Browsing by Author "Boyer, Dominic C."

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    Memory as Concept and Design in Digital Recording Devices
    (2013-09-16) Dib, Lina; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Wolfe, Cary
    This thesis focuses on scientists and technologies brought together around the desire to improve fallible human memory. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork, it considers interdisciplinary collaborations among experts who design recording and archiving technologies that seek to maintain, extend, and commemorate life. How are everyday experiences translated as information, and for what purpose? How are our habits of drinking tea, talking on the phone, driving to work, and reminiscing with old photographs, turned into something that can be stored, analyzed and acted upon? How might information be used in real time to supplement the living in a recursive feedback loop? By addressing these questions, I reveal how these memory banks are inherently tied to logics of capital, of stock and storage, and to logics of the technological where, when it comes to memory, more is more. The first sections that make up this dissertation shift in scale from the micro to the macro: from historical national endeavors that turned ordinary citizens into a sensors and collectors of the mundane, to contemporary computational projects designed to store, organize and retrieve vast amounts of information. The second half of this dissertation focuses on two extreme cases of lifelogging that make use of prototypical recording technologies: Gordon Bell, who is on a quest to record his life for the sake of increased objectivity, productivity, and digital posterity, and Mrs. B, a woman who suffers from amnesia and records her life in the hopes of leading a normal life in which she can share the past with loved ones. Through these case studies, I show how new recording technologies are both a symptom of, and a cure for, anxieties about time. By focusing on the design of new objects and by addressing contemporary debates on the intentions that govern the making of recording machines, I examine how technologies take shape, and how they inform understandings of memory and the self as well as notions of human disability and enhancement. In short, I show that the past, as well as the present and the future, are always discursively, practically, and technologically informed.
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    Pastoralist Ethic and a "Spirit" of Traditionalism: US Cowboys' Livestock, Land, and Kin
    (2014-04-24) Bendixsen, Casper; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Comer, Krista
    What kind of ethical subjects are contemporary US cowboys, or any other keepers of livestock for that matter? Moreover, how are those ethics distinctly representative of the US or its western region and its residents’ sense of character? These questions are particularly relevant to herders enveloped in folk and nationalist mythology, of these the US cowboy is one of the most popular examples. After twenty years of combined experience in ranching, farming, and rodeo as well as more than twelve months of formal ethnographic fieldwork – I submit this report: If cowboys and other herders are any sort of ethical subject, it is as pastoralists – as husbanders to livestock, stewards of land, and the caretakers of kin; and if US cowboys are a particular kind of pastoralist (as ethical subjects), the specificities are established through the practice and rhetoric of regionally identifiable traditionalism. Simply put, if cowboys are virtuous people, it is through their care for animals, land, and family; and if US cowboys are special types of role models, it is because they possess certain characteristics and ambitions that fulfill regionalized cultural categories. This ethnography and the theorizations therein abide by James Faubion’s recent re-presentation of Michel Foucault’s system of ethical inquiry. In doing so, it reveals the complex subject position pastoralists often strive to fulfill. While designed to stand as a case study in an emerging anthropology of ethics, this dissertation does offer corrective insight into theories of pastoralism, traditionalism, and the American West.
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    The Construction of Sustainability in the Cement Industry: Audit Culture, Materiality and Affective Processes
    (2013-09-16) Resendez de Lozano, Laura; Faubion, James D.; Boyer, Dominic C.; Duenas-Osorio, Leonardo; Padgett, Jamie E.; Schuler, Douglas A.
    Introducing sustainability policies in the cement industry involves changing not only production technologies, but the organizational culture of a mature industry that is characterized by huge CO₂ emissions and significant environmental impacts. This research attempts to understand the transition process of the industry and its employees as the process is taking place. The actors involved are strongly influenced by often contradictory forces: On one hand the naturalized market dynamics in the context of the automobile dependent society and widespread networks of highways and other concrete structures, and on the other, the growing concern of preserving resources for future generations as a shared responsibility that raises awareness of the negative environmental impacts of cement production. The fieldwork component of the project was comprised of two complementary parts: First, an ethnographic study of how the abstract goal of becoming sustainable is given meaning as it is implemented in Cemex, one of the largest companies in the cement industry at the global level. Second, an analysis of the audit culture mechanisms present in the production of knowledge among experts involved in designing sustainability assessment mechanisms for infrastructure projects. The latter component took place among experts in the academy and in the Texas Department of Transportation, which represents at the same time a regulating force and a key client of the cement industry. To present the findings, I approach the subject of sustainability as a construction project where cement and sustainability act as boundary objects between multiple communities (Star and Griesemer 1989) at the same time that sustainability is being constructed. I attempt to present the interactions as an institutional ecology with multiple actors and layers of meaning which are interdependent. The work first describes the prevailing landscape of the urban environment pointing to the influence of aesthetic discourses through the course of history from modernism to brutalism and place-making as well as to the prevailing regulatory, geographic and cultural conditions. Here, the landscape is taken as the point of departure where the construction project of sustainability is to take place given that its characteristics allow certain constructions of sustainability while thwarting others. I consider the built environment to be the response to the surrounding conditions that constitute the landscape and to the prevailing preferences of key players. To follow, I describe the main actors who participate in the construction of sustainability including internal and external stakeholders. I take these groups as members of the construction crew of sustainability presenting their interests as they relate to the triple bottom line and to their affiliation