anthropological relocations and the limits of design · anthropology’s relocation as a ﬁeld,...

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AN40CH01-Suchman ARI 7 September 2011 8:48

Anthropological Relocationsand the Limits of DesignLucy SuchmanDepartment of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YT, United Kingdom;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2011. 40:1–18

First published online as a Review in Advance onJune 29, 2011

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online atanthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.041608.105640

Copyright c© 2011 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/11/1021-0001$20.00

Keywords

innovation, knowledge politics, reflexive organization, technoscapes

Abstract

This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has beenarticulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and posi-tioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contem-porary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touch-stone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds ofprofessional technology design. With figures of location and design inplay, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generativeand problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engage-ment between anthropology and design. Though design has been con-sidered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue insteadthat it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropologyof the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument isthat, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificitiesof its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice oftransformation.

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INTRODUCTION

“The future arrives sooner here.” Drivingmy car down Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto,California, one evening around 1995, I hearthis assertion on U.S. National Public Radio,spoken by a Silicon Valley technologist who isbeing interviewed. It elicits a by-now-familiarresponse—I have inhabited the Valley by thistime for 15 years—a bodily resistance to be-ing hailed into this claim to the vanguard, withits attendant mandate to enact the future thatothers will subsequently live.

These words constitute a place—a “here”—that comprises part of my problematic. Theyposition the speaker in an identifiable territory,indexically referencing the interviewee’s loca-tion as the Silicon Valley and in turn, of course,performing the existence of that place onceagain through this naming of it. And in theirpositing of a singular, universal future, they re-iterate, as well, a past in the form of a diffusionistmodel of change. Described by Fabian (1983)in Time and the Other as a form of temporaldistancing, this “involves placing chronologi-cally contemporary and spatially distant peo-ples along a temporal trajectory, such that therecord of humanity across the globe is progres-sively ordered in historical time” (p. 13). Thekind of spatial and temporal distancing enactedin a statement such as this is also, in this sense,a colonizing move.

We can read this statement as reproducingthe neocolonial geographies of center and pe-riphery, and temporalities of technological de-velopment, that in the mid-1990s underwrotethe Silicon Valley’s figuration as central to thefuture of everywhere. Escobar (1994) proposesthe term “technoscape” to reference the waysin which discourses and practices generated byand around information and communicationstechnologies comprise a kind of landscape to beinhabited. Like other maps, depictions of thetechnoscape are not simply aids to navigationthrough an already-existing terrain, but propo-sitions for a geography within which relevantsubjects and objects might claim their place.Appadurai (1997) develops this trope further

through the figuring of five “scapes” (which hedesignates as ethno, media, techno, finance, andideo), meant to articulate multiple geographies“constituted by the historically situated imag-inations of persons and groups spread aroundthe globe” (p. 33). The value of the trope ofscape for Appadurai is its orientation to dis-junctures as much as continuities within andamong these mappings so that they interact andintersect in multiple and specific ways (see alsoBarry 2001, p. 37). And writing of “techniquesfor the production of locality” (Appadurai 1997,p. 182), Appadurai emphasizes that the local isnot the ground for cultural analysis but the fig-ure, not already given but constituted in andthrough practices such as the statement withwhich I began.

Postcolonial scholarship has taught us thatcenters and margins are multiple and relative,and futures can be enacted only in what Tsing(2005) names “the sticky materiality of practi-cal encounters . . . the makeshift links across dis-tance and difference that shape global futures—and ensure their uncertain status” (pp. 1–2).These encounters happen within circulatorysystems characterized by specific moments ofplace-making and transversal movement, pro-cesses that we are just beginning to articulatein ways other than through the simple tropesof local knowledge or global flows. Locally en-acted effects are made to travel less througheasy flows than through messy translations and,as Tsing observes, those who claim to be intouch with the universal are notoriously bad atseeing the limits and exclusions of their ownknowledge practices (p. 8). Postcolonial formsof future-making, it follows, require geogra-phies that have less certain centers (Redfield2002, p. 794). One contribution to the projectof relocating future-making, then, is an anthro-pology of those places presently enacted as cen-ters of innovation that illuminate the provincialcontingencies and uncertainties of their own fu-tures, as well as the situated practices requiredto sustain their reproduction as central.

The first touchstone for my article is thisconcept of location, as it has been articulated inthe context of anthropology’s reflections on its

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history and positioning as a field and in relationto shifting engagements with contemporarytechnoscientific, political, and ethical problems(see, for example, Clifford & Marcus 1986,Strathern 1995, Gupta & Ferguson 1997, Ong& Collier 2005). A second touchstone is onespecific anthropological relocation in which Ihave been directly implicated: into worlds ofprofessional technology design. Consideredrecently as a model for anthropology’s future(Rabinow et al. 2008), I argue instead thatdesign and innovation are best positioned asproblematic objects for an anthropology ofthe contemporary. I share an interest in waysof theorizing change, breaks, ruptures, andthe new that do not rely on singular origins,definite moments of invention, or trajectoriesof progressive development. And I share aswell a commitment to an anthropology thatworks across disciplinary boundaries within theacademy and allies with relevant practitionersin other locations. At the same time, I believethat we need less a reinvented anthropologyas (or for) design than a critical anthropologyof design. The latter requires, among otherthings, ethnographic projects that articulatethe cultural imaginaries and micropolitics thatdelineate design’s promises and practices.

With figures of location and design inplay, I offer what I hope are some perspicuousmoments, encounters that proved both gen-erative and problematic in my own experienceof establishing terms of engagement betweenanthropology and design. I reflect on whatinsights these anthropological relocationsmight offer regarding what I am calling herethe limits of design. In writing about design’slimits, my intention is not to diminish thevalue of projects aimed at thinking throughrearrangements and transformations that couldaddress pressing problems or explore untriedpossibilities. Rather my argument is that, likeanthropology, design needs to acknowledgethe specificities of its place, to locate itselfas one (albeit multiple) figure and practiceof change. I recall how knowledge practicesand values have been figured in the historyof professional design, particularly within the

United States since the mid-twentieth centuryand with what effects. However suggestive, wecannot mobilize the trope of design withoutattending to that history and its legacies.Among the latter, I argue, is a conception ofdesign method that has, until recently, gonelargely uncontested and that systematicallyobscures the questions that anthropologymight find central to a consideration of whatconstitutes transformative change and how ithappens. Thinking about design as methoddirects our attention to what Law (2004) hasnamed design’s “hinterlands”; that is, that onwhich method relies, but which necessarilyoverflows its frame (see also Callon 1998).This is another sense of limits that I seek.Method (as ethnomethodology has extensivelydemonstrated) presupposes an open horizonof competencies and contingencies on whichits efficacies depend, but which it can neverfully specify (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970). Theseobservations alert us to the ways in whichconventional design methods are (necessarily)silent on matters that anthropology would beinterested in articulating. And they suggest thesense of the limits that I seek, putting profes-sional design in its place in ways that could helpus to think through its history and possibilitiesin a more critical and generative way.

