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Copyright of Literatura: Teoría, Historia, Crítica is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network advocates considering forms in terms of their affordances, "the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs" (6). This depends, however, on the reliable identification of forms in a particular text, activity, ormaterial; and the critical response to John Henry Days gives us evidence that, while we can analyze forms the novel deploys and contains, it remains a challenge to identify the novel's form as a whole. In a different vein, Heather Love'swork ondescription is explicitly concernedwith "forms of analysis," but not with the analysis of formper se. The present examination of JohnHenry Days attempts to bridge such valuable conversations about form and description. This article argues that as John Henry Days grapples with describing forms that constantly remake themselves, it takes a position akin to science and technology studies scholar Michael Lynch's theoretical agnosticism with respect to capital-O Ontology. Refusing anything like a full-blowntheory of form, John HenryDays both practices and advocates provisional taxonomy--touching and moving on--as a way of knowing its ever-changingmaterial. This article's analysis of the describer's nightmare is thus a case study for Lynch's claim that "particular descriptions--including descriptions of ontologies--can make sense, apparently even to others who do not share our grand theories". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Mélanges francophones is the property of Galati University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, one that takes seriously the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place. Taking this fact seriously, the article argues, requires us to think about the material world not in terms of ‘objects’, but ecologically, that is, in terms of the processes and conditions under which certain ‘things’ come to be differentiated and identified as particular kinds of ‘objects’ endowed with particular forms of meaning, value and power. The article demonstrates the purchase of this ecological approach through the example of the Mona Lisa. It does so by exploring the rather extraordinary processes of containment and maintenance that are required to keep the Mona Lisa legible as an art object over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a co-laborative laboratory ethnography in a molecular biology laboratory conducting research on environmental epigenetics. It focuses on a single study concerned with the material implications of social differentiation. The analysis briefly raises biopolitical concerns. Its main concern lies with an understanding of the human body as local in its working infrastructure or “inner laboratory”, an understanding that emerges from the co-laborative inquiry between biologists and anthropologist. This co-laborative mode of inquiry raises productive tensions within biology as to the universal or local nature of human nature and within anthropology as to the status of human biology within social theory. The paper cannot resolve this tension. Rather it explores it as an epistemic object in the context of interdisciplinarity, ontography and co-laboration. In concluding, it specifies co-laboration as temporary, non-teleological joint epistemic work aimed at producing new kinds of reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]