Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

“This compelling book demonstrates how a very sophisticated anthropological perspective can transform ‘globalization’ into a useful tool for investigating emerging social forms and ways of ruling and living. Certainly this non-structural approach is needed—one that attends to the specificity of combinations, interactions, sites, and effects associated with the spread of technology and risk.”

Ulrich Beck, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

“Global Assemblages provides excellent and rich insight into a developing anthropology of the contemporary world. The intertwining of violence, capital flows, political fragmentation, and regimes of social and moral control are investigated here in what must be recognized as a major contribution to anthropological scholarship.”

Jonathan Friedman, L’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and Lund University, Sweden

“This volume will give assemblages of many types a good name—the authors are astute, varied, and at the top of their game; the geographies do justice to the notion of global; and the book has a core intellectual inquiry about reflexive practices that holds together its wide-ranging essays. From transplanted kidneys to research audit protocols, the uneasy interrelationships of global assemblages emerge in the fleshy details of a knotted world.”

Donna Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz