Orphaned wells,oil assets,and debt: the competing ethics of value creation and care within petrocapitalist projects of return

This essay explores the phenomenon known as ‘orphaned wells’, meaning unprofitable oil and gas wells (‘legacy wells’) that have become disentangled from their corporate owners owing to insolvency, or owing to a failure to comply with local regulations. Drawing from an ethnographic example of a near-insolvent oil and gas corporation in Alberta, Canada, and its strategies of refinancing, the essay explores how value creation and the moral force of the obligation to create a financial return give rise to a ‘durational ethics’ that shapes corporate and financial performativities and prolongs the ‘life’ of legacy oil and gas assets. Legacy assets, understood as potential orphans, are thus caught up in a lively corporate practice of asset circulation and recombination often deployed by producers for the moral work of ‘cleaning balance sheets’. This essay calls for ‘thinking with orphans’ to recognize the competing ethical registers which produce them in addition to the growing need for responsibility and corporate care for legacy oil and gas assets.     

Boom to bust,ashes to (coal) dust: the contested ethics of energy exchanges in a declining US coal market

This essay explores how rank-and-file producers of energy evaluate the ethics of energy exchanges, which sheds light on some of the unexamined assumptions animating anthropological studies of energy and ethics. Exploring how coal miners experience a massive downturn in Wyoming, the centre of US coal production, reveals differing logics of exchange between the producers and consumers of electricity. Most Americans engage with electricity as consumers through a commodity framework, paying utility companies a fee to purchase kilowatt hours that are abstracted from their productive origins. In contrast, the miners experience energy as more of a gift exchange, keeping in view the network of the ultimate consumers of the coal they produce. These differing logics of exchange entail different ethical obligations in the face of the termination of those relationships as the country moves away from coal-fired electricity, helping to explain the outrage that was felt in ‘coal country’ – an outrage that Donald Trump exploited for political purposes during the 2016 US presidential election.     

Labs and slabs: Television crime drama and the quest for forensic realism

This essay examines how crime dramas produced during, and since, the 1990s became marked by the quest for ‘forensic realism’. In particular, the essay traces a landmark shift in the development of forensic realism in the form of the ground-breaking British police drama Prime Suspect in 1991. It is argued that this television series not only represents a turning point in television history, but that it also constitutes a key text in the broader cultural turn towards forensic fascination. Prime Suspect vividly revealed and displayed corpses, crime scenes and post-mortem photos in an unprecedented fashion for television. This essay shows how in the process it established new standards and expectations regarding the aesthetics and thematic content of the perceived ‘realism’ of the crime genre. Through an analysis of the reception and impact of Prime Suspect the essay also demonstrates how crime drama’s increasing fascination with forensic realism has driven debate over just what kinds of stories and images constitute acceptable or appropriate subject matter for popular entertainment, and for the medium of television itself.     

The ordinary ethics of charcoal in northern Madagascar

Charcoal producers are among the most frequently maligned entrepreneurs in Madagascar, often singled out in conservation reports and targeted in conservation measures as enemies of the island's threatened forests and ecosystems. And yet charcoal remains an important cooking fuel and thus a primary energy commodity for many people on the island. This essay addresses the ordinary ethics of charcoal production and consumption in northern Madagascar, focusing especially on how these processes are fundamental to an ‘artisanal’ energy system that involves people and engages them with one another in distinctive ways.     

Hacking anthropology

This essay outlines how the ‘hack’ might offer a model for anthropological research in the face of the distributed relations evidenced by digital data. The argument builds on fieldwork with citizens and activists and looks at their attempts to understand and make use of the data produced by energy sensors and monitors. Drawing on their experiences, I suggest that ‘the hack’ emerges as an important form of practice that helps people navigate the place of data in social relations. Taking the hack not just as ethnographic observation but also as a methodological proposition, I use my ethnographic material on the practice of the hack to reconsider the anthropological challenge of doing ethnography of processes that are only perceptible through numerical or digital data. To explore the value of the hack for anthropology, I introduce an example of an attempt to do ethnography in the mode of the hack. The essay ends with reflections on how the hack might provide us with new ways of getting to grips with the anthropological implications of systemic and emergent relations that are both brought to light and remade through data.     

