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Paper short abstract

This paper lends theoretical and methodological arguments for anthropological engagement with the Biological Philosophy of Technology and its postulates on InOrganic life. Implications are considered through an ethnographic tracing of Lebanese amber and its technologization in deep-time science.

Paper long abstract

Amber is a deep-time technology – a material that enables earth-history scientists (i.e., palaeontologists, geoscientists) to peer into the ecological relationships constituting planetary history, as well as a device deployed to model macro and micro projections of planetary change. The historical and ongoing technologization of amber is both a product and constitutive factor of the deep-time sensibilities at the heart of the Anthropocene.

Through amber, I outline implications for anthropological engagement with the Biological Philosophy of Technology (BPT), a foundational if not forgotten bedrock to many theoretical movements that have taken hold within anthropology, including the new materialism(s), multispecies perspectives, and recently, the geological turn. This paper engages this lineage in two ways beyond mere bibliographic exercise. The first outlines how technologies are regarded in BPT – diffuse and always-already more-than-human phenomena corresponding to the modes by which entities come into association. Foregrounding this approach is a position incompatible with a rigid distinction of bios/geos, as technologies and their associative milieux (Simondon 1958) criss-cross and transcend such domains, providing a more encompassing and analytically productive view of InOrganic life (Linder 2025; Dittrich 2011; Deleuze & Guattari 1980). BPT therefore deploys genealogical methodologies to trace how associative networks form and the kinds of feedback mechanisms they generate. This extends to the second intervention of this paper, as I argue this has implications for ethnographic method.

This paper is based on my ethnographic work on Lebanese amber, its circulations, and its technologization as one of the most valuable materials for deep-time science.