Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my work on Public-Private-Partnerships in Ethiopia, I introduce ‘viral assemblage’ as an analytical and therapeutic concept. The concept of viral assemblage allows us to recognize and make sense of the affective and largely unpredictable nature of anthropological practice.

Paper long abstract:

A growing number of anthropologists approach anthropology and its methods through the lens of assemblage thinking. For example, Jarrett Zigon has suggested “assemblic ethnography” as a method of tracing situations across different global scales, particularly highlighting the method’s unpredictability. In this paper, I draw on my work on Public-Private-Partnerships in Ethiopia to introduce ‘viral assemblage’ – not as a an alternative to Zigon’s assemblic ethnography – but as an analytical and therapeutic concept that allows us to recognize and make sense of the affective and largely unpredictable nature of anthropological practice. By looking at anthropology as a viral assemblage, we acknowledge that our work as anthropologists—just as life itself—is a disordered endeavor: a result of unpredictable and affective moments where human and non-human actors, things, ideas, and memories are brought together in shifting relational arrangements. Approaching anthropology as viral assemblage also implies a recognition of how our personal histories and background determines what we pick up from a situation or an interview, and the lines or stories we end up following and tracing. Similar to a virus, we tend to embrace the ideas and the “things” to which we are already receptive to, which we recognize and, hence, to which we can easily relate. While our virus-like tendencies should compel us to carefully examine our potential biases and blind-spots, our inclination to pick up things that are familiar to us and to which we can relate, can also be a resource for the discovery of hidden and unexpected relations.