Sean T. Mitchell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226499123
- eISBN:
- 9780226499437
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226499437.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between ...
More
Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between inequality and consciousness at multiple scales—local, national and global. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Alcântara, Maranhão, the book analyzes the conflicts surrounding Brazil’s spaceport—a high-technology project of global transcendence located in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. The spaceport was built in the 1980s in a region principally populated by the descendants of those once enslaved on local cotton plantations, inaugurating a land conflict that continues today. Announced by Brazil’s military government as part of a project to make Brazil a world technomilitary power, the spaceport has been beset by internal and external problems, and is today populated by two Brazilian space programs (one military and the other neoliberal) that differ in their projects to confront global political and economic inequalities. Another project at the site is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race. Mobilizing as escaped-slave descendants (quilombolas), villagers and their allies have organized to resist the expansion of the spaceport and to win the villagers rights of wellbeing and citizenship that have long been denied to them. The spaceport thus stands at the center of competing projects of social and material transformation, different utopias, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales, and in very different ways.Less
Through an analysis of Brazil’s changing politics of inequality, development, and race, Constellations of Inequality demonstrates the value of ethnography to illuminate the relationships between inequality and consciousness at multiple scales—local, national and global. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Alcântara, Maranhão, the book analyzes the conflicts surrounding Brazil’s spaceport—a high-technology project of global transcendence located in one of Brazil’s poorest regions. The spaceport was built in the 1980s in a region principally populated by the descendants of those once enslaved on local cotton plantations, inaugurating a land conflict that continues today. Announced by Brazil’s military government as part of a project to make Brazil a world technomilitary power, the spaceport has been beset by internal and external problems, and is today populated by two Brazilian space programs (one military and the other neoliberal) that differ in their projects to confront global political and economic inequalities. Another project at the site is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race. Mobilizing as escaped-slave descendants (quilombolas), villagers and their allies have organized to resist the expansion of the spaceport and to win the villagers rights of wellbeing and citizenship that have long been denied to them. The spaceport thus stands at the center of competing projects of social and material transformation, different utopias, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales, and in very different ways.
Alfred Nordmann
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262533287
- eISBN:
- 9780262340267
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262533287.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a tale of modern science. Instead, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature shows that the premodern, alchemical dream of animating lifeless things returns ...
More
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a tale of modern science. Instead, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature shows that the premodern, alchemical dream of animating lifeless things returns after science has studied its “realities of little worth.” If Frankenstein speaks to us today, it is because today’s technosciences carry forward the alchemical dream. Whereas science requires a calm and peaceful state of mind, Victor’s technoscience – then and now – is driven by a supernatural enthusiasm. Accordingly we may find that even the supposedly ordinary nanotechnologies and materials sciences of our day and age are not “befitting the human mind” – long before one seeks to create artificial life. Less
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a tale of modern science. Instead, the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature shows that the premodern, alchemical dream of animating lifeless things returns after science has studied its “realities of little worth.” If Frankenstein speaks to us today, it is because today’s technosciences carry forward the alchemical dream. Whereas science requires a calm and peaceful state of mind, Victor’s technoscience – then and now – is driven by a supernatural enthusiasm. Accordingly we may find that even the supposedly ordinary nanotechnologies and materials sciences of our day and age are not “befitting the human mind” – long before one seeks to create artificial life.
Jess Bier
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262036153
- eISBN:
- 9780262339957
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262036153.003.0006
- Subject:
- Earth Sciences and Geography, Cartography
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic ...
