Zeitschrift für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Content/Inhalt

149-1 — 2024-10-04

Introduction to the Special Issue "Universality in Pieces? Mobilizations of Science in a Fractured World"

Hynek Bečka — 2024-10-04

In recent years – in the context of debates on post-truth, Covid-scepticism and decolonization – the idea that science represents universal knowledge has been challenged from a variety of perspectives. Despite (or because of) this, science and the promise it holds out for generating knowledge that is relevant to solving planetary problems are gaining new valence and momentum. Based on ethnographic research, this special issue investigates mobilizations of science and claims to universality in a variety of different contexts. We ask: When, and around which issues, does universality become mobilized and contested? What are the politics behind specific attempts to universalize and/or localize knowledge? Where do claims to universality enact inclusive and/or exclusive socialities? Our central argument is that universality is both necessary and unreachable, problematic and desirable; it is an elusive, but powerful notion, deeply engrained in the idea of science, which orients people’s actions towards particular goals. Studying people’s varied attempts to universalize or localize knowledge in the name of science – for political, ethical, or pragmatic purposes – offers relevant insights into how people imagine, create, justify or call into question often unequal social structures. It also reveals, as many of the contributions in this issue show, the hopeful visions scientists and citizen-scientists pursue in striving to build better futures. This special issue, then, speaks to a key theme in contemporary anthropological debate, namely the politics of knowledge and the complex quest for epistemic justice in an unequal world.

From Context-Free to Aggregate Universality: Life Skills Courses and The Making of Automated Therapy in Bengaluru, India

Claudia Lang — 2024-10-04

This paper uses life-skills training courses and an automated therapeutic self-help app from Bengaluru, India, as lenses through which to investigate universalizing processes of psychology and therapy and some of its frictions. How is psychological universality achieved in these courses and in the app, and in so far as context comes to matter, how does it do so? We show that, in the case of the courses, universality is assumed to be bounded and context-free, while in the case of the app it is ‘aggregated’. Thus, the different ways in which achieving the universal is aspired to in these two cases is linked to a shift in the meaning of ‘context, which is bracketed in the first case and operationalized in the second. In the former, it is a cultural feature to be silenced or reduced; in the latter, it is the generative material of the aggregate universal itself. While in life-skills training courses universality is assumed to be free of context, automated therapy is pragmatic and assembles context to generate what we call ‘aggregated universality’.

Rethinking Psychology in Africa: From Decolonizing to Universalizing Knowledge in an Emerging Field

Julia Vorhölter — 2024-10-04

Inspired by broader calls to decolonize knowledge, psychologists in Africa have recently started debating the necessity and feasibility of creating a distinctly African psychology as a new academic discipline and field of practice. Some view this idea, whether sceptically or enthusiastically, as a primarily political move; others are more concerned with philosophical questions regarding the possibilities, and boundaries, of universal psychological knowledge. While critics warn of the risks of exoticizing and further marginalizing ‘African’ psychology from what they see as a universal discipline, proponents argue that mainstream ‘Western psychology’ has so far been harmful, or at best irrelevant, for Africans. My article engages with these recent debates by drawing on my fieldwork among psychotherapists in Uganda. I question conventional framings of psychotherapy as something external and foreign to ‘Africa’ that has been imposed by outsiders. Instead, I show how Ugandan therapists consider themselves part of a universal field of knowledge and how, through their efforts to make this knowledge relevant in Uganda, they actively engage in the production and negotiation of psy’s universality. Nevertheless, they are confronted by historical legacies and contemporary structural inequalities which limit how and where they can practice, and how their work is valued.

Universality as Horizon: Aspirations and Geometries of Astrophysics in Africa

Hanna Nieber — 2024-10-04

For astronomers in Africa, both amateurs and professionals, the universality of the scientific investigation of the universe holds out the promise of navigating inequalities on earth. Universality is attractive: it allows astronomers from Africa to enter the global field of science diplomacy and provides them with a discursive framework in which to combat the structural inequalities of participation. Rather than taking universality as a descriptor for science, this article is inspired by Paulin Hountondji’s formulation of universality as horizon and speculatively elaborates this metaphor. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, one on the spatial geometry of a Malagasy amateur astronomer, the other on the crafting of a vision document by and for astronomers in Africa, the article explores how different notions of ‘horizon’ are evoked in each case. In so doing, the article engages with the temporal and spatial aspects of universality and shows how this concept can elicit hope, provide direction and enable an examination of position-based particularities.

Camera Trapping Wolves and Ghosts: Sensing Universality in the Conservation Sciences

Desirée Kumpf — 2024-10-04

This article examines how scientists sense the rewilding of wolves in Italy through camera traps. Specifically, I elaborate on two cases when footage of these elusive animals did not allow scientifically sound conclusions but instead lent itself to storytelling about the fragility of human–wolf entanglements. Turning ‘the haunted data’, they collect in the wild, into ghostly tales on social media or conservation blogs becomes an important way for scientists to engage with wider publics. Taking a processual view of how scientists work with camera traps – from setting them up to capturing imagery and eventually turning their data into stories – the article argues that the uncertain and unreliable imagery of camera traps allows scientists to sense and narrate the fragile interconnectedness between humans and other species. Such scientifically inspired stories are used explicitly to counter widespread opposition to rewilding. On the basis of this case study, the article explores the more general question of how disseminating a narrative of universal interconnection has become a central mission of contemporary conservation science.