Strategic translation: pollution,data, and Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

This essay examines the role of data practices in the making and refuting of settler colonial environmental science. Investigating the epistemic contestation surrounding environmental contamination produced by the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, I discuss an alternative approach to toxicology: a community-based monitoring programme that uses a ‘three-track’ methodology to present data in three distinct forms. Using this method, First Nations communities engaged in strategic translation, balancing their aim of rendering Traditional Knowledge and community needs legible to policy-makers against their desire to protect Traditional Knowledge from being assimilated into the dominant data paradigm. This translation, I argue, enacts a form of resistance in an era of relentless datafication: making-things-into-data can reflect the exercise of agency rather than submission to external pressure. In this way, the three-track methodology models how marginalized communities can leverage data's productive capacities for their own ends and produce scientific knowledge on their own terms.     

Cacogenic Cartographies: Space and Place in the Eugenic Family Study

Though only one component product of the larger eugenics movement, the eugenic family study proved to be, by far, its most potent ideological tool. The Kallikak Family, for instance, went through eight editions between 1913 and 1931. This essay argues that the current scholarship has missed important ways that the architects of the eugenic family studies theorized and described the subjects of their investigation. Using one sparsely interrogated work (sociologist Frank Wilson Blackmar’s “The Smoky Pilgrims”) and one previously unknown eugenic family study (biologist Frank Gary Brooks’ untitled analysis of the flood-zone Oklahomans) from the Southern Plains, this essay aims to introduce “environment” as a schema that allows for how the subjects of the eugenic family study were conceptualized with respect to their surroundings. Geospatially and environmentally relevant constructions of scientific knowledge were central to the project of eugenics during its formative years, but remain largely and conspicuously absent from the critical literature which engages this project to separate the fit from the unfit in American society. The dysgenic constituted a unique human geography, giving us significant insight into how concatenations of jurisprudence as well as cultural and social worth were tied to the land.     

Children of the palms: growing plants and growing people in a Papuan Plantationocene

This article explores how ecological change transforms children and child-rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim ' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.     

The making of an ‘ideal’ live-in migrant care worker: recruiting,training, matching and disciplining

This essay investigates the contested processes through which gender and racial ideologies are practised and thereby place specific groups of women in particular gendered and racialized labour markets. The migration of female live-in care workers to Taiwan exemplifies how gender and racial ideologies are embodied in everyday practices that justify the paid care work done by these women and that produce their subordinate status. In this essay, I take the problematic of representation of ‘migrant care workers’ as a point of entry, to investigate how a gendered-racialized ideology is utilized to legitimate and naturalize the gendered-racialized division of care labour within the global capitalist context.     

Race and place at the city limits: imaginative geographies of South Central Los Angeles

In the early 1990s, a new cycle of films emerged that depicted complex portrayals of the lives of African-Americans in the neighbourhoods in which they lived. This so-called ‘hood genre was quite radical in its foregrounding of structural racism and police violence. But Hollywood's marketing of these films muted this radical content by directly contradicting explicit signifiers in the films’ story worlds. While many of the ‘hood films take place on the urban fringe and in suburbs, their promotional materials worked to confine the action, to a mythic ‘inner city'.

This essay studies the two most popular films of the genre, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, to illustrate how ‘paratexts' redistricted 'hood films. Through a comparative analysis of the films and their promotional materials, this essay argues Hollywood marketed a racialized ‘imaginative geography' for this important genre of African-American cinema.     

‘Horse tripping’: animal welfare laws and the production of ethnic Mexican illegality

Conflicts over animal practices have long been used to construct dynamics of power. This essay examines how debates over immigrant animal practices contribute to the production of immigrant ‘illegality’ in the contemporary USA. I examine laws banning the ‘horse tripping’ events of the Mexican rodeo enacted in California (1994) and Arizona (2009), situating these laws and related media coverage within the broader landscape of exclusionary anti-immigrant politics. While the activists (including Latinos) who supported the bills were primarily concerned with animal welfare, their concerns were marshalled, out of context and against their will, by nativists who demand border militarization, exclusion and deportation. This essay shows that a range of actors – not just notoriously nativist groups but also Latinos themselves, as well as progressive people and organizations – participate, indirectly and inadvertently, in the production of immigrant illegality.     

