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Rejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 97–108

All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse how the concept of institutions has been used in scholarship on land tenure in Sudan. We then suggest, using a case study, that increased attention to the different ways in which actors validate or challenge institutions helps to examine the precariousness of institutional orders in the Sudans. This can move Sudan Studies beyond some of the limitations of previous scholarship, such as a tendency towards interpretations that reiterate institutions as timeless, discrete and immutable units such as “traditional” or “modern”.

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that Rottenburg has done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention (or the element of a “metacode”) is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them.

In this essay I argue that in certain contemporaneous African contexts the boundary between laboratory and life outside the laboratory is being transgressed in specific ways resulting in the emergence of novel forms of social and public experiments. The main focus of the essay is on biomedical research and its relation to health care, both of them being situated in a larger frame of biopolitics, recent reconfigurations of neoliberal regimes of governance, privatization of research, and developments in discourses and practices concerning human rights. The novelty to be worked out in more detail is not the boundary transgression between laboratory and the world outside of it, but the particular form this ubiquitous transgression is taking. I develop my argument in a critical dialogue with recent literature on global health, humanitarian interventions, therapeutic domination, and science and technology studies.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of concepts covered in this book Travelling Models in African Conflict Management . The book examines how travelling models shape global processes of change in the field of conflict management. Two of the principal questions addressed in the book are the following: How is change in one place related to developments in other places? And, why are certain issues that are important in one place taken up in other places, while others are not? The book examines how travelling models enact changes in conflict situations in unexpected ways. They look at what happens when a model has been put into practice at a conflict site, and they pay attention to the forms of (re-)ordering resulting from this process. The book explains the travel of models in conflict management with the aim of exploring the production of order and disorder they trigger in various contexts. Keywords: African conflict management; travelling models

In the domain of health, the relation between bodies, citizenship, nations and governments has changed beyond recognition over the past four decades, especially in Africa. In many regions, populations are now faced with a total lack of medical care, and the disciplinary regimes of modernity are faint memories. In this situation, new critical insights beyond the critique of old »modernization« and the »disciplinary regimes« of imperial times are needed. How can we keep up our sophisticated criticism of knowledge regimes and our doubts with regard to narratives of development, when so many people in Africa are dreaming about modernity and are envisioning their own renaissance?

The transformation of East German companies is presented as a crisis in cor porate reality construction. The socialist system has generated a particular view on what is "real" as opposed to the fictions of the official philosophy. The notion of the "self" and of "solidarity" lay at the core of this "socialist realism." The change to market economy has shaken up many an idea which was previously taken for granted. The same process also exposes corporate reality constructions under the conditions of capitalism as fragile and precar ious.

In diesem Artikel zeige ich, dass sich in manchen Anwendungsbereichen neoliberaler Regierungstechnologien eine neue Figuration von Wissenschaft, Politik und Markt abzeichnet und dass sie sich insbesondere im Bereich der Biomedizin im globalen Suden zu erkennen gibt. Einerseits folge ich dem inzwischen viel diskutieren und weit anerkannten foucaultschen Ansatz der ,therapeutischen Herrschaft‘, andererseits werde ich versuchen, eine seiner Grundannahmen uber das Zustandekommen und die Funktion des Ausnahmezustandes zu widerlegen. Im Zentrum der Argumentation steht eine Auseinandersetzung um das damit verbundene und umstrittene Konzept der Experimentalitat bzw. der Experimentalisierung. Wenn sich politische Entscheidungen und die Wahl bestimmter Regierungstechnologien zunehmend durch Verweis auf wissenschaftliches Wissen legitimieren, letzteres aber zunehmend auf seine Vorlaufigkeit und prinzipielle Ungewissheit verweist, ist der Einsatz dieser Regierungstechnologien dann eine Form des Experimentierens?

Zusammenfassung „Volkseigene Betriebe“ der DDR mußten wie alle Organisationen darum ringen, ihre Interessen mit jenen der Mitarbeiter in Einklang zu bringen. Die von der Organisationsumwelt vorgeschriebenen formalen Strukturen verhinderten hier allerdings ein selbstorganisiertes Zusammenspiel zwischen den vertraglichen und den nichtvertraglichen Aspekten der sozialen Organisation der Arbeit. Gleichzeitig bewirkte das Versagen des Plans, daß die Aufrechterhaltung der Produktion immer mehr von nichtvertraglichen Leistungen abhing. Diese „freiwilligen“ Leistungen waren weitgehend sublegal, da sie zwangsläufig Regelverletzungen der institutionalisierten Ordnung einschlossen. Dennoch entstand dadurch innerhalb und zwischen den Betrieben eine umfassende Schattenwirtschaft. Die vollständige Entkoppelung der nur noch zeremoniell dargebotenen formalen Struktur der VEB von den ausschlaggebenden, hinter der Bühne ablaufenden Handlungen verursachte indes nicht nur eine bemerkenswerte Ineffektivität der Betriebe. Sie führte auch dazu, daß sich Vertrauen und Solidarität unter Bedingungen entwickelt haben, die nur im Schatten der Hinterbühne, nicht aber im wirklichen Leben gelten.

This book is about the making and unmaking of socio-cultural differences, seen from anthropological, sociological and philosophical perspectives. Some contributions are of a theoretical nature, such as when the »problem of translation«, »the enigma of alienity« or »queer theory« are addressed; other contributors throw light on contemporary issues like the integration of Muslims in Norway, identity-forming processes in »Creole« societies or »neo-traditionalist movements« and »identity« in Africa. Moreover, the book deals with »strangers« looked at from an »anthropology of the night«. Special emphasis is placed on how globalization and the rapid spread of ever new technologies of information have generated ever new patterns of inclusion and exclusion, and how these can be theorized.