Rational Sceptics: Contestations of Science and Conspiracy in the Czech Republic

Hynek Bečka — 2024-10-04

Covid-sceptics in the Czech Republic relate strongly to the idea of universal science. They understand this universality as emerging through the participation of ordinary citizens in scientific knowledge-making. Rather than then belonging solely to the experts, science ought to be democratic and accessible. This article describes several ways in which Czech Covid-sceptics contest the boundaries of science and devise their own theories, observations and experiences as scientific. I describe how Covid-sceptics mobilize their embodied experience of the pandemic as evidence and intertwine this embodied knowledge with narratives of universal science. By relating to the notion of the rational, educated and self-informing citizen, they are able to enter into a relationship with science even despite the lack of formal expertise. Scientific universality becomes a point of contestation through which alternative knowledge is linked to the imaginaries of ‘good science’ and scientific authority.

Ambivalent Allies? Environmentalism and Science in Contemporary India

Hanna Werner — 2024-10-04

Science played a crucial role in the early days of Indian nationalism. This has not changed since India’s independence. With recent political transformations, the significance of science has acquired a new dimension. Contemporary apologists of Hindu nationalism have recognized the value of appeals to science, whether they are trying to legitimize claims to supremacy or to prove that ancient Indian scriptures attest to the presence of ‘modern’ science at their time of writing. Such mobilizations of science oscillate between particularism and universalism, whereby calls to reject ‘western’ universalism as culturally specific and therefore limited live in tension with efforts to universalize ‘native’ achievements, thought of as always already modern.
Complicating matters, this tension cuts across fields and political camps. The appeal to science also serves the critics of Hindu nationalist aspirations, whether they challenge the ‘hindutvaization’ of environmentalism or seek to substantiate socioecological concerns scientifically. The problem: recourse to (allegedly universal) science not only tends to depreciate ‘non-science’ achievements, it also situates one’s claims in a hegemonic political discourse that privileges some voices and concerns over others.
In this article, I use the example of environmentalism to decipher the ambiguous role of science as a source of legitimacy in contemporary Indian politics, where it creates both friction and unexpected alignments. To conclude, I attempt to outline a timely ‘grammar of environmentalism’ capable of addressing these tensions.

Population in Fragments: Inclusion, Risk, and the Anticipatory Universality of Postcolonial Genomics

Samiksha Bhan — 2024-10-04

In recent years, genomic medicine has invited critical attention for its potential to include diverse population groups and therefore expand the clinical relevance of global genome databases in diagnosing diseases. Population geneticists across the Global South demand being included in this process by translating their national populations into geneticized fragments that move back and forth between laboratories, databases and sites of diagnosis and care. Taking the case of postcolonial India, this article explores how the scientific universality of genomics becomes contested, only to produce an ‘anticipatory universality’ oriented towards public-health futures. Drawing on Ruha Benjamin’s concept of ‘postcolonial genomics’, my argument is three-fold. First, I critique analyses that have explained population genetic studies in India as an exercise in fostering nationalism, showing instead that geneticists are increasingly interested not in the ‘Indian’ population as a whole, but rather in its ‘fragments’. Second, through a case study of the Lambadas in Telangana, I show how the material formation of these fragments highlights the limits of genomic universality, where the haplotype is treated as the ultimate fact in tracing both ancestry and disease risk. Third, I argue that it is partly due to the financial dependence of postcolonial geneticists on state bureaucracies that they enact an ‘anticipatory universality’ for genomics, which, even if severely limited and often harmful in the present, promises to be universally applicable in the future.

Afterword: The Sites of Universalities: Ethnographic Engagements with/of Sciences

Anne Dippel — 2024-10-04

How do we do an ethnography of universalities? Is it possible to reconcile local specifi cities with universalities through/in ethnography? That is the question the authors in this special issue ask and engage with. If ethnography is about specificities and specific locations, about contexts, how can we imagine an ethnography of ‘universals’? The question sounds simplistic at the first glance, but it becomes more complex as we address it in relation to the articles in this special issue. The topic is of importance since it reinforces the tension between universal truth claims and relative interpretations of the world through scientifi c reasoning. It has been exacerbated by media technologies. Political authorities who either have both feet firmly on the ground of scientific majority’s opinion or question it for their own benefit face resistance from globally networked communities. The old debate between mostly Marxist-positioned empiricism and postmodern relativism is taking a new turn in these digital times.

Muehlebach, Andrea: A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe

Jonas Köppel — 2024-10-04

Born, Georgina (ed.): Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology

Martin Büdel — 2024-10-04

Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim: Sufi Hotel. Aufzeichnungen aus den Untiefen einer Megacity

Philipp Zehmisch — 2024-10-04

Fay, Franziska: Disputing Discipline: Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

Abdoulaye Sounaye — 2024-10-04

Ungruhe, Christian: Lasten tragen, Moderne befördern: Wanderarbeit, Jugend, Erwachsenwerden und ihre geschlechtsspezifischen Differenzierungen in Ghana

Sabine Klocke-Daffa — 2024-10-04

Schick, Johannes F.M., Mario Schmidt and Martin Zillinger (eds.): The Social Origins of Thought: Durkheim, Mauss, and the Category Project

Guido Sprenger — 2024-10-04

Berger, Stefan and Philipp Müller (eds.): Dynamics of Emigration: Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the 20th Century

Viktor Stoll — 2024-10-04

Dasgupta, Sangeeta: Reordering Adivasi Worlds: Representation, Resistance, Memory

Virginius Xaxa — 2024-10-04

Ute Röschenthaler Obituary (1960–2024)

Hauke Dorsch — 2024-10-04

Tributes for Ute Röschenthaler (1960–2024)

Antoine Socpa — 2024-10-04