Assembling an Anthropological Actor: Anthropological Assemblage and Colonial Government in Papua

Touch in anthropometry: Enacting race in Dutch New Guinea 1903–1909

“…This required an enormous anthropometrical apparatus. Adopting an actor-network-theory (ANT) approach as recently proposed in this journal by Bennett, Dipley, Harrison and others, this apparatus of anthropometry can be seen as an assemblage of skills, people, material objects, knowledge, "centers of calculation" (Latour 1986), infrastructures of travel and more (Bennett, Dibley, and Harrison 2014;Dibley 2014).…”

Introduction: Anthropology, Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

“…However, read collectively, the papers also constitute an attempt to disconnect arguments about "the practical history of anthropology" from the assumption that the relationship between anthropology and governmentality can only be identified under circumstances where there is a direct or identifiable impact on the administrative practices of the state. Of course there are a number of instances where this can be demonstrated (see Dibley 2014, for example), but arguments about governmentality have a broader orientation: that of the respects in which knowledge practices provide means of acting on populations and individuals on the part of experts whose relations to state administrative practices might take many forms-as parts of administrative bureaus, or as agents outside such bureaus whose activities nonetheless impinge on and effect in various ways the discourses and apparatuses which such bureaus employ in conceptualizing, organizing, and legitimizing their practices (see Bennett 2014;Harrison 2014). Tony Bennett's formulations on the role played by the post-Boasian concept of culture in providing a "working surface on the social" offer a useful example.…”

“…Indeed, anthropology's distinctive contribution to processes of governing has consisted precisely in the variability of the conduits it has organized for acting on populations. Boasian "culture" provides one strong example of this (Bennett 2014), but contributors to the special issue identify a number of other transactional realities which served to mediate relations of governmentality: "the dying native" (Rowse 2014), "native culture" (Dibley 2014), and "morale" (Harrison 2014) are all examples of entities that have emerged to work this interface.…”

“…In contending with these relations two concepts have been significant for contributors, the connected notions of "centre of calculation" and "centre of collection". In a number of papers, particularly Dias's (2014) and Dibley's (2014), the question of the relationship between such centres is raised in ways that come to qualify Latour's initial formulations. In this they challenge the implicit centre-periphery logic that would seem to accompany Latour when he posits centres of calculation exclusively in the metropole, as sites distant from the field as a site of collecting.…”