Ethnography In/Of/As Open Systems1

Learning to feel at home in the Anthropocene:

“…According to Rheinberger, the foundational trait of the experimental system is its capacity for differential reproduction: the ability to be replicated with high fidelity across space and time, combined with the tendency to engender unanticipated, surprising effects (Rheinberger , 292). As anthropologist Kim Fortun (, 186) explains, the experimental system “provides orientation, without determining where the system itself, or those that use it [will] go.” Along similar lines, experiments in the ecologies of everyday life can produce transformative effects that unfold across multiple registers and gather momentum even in the absence of a well‐defined end point. About his own project of domestic adjustment, adaptation, and self‐provisioning, Peter once said, “We can't know what's possible and what isn't until we try.…”

Unfinished

“…144 Marked by returns, ongoingness, and the meantimes that unfold while the anthropologist is in the field and afterward, ethnography also brings subjects into contact with each other in lasting, unpredictable, and transformative ways. 145 Through fieldwork, we become a part of ethnographic open systems and are folded into lives, relationships, and swerves across time and space. 146 These systems hold us in a kind of unfinished proximity with one another, retreating and reemerging, engendering unanticipated connections and reconfigurations, never definitively closed off nor decisively transformational.…”

Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems

“…At issue are not just better methods, but a return to some of the most fundamental moral and cultural issues that anthropology and cultural analysis have addressed over the past century and a half (see Figure 3): issues of class differences, culture wars, social warrants, social reform, and social justice (viz., the August 2006 special issue on U.S. culture and social warrants, Cultural Anthropology); of individual rights, human rights, cultural tolerance, multicultural ethics (viz., the journal Cultural Survival; Allen 2003;Engle 2001;Povinelli 2002;Ramos 1995Ramos , 1998; of mental health and subjectivation (Biehl et al in press;Good et al in press;Kleinman et al 1997); of democratic checks 39 and balances, institutions of ethical debate, regulation, and the slow negotiation of international law (Fassin 2006;Jasanoff 2005;Kuo 2006;Masco 2006;Pandolfi 2002Pandolfi , 2006; and of access to information and the formation of new kinds of public spheres (Dumit in press;Fortun 2001;M. Fortun in press, Kelty in press).…”

“…But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of "methodological relativism," of the social conflicts involved in negotiating political and legal regimes, and of the cultural resources in any society for claiming and contesting legitimacy. Methodological relativism includes exploring cultural contestations within societies (Fischer 1980(Fischer , 1982(Fischer , 1986(Fischer , 2004, struggles to form public spheres in different sociopolitical contexts and historical horizons (Anderson 1983;Appadurai 2006;Fortun 2001;Habermas 1989;Lynch 2006), and cross-cultural and cross-nation-state networks and alliances, including efforts to negotiate across "enunciatory communities" (Fortun 2001) and civic epistemologies (Jasanoff 2005). Methodological relativism includes exploring cultural contestations within societies (Fischer 1980(Fischer , 1982(Fischer , 1986(Fischer , 2004, struggles to form public spheres in different sociopolitical contexts and historical horizons (Anderson 1983;Appadurai 2006;Fortun 2001;Habermas 1989;Lynch 2006), and cross-cultural and cross-nation-state networks and alliances, including efforts to negotiate across "enunciatory communities" (Fortun 2001) and civic epistemologies (Jasanoff 2005).…”

“…The 1980s revisions included new efforts to use ethnography to investigate and map the changing nature of cultural and social forms at the end of the 20th century (Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences [1986]); inquiries into the multiple disciplinary tools that could be employed in making cultural analysis more trenchant and revealing (Writing Culture [Clifford and Marcus 1986]); the incorporation of transdisciplinary approaches (feminism, deconstruction, film and media studies, new historicism, science and technology studies, cyborg anthropology); the efforts to revive area and global studies with fresher ideas about how to do multisited ethnographies of mutually dependent activities in dispersed parts of larger systems or networks; and inquiries into second-order modernization and risk society (Beck 1992(Beck , 2000(Beck , 2005Brown and Mikkelson 1990;Epstein 1996;Fortun 2001;George 2001;Harr 1995;Petryna 2002;Reich 1991). New journals propelled these initiatives: 1988), Positions (1, 1992, Visual Anthropology (1987), Subaltern Studies (1, 1982), Representations (1983), and the eight-volume annual Late Editions (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000).…”