My current book project is about human-rodent encounters in Tanzania as sites for constructing theories, traps, and training techniques that unsettle dominant understandings of who is and can be human in the 21st century. These are, to borrow from Sylvia Wynter's work, "counterhuman" interventions. The counterhuman also gestures at an attempt to theorize the human rooted in traditions, histories, and experiences based on the African continent.

"Olfactory Sublime" is part of an ethnography of chemists, perfumers and other olfaction enthusiasts in Grasse, France, based on research conducted with the Musée International de la Parfumerie. It also features beautiful art by Junyi Yang. In it, I ask what an anthropology of the senses might do when it attends to the technologies that shape our experiences of smell.

This project focuses on rodent traps as material and theoretical inventions that help people figure out how best to live with and kill rodent pests in Tanzania. I analyze the design and creation of rodent traps using concepts and terminology borrowed from Maker communities, and challenged by Tanzanian trap designers. This work helpfully questions what words like technology and innovation mean when considered within the creative contexts of Tanzanian rodent trap design. The material was published in The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Sept. 2022), edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey.

A Sense of Things: Technology, Techniques, and Other Storied Matter

With their dimensions, densities, textures, shapes, colors, odors, fetishes, and auras, things evoke sensation and sentiment. To grasp something, or to craft and use a thing is to sense it, to understand its position in an entangled mesh of social, technological, material, historical, and political processes. To contend with things is to also confront breakage, decay, immobility, and inoperability.

Drawing on critical theory, science and technology studies, and anthropology we consider the power, promise, and perils of taking things seriously. Do things expose hierarchies of power and oppression made insensible by social and historical processes? Are they technologies imbued with capacities to reorder society or nature? Can they be sensed in ways that offer an opening for alternative expressions and embodiments? Do they mediate, filter, or distort perceptions of the world(s) we inhabit? Are things to be possessed? Or do they, indeed, possess us?

This symposium, convened by Jia Hui Lee, invites five scholars and artists to encounter, contest, and consider things that figure in their work through a series of several workshops. Participants bring a thing to the workshop that they would share with each other and with the greater Haverford community through storytelling, object lessons, and performance. The symposium ends with the launch of Ginssiyo Apara’s solo art exhibition, BAGGAGE.

An experimental, collaborative, speculative film that considers anthropological themes for a future without clouds. The story revolves around five anthropologists in the years 2045-50 who are trying to save clouds from going extinct. Watch it HERE.

We blend storytelling and academic scholarship in a way that refuses easy categorization into individual-authored research. We ask what kinds of new (cloud) formations might appear in the future. We flirt—critically—with possible anthropological logics that are rooted in century-long practices of ethnographic documentation and salvation. We invite you to engage with our story.