RELOCATIONS

My thinking about these questions draws froman archive of memories and documentarymaterials assembled during my 20-year tenure(from 1979 to 1999) at Xerox’s Palo Alto Re-search Center (PARC). At its founding in 1970,PARC represented an investment in makingtechnology futures. Deliberately placed farfrom Xerox’s corporate headquarters in Con-necticut, the story goes, the research center waslocated on the west coast of the United States,in the nascent Silicon Valley, and charged withmaking a difference. In a topography mirroringearlier waves of westward expansion, PARCis positioned within this imaginary as a kindof advanced settlement on the frontier of theemerging markets of computing. But frontiers,

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Tsing (2005) reminds us, are “not just discov-ered at the edge; they are projects in makinggeographic and temporal experience” (p. 53).Like its predecessors, the frontier of computingwas imagined to be indefinitely extensible,even more reflexively an effect of the activitiesof those who gain benefit from it than werefrontiers marked more obviously by landscapesand natural resources. And as Tsing observes,“[t]he activity of the frontier is to make humansubjects as well as natural objects . . . . It is aspace of desire: it calls; it appears to create itsown demands; once it is glimpsed, one cannotbut explore and exploit it further” (pp. 29–32).

The decade of PARC’s founding coincidedas well with a particular moment in Americananthropology’s relocation as a field, the turn to“studying up” set out most famously by LauraNader (1974) in her contribution to the editedvolume, aptly titled for my purposes, Reinvent-ing Anthropology. Committed to this call as astudent of anthropology, I had the broad aimto engage with power performatively throughan ethnography of the everyday life of a majorAmerican corporation. Searching for a site inwhich to pursue this project led me, through aseries of serendipitous circumstances, to Xeroxand, more specifically, to Xerox PARC. (For amore extended account of the history of anthro-pological engagement at PARC, see Suchman2011). And I became drawn, on my arrival atPARC, into questions of technology.

The founding of PARC in 1970 wassymptomatic of Xerox’s early concerns with itsplace in the imaginaries and technologies thatcomprised what was then figured as the “officeof the future.” I return to this storyline below,but first fast-forward to the 1990s. The office ofthe future (at least in its paperless imagining) isa thing of the past, whereas digital informationsystems comprise an unremarkable, albeit con-tinually changing, medium of administrativework. The Systems Science Laboratory inwhich I held my first research internship isnow the Knowledge and Practices Laboratory,and the Work Practice & Technology researcharea, established in 1989, is in place. Graduallyachieving sufficient credibility to constitute

a small research group comprising four an-thropologists and two computer scientists,we mobilize arguments about the value of ananthropologically informed research practice.1

Our arguments have opened the space for arange of collaborations: critical engagementwith cognitive and computer scientists aroundquestions of intelligence and interactivity;collaboration with system designers aimed atrespecifying central issues for them includingthe human-machine interface, usability, and re-pair; extensive studies of work settings orientedto articulating technologies as sociotechnicalpractice; engagement with an emerging inter-national network of computer scientists andsystem designers committed to more participa-tory forms of system development with relevantworkers/users; activism within relevant com-puter research networks to raise awareness ofthose alternatives; and iterative enactment ofan ethnographically informed, participatorydesign practice within the context of the re-search center and the wider corporation. Theseefforts took advantage of the ways in whichour position at PARC—in its identification asa center for basic research and its members asacademically recognized scientists—affordedus margins of maneuver to sustain affiliationsthat overflowed the conventional market frame(Barry & Slater 2002, p. 303). Although thisstrategy, and the extended history of collabora-tive experimentation and engagement throughwhich it was realized over two decades, wasunquestionably fruitful, it also raises a numberof questions that have yet, in my reading, to befully or clearly addressed. To do that requiresbringing into view the politics of design,including the systematic placement of politicsbeyond the limits of the designer’s frame.

DESIGN

One of the marks of a technological society,Barry (2001) observes, is an orientation that

1Founding members of the group along with me wereJeanette Blomberg, Brigitte Jordan, David Levy, Julian Orr,and Randall Trigg.

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privileges change and then figures change astechnological innovation (p. 201). Innovation,in turn, is embedded within a broader culturalimaginary that posits a world that is alwayslagging, always in need of being brought up todate through the intercessions of those trainedto shape it: a world, in sum, in need of design.A particularly encompassing expression ofthis orientation is the project titled MassiveChange, launched around 2005 by Canadiandesigner and architect Bruce Mau and theInstitute Without Boundaries (a small teamoperating out of Mau’s studio in Toronto) (seeFigure 1).

Massive Change, the Web site proclaims, “isnot about the world of design. It’s about thedesign of the world.” The text continues:

Design has emerged as one of the world’s mostpowerful forces. It has placed us at the begin-ning of a new, unprecedented period of humanpossibility, where all economies and ecolo-gies are becoming global, relational, and inter-connected. (Bruce Mau Design, Inst. WithoutBound. 2005)

Design has emerged as a force of nature, thisdeclaration implies, and “it” now places “us” atthe beginning of something unprecedented andglobal. This announced tipping point, of pastand future action, is a hallmark of new things.“Capacity,” represented by a supercomputermade more super by a fish eye lens, promisesthat “we” can now “plan and produce desiredoutcomes through design” at an unprecedentedscale. This leads, seemingly inexorably via anorange arrow, to the “global scale,” a cycle ofmovement of things that, while seeming circu-lar, presumably heads somewhere that we wantto go. This is confirmed by the resulting op-timism that we can, or will, for the first timein history “minimize unintended consequencesand maximize positive outcomes,” implicitlydelivering innovations such as the hippo roller,a polyethylene drum designed by South Africandesigners Pettie Penzer and Johan Jonker to en-able transport of 20 gallons of water over roughterrain with minimal strain on the body. (This

is not as far as I can tell itself a project of theMassive Change initiative but is funded and dis-tributed through the World Food Program andother nongovernmental organizations.)

The position of design is further illustratedby a model (Figure 2) in which design movesfrom being one among the four primary ele-ments of nature, culture, business, and design(albeit at the core) to being the enveloping,encompassing, and, by implication, directingforce, leading to a reiteration of the nineteenth-century declaration of the conquest of natureand the rhetorical query regarding the future:“Now that we can do anything what will wedo?”

