Researching the Ebola Reservoir with the Heuristic of the Fetish in Guinea

The unprecedented character of the 2013-2016 epidemic of Ebola in West Africa paved the way for a wave of investigations into the reservoir of the disease. A novel economy of health projects arose, which employed Guinean professionals to sample animals and fortify a hypothesis: that the disease spilled over from a bat. Through exploring virology research and its dangers in post-Ebola Guinea, I argue that the hypothesis of a bat reservoir has taken on a heuristic role that can be compared to the way that a fetish polarizes relations between the people who manipulate and fear this idea.

Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty

Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself.

Socially robotic: making useless machines

As robots increasingly become part of our everyday lives, questions arise with regards to how to approach them and how to understand them in social contexts. The Western history of human–robot relations revolves around competition and control, which restricts our ability to relate to machines in other ways. In this study, we take a relational approach to explore different manners of socializing with robots, especially those that exceed an instrumental approach. The nonhuman subjects of this study are built to explore non-purposeful behavior, in an attempt to break away from the assumptions of utility that underlie the hegemonic human–machine interactions. This breakaway is accompanied by ‘learning to be attuned’ on the side of the human subjects, which is facilitated by continuous relations at the level of everyday life. Our paper highlights this ground for the emergence of meanings and questions that could not be subsumed by frameworks of control and domination. The research-creation project Machine Ménagerie serves as a case study for these ideas, demonstrating a relational approach in which the designer and the machines co-constitute each other through sustained interactions, becoming attuned to one another through the performance of research. Machine Ménagerie attempts to produce affective and playful—if not unruly—nonhuman entities that invite interaction yet have no intention of serving human social or physical needs. We diverge from other social robotics research by creating machines that do not attempt to mimic human social behaviours.

Food Values

■ Concern about the agro-industrial food system has generated movements that reconnect producers and consumers, either through alternative distribution networks, or through providing histories of each quality foodstuff. Although these movements share a romantic discourse, they have a range of objectives and a more complex relationship to the mainstream than first appears. The article analyses particularly the concept of authenticity, first in representations of food, then more widely as a value that links production and consumption. The material illustrates a wider analysis (in Graeber, Harvey) of the coexistence of monetary and non-monetary value in an economy dominated by the commodity form. Following on from this, the article sets out the different judgements that have been made about the transformative political potential of these movements.

Sexual fetishism in organizations: The case of journal list fetishism

Organizations can encourage their members to over-value means above ends. A case in point is the tendency among academics to over-value standardized ranking lists for academic journals at the expense of high quality research. To make sense of such seemingly perverse object choices, organizational researchers have turned to the concept of fetishism. However, organizational researchers have yet to consider how these fetishes are organized as sexual object choices—a strange omission given the expansive empirical and theoretical literature exploring fetishism as a sexual practice. Drawing a distinction between the fetishism of organizations and fetishism in organizations, the article seeks to redress this oversight.