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Paper short abstract:

The paper traces the biographical trajectories of German second-hand heavy weight trucks transported across the Atlantic to Bolivia and explores how they are adopted into a community of indigenous trucking that includes human, non-human animals and superhuman Earth Beings alongside technology.

Paper long abstract:

Many logistics companies in Germany replace their fleet of heavy weight trucks after just four years of use due to high maintenance costs and in order to be able to offer drivers attractive new vehicles. Some of these second-hand trucks are shipped on RoRo ships to North Chilean ports, from where they are transported through the Atacama desert to Bolivia and Paraguay. In an ethnography of twelve months, I followed the trajectory of these professionally used automobiles in Germany and Bolivia and investigated how they are introduced to the communities of indigenous long-haul truck driving. In this paper, I am going to present different adoption practices of Bolivian drivers receiving German trucks. I will show that, as in Africa (Grace 2021), automobiles in Bolivia are closely linked to ideas of development and progress (Giucci 2012): Many truck drivers in Bolivia come from rural families serving as transport providers for generations, but who just recently exchanged their llama caravans for motorised vehicles. As will be shown, the drivers subsequently compare their relationship with their trucks to the relationship they had with their herd animals in past times. Concluding, I examine how trucks gain importance in networks of beings that extend beyond humanity including so-called Earth Beings (de la Cadena 2015) and what role miniaturisations of the trucks play in their well-being and productivity (alasitas, illas).

de la Cadena, Marisol (2015): Earth Beings.

Giucci, Guillermo (2012): The cultural life of the automobile.

Grace, Joshua (2021): African motors.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows the limitations of the dominant approaches to science and technology; it argues, unlike the positive dimension of Western technology as widely published, it has also resulted into deskilling of other technologies in the 'South'.

Paper long abstract:

The dominant approach on the relationship between technology and society is a positive one; many literature in anthropology and sociology shows how technological advancement results to modernization or social development in various aspects. There are also few literature in the negative dimensions, which tries to criticize the “technology-development” thesis. These shows the impacts of technology on climate change, war etc. however the relationship between technological consumption and deskilling of certain groups of people has not attracted much attention in academia. The main assumption in this article is that human beings are divided into sub species i.e. social positions with regard to the global capitalism; these positions are contradictory to the extent that success in one group (center) in forms of economy, polity, technology etc. leads to crises in the other group (periphery). By using the concept of "headless body" and "epistemicide" developed by waThiong’o N. (1986) and Santos B. (2015) respectively, this study argues though technological consumption in the periphery is dominantly viewed as a form of progress, it constantly kills traditional technologies. This process of deskilling creating hostile living conditions for the people in the periphery and thus put their future in vain.

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Paper short abstract:

The glucometer is considered as vital in self-management of diabetes in most high-income settings. Patients and health care workers in low and middle-income countries appropriate it in ways that facilitate care and social relations, as they live with uncertainties of diabetes and its management.

Paper long abstract:

Among diabetes patients in most high-income countries, a glucometer (a blood glucose measuring technology) is an important, if not indispensable, technology for self-management of diabetes. However, this technology is often appropriated and improvised beyond its envisaged uses in low and middle-income countries, where the prevalence of diabetes is increasing among younger and poorer people, and experienced alongside infectious and chronic diseases. This paper is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork using interviews, participant observation, and informal conversations in patients’ homes and diabetes clinics at a rural mission hospital and a referral teaching hospital in the Southern Region of Malawi. The aim of the study was to explore how patients live with and manage diabetes in Malawi. While the glucometer is envisaged as a technology for individual use, patients and health care workers used the same glucometer among different patients to facilitate care. Within rural health facilities, it was used for monitoring sugar levels among all patients attending diabetes clinics. Due to challenges in sourcing testing strips and batteries, patients used the glucometer “only when something was wrong” rather than as a continuously as a self-management technology. It was used in response to uncertainties in diabetes as a condition but also its management practices. Following Annemarie Mol who explores what diagnostic devices can do, the glucometer in this context was vital in maintaining and facilitating social relations among patients but also between patients and health care workers.

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Paper short abstract:

Opposed to treating plastics as harbingers of toxicity, research explores the labors and material transformations of plastics repair. Using artisanal and industrial substances and sensibilities, repairers are attuned to plastics’ unique metabolism and admixture with human and other natures.

Paper long abstract:

Across the world, the large-scale technical systems are in decline, supplanted or supplemented by alternative orders. In the urban centers of the global south, this is evident in the inadequacy of urban infrastructural grids, unable to keep pace with urban growth or the finances of state authorities. In West Africa’s cities, the techno-material and commercial contours of urban water systems reflect such conditions of public divestiture. In the stead of mass-provisioning, smaller scale technical solutions prevail, transforming water access from a durable public good to privately owned and managed technology, commoditized and ephemeral. Widespread reliance on plastic water storage tanks across classes and climes in countries such as Ghana embody this trend.

Focusing on a squad of plastic tank repairers in Ghana’s savannah city of Tamale, this paper examines the care and repair of plastics water storage technologies. Opposed to treating plastics always and already waste and harbingers of toxicity, research explores the labor, knowledge, and material transformations produced in these encounters. Utilizing a combination of artisanal and industrial substances and sensibilities, repairers demonstrate attunement to plastics’ unique metabolism and admixture with human and other natures. They display sensory acuity to the organic attributes of these mass-produced goods: plastic tanks’ interactions with humidity, harsh sunlight and harmattan winds; corrosion induced by contact with sand and soil, and responsiveness to the careful application of heat and fire. Moving beyond broken world thinking, techniques of plastic repair demonstrate labile sense of materiality, bridging organic and inorganic, machinic and human, science and craft.

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Paper short abstract:

Why is repair not slowing down in Tanzania, even in the neoliberal market, where things are made to be wasted as soon as possible?

Paper long abstract:

Repairing is an everyday experience for many people in Tanzania. A repairer is always available to tinker with anything. However, acts of repair or finding a repairer do not only appear when things break down. Repair is considered a part of an object’s life and people´s life with an object. As a result, people consume certain products, relying on particular infrastructures and the availability of repair before breakdowns happen. These possibilities and the ability to repair are considered and searched before acquiring the object. This contrasts with a radical emphasis in other economies between the whole, intact and functioning object and the one that is broken, apart, and not working – in need of repair. In Tanzania, as this paper will show, for most people, objects are never really whole and never really broken; even when brokenness happens, objects retain the potentialities of a life, keep memories and the intimate relations that the object gathers with the people. And there is a way to restore those relationships. There is a repairer always ready in handy to repair.