Tracing the genealogy of this proposition,that we can do anything, might take us backagain to the 1970s, a particular decade in thehistory of professional design in the UnitedStates. The first call for a science of designis commonly attributed to Herbert Simon’smanifesto, The Sciences of the Artificial (1969),based on a series of lectures delivered (wecan imagine to an audience composed largelyof scientists and engineers) at MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. Trained as a politicalscientist, Simon received the Turing Awardin 1975 for his contributions to artificialintelligence (AI) and the psychology of humancognition, and three years later he received aNobel Prize in economics for “his research intothe decision-making process within economicorganizations” (Nobelprize.org 1978). Simon’sdesign palette, then, encompassed the multiplesites targeted for a science and technology ofenhanced rationality in the mid-twentieth cen-tury, from brains to boardrooms. For Simon,the road to scientific legitimacy was paved witha requisite reduction in so-called intuitive judg-ment, in favor of demonstrable rationalities,a move from in his words “soft cookbooky”knowledge to “a body of tough, analyticteachable doctrine” (Simon 1969, p. 113).

In his collection of responsive essays titledThe Politics of the Artificial, Margolin (2002) ar-gues that one result of Simon’s paternity is alineage focused “more on creating . . . modelsof the design process than on developing a


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critical theory of practice” (p. 237). Margolinobserves that Simon’s rhetoric naturalized de-sign methods and embedded them in a technicalframework that privileged systems thinking asa means of generating design projects and effi-ciency as a way of judging the effectiveness ofdesign thought (p. 238). In calling for a more“open conception” of design activity, Margolinurges a positioning of history, theory, and criti-cism as central rather than peripheral elements,including critical examination of conceptions ofdesign theory inherited from Simon and his fol-lowers. In thinking of design as a social practice,Margolin argues, we are always obliged to con-sider and evaluate the conditions in which it oc-curs. He concludes that “[i]f designers are goingto realize the full potential of design thought,then they should also learn to analyze how thesituations that frame design practice are them-selves constructed” (p. 241).

It is this question of the situations thatframe design, and the frames that conditionprofessional practice, that comprises thegrounds of my own engagements. To makethis more concrete, I offer brief accountsof interventions undertaken with respect tothree problems: office procedures and theirautomation, the design of intelligent machines,and design methods themselves. My aim isto describe some strategies of reframing thatproved generative in each case. At the sametime, and through those reflections, I suggestsome limits to design and their implicationsfor a critical ethnographic practice.

Intervention 1: Procedure

My first internship at PARC in 1979 posi-tioned me with a group of computer scientistsengaged in “modeling” office work in serviceof the design of computer-based informationsystems. My colleagues’ approach began fromthe premise that office work is essentiallyprocedural in nature, involving the executionby office workers of a prescribed sequenceof steps. Understood algorithmically, “officeprocedures” seemed ready made for automa-tion. My ethnomethodological background,

in contrast, alerted me to the likelihood that“procedure” as a term of art in office work wassomething quite different from the models thatmy colleagues were developing. To explore thisnotion, I proposed a small study of the actualpractice of the kinds of routine office work thatwere the focus of my colleagues’ diagrammaticrepresentations. This led me, in turn, to theaccounting office at PARC and the work of“processing” expense reports and accountspayable. My study began from the observation,in a paper published by two of my colleagues,that specification of even the most routineclerical work as a schema of procedures was anunsolved problem in automated office systemsdesign (Ellis & Nutt 1980). The difficulty, theysuggested, was tied to the “softness” that char-acterized representations of office proceduresprovided by workers. Whereas for computerscientists “procedure” had a very definite tech-nical sense, for practitioners of office work theterm seemed to have some other, more looselyformulated meaning and usefulness. It was thequestion of the status of office procedures forpractitioners that organized my own research.But rather than produce an alternative formal-ization of the work, I sought at least a partialaccount of the lived work of getting it done.

The more specific focus of my study becamethe practices through which evidence providedby documents, coworkers, and clients is used,in conjunction with knowledge of accountspayable regulations, to generate a record of ac-tions taken “according to procedure” (Suchman1983). Workers in the accounting office wereanimated by the scenario of the audit, in whicha file selected at random would be read as ev-idence that the actions documented were pro-cedurally compliant. This involved assemblingdocumentary records of compliance out of thepractical contingencies of actual cases. This isnot to say that workers faked the appearanceof compliance in the records. Rather, the workof accounting was to create a record that doc-umented an accountable relation among pro-cedural requirements (for spending money onbusiness travel or for ordering and paying forgoods received), actions and events in the world,

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and payments made. My study suggested thatthe procedural structure of organizational ac-tivities was an effect of the orderly work ofthe accounting office, rather than its antecedentand determining condition. This view, in turn,recommended an understanding of office workthat attended to judgmental practices presup-posed, but not fully articulated, by its pro-cedural specifications. Those practices, irre-mediably, overflowed the frame of the work’srepresentation.

Intervention 2: Inference

My interventions regarding office work res-onated with emerging divides within thefield of computer science in the early 1980s,between approaches to automation based ininformation flow and control and a growinginterest in knowledge-based systems andAI. By the early 1990s, the Systems ScienceLaboratory had been renamed the IntelligentSystems Laboratory, and my colleague RandallTrigg (a computer scientist with a backgroundin AI) and I set out to do a small case study ofan initiative in AI then under way within thelaboratory (Suchman & Trigg 1993; for my pri-mary engagement with this field, see Suchman2007). The initiative was itself a form of indige-nous critique: an effort, motivated by certaindissatisfactions among our colleagues withmainstream research in AI, to design a situatedinference engine (SIE), a machine capable oftaking advantage of the implicit context andembedding circumstances of its interactionswith a human user (CSLI 1987). Researcherson the project saw their efforts as leading to asignificantly different view of computation thanwas prevalent in AI at the time. This includedthe notion that computers are physicallyembodied and contextually embedded, suchthat their abilities and limitations depend on aphysical substrate and a surrounding situation.

Work on the SIE at the time involved tworelated enterprises: (a) constructing scenariosof activity that raised certain thorny repre-sentational issues in AI and (b) designing andimplementing a computer program that ran

the scenarios, providing evidence that thebehaviors identified there were realizable in amachine that could participate in the activityrepresented. At this stage in the project, how-ever, the goal was less immediately to build ausable artifact than to develop a new formalismwithin a subfield of AI known as knowledge rep-resentation and to demonstrate the formalism’sefficacy to other practitioners. The enterpriseof knowledge representation at that point layat the heart of AI (Brachman & Levesque1985). Crucially, representations of knowledgein the case of AI are more than passive texts.Rather, they must combine data structuresand interpretive algorithms in such a way thatthe program that runs over them will producerecognizably knowledgeable behavior (Barr &Feigenbaum 1981, p. 143). It was this problem,of combining data structures and algorithmsto produce appropriate machine behavior, thatconstituted our colleagues’ project.

Our study of work on the SIE included aclose reading of a videotaped episode of tworesearchers, both computer scientists, engagedin a design session, done at this point in theirproject not at the screen but at a whiteboard.As Newman (1998) observes, to a large extentand for much of the time the technical objectof software design is embodied as textual-graphical renderings (typically annotatedboxes and arrows to indicate components andexchanges of input and output among them),along with the talk and animating gestures ofrelevant actors: performances and effects thatNewman has named “techniques of virtualiza-tion” (p. 236). The materials for work on theSIE on this occasion were a textual scenario anda developing language of graphical formalisms.To be effective, the scenario with which theresearchers worked needed to be plausible asa representation of familiar practices, whilebeing translatable into the graphical language.The graphical formalisms, in their turn, neededto be readable in terms of the scenario at thesame time that they set up the conditionsfor its inscription as code interpretable by amachine. Through the devices of scenarios andformalisms, our colleagues were attempting to


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bring practical activity under the jurisdictionof runnable programs.

Their work as we witnessed it was not asimple unilinear series of transformations fromhuman behavior to code, however, but the craft-ing together of a collection of diverse materi-als and accountabilities. Drawing from a rangeof vocabularies and orienting to multiple au-diences (including computer science, philoso-phy, mathematics, engineering, and psychol-ogy, as well as their own everyday experiencesof scheduling), the researchers’ task was to workacross, and between, lived experiences, scenar-ios, formalisms, and code in such a way that eachmaintained an accountable relation to the oth-ers and to their fields of origin and reception.It was this kind of practical and material inter-textuality that led us to characterize the workas a form of craftwork, a process of assemblingtogether heterogeneous materials into a coher-ent whole. Like any product of skilled prac-tice, moreover, the formalism inscribed on theboard left behind the situated logics of its ownproduction and use. Given this, our study wasaimed at articulating the work of designing in-telligent machines as a form of embodied socialpractice—a form made more interesting by AI’sown concern with the delegation of social prac-tice to machines—that demonstrates not onlythe efficacy but also the limits of representation.

Intervention 3: Prototype

Lastly, I turn to the prototype, an artifact withparticular performative characteristics withinthe work of new technology design. One un-derstanding of the prototype is as a response tothe persistent troubles of system requirementsand formal specifications that formed the doc-trine of Simon’s design science. For many ifnot most advocates of prototyping within main-stream professional design, prototyping rep-resents a strategy for uncovering user needs,taken as already existing but somehow latent,unarticulated, or even unrecognized by practi-tioners themselves. The project then is to elicitthese pre-existing attributes from the prospec-tive user, to express them precisely, and thereby

to make them available for use by system de-signers. An alternative position is that pro-totyping practice simultaneously recovers andinvents work requirements and technologicalpossibilities that make sense each in relationto the other. A case in point was a projectthat we conducted in the late 1990s, at theheadquarters of a state department of highways(Suchman et al. 2002). For approximately twoyears, we engaged in a collaborative research ef-fort with engineers at the department chargedwith the design of a bridge scheduled for com-pletion by the year 2004. The focus of our pro-totyping efforts with members of the bridgeproject was a collection of their documents—a heterogeneous assortment of letters, memos,reports, newspaper clippings, maps, and thelike—that together provide an archive of pro-fessional and organizational accountability. Weembarked on a cooperative design effort withthe engineering team aimed at understandingwhether digital media might provide new anduseful ways of accessing their collection. Morespecifically, this involved understanding justwhat would be required to move their projectfiles, currently kept on paper in three-ringbinders, into an electronic, computer-basedrepository with a rich search interface.

Latour (1996) observes that technicalprojects encounter not only human actors whoare differently interested and aligned, but alsoassemblages of things that may or may not becompatible one with another (p. 57). Perhapsnowhere is this more true than with software,despite its famed flexibility. Compatibility, therequirement for things to work with one an-other, can be missing for a plethora of reasons.These range from the deliberate inclusion inone device of proprietary or closed software thatmakes it impossible to integrate that device withothers, to simple oversight on the part of de-velopers, to historical discontinuities that leavegaps that dedicated labor (that may or may notbe available) is required to fill. Far from the denovo invention of a new device, then, config-uring the project files prototype included iden-tifying appropriate hardware and software andacquiring the various pieces required through a

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variety of channels (purchasing and download-ing from the Internet, primarily). It includedas well, and essentially, designing the compu-tational glue that would connect them togetherinto a coherent and working whole.

The aim for the prototype that we con-figured and installed in the project team’sworkspace was that it should archive the docu-ments in the project files in recognizably famil-iar, but newly flexible ways. This included novelrenderings of documents that nonetheless madesense with reference to working practices. As itwas assembled on site, the prototype stood asa kind of developing description of how it wasthat engineers were interested in accessing theirdocuments. But more than just description, theprototype offered a provisional proposal for anew way of working. It did so not simply as amatter of talk, but as a means for trying theproposal out. In response, it elicited either a“Yes, that makes sense,” or an account of howit was that, in that proposal, we had missed thepoint. It is in this sense that prototypes per-form as working artifacts—artifacts whose sig-nificance is not given in their specifications butin the unfolding activity of cooperative design-in-use. The prototype reworked the configura-tion of project files as documents, classificationschemes, and associated work practices into anew, screen-based workspace. But it also illu-minated the coherence of technical artifacts asa contingent achievement in ways deliberatelyobscured in professional talk about methodicaldesign. In this respect the prototype worked asa reflexive probe into the practical materializa-tions that configure new technological objects.

REPRODUCING INNOVATION

It was during the mid 1990s, as we were en-gaged in the project just described, that theimperative of innovation doubled back to takeas its object PARC itself. With mainstreammanagement discourses focused on businessprocess reengineering, laboratory managers atPARC circulated a round table interview pub-lished in the Harvard Business Review withfour chief executive officers (CEOs) “who have

pioneered the shift to process-based organi-zations,” including Xerox CEO Paul Allaire(Garvin 1995, p. 77). The interviewer at theopening of the session remarks that acrossthe substantial differences in the industries in-volved (document processing, insurance, phar-maceuticals, and soft drinks) the observationsabout processes and process management arestrikingly similar. SmithKline Beecham’s JanLeschly praises processes for the ways in whichthey make repetition possible:

We realized that a capability comes only bycombining a competence with a reliable pro-cess. To be a leader in biotechnology, you firstneed the best cellular and molecular biolo-gists in the world. But that isn’t enough. Youmust also have a reliable, repeatable discoveryand development process; otherwise, prod-ucts won’t emerge regularly from the pipeline.These larger processes are themselves dividedinto many smaller ones – in the case of prod-uct development, more than 3,000 in all. To-day each of these processes is charted and onthe way to being repeatable and controllable.(p. 78)

In this imaginary, the control technolo-gies of operations research, developed first, asNoble (1984) reminds us, in the context of mid-twentieth-century military operations and thenapplied to “continuous process industries wherethe product itself was in a liquid or gaseous formand thus could literally be made to flow” (p. 59),are applied to the control of organizations. Inthe roundtable interview, Xerox’s Allaire makesreference to the Xerox 2000 Process, at the endof which

our senior team created a list of some 60possible assumptions about the future. Thenwe voted on the ones that we deemed mostlikely to prove valid. Some of the assumptionswere particularly thorny, such as whetherpaper would continue to be widely used inoffices . . . . The validated assumptions led usto a new set of imperatives . . . as well as to anew strategic direction, which we called the


