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- Convenors:
-
Chakad Ojani
(Uppsala University)
Kathrin Eitel (University of Zurich)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Practices of speculation have been described both as destructive and as capable of engendering more desirable futures. At the same time, speculation has also been adopted as an aspect of ethnographic practice. This panel explores the tension between speculation as method and object of inquiry.
Long Abstract:
Practices of speculation have been approached ethnographically both with suspicion and awe. For instance, speculative finance is often described as an ill whereby desirable worlds are tragically unmade (Bear 2020). In contrast, speculative art, design, or engineering hint at sounder futures already in the process of taking shape (Watts 2019). The latter approach to speculation treats the empirical as a realm that “bubble[s] with unrealized possibilities” (Tsing 2015: 255). Framings of anthropology as inventive (Wagner 1975) situate ethnographic practice firmly within that very same pluriverse-in-the-making. Here, traffic between the conceptual and the empirical runs in multiple directions, at times undoing the duality altogether (Gad & Jensen 2016).
While humbling, this recursivity also has an empowering effect: It makes it increasingly difficult to adopt an “ethics of estrangement” (Savransky 2016: 15) that treats the empirical with suspicion. Yet, at the same time, ethnography is rendered experimental (Ballestero & Winthereik 2021) and thus analogous to the speculative practices it has sought to merely describe. Indeed, anthropologists have recently turned to speculative fiction for “thinking across worlds” (Jensen and Kemiksiz 2019) and, by the same token, for “remaking our presence in this world” (Anderson et al. 2018). As a speculative practice in its own right, ethnography becomes a means to do the contemporary otherwise.
We invite papers that seek potency in the tension between speculation as method and object of inquiry. How might an ethnography of, with, and as speculation help us rethink the relation between anthropology and the empirical?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Jonas Köppel (University of Bern)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is about how diverse practices of speculation – or not – play out in the context of natural resource extraction in the case of lithium mining in Bolivia and beyond. What can ethnography this case say about lithium’s significance as a “critical” raw material for the energy transition?
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about how diverse practices of speculation – or not – play out in the context of natural resource extraction, particularly in the case of lithium mining in Bolivia and beyond. Extractive industries have been described as fundamentally speculative endeavors, in particular as they have come to rely heavily on the logic of financial markets. However, here I deal with practices that have received somewhat less attention, namely those of scientists and engineers who work hard to get the minerals out of the ground. These people would hardly describe their own doing as speculation, for their projects and plans are founded on the apparently solid grounds of information – or knowledge. Yet in this case, the object they have sought to extract has remained elusive, existing only in the future tense. For long, lithium has been known by many in Bolivia to be imminent, and accordingly the politics surrounding its presence have played out in its absence. In this paper I unpack one apparently solid plan to realize lithium’s potential, which was thwarted by such speculative politics. What, I wonder, can an ethnographic approach in this case say about the context in which lithium gains its global significance as a so-called critical raw material for the energy transition? I understand ethnography in particular to include my own practice as a scientist, speculative and otherwise. How does my own trajectory with lithium shape the mineral’s significance as it becomes part of the story?
Maria Debinska (Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses my research with and on the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, and artists, biologists and computer scientists who work with it. It focuses on speculative practices that Physarum invites and analyses them using Michel Serres’ concept of parasite.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses my research with and on the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum, and the people who work with it in a variety of fields, including biology, arts and computer science. It focuses on speculative practices that Physarum invites - from imagining world colonisation scenarios by computer scientists (Adamatzky) to writing their own science fiction stories by biologists (Dussutour). It examines how the peculiar properties of this organism, which is neither a fungus, nor a plant, nor an animal, but exhibits behaviours that can be interpreted as intelligence, memory, and learning capability, forces scientists to cross disciplinary boundaries and tell different stories than the ones they have been trained to tell.
