ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society (Semester 2,
2025)
September 12, 2025
Main reading: Anand (2011)
Other reading: Larkin (2013); Larkin (2008); Star (1999)
As Star (1999) says, a lot of everyday life is sustained by “boring things,” and particularly the constant hum of systems that we barely notice, but which must continually operate in order for anything else to operate. Everything needs an infrastructure. Roads connect Point A to Point B. And yet, roads are not really that interesting or useful if one examines them independently of Points A and B. Infrastructures are important yet often ignored foundation, and yet they aren’t things. Their importance lies in the connections they have with other things. The same could be said of all technology: “It is product and process” (Star and Ruhleder 1996, 111).
When you are on a train, you may see another train alongside you on the next track going in the same direction at a different speed. If you’re on the express and the other train is the local, you will pass it by, but for a minute you may have the strange sensation that it is going the wrong way. And when you take the local and an express train overtakes you, you may feel for a moment that your train started going backwards. This is a Gestalt switch. The figure becomes the ground, and the ground becomes the figure. First you were moving from A to B. Then you saw another train. Now your brain has to make a choice. Am I watching the world go by as I move or am I watching the movement of something else? You have to switch your frame of reference.
Moving to a network perspective requires this capacity to switch one’s frame of reference. In a way, anthropology is very comfortable with that. We like to see the forest, not the trees. But this can involve a God trick, and so we have a reason to try and achieve another kind of Gestalt switch.
The network paradigm has facilitated that in anthropology, and sparked a number of studies of sociotechnical networks—physical infrastructures—as meeting places, contact zones, and indeed shadow publics for a hidden politics. Theories of technical infrastructures, as Star for instance has helped to formulate, moreover also help us understand the network paradigm better.
infrastructure, citizenship, political society
[T]he framers [of the US constitution] had a distinctly limited vision of those who counted among “We the People.” Qualified voters when the nation was new bore more than a passing resemblance to the framers: the franchise was confined to property-owning adult white males, people free from dependence on others, and therefore considered trustworthy citizens, not susceptible to influence or control by masters, overlords, or supervisors. (Ginsburg 1992, 1187)
But the founders stated a commitment in the Declaration of Independence to equality and in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights to individual liberty. Those commitments had growth potential. As historian Richard Morris has written, a prime portion of the history of the U.S. Constitution is the story of the extension (through amendment, judicial interpretation, and practice) of constitutional rights and protections to once-excluded groups: to people who were once held in bondage, to men without property, to Native Americans, and to women. (Ginsburg 1992, 1188)
What do anthropologists, and network thinkers, make of this conception of citizenship?
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. 1992. “Speaking in a Judicial Voice.” New York University Law Review 67 (6): 1185–209.