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Document Company . . . . We soon realizedthat the organization had to be redesigned toreflect our strategy, and that’s when we beganfocusing on process. (Garvin 1995, p. 78)

Allaire offers as well an argument as to whyprocesses are empowering rather than con-straining, arguing that “if you have processesthat are in control, you know how the organi-zation is working . . . . Couple that with objec-tives that are consistent with your strategy andcommunicated all the way down the line . . . andyou get quality output without a lot of check-ing” (p. 78). SmithKline Beecham’s Leschly ad-mits, however, that acceptance at his organiza-tion was in part effected by getting rid of thosewho resisted: “We found that we needed peo-ple who were capable of adapting to a com-pletely new way of running the business,” towhich Pepsi’s CEO Craig Weatherup exclaims“Bless you! It’s good to know I have company.I also had 12 people reporting to me at the startof our change process. That was four years ago,and today only 2 of them remain.” He elabo-rates the process of “enrollment”:

We ended up calling it “head, heart, hands”because we believed that for change to oc-cur, people had to do three things: developa conceptual understanding of the rationaleand proposed direction of the change, inter-nalize and commit emotionally to the new vi-sion, and acquire new skills to ensure that thevision would be realized . . . our basic messagewas, Don’t go underground. Either sign up orwe’ll be happy to give you a nice severancepackage—and you can go work for somebodyelse. (p. 84)

The roundtable discussion offers a contextfor the redesign exercise initiated at PARC inthe same year. At once responsive and resistantto corporate precepts regarding the manage-ment of change, the process at PARC beganwith a series of discussions among senior staff(center and laboratory managers), which wassubsequently expanded to include research areamanagers and principal scientists. This wider

exercise took the form of two off-site workshopsheld at a downtown Palo Alto hotel during thesummer of 1995, at which participants were as-signed to tables that subsequently became theidentifiers for a series of working groups. (I,for example, became a member of Table 7).The Tables, in turn, were charged with for-mulating key problems or questions, reflect-ing concerns attributed to the research staff.Table 7’s problem, for example, formulated ananxiety about what seemed at the time to bea shift in PARC priorities and values, towardmore instrumental research promising short-term financial returns to the corporation. Theopposition of short- and long-term researchwas elaborated through Table 7’s discussionsinto a two-dimensional matrix, with the sec-ond axis being reactive and proactive: We pro-posed that all the cells of the matrix could befilled with representative projects. More im-portantly, perhaps, we suggested that any givenproject might not just occupy a single cell, butalso move through this space. So, for example,a project initiated in response to a business divi-sion problem (reactive) might become the ba-sis for long-term research; or an open-endedresearch project might suggest new directions(proactive) for a near-term product. Sharing theslippery boundaries between research’s actualunfolding and its narration, the matrix nonethe-less promised to work as a kind of orderingdevice. Ambiguously framed between descrip-tive and prescriptive (always thinking of actu-ally existing projects, while designing what waspresented as a more general analytic tool), weshared a sense that the outcome of our workwas a valuable contribution to thinking aboutthe question that we took up. Initially embracedby senior staff as a tool for mapping currentprojects and thinking about future ones, thisprototype dissolved in subsequent rounds of theexercise. The effects of our labors were diffuse,in the end, less a discrete deliverable in the formof a tool for planning than a series of engage-ments within an ongoing, more fragmented,and contested conversation.

The limits of the design exercise were for-mulated, at the time, as an effect of the limits of

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participation, leading to a call by a number ofthose involved for the initiative to be expandedto include the entire imagined community ofPARC. In October of 1996, senior staff issuedan open invitation to all employees to partici-pate in setting a new agenda for research underthe name (mirroring that of the parent corpo-ration) PARC 2000. The invitation explained,

The notion of PARC 2000 is not intended tosuggest we are developing a plan targeted forthe year 2000. What it does imply is the needto do three things: (1) to comprehend nowwhat the future is becoming, (2) to achievea platform for continually understanding howwe can impact the world by what we chooseto do at PARC, and (3) and to launch a nearterm strategy for if, and how, we should bedifferent . . . Senior Staff . . . are convinced thateveryone, no matter what job function you fill,can play an active role in helping us shape thefuture. (L. Suchman, email archive, 10 Octo-ber 1996)

The future no longer simply arrives soonerhere, but rather has a kind of independentagency positioned beyond the confines, or con-trol, of the research laboratory or even the widerSilicon Valley. And rather than being inventedand propagated, this future now requires an un-derstanding of a future that is becoming, else-where as well as here, and that might demanda reinvention of the Center itself. PARC’s re-searchers are called on now to shape the futurenot only for others, but for themselves, not inthe sense of “build what you use, use what youbuild,” a maxim that informed the early days ofinvention at PARC, but in the sense of a futurein which they themselves will have a place.

This call from management for participa-tion and collective responsibility for PARC’sfuture was positioned as a democratizing move,and indeed it was. But what were the subtextsthat haunted this exercise? Framed as a responseto “a rapidly changing context” for the corpo-ration, we were called on to “collectively em-brace a more visible and proactive steward-ship of PARC’s future” (L. Suchman, email

archive, 10 October 1996). This call promptedmore questions than answers: Why this exer-cise? Why now? These questions contributedto what became a period of intensive, and com-peting, rounds of story telling—stories that var-iously narrated a past that could make sense ofthe present (what PARC was, and had become),and presents (in the form of existing and imag-ined projects) that might answer the call to fu-ture making (what PARC could be). Many ofthe stories told had, to those involved in tellingand hearing them, little discernable effect. Buttheir generation involved a familiar, competi-tive micropolitics of self-positioning, and par-ticipation was mandatory. Failure to participaterisked disappearing from the picture, having noplace in the future under construction.

The naming of PARC 2000 as itself a projectreasserts the existence of a singular body and in-corporates us, as constituents of that body, intocollectively articulating its future. But whoseproject was this, and what should be done withother projects already under way? Framed interms of PARC’s potential, what we could be-come, the exercise implied a past promise stillpending, unfulfilled. The call for vision was re-sponsive to expressions of uncertainty over di-rection but also enacted researchers as lost andin need of guidance. The problems were ar-ticulated innocently, as changes in the outsideworld, or as personal anxieties inside, as a fail-ure of communication rather than an effect ofmanagement discourses and actions, includingthe continual theme of loss, lack, and the needfor reinvention. The discussions held duringthis period were regularly summarized as lists.These lists, which included assertions of theproblems to which the collective self-reflectionwas a response, worked to dis-integrate PARC,then call for its reassembly. They assembledmultiple voices as if they were a single self-contradictory one, while erasing the potentiallyintegrative fabric of the discussions that theypurportedly summarized. These lists set theframe for what seemed to be endlessly churn-ing, repetitive reinventions of the crisis and ourresponse. A set of themes was eventually for-mulated, posited at once as differential rallying


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points and as a connective tissue (leading some-one to propose that we had now become theemployees of a kind of artfully crafted fantasy,of a “theme PARC”).