It then analyses the role of an anthropologist in a field that is scattered, multidisciplinary and involving other than human agents, and the hybrid research methodology shaped by the slime mould’s ever evolving networks. It speculates that researching the human futures imagined with the help of the slime mould puts the anthropologist’s in an ambiguous position, that can be understood in terms of Michel Serres’ work on the parasite: relations established in the course of fieldwork are parasitic in nature in that each relation is towards another relation between two subjects or entities (e.g. researcher and slime mould), and distorts the latter by introducing informational noise into it.
Andrew B. Kipnis (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Paper short abstract:
This paper ethnographically depicts and analyzes the speculative market in columbaria niches in Hong Kong and Macau and interprets how the problem of whether one believes in ghosts, or whether one believes that other people believes in ghosts, affects the market.
Paper long abstract:
In many Chinese contexts, the terms Yin and Yang are used to compare graves for the dead to homes for the living. Yin residences are homes for the dead while Yang residences are for the living. In Hong Kong, multi-story columbaria, with thousands of niches on each floor, are compared to high-rise apartment buildings, where neighbors hardly know one another. In mainland China, some people used to purchase gravesites in advance, because the price for gravesites rose regularly. But now the law labels such purchases a type of “illegal real estate speculation.” But in Macau, privately built columbaria openly market columbaria niches as a form speculative commodity. The niches can be resold at any time and the rights to the niches supposedly last forever no matter who owns them. One can place one’s ancestors’ ashes in a niche for a period and then remove them and resell the niche. Or one can keep the niche empty in anticipation of a future price rise, before reselling. In the mainland, such speculation would not only be illegal, but might also prove unprofitable, because many people fear that a second-hand columbaria niche would be haunted by the ghost of its previous occupant. This paper examines the factors that people consider when speculating in columbaria niches, both in the views of sales people and in ghost stories that circulate online. A driving question will be: how does speculation about future profits proceed alongside dynamics of haunting from the past?
Lisa Hoffman (University of Washington Tacoma)
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers how precision medicine, with a focus on cancer, works through speculation. As a future-oriented, predictive analytics, precision medicine enacts logics and politics of profiling while also creating hope in patients based on statistics (vs. certainty).
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers how precision medicine, with a focus on cancer risk, diagnosis, and treatment, works through speculation. Also known as personalized or stratified medicine, precision medicine divides the population into segments based on genetics, lifestyle, and environment. It then predicts - speculates - about which treatments would be most effective for a particular patient, at a particular time. Massive datasets (big data) are analyzed through computational algorithms to create these predictions. This is a future-oriented, predictive analytics, which in many ways works through logics and politics of profiling. Moreover, rather than certainty, oncology, like precision medicine overall, “relies on statistics,” as Lochlann Jain (2013) argues, to make its claims and hedge its bets about how one may respond to treatment and perhaps even be lucky enough to survive. As health care becomes more personalized, hopes increase for individuals, yet the socio-political logics of knowing seem to be highly steeped in speculative predictions. How does one conduct an ethnographic study of such speculative practices when the stakes are so high for the individuals and their loved ones? What is at stake in such speculation? This paper addresses such questions based on research conducted for a project on how future risk is embedded in present bodies through precision medicine and the increased prominence of understanding ourselves through genetics.
Alkim Erol (ERC Visual Trust - Universitat de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation focuses on the interaction between astronomical data and data-visualization. This interaction is illustrated through some speculative visual experiments which are assigned both as research subject and as research technique, showing the intrinsic speculative nature of these images.
Paper long abstract:
Built upon on-going ethnographic visual research on astronomical images, this presentation focuses on the interaction between astronomical data and data-visualization. This interaction is illustrated through some speculative visual experiments which are assigned both as research subject and as research technique, showing the intrinsic speculative nature of these images.
The astronomical images are the data-based visual representations of objects that are incredibly far away from direct human experience in space and time. This kind of an accentuation assigns astronomical images to exist at an intersection between science and art, information and aesthetics, the conceptual and the visual. Thus, astronomers combine empirical data and conceptual imagination throughout the process of data-visualization. This allocates astronomical images to be ontologically speculative, that is, they are rather ‘mental’ than ‘material’. Subsequently, the ‘mental’ and speculative nature of astronomical images prompts us to recursively use speculation both as a method and as an object of inquiry in anthropology.
