Dis/connection Matters: Natural, Synthetic, and Digital

Introduction

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36950/tsantsa.2021.26.7680

Keywords:

materiality, natural, ontology, digital, synthetic, mediation, valuation

Abstract

The world is experiencing new relations and transformations between natural, synthetic, and digital substances. Rather than considering these as materially distinct or ontologically separate, this Special Issue of TSANTSA interrogates how they are interlocked in socio-material processes of mediation, transmutation, and valuation. By conceptualizing the specificity of their separateness, the special issue makes possible the comparison and commensuration of their relationship, and to move beyond their essential qualities. What are the boundaries, leakages, or dis/connections between human and digital, natural and artificial, the organic and synthetic matters? Based on ethnographic research in laboratories, gold refineries, bio-tech microbial seeds and digitally-produced natural sounds, human-machine apps and cellular agriculture, each contribution theorizes the mediation, transmutation, and valuation of natural synthetics, the humanness of artificial intelligence, or the materiality of digital elements.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

  • Filipe Calvão, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

    Filipe Calvão is an associate professor in anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID). His research examines extractive industries in postcolonial Africa, materiality and mining labor, and digital economies in the Global South.

  • Matthieu Bolay, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

    Matthieu Bolay is a social anthropologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. He has expertise in the politics of extraction and his research lies at the crossroads of migration, labour, politics, technology and the law.

  • Lindsay Bell, University of Western Ontario

    Lindsay Bell is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Western, Ontario in Canada. Situated at the intersection of linguistic and cultural anthropology, her research has largely focused on extractive industries in arctic countries.

Downloads

Published

2021-06-30

How to Cite

Calvão, Filipe, Matthieu Bolay, and Lindsay Bell. 2021. “Dis/Connection/Matters:/Natural,/Synthetic,/and/Digital:/Introduction”. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 26 (June): 7-17. https://doi.org/10.36950/tsantsa.2021.26.7680.