The exercise enrolled us, in sum, in takingthe organization as an object of design and re-making ourselves, collectively, into somethingnew. This required not only imagining possibleorganizational futures, but also establishing apast and present PARC against which differencecould be measured. Reflecting a familiar patternin histories of the future (Rosenberg & Harding2005), the past that was created was a nostalgicone to which, in some respects, the reinventionaimed to return. How, we were asked, mightwe recapture the intellectual excitement thathad been lost? Reference to previous visions(including the office of the future) cast themas unifying and directing rallying points, againpositing a difference between the once and fu-ture PARC of clarity, integration, and effec-tiveness and the current situation—the sense ofthe lost past that the future must regain. Thesestatements forgot the vagaries and uncertain-ties that my own archives from those earliertimes clearly documented. The present, com-mensurately, was framed as a lack or emptinessto which reinvention was a necessary and ur-gent response. More specifically, the assertionthat we needed to develop a research agendaand vision for PARC presupposed either thatthere were not already visions in play or thatthose were rendered obsolete by developmentsin the world outside. The very fact that a projectwas already under way could be grounds for itsidentification as a legacy, something left overfrom the past that gets in the way of progresstoward a new future. This worked, in turn, tosilence those of us who felt that (in part in re-sponse to previous calls for innovation) we weredeep in the midst of carrying through on com-mitments already made. Rather than responsi-ble action, our reluctance to abandon existingprojects and join in the project of renewal wasread as a kind of recalcitrance, a form of re-sistance to change. In this respect the fallacyof the empty vessel—that is, the assumption bythose who position themselves at the center of

some form of knowledge creation that there isno knowledge anywhere else, but only emptyreceptacles waiting to be filled—came home toroost (Suchman & Jordan 1988).

In January of 2002, following a series of fi-nancial crises resulting in near-bankruptcy, Xe-rox removed its name from the PARC logoand turned the research center into an inde-pendent subsidiary (Adame 2002). Still heav-ily subsidized by Xerox, the premise is that thenew Palo Alto Research Center will generaterevenue by licensing its intellectual property,obtaining sponsored research, and commercial-izing its technology through industry partners.Viewed as an uncertain map for a sustainable fu-ture, commentators point to the limited returnsfrom licensing, the lack of financial partners in aposition to support long-term research, and theunlikelihood that established companies withtheir own financial challenges would look topay premium prices for research not under theirdirect control. But PARC’s current recruitingsite offers prospective employees a more posi-tive representation:

People work at PARC because they wantto transform their ideas into real-worldbreakthroughs. . .

1. Your work will have impact. PARCemployees work across disciplines, andacross the entire pipeline from ideationto commercialization.

2. You get the best of “both worlds.” Weoffer the stability of a subsidiary com-pany with the entrepreneurial spirit of astartup.

3. Your work will be interesting and var-ied. You’ll work on different projectsfor different clients (large global corpo-rations, startups, government agencies)across multiple industries and systemplayers.

4. You’ll never have to pigeonhole yourself.People come in as experts in one area,then reinvent themselves as their inter-ests, and industry-wide problems, evolve(PARC 2011).

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Each of these promises indexes its alternateresearch center (implicitly, the PARC of thepast). But rather than a valuation of knowledge-making as a public good, the figure is of ef-forts wasted through their failure to reachthe ultimate goal of commercialization; ratherthan enjoying the enabling conditions of se-cure employment, workers entrenched in a sta-ble company miss out on the excitement ofentrepreneurship; rather than the rewards ofsustained engagement with an elaborating anddeepening course of research, labors are rele-gated to the monotonous repetitions of disci-plinary programs, and identities stagnate withinthe confines of specialized knowledge making.

RECOMBINATIONS

In his call for a “recombinant” anthropology ofscience and technology, Fischer (2007, p. 539)mobilizes the language of genetics to draw an-thropological attention to the “reflexive socialinstitutions” through which the technosciencesoperate. I take reflexivity to mean that institu-tions are—can only be—enacted in and throughthe same ontic/epistemic imaginaries and ma-terial practices that produce their constitutivesubjects and objects (Verran 1998). In contrastto the premise that institutional reflexivity is arecent, or even yet to be realized, desideratumfor technoscientifically infused cultural orders,I take it to be built in to the very possibilityof organization (see for example Smith 1990).This means that reflexivity can operate in thereproduction of historically entrenched socialarrangements as much as in the interest of in-novative and emancipatory ends. In this sense,organizations can be no more or less reflex-ive, only differently, and with greater and lesserawareness of their own performativity.

In the case of Xerox PARC, our labors in-cluded the ongoing reproduction of an organi-zation that warranted and adjudicated the valueof ourselves as researchers and of the objectsthat we produced. Yet this was far from a me-chanical form of reproduction. The generationof new technologies, including not least theiridentification as new, occurs within a crucible

of complex and shifting sociomaterial and po-litical formations. I and my colleagues at PARCdid work to explore various recombinations ofdisciplinary practices and technoscientific pos-sibilities during our tenure there. Each projectwas shaped by what was learned and what wasabsent from the previous one, the question be-ing always, given what we know now, whatshould we do next? Given where we are, howcan we proceed in a responsible way? But look-ing back on these efforts I would argue, contrathe widely accepted narrative, that a site suchas PARC is designed in important respects sys-tematically to block innovation, if by the lat-ter we understand a kind of ongoing or unfold-ing transformation. In his metaphysics of cre-ativity, Ingold (2010) seeks “an ontology thatassigns primacy to processes of formation asagainst their final products, and to flows andtransformations of materials as against states ofmatter . . . this is to read creativity ‘forwards’, asan improvisatory joining in with formative pro-cesses, rather than ‘backwards’, as an abductionfrom a finished object to an intention in themind of an agent” (pp. 2–3). This rereading ofcreativity is, of course, inimical to the invest-ment in proprietary rights over fixed forms thatunderwrites intellectual property, patenting, li-censing, and the other legal underpinnings ofcontemporary capitalism. In this sense, onecould argue that the conditions enabling of par-ticular forms of action and disabling of othersthat PARC provided were at least conflicted—caught between a commitment to openness andflow on one hand, and an investment in ob-jects with definite and fixed boundaries, sep-arable from their surroundings, on the other.The regimes of value that we inhabited pulledin both directions a conflict described by one ofmy colleagues, in the context of the exercise ofPARC 2000, as the thin line between “balance”on one hand and “schizophrenia” on the other.

