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[EN] This chapter develops an argument about the relation between autonomy and ethnography—in particular, about autonomy as an experimental design in political and anthropological praxis. I am interested in what I call autonomia ethnographica: the pressures and challenges confronting the mise-en-scénes of anthropological fieldwork today and the sometimes troubled, sometimes conflictive, yet ultimately liberating arrangements in complicity and complexity through which anthropologists construct the conditions for ethnographic practice and description. ; Peer reviewed

This essay describes the complex negotiations around stranger sociability, public space, and democratic knowledge that shaped the meetings of popular assemblies in the wake of the Spanish 15M/Occupy movement. The work of assembling was 'exhausting', by which participants would mean two things. In one sense, meetings would often turn into tiresome affairs, trying the patience and resilience of participants. In another sense, attendants would describe assemblies as spaces of political