Genomic susceptibility‐testing and pregnancy: something old,something new

This essay explores how testing for common and complex or genomic, as opposed to genetic, susceptibility to deep vein thrombosis both challenges and consolidates old social discourses on genes, gender and pregnancy. The nexus between genetics and reproduction usually crystallizes in the moral dilemma of selective termination. This essay examines online discussion among women with a genomic predisposition to deep vein thrombosis, which is associated with miscarriage and stillbirth. It explores the women's exchanges on what to ‘do’ in order to safely carry to term a foetus, which may always also have the genomic susceptibility. Interpreting DNA not in terms of predicting fate but of suggesting how to modify one's behaviour in order to give and care for life blunts its eugenistic edge. However, this interpretation also shoulders discussants with the complicated and laborious responsibility of modifying themselves, their life styles and the life styles of their families—all of which falls within women's traditional labour of love in the privatized age of bioindividuality.     

Forensic fictions: Science,television production,and modern storytelling

This essay uses interviews with television creators, writers, and producers to examine how media practitioners utilise, negotiate and transform forensic science in the production of televisual stories including the creation of unique visuals, character exploration, narrative progression, plot complication, thematic development, and adding a sense of authenticity. Television as a medium has its own structures and conventions, including adherence to a show’s franchise, which put constraints on how stories are told. I demonstrate how television writers find forensic science to be an ideal tool in navigating television’s narrative constraints by using forensics to create conflicts, new obstacles, potential solutions, and final solutions in their stories. I show how television writers utilise forensic science to provide the scientific certainty their characters require to catch the criminal, but also how uncertainty is introduced in a story through the interpretation of the forensics by the show’s characters. I also argue that televisual storytellers maintain a flexible notion of scientific realism based on the notion of possibility that puts them at odds with scientists who take a more demanding conception of scientific accuracy based on the concept of probability.     

Future-proof: bunkered data centres and the selling of ultra-secure cloud storage

Abandoned after the Cold War, nuclear bunkers around the world have found afterlives as ultra-secure data storage sites for cloud computing providers. The operators of these bunkered data centres capitalize on the spatial, temporal, and material security affordances of their subterranean fortresses, promoting them as ‘future-proof’ cloud storage solutions. Taking the concept of ‘future-proofing’ as its entry-point, this essay explores how data centre professionals work with the imaginative properties of the bunker to configure data as an object to be securitized. The essay takes the form of an ethnographic tour through a UK-based data bunker. During this tour, threatening data futures and fragile data materialities are conjured in order to secure the conditions of possibility for the bunkered data centre's commercial continuity. Future-proofing, it is argued, provides a conceptual opening onto the entangled imperatives of security and marketing that drive the commercial data storage industry.     

Parallel and divergent landscapes: cultural encounters in the ethnographic space of Tuareg medicine

This essay explores the dialogue between the local quest for healing and the anthropological quest for healing knowledge, and local assessments of knowledge-power relationships in these processes. The context is medical discourse among the Tuareg of Niger Republic, West Africa, and my research experiences among these people. I examine local medical specialists and their traditional and changing practice in terms of how they perceive and respond to wider knowledge and power systems that impinge on local health care. Paramount in these systems are central state policies and medical anthropological research on healing, as these intersect in a postcolonial and post-separatist/rebellion setting. The essay analyzes parallels between the exchange of medicine and the exchange of knowledge and reflects upon how anthropological knowledge of African healing systems is constructed in an environment highly charged with power and danger--of political violence and economic crisis. The broader issue addressed here is how to give greater empowerment to local residents' voices in their "indigenous critique" of the medical anthropological project.     

Learning from cholera: medical and social responses to the first great Paris epidemic in 1832

This essay explores responses to the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832 to show how medical ideas shaped popular conceptions of the social world, while at the same time this world influenced how scientists posed their basic hypotheses. It demonstrates how responses to the epidemic were shaped by two major realities: the population of Paris was exploding and France had recently experienced a second major revolution.     

Spinoza,Styron, and the Ethics of Healing

In this essay I discuss a passage from William Styron’s memoir of his long struggle with chronic severe depression, from the standpoint of a Spinozian understanding of agency and self-worth. In this passage Styron relates how in hearing a piece of music he was abruptly struck by a recollection of “all the joys [his] house had known” and how this brought a realization that it would be wrong for him to kill himself: wrong because it would be an abandonment of those who had shared in those joys and a “desecration” of himself. He tells how this realization led him to admit himself to hospital for treatment and thereby to a slow and difficult recovery. This, I propose, illustrates the Spinozian idea that the value of an individual life is properly understood in terms of that individual’s participation in the actualization of a shared value and that individual agency is empowered by the knowledge of such value.     

Between Europe and the Balkans: Mapping Slovenia and Croatia's “Return to Europe” in the 1990s

This essay traces the ongoing discursive processes through which two former Yugoslav states — Croatia and Slovenia — framed their so-called “exit from the Balkans” and “return to Europe” throughout the 1990s. Applying Maria Todorova's framework of “Balkanism” to these two cases, the essay examines how leaders sought recognition as belonging to Europe, or Central Europe, by defining their respective national identities in opposition to Balkan or Yugoslav ones. What distinguishes Balkanism from other critical traditions such as Orientalism is that the Balkans are located in a distinctively liminal position: at the same time part of Europe as well as its antithetical periphery, the “other” within. This in-between position can often lead to contradictory identity constructions, whereby an insistence on concretizing one's Europeanness coincides with a certain awareness that this European status is never ontologically secure. The essay concludes by considering ways in which the Balkans can be re-imagined, reassembling diverse fragments of Balkan identity into a site for positive engagement and critique.     

Horned larks on the Tibetan Plateau adjust the breeding strategy according to the seasonal changes in the risk of nest predation and food availability

Songbirds in seasonal environments often adjust their breeding strategy according to spatial or temporal changes in breeding conditions. Here we investigate how horned larks Eremophila alpestris, a multi‐brooded songbird on the Tibetan Plateau, responded to the changing risk of nest predation and food availability across breeding attempts. We showed that both nest concealment and food supply increased with plant growth, and horned larks adjusted their breeding strategies accordingly. First they selected nest‐sites where predator density was low, which enhanced nest survival. Second, clutch size increased with improving breeding conditions. They did not adopt an ‘egg‐size’ strategy as egg size did not change with laying sequence or breeding attempt. Instead, they adopted the ‘brood survival (feeding later‐hatched nestlings more)’ and ‘brood reduction (feeding early‐hatched nestlings more)’ strategies during early and later attempts. Moreover, nestlings’ growth varied with breeding attempt: more energy was invested into the growth of body mass during the first attempt but more energy was expended on the growth of linear structures during later attempts. This difference in energy allocation reflected changing food availability. We suggest that temporal changes of environmental factors are also the important force driving the evolution of avian breeding strategies.     

Egress and Regress: Pentecostal Precursors and Parallels in Northern Mozambique

Based on fieldwork among the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, this essay explores how non-Pentecostal models of transformation shape a people's manner of relating to Pentecostalism. Radical change has long been constitutive of Makhuwa history and subjectivity. Yet Makhuwa patterns of change, commonly conceived in terms of movement, entail regress as much as egress – circular mobilities that disrupt linear teleologies. State administrators and Pentecostal missionaries attempt to reform local inhabitants by, respectively, ‘sedentarising’ and ‘converting’ them. Deploying their historical proclivity towards mobility, those among whom I worked appear simultaneously eager to partake in resettlement schemes and reluctant to remain settled by them. I argue that their ambivalence towards Pentecostal churches and teachings, in particular, challenges two prevailing assumptions within anthropological studies of Christianity: that discontinuity is definitive, and that it is exceptional to Pentecostalism.