More
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic Production of Knowledge”, draws on this overarching motif to explore its significance for broader research on knowledge and expertise. In particular, it highlights the need for researchers to materially alter the process of research in order to enable more heterogeneous landscapes for knowledge production. Returning to the themes of internationalism, landscape, and symmetry from chapter 1, this chapter also critically draws on the work of iconic poets and social justice activists like Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde, and Nawal El Saadawi. It explores the following questions: How can researchers reflexively reshape landscapes in order to allow for more socially just forms of knowledge? What are the challenges to solidarity and cooperation due to geographical imbalances of power? The resulting analysis returns to the overall notion of geographic production, while also indicating a further layer of reflexivity for critical theory: the practice of material reflexivity, or awareness of one’s own situated position in landscapes with respect to power asymmetries—asymmetries that include international and economic hierarchies within academia itself.Less
Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine provides an extended critique of the notion that technoscientific facts should function as impartial arbiters in international conflicts. Chapter 6, “The Geographic Production of Knowledge”, draws on this overarching motif to explore its significance for broader research on knowledge and expertise. In particular, it highlights the need for researchers to materially alter the process of research in order to enable more heterogeneous landscapes for knowledge production. Returning to the themes of internationalism, landscape, and symmetry from chapter 1, this chapter also critically draws on the work of iconic poets and social justice activists like Mahmoud Darwish, Audre Lorde, and Nawal El Saadawi. It explores the following questions: How can researchers reflexively reshape landscapes in order to allow for more socially just forms of knowledge? What are the challenges to solidarity and cooperation due to geographical imbalances of power? The resulting analysis returns to the overall notion of geographic production, while also indicating a further layer of reflexivity for critical theory: the practice of material reflexivity, or awareness of one’s own situated position in landscapes with respect to power asymmetries—asymmetries that include international and economic hierarchies within academia itself.
Sean T. Mitchell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226499123
- eISBN:
- 9780226499437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226499437.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Chapter 3 explores the implications of narratives stemming from the explosion of Brazil’s VLS satellite launch rocket in Alcântara in 2003. The explosion killed twenty-one technicians on the ...
More
Chapter 3 explores the implications of narratives stemming from the explosion of Brazil’s VLS satellite launch rocket in Alcântara in 2003. The explosion killed twenty-one technicians on the launchpad but the official explanations have left many unsatisfied. The chapter examines interpretations of the explosion and analyzes three implicit imaginaries of progress and national development: the nationalist, the neoliberal, and the redistributive. The importance of the launch to the Brazilian space program, the event’s gruesome outcome, the opacity of its causes, and the uncertainty surrounding its investigation have made the event a metonym for different groups’ ideas about the nation-state’s possible and desirable futures. This chapter notes that right-wing nationalisms have been largely ignored in the scholarship in Latin America. It also argues that science-and-technology studies have done a poor job of analyzing the relations between technoscience and inequality. And the chapter shows how the utopias of spaceflight are themselves inflected by inequality. Globally dominant nations and corporations most often claim to represent all of humanity in the dream of spaceflight. For aspirational powers, such as Brazil, however, claims to stand in for all of humanity are rare, and spaceflight is more often conceived as a project of convergence or profit.Less
Chapter 3 explores the implications of narratives stemming from the explosion of Brazil’s VLS satellite launch rocket in Alcântara in 2003. The explosion killed twenty-one technicians on the launchpad but the official explanations have left many unsatisfied. The chapter examines interpretations of the explosion and analyzes three implicit imaginaries of progress and national development: the nationalist, the neoliberal, and the redistributive. The importance of the launch to the Brazilian space program, the event’s gruesome outcome, the opacity of its causes, and the uncertainty surrounding its investigation have made the event a metonym for different groups’ ideas about the nation-state’s possible and desirable futures. This chapter notes that right-wing nationalisms have been largely ignored in the scholarship in Latin America. It also argues that science-and-technology studies have done a poor job of analyzing the relations between technoscience and inequality. And the chapter shows how the utopias of spaceflight are themselves inflected by inequality. Globally dominant nations and corporations most often claim to represent all of humanity in the dream of spaceflight. For aspirational powers, such as Brazil, however, claims to stand in for all of humanity are rare, and spaceflight is more often conceived as a project of convergence or profit.
Henning Schmidgen
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823263691
- eISBN:
- 9780823266555
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823263691.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” ...
More
Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” and “centres of calculation.” It points out connections between Latour’s interest in scientific imagery and similar interests in media studies and the history of art. At the same time, it draws attention to important role played in this context by the criticism of linguistics in authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.Less
Focusing on “Science in Action,” published in 1987, this chapter discusses the key concepts of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of science, e.g. “technoscience,” “inscription device,” “immutable mobiles,” and “centres of calculation.” It points out connections between Latour’s interest in scientific imagery and similar interests in media studies and the history of art. At the same time, it draws attention to important role played in this context by the criticism of linguistics in authors such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