Things, Ingold (2010) observes “are alivebecause they leak” (p. 7). Our projects of de-sign aimed to produce, in this sense, things andnot objects, and this was an aim in tension withthe conditions of possibility that comprise cor-porate research. The making of things versus


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objects is not the exclusive provenance of pro-fessional designers, but an always already on-going effect of material practices in motion. Akindred argument to Ingold’s has been madeby Lave with respect to learning (1988, 2011).Rather than assume an inert person who mustbe activated to learn, Lave argues that learn-ing is an irrepressible constituent of alive-ness, one that formal schooling denies in itsvery projects of pedagogy. Lave (2011) readsthe practice of anthropology, as a theoreti-cal/empirical project, in and through her stud-ies of learning and making by Vai and Golatailors in Liberia and shoppers and cooks inSouthern California—studies that in turn take“comparative educational theory and cognitivetheorizing about learning as exemplars of colo-nialist politics, dualistic argumentation, and ex-perimental method” (p. 34). Embracing a figureof ethnographic projects as always in motion,Lave reflects on her own journey and proposesthat “[t]he question is how to become over thelong-term an apprentice to one’s own changingpractice” (p. 2). It is this, research as learning,that she names a critical ethnographic practice.Like Ingold’s “thing,” Lave’s “learning” refer-ences a practice always entangled in ongoinglines of movement and relationship, situated inenvironments that provide its conditions of pos-sibility and furnishings and which it, in turn,works to variously reproduce and transform.This is not only a theoretical and methodolog-ical practice but also a political/ethical one aswell, insofar as taking account of one’s ownlocation and modes of implication is a com-mitment of feminist anthropology and kindredapproaches, as arguably the only basis fora scholarship that illuminates its own en-tanglements in the knowledge that it makes(Haraway 1988, Strathern 1999, Verran 2001,Barad 2007).

Like Lave’s, my own relocation in the 1970swas aimed at an intervention, one that turnedinto a series of engagements with prevailingfigures within information systems design, in-cluding labor and practical reasoning, actionand interaction, and eventually the politics andprofessional practices of design itself. Whereas

Lave’s strategy led her to sites “nominated byhistorical, political, official Western common-sense theorizing to be marginal and inferior”(Lave 2011, p. 32), my own strategy, inspiredby the same concerns, was the opposite—thatis, to position myself in a place posited to bea central and superior site of knowledge mak-ing. Anderson & Adams (2007) characterizepostcolonial science and technology studies asan approach that “challenges us to understand‘global’ technoscience as a series of local eco-nomic accomplishments, each of them confusedand contested” (p. 736). They continue:

We need multi-sited histories of science whichstudy the bounding of sites of knowledge pro-duction, the creation of value within suchboundaries, the relations with other local so-cial circumstances, and the traffic of objectsand careers between these sites, and in and outof them . . . If we are especially fortunate, thesehistories will creatively complicate conven-tional distinctions between center and periph-ery, modern and traditional, dominant andsubordinate, civilized and primitive, globaland local. (p. 736)

In contribution to this project, I ask whatinsights we might gain by shifting questionsof innovation, creativity, and the new fromtheir status as unexamined qualities, to consti-tutive moments in the reproduction of familiarmodes of identification and action within par-ticular locales and imaginaries. The universal-ization of novelty as a good presupposes cri-teria by which places, persons, and things canbe identified as points of origin. But while thisqualification implies the existence of criteriaapplicable across times, events, and materiali-ties, I am interested in interrogating the cate-gory of the new according to a more perfor-mative metaphysics. The latter aims to charac-terize innovation’s enactment as an identifica-tion produced through multiple, particular, in-tersecting performances (Robbins 2008). Inno-vation in this sense involves making differencesthat variously disrupt particular arrangementsof interest or, through associated continuities,

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further fix them in place. At the same time, rele-vant histories and futures are made. The new onthis understanding is an outcome rather than astarting point of assessment; the similarity thatenables the making of difference is not inherentin things but an achievement of relevant discur-sive and material practices.

Postcolonial scholarship within anthropol-ogy, science and technology studies, and re-lated fields makes clear that far from a univer-sal good, the valorization of newness is a lo-cal preoccupation, identifying actors investedin particular forms of property within specificregimes of commodity capitalism (see Philip2005). And a performative metaphysics of thenew makes evident that originals and copies arenot different in kind so much as in time andplace, and that just as translation invariably pro-duces difference, novelty requires imitation orlikenesses to familiar forms. Bhabha (1994) di-rects our attention to the indeterminate spa-tiality and temporality of the “in-between” ascrucial to a postcolonial figuration of difference(p. 227), an insight that I take to be generativefor thinking about objects as well as subjectsand about relations of old and new so centralto discourses of design. The latter systemati-cally obscure the “in-between” to assert discon-tinuity. If we treat oppositions not in terms offixed boundaries or breaks, however, but ratheras ongoing engagements through which eachterm defines itself in relation to the other, thennewness is less a property than it is an artic-ulation that calls out differences from what-ever is referenced as the thing that came before.The premium placed on discrete, discontinuouschange events and the generally negative valueattributed to processes of incremental changeare part of a form of wishful thinking that aimsto bring about desired transformations withoutthe associated costs in time and human effort.In contrast to the premise that innovation canbe measured in terms of the number of ideasthat are locked in place through their mate-rialization as patented artifacts, Barry (2001)proposes a view of inventiveness as “an indexof the degree to which an object or practiceis associated with opening up possibilities . . . .

What is inventive is not the novelty of artefactsin themselves, but the novelty of the arrange-ments with other activities and entities withinwhich artefacts are situated. And might be sit-uated in the future” (pp. 211–12). I have ex-plored terrain similar to that which Barry iden-tifies under the heading of artful integrations(Suchman 2002). A frame of artful integrationemphasizes the ways in which new things aremade up out of laborious reconfigurations—always partial, provisional, and precarious—to familiar arrangements and modes ofaction.

Tsing (2005) provides us with furtherguidance through her elaboration of the tropeof “friction” as a way of figuring encounterswith difference, including (but not limited to)anthropological ones. She invites us to thinkabout the ambivalent effects of relations charac-terized by often uncomfortable alliances, whereit is the failure to resolve significant, even in-commensurable, points of difference that makesworking together (at least in limited ways, forpractical purposes) possible. Echoing Verran’s(1998, 2001, 2002) exploration of strategies forworking disparate knowledge systems together,these writings resonate deeply with the rela-tions of anthropology and design that I elabo-rate here. Of course the line between generativefrictions and those that operate through the de-nial of power differences and in-built forms ofcoercion is a slippery one: Not all conciliationsare desirable or sustainable. Knowledge inthese contexts, Tsing (2005) observes, “growsthrough multiple layers of collaboration—asboth empathy and betrayal” (p. 155). Artic-ulating and negotiating the tricky politics offriction is a continuing and integral aspect ofengagement.

My aim in this article has been to weave re-locations in the discipline of anthropology sincethe 1960s together with the rise of professionaldesign as a dominant figure of transformativechange. Anthropology’s growing awareness ofits own colonial history and associated calls forits reinvention have led, among other shifts,to a turn toward “home,” understood as thevalue, even urgency, of anthropological inquiry


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into locations characterized by their culturalfamiliarity and their political and economiccentrality. For me, this turn unfolded as along-term immersion within a site identifiedas a center of innovation and future-making,which became my own professional home.I have traced the outlines of the foundingcommitment to a “design science” that char-acterized the growth of interrelated disciplinesof computer science, AI, management, andorganization theory during the same periodthat anthropology was beginning its owncritical self-examination and the related turnwithin design research toward a more criticaldesign practice. Outlining a series of momentsas illustrative cases, I have articulated anengagement between anthropology and designbased in anthropological reframings of received

conceptualizations of the design problem. Ineach case, these reframings shift attention tothat which overflows the frame, arguing thatthose things that exceeded the bounds of designcomprise the conditions of possibility for itsefficacy. These cases are contextualized withinthe aspirations of a critical anthropology of de-sign as a way of contributing to the emergenceof a critical technical practice (Agre 1997,p. 23). The conditions of possibility for bothinclude recognition of the specificity of loca-tion and the generative limits of method, suchthat a responsible practice is one characterizedby humility rather than hubris, aspiring not tomassive change or discontinuous innovationbut to modest interventions within ongoing,continually shifting and unfolding, landscapesof transformation.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that mightbe perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper draws from a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK,Science in Society Programme in 2003, grant reference L144250006, and my collaborations withEndre Danyi and Laura Watts on the project “Relocating Innovation: Places and Material Practicesof Future Making” with support from The Leverhulme Trust, grant reference F/00 185/U. Mythinking on these topics has benefited from a series of events over the years, most notably the session“Mere Innovation: Postcolonial and Other Ruminations on Invention and Imitation,” organizedwith Cori Hayden for the 2008 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science/EuropeanAssociation for Science and Technology Studies in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. I am grateful tocolleagues at Xerox PARC during my tenure there, to my colleagues in the Centre for ScienceStudies at Lancaster University, to Jean Lave for inspirational conversations, and to Don Brenneisfor his warm encouragement in the preparation of this article.

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Figure 1The 2005 home page of the Massive Change project. From Bruce Mau Design and the Institute Without Boundaries (2005).

www.annualreviews.org • Anthropological Relocations C-1

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Figure 2Model showing the primacy of design. From Bruce Mau Design and the Institute Without Boundaries(2005).

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Annual Review ofAnthropology

Volume 40, 2011 Contents

Prefatory Chapter

Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of DesignLucy Suchman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Archaeology

The Archaeology of ConsumptionPaul R. Mullins � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133

Migration Concepts in Central Eurasian ArchaeologyMichael D. Frachetti � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 195

Archaeologists and Indigenous People: A Maturing Relationship?Tim Murray � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 363

Archaeological Ethnography: A Multitemporal Meeting Groundfor Archaeology and AnthropologyYannis Hamilakis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 399

Archaeologies of SovereigntyAdam T. Smith � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 415

A Century of Feasting StudiesBrian Hayden and Suzanne Villeneuve � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 433

Biological Anthropology

Menopause, A Biocultural PerspectiveMelissa K. Melby and Michelle Lampl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �53

Ethnic Groups as Migrant Groups: Improving Understandingof Links Between Ethnicity/Race and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes andAssociated ConditionsTessa M. Pollard � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 145

From Mirror Neurons to Complex Imitation in the Evolutionof Language and Tool UseMichael A. Arbib � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 257

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From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?Brian Hare � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 293

The Human Microbiota as a Marker for Migrations of Individualsand PopulationsMaria Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Martin J. Blaser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 451

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

Publics and PoliticsFrancis Cody � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �37

Ritual and Oratory Revisited: The Semiotics of Effective ActionRupert Stasch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 159

Language and Migration to the United StatesHilary Parsons Dick � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 227

The Balkan Languages and Balkan LinguisticsVictor A. Friedman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 275

International Anthropology and Regional Studies

Central Asia in the Post–Cold War WorldMorgan Y. Liu � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 115

The Ethnographic Arriving of PalestineKhaled Furani and Dan Rabinowitz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 475

Sociocultural Anthropology

Substance and Relationality: Blood in ContextsJanet Carsten � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �19

Hallucinations and Sensory OverridesT.M. Luhrmann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �71

Phenomenological Approaches in AnthropologyRobert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

Migration, Remittances, and Household StrategiesJeffrey H. Cohen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 103

Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of ContemporaryClimate ChangeSusan A. Crate � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 175

Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentalityof Immigration in Dark TimesDidier Fassin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 213

Contents vii

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The Cultural Politics of Nation and MigrationSteven Vertovec � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 241

Migrations and SchoolingMarcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Tasha Darbes, Sandra Isabel Dias, and Matt Sutin � � � � � � 311

TobaccoMatthew Kohrman and Peter Benson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 329

Transnational Migration and Global Health: The Production andManagement of Risk, Illness, and Access to CareCarolyn Sargent and Stephanie Larchanche � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 345

Concepts and Folk TheoriesSusan A. Gelman and Cristine H. Legare � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379

Migration-Religion Studies in France: Evolving Toward a ReligiousAnthropology of MovementSophie Bava � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 493

Theme I: Anthropology of Mind

Hallucinations and Sensory OverridesT.M. Luhrmann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �71

Phenomenological Approaches in AnthropologyRobert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �87

From Mirror Neurons to Complex Imitation in the Evolution ofLanguage and Tool UseMichael A. Arbib � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 257

From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?Brian Hare � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 293

Concepts and Folk TheoriesSusan A. Gelman and Cristine H. Legare � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379

Theme II: Migration

Migration, Remittances, and Household StrategiesJeffrey H. Cohen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 103

Ethnic Groups as Migrant Groups: Improving Understanding of LinksBetween Ethnicity/Race and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes and AssociatedConditionsTessa M. Pollard � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 145

Migration Concepts in Central Eurasian ArchaeologyMichael D. Frachetti � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 195

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Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentalityof Immigration in Dark TimesDidier Fassin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 213

Language and Migration to the United StatesHilary Parsons Dick � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 227

The Cultural Politics of Nation and MigrationSteven Vertovec � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 241

Migrations and SchoolingMarcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Tasha Darbes, Sandra Isabel Dias,

and Matt Sutin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 311

Transnational Migration and Global Health: The Productionand Management of Risk, Illness, and Access to CareCarolyn Sargent and Stephanie Larchanche � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 345

The Human Microbiota as a Marker for Migrations of Individualsand PopulationsMaria Gloria Dominguez-Bello and Martin J. Blaser � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 451

Migration-Religion Studies in France: Evolving Toward a ReligiousAnthropology of MovementSophie Bava � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 493

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 31–40 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 509

Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 31–40 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 512

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found athttp://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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anthropological relocations and the limits of design · anthropology’s relocation as a ﬁeld,...

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