to multiple publics (Warner 2002). Next, I turn to the accreditation mechanisms and the dynamics followed by experts and their interlocutors defining the blueprints which the cement industry must follow while sustainability is being constructed within the company and in dialogue with stakeholders. These blueprints are the result of negotiations between experts in industry, government and academy and portray the influence of audit culture, the widespread trust in quantification and the importance of the efficiency paradigm as described by informants. Afterwards, I focus on the construction of sustainability project that takes place within the cement company where multiple avenues are followed to complete the building of sustainability as a material object, combining the blueprints defined by experts as they are translated into concrete demonstrations of sustainability with the subjective interpretations of actors within the material constraints set by concrete and the plasticity of sustainability. While this is the institutional response to comply with sustainability expectations, the final construction of sustainability needs to include the construction of the sustainable subject where individuals incorporate into their mindset sustainability considerations. As the last part of the work, I discuss the emergence of sustainable subjectivities among key participating members of the construction crew of sustainability taken as employees and other stakeholders, presenting the distinct logics followed by individuals while becoming committed to sustainability. Finally, I present the conclusions of this constructive analysis. Foucault’s (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991) concept of governmentality and Strathern’s (Strathern 2000b) analysis of audit culture frame this study, offering a common thread that transforms the need of corporate legitimacy into a process of accountability and transparency that resembles Rose and Miller’s (Rose and Miller 2008) description of the neoliberal rationalities of government. Paradoxically, sustainability as an ideal is transformed into an established system that tends to be mechanical. For this to occur, experts shape the meaning of sustainability and determine the parameters that must be met, creating metrics and certification processes that define a set of procedures that track and evaluate sustainability performance, hence defining what practices are selected by cement companies to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, and how these are implemented. Furthermore, both sustainability and cement are vibrant matters (Bennett 2010) with an agency of their own which introduces further constraints into the construction of sustainability process and influences the pace of change. However, the process of becoming sustainable is far from homogenous since each individual relates to sustainability according to the gamut of personal ethical convictions, affective needs, aesthetic preferences and gender perceptions which vary among many factors, including social class, geographic region, educational level and gender. Hence, it is not suitable for a single definition even when subjected to seemingly objective standards. In addition, in the case of employees, the interaction with different groups of stakeholders raises awareness about particular interests also influencing the meaning making process for each of them. Hence, the making of sustainable subjects not only involves the creation of specific regulatory practices tied to the emergence of a greater concern for social and environmental challenges but also the particular context of the individual. Even in this highly structured environment, the affect/emotion dynamic strongly shapes the interpretation and the weight that sustainability eventually gains. The material expressions of sustainability mediate the process and materialize morality at the same time (Verbeek 2006) given the underlying ethical position that sustainability as an idea conveys. As sustainability is becoming widely adopted and introduced into the conscience of more people, it is also being transformed into a numerical parameter that makes possible the perpetuation of market efficiency parameters. Capitalism is thus legitimated through the meta-narrative of sustainability as the triple bottom line that promises to fulfill the desire of progress for all while not really transforming the life-style and consumption patterns of today. As the concept of the triple bottom line enables sustainability to be adopted by key economic, governmental and NGO actors, it also contributes to the naturalization of market forces and profit oriented priorities making it difficult to re-orient human activities towards more environmentally friendly and socially inclusive models of community organization.
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    The Pragmatics of Hope: Class, Elections and Political Management in Contemporary Colombia.
    (2013-09-16) Vidart Delgado, Maria; Boyer, Dominic C.; Faubion, James D.; Jones, Mark P.
    This dissertation examines the recent introduction of U.S.-style, image-based political management techniques into Colombian politics, a phenomenon facilitated by the comprehensive market and political reforms of the 1990s. The Colombian elites who favored these reforms hoped to dismantle the clientelistic networks of private interests that, in their view, perpetuated a corrupt, ineffective, and at times, collusive two-party system. They hoped that a multi-party system would provide Colombian voters with real political choice. However, despite these efforts, clientelism continues to thrive under the new regime. With party/faction loyalty no longer the dominant driver in elections, campaigns now hire political managers to guide voters’ choices based on individual candidates’ appeal. Ironically, these practices have created “electoral industries,” networks of voters organized around political figures as opposed to party platforms. These electoral industries have easily adapted to existing clientelistic networks, the very networks the reforms were meant to dismantle. Meanwhile, through the language of market segmentation, political elites have publicly moralized clientelism’s resilience, characterizing it as a persistent, anti-modern behavior that can be objectively correlated with lower class voters. Their portrait of clientelism stands in stark contrast to the liberal political subjectivity (grounded in individual choice) that they attribute to urban middle and upper classes. According to these ideas, political managers mobilize specific technologies meant to more effectively manage each kind of vote. While lower class voters are managed through face-to-face networks and informal channels of communication, middle and upper class voters are reached through broadcast media and web-based social media. By looking at the institutional platforms, expert knowledge, political technologies and normative political ideas at work in the organization of these environments for political participation, my work explores the features of liberalism that allow clientelism and media-based politics to coexist, and even thrive, under a single system. Specifically, I trace the emergence of a form of “strategic citizenship,” to borrow Partha Chatterjee’s term, that I argue is the latest guise that the transactional dimensions of liberalism has taken.