Along the lines of experimental and multimodal anthropology, I created two speculative visual experimentations: “NASA CHAPEA Mission: Ground Control through Speculative Fiction” and “Speculative Futures: Asgardia Space Nation and the Space Child”. I will present these two speculative visual pieces along with my on-going research experimentation(s) with the aim of proposing a reflection on the pluriverse-in-the-making within the anthropology of outer space.
This research forms part of the ERC-Consolidator Grant “Visual Trust” (2021-2026, www.visualtrust.ub.edu).
Carl Rommel (Uppsala University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines fieldwork with men devising small business projects in Cairo to spotlight predicaments in a projectified anthropological field. Arguing that all project making entails speculation tamed by the project’s organizational form, it rethinks serendipity inside and outside anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines ethnographic fieldwork with lower-middle class men in Cairo who devise and launch small businesses and investments glossed as “projects” (mashari‘). The ethnography underscores project making as inherently speculative, requiring constant movement, awareness of opportunities across urban space and social networks, and the skill to forge connections between people, materiality and capital. When discussing what makes a successful project, my interlocutors emphasize perseverance, an instinct for whom to trust and follow, and the ability to seize fortuitous moments while knowing when to let go.
The paper also notes that similar ideals animate contemporary anthropology. As funding structures designate the time-bound research project as the default format for anthropological research, we all turn into speculative projectors. My fieldwork too is premised on moving and establishing connections, on deciding which interlocutors to follow, and on grabbing insightful moments that suddenly occur. Indeed, the success of my whole three-year research project is contingent on speculative bets: which literary trends to adopt, which colleagues to collaborate with, which journals to submit to, when to leave fieldwork and start writing.
In conclusion, I reflect on these parallels to rethink anthropological serendipity. Serendipitous encounters might not only be invaluable as anthropologists move across inherently unforeseeable ethnographic fields (Rivoal & Salazar 2013). In an era when future-oriented projects entail speculation, when speculation is becoming projectified, and when projectification saturates anthropology, the success or failure of any anthropological career is predicated on multilayered practices of speculation tamed by the distinct temporalities of the project’s organizational form.
Anna Horolets (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
Paper explores anthropology’s speculative potential through an ethnography of urban climate change adaptation. It focuses on speculative art and design as forms of translation and negotiation of climate adaptation goals in Warsaw. It asks if and how the urgency of climate change is being invoked.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper suggests to explore the modes of engagement with anticipation in anthropological inquiry and the role anthropology’s own speculative potential by reflecting on a particular case study: an ethnography of urban climate change adaptation that engages not only with the events and processes that actually take place or the actors who exist but also with the plans, failed projects, and anticipations as well as imagined or hoped for actors.
The paper focuses on speculative art and design as a form of navigation, translation and negotiation of climate adaptation goals in and for the cities. Specifically, it zooms in on if and how the urgency of climate change is being invoked through speculative art and design practices as well as related objects and discourses.
Speculative art and design that engage with climate change take on the modalities of provocation, inspiration, evocation or revelation. They bring multiple potential futures into the present and make them objects of affect. The speculative work they do appears to have a high potential of urgency invocation.
I rely on the ethnographic research among artists, designers and cultural entrepreneurs in Warsaw who directly address climate change in their work as well as on the interpretation of their projects in examining the invocation of urgency. Specifically, I focus on the art and design work from the public competition ‘Futuwawa’ whose goal was to imagine and project the capital of the future.
Laura Anna Kocksch (Aalborg University Copenhagen) Johan Irving Søltoft (Technical University of Denmark) Anders Kristian Munk (Technical University of Denmark)
Paper short abstract:
Based on a series of experiments with a large language model ingested with ethnographic interviews, we reflect on moments of disconcertment, re-experiencing and estranging ethnographic encounters. We argue for a speculative use of Generative AI in Anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Generative AI (GAI), such as Chat-GPT have permeated various spheres of academic work. They have also entered anthropological research and teaching. To sort haphazard engagements with virtues and fallacies, we propose there currently are both an Anthropology of and with GAI.
