Objects that have agency: A tutorial discussion

Objects that have agency: A tutorial discussion

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of May 19, 2025 (Week 12)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/12/tut

Main reading: Schnitzler (2016b)

Other reading: Schnitzler (2016a)

Before we begin, take 5 minutes to complete the USS for this class

You can find the USS for the class on this page: https://student-surveys.sydney.edu.au/students.

This class is a conversation

• I learn a lot from student comments, and I read every one.
• Most students don’t ever fill out the USS for their classes.

USSs change classes

FASS analyzes the qualitative open-ended comments in the USS for all of the units in the Faculty to look for common problems or themes.

• If you see the same thing over and over, then you have to make a change.
• ANTH and SSPS is particularly interested in feedback on its feedback. It’s a Mobius strip of learning.
• They are also interested in comments on how intellectually rewarding, challenging, or meaningful your classes are. Did you feel challenged? Did you see progress in yourself?

All of this is to say that it is actually worth it to fill out every USS for every class.

The bourgeois public sphere as an ideal and as a prescription

Habermas seeks to recover a cultural form from the European bourgeoisie as a basis for a normative theory of democracy.

His work has been criticized in many ways. Social scientists and theorists also question whether he tells the full story of the bourgeois public sphere, going beyond some of his critics.

• The 18th century concept of a singular public sphere was not only an ideal, but a model that European powers exported to colonized peoples and a standard by which they justified their colonial rule.
  • It is the duty of a paternalistic colonial state to train people to be good public citizens.
  • If you want freedom then you have to show that you can govern yourselves rationally.
• Exporting the ideal of a public sphere ultimately leads to creating a divided society.

  • A select few are drawn into a liberal system through education and integration into the formal economy
  • The vast majority are governed as members of various quantifiable populations whose health and welfare is measured by official statistics
  • The elites inherit the colonial order. In the postcolonial nation, an elite participates in liberal politics in “civil society” while everyone else participates in an invisible form of politics in “political society”—a politics of patronage and clientship, particularism, boundaries, and autonomy, rather than liberation, rights, freedom, and equality (Chatterjee 1998, 2011).

Where does Schnitzler stand in the conversation in anthropology?

What if Schnitzler was your essay topic? What would your thesis statement be?

• What position does she take with respect to the major perspectives we've encountered?

  • Symbolic anthropology and methodological holism
  • Marxist perspectives on historical change as a dialectic
  • Foucault's theories of subjectivation through power relations, or through care of the self
  • Bourdieusian approaches to society as a game, and social life as an embodied practice
  • A relational ontology for social analysis in which knowledge is performative and seeing is doing
• Consider her discussion of these topics and ideas
  • The role of machines in Marx's theory of capitalism (p. 114)
  • Moral reform and social control of working classes (pp. 115–116, 121)
  • “Metrology” in public administration (p. 138)
  • Corporatization of social services (pp. 139–140)

Small groups are micropublics

• Form a small group of 4–5 people.
  • Introduce yourselves and check in.
  • At least one person should be the scribe and at least one person should be the reporter.
• Discuss your general impressions of Schnitzler and share what you know of her work.
  • Does she remind you of anyone? Is her work similar to other work you know?
  • What kind of anthropologist is she? How would you characterize her approach or her orientation.
• Formulate a thesis statement for an essay on Schnitzler.
  • A thesis statement is an answer to an open question, for instance one of the three open questions for the second essay.
  • A thesis statement is debatable because it answers a question with more than one possible answer; it's not just a description or a factual statement.

References

Chatterjee, Partha. 1998. “Community in the East.” Economic and Political Weekly 33 (6): 277–82.

———. 2011. “Lineages of Political Society.” In Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy, 1–26. New York: Columbia University Press.

Schnitzler, Antina von. 2016a. “Measuring Life: Living Prepaid and the Politics of Numbers after Apartheid.” In Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid, 132–67. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400882991-006.

———. 2016b. “The Making of a Techno-Political Device.” In Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid, 105–31. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400882991-005.