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Short abstract:

Drawing on topology to engage perspective as a question of anthropological method, I explore the elicitation of context as an interpretive device in ethnography as relational objectification of "embedding", looking specifically at self-intersection as a marker of infelicitous embedding.

Long abstract:

Topology is widely used in the social sciences to metaphorically render complex relationalities of individuation and transformation. Cases often involve the invocation of a phenomena which raise specific questions of their continuity over space, time, and experience, and the most direct uses of topology often invoke varied geneaological references to ideas of structure. However, these projections of "topological" qualities often carry with them an affect and analytic of excess - of absolute fluidity, of the absence of fixity, of the arbitrariness of connection. The poetic force such excesses paradoxically elicit raises interesting questions concerning the use of topology as an infrastructure of description, in that it often entails the improper description of model "topological" phenomena. What appear as properties of a properly "topological" object, such as the Möbius strip, often arise from the visualisation of their embedding, or a perspectival interaction between the dimensional properties of a surface and the dimensional properties of the space in which it is rendered, where the object appears as an artefact having given properties in a neutral context. In this paper, I will address the possible implications of taking the elicitation of context as interpretive device in ethnography as a relational objectification of embedding, looking specifically at the relation of self-intersection as marking an infelicitous embedding. In this way, I hope to provide a reflection on the political economies of commensuration that give rise to the intelligibility of perspective as a question of anthropological method.