Anthropology of GAI includes tracing the computational and cultural resources algorithms mobilize and their acute effects, such as investigations into cultural biases, material-ecological requirements, or creative engagements of users. Anthropology with GAI includes experimentation with how to employ GAI in anthropological practices, such as ethnographic research, analysis, writing or teaching.
Contributing to the latter, we present a series of experiments with retrieval augmented generation (RAG), combining an open large language model with a vector database of ethnographic interviews. Our ethnographic data, drawn from three distinct projects, includes over 3000 mobile interviews on European movies, 230+ interviews from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a study of cybersecurity in 30 Danish SMEs. By engaging in chat conversations with our material, we prolonged and estranged the ethnographic encounter. We offer a series of reflections on the embodied experiments with the model, dynamics of conversations, and provocations that it evoked. We argue that we experienced a sense of companionship but also disconcertment and friction (Madsen et al. 2023). The experiments allowed us to facilitate spaces of speculation and allowing others to participate in or re-experience ethnographic moments. We argue that our experiments give reasons to further explore how GAI can be employed in anthropological practice and especially their merits as tools for speculation.
Elsa Charlety (Universiteit Leiden)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reevaluates speculative ethnographic fiction through the lens of gender studies and literary criticism. I argue that speculative fiction can be seen not only as a mode of writing ethnography but a research practice in and of itself that is rooted in collaborative and feminist ethics.
Paper long abstract:
In recent decades, some anthropologists have turned to fiction as a speculative mode of representation. Its appeal rests partially on how fiction, through its power of evocation, reveals the troubled relationship anthropology has with the politics and ethics of its primary method, ethnography. However, the use of creative writing is still met with reluctance. When used by researchers, it is often labeled as experimental or far from reality, and too often, "fiction” is evoked to discredit academic work from the fringes of the discipline. The boundary with fiction is still often used as a litmus test for what is real ethnographic research.
Fiction writing, however, can not only provide alternative modes of representing reality or inspire creative tinkering with ethnographic prose. It can also offer new ways of projecting academic futures. Within a context of individualistic research paradigms, I argue that fiction, through its speculative power, provides a means of challenging what feminist scholar Barbara Babcock calls the “absolute singular” (Babcock 1995). In detaching itself from the obligation of the real, speculative fiction fosters, I argue, creative and collaborative modes of writing that are feminist at their core and have the potential to challenge anthropology’s individualistic and results-driven publishing culture.
Adolfo Estalella (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Paper short abstract:
Ethnographic experiments have emerged as a form of speculation with novel modes of relation with the empirical. The locus of knowledge production in them is not the anthropologist’s unmediated experience but rather the experimental arrangement (field device) through which ethnography takes place.
Paper long abstract:
We live in a tumultuous epoch that demands from anthropology to learn how to inquire anew since our conventional modes of relation to the empirical (this technical knowledge we have traditionally called method) seems to be unable to cope with the growing complexities of our worlds. Under these circumstances, Martin Savransky has argued that our modes of inquiry demand ‘a practice of speculative experimentation as a means of imagining novel and future modes of social inquiry’ (Savransky, 2016: 23). It could be said that his invocation has been embraced by many anthropologists engaging in all kinds of field experiments in recent times. Far from the traditional naturalistic relation to the empirical, in these experiments anthropologists devise the ethnographic encounter with their counterparts: arranging scenographies (Cantarella, Marcus, and Hegel 2019), designing infrastructures (Kim Fortun et al. 2014) or engaging in co-reaction processes (Martínez 2021). The experiment emerges thus as a form of speculation with novel modes of relation with the empirical. I argue that ethnographic experiments involve a radical transformation in the anthropological relation to the empirical, since the locus of knowledge production is not the anthropologist’s unmediated experience in the field, but rather the experimental arrangement through which ethnography takes place. In this displacement, the field loses its relevance in the conceptualisation of empirical practices and it is by relegating the field to a secondary position that ethnography is enhanced by the inventive and speculative experimental arrangements (what I call field devices) through which ethnographic experimentation is carried out.