dahlia pinnata in 1791. The dahlia is a vector for an unanticipated life form, clueing us in on where the LatinX world-in-process was heading. It offers a glimpse of how the garden and the Latin find themselves arranged and come into being. How LatinX history is blurred—and how LatinX difference has been produced—in Madrid’s iconography is disentangled here. The piece weighs in on these considerations: What does it mean to think alongside the dahlia? What might the plant mean to a human whose body has been tampered with; who asymmetrically became one of Carolus Linnaeus’s Latin species; who has been “naturally” passed down to different kinds of nature; whose construction is both native and foreign; and who comes into being through a rather unnatural classificatory order?

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“…At the same time, however, ziran is also, and often more appropriately, used quite differently in ways that make little immediate sense in English. Possibilities for translation include ‘self-so’, ‘what is spontaneously so’ or ‘let the character of the self unfold’ – locutions that resonate in some measure with Daston’s ‘specific nature’ ( 2019 : 7ff). However, the larger story is that ziran in this second family of senses indexes Chinese philosophical and medical assumptions about unfolding forms of balance and imbalance in flows of qi that are more or less foreign to European thought and practice.…”

Section: Chinese Medicine Ziran and Nature-factsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking differently with Chinese medicine: ‘Explanations’ and case studies for a postcolonial STS

Lin

Law

2022

Soc Stud Sci

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In Mandarin, the English word ‘nature’ translates as ‘ ziran’ (自然zìrán) in science, biomedicine and everyday life. At the same time, ziran indexes a second older set of meanings that make little immediate sense in English. Current in many Chinese medical practices as well as in classical Chinese philosophy, these include ‘what is spontaneously so’ or ‘let the character of the self unfold’. In this article we explore how these two families of meaning are related by particular Taiwanese Chinese medical practitioners as they describe how they negotiate the relations between biomedicine and Chinese medicine in daily professional practice. At the same time, inspired by related logic-shifting writing in anthropology, postcolonial studies and postcolonial STS, we draw on the ‘art of patterning’ (辨證 biàn zhèng) to understand how ziran-nature relations are specified in those accounts. Patterning is the art of specifying the shifting arrangements and misalignments that lead to ill health. Treating this as a way of thinking about ziran-related overlaps between biomedicine and Chinese medicine, we show that patterning attends not to objects ‘out there’ but to appearances (象xiang, xiàng). Put into use as an STS term of art it therefore shifts the epistemological basis of inquiry because case-stories no longer reveal underlying mechanisms, but instead narrate patterned appearances. One implication of this is that any particular pattern diagnosis lies alongside a galaxy of alternatives that might be equally good to think with. Within the limits set by referential academic conventions, we thus attempt a postcolonial shi (勢)-inflected STS in this paper by resisting the use of a single analytical framework, instead setting different forms of patterning alongside one another.

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Global Discourse Forum on Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (MIT Press, 2019)

Cited by 7 publications

References 8 publications

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LatinX genesis: On the origins of a mongrel species

Thinking differently with Chinese medicine: ‘Explanations’ and case studies for a postcolonial STS

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