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Arch Sci (2008) 8:165180
DOI 10.1007/s10502-008-9073-y
ORIGINAL PAPER
Bernd Frohmann
Published online: 30 December 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008
Abstract Recent years have seen a sharp rise of attention to the importance of documentation in various disciplines in the social sciences. Many thinkers have found the concept of assemblages, which emphasizes complexity, heterogeneity, and emergence, fruitful for investigating the role of documents and documentation. This article analyses some examples from anthropology and management studies as contributions to documentary ethics, ontology, and politics. The rst pair of case studies reveals a documentary activism of biological and therapeutic citizenship. The second pair shows how documentation works constitutively to bring different kinds of entities into being. Both kinds of cases practice a documentary politics, which is analyzed in terms of Bruno Latours ideas of reassembling the social.
Keywords Documentation Ethics Ontology Biopolitics Assemblages
About a year ago, a faculty colleague with background in anthropology, knowing my interest in documentation, sent me a conference announcement from the American Anthropological Association that included a notice of a special interest group in documentation. That event led to Annelise Riles Documents: Artifacts of modern knowledge (Riles 2006), an anthology of papers on ethnographical studies of documents, which follows her own book-length study, The network inside out (Riles 2000). As Ill show below, anthropologists have also turned to documentation in a wide variety of ethnographic studies with a global dimension, especially the anthology Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (Ong and Collier 2005). The document has become a hot topic, not only in anthropology but in other areas of the social sciences.
B. Frohmann (&)
Faculty of Information & Media Studies, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON N6A 5B7, Canadae-mail: [email protected]
Documentary ethics, ontology, and politics
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This turn to documentation is, of course, of keen interest to the DOCAM conferences, which are dedicated to multiplying studies of documentary practices and to strengthening theoretical work on the concept of the document, and particularly to me because of my interest in what Manuel DeLanda in his recent book on social theory after Gilles Deleuze calls assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006). My previous contributions to the DOCAM
conferences have pursued ways to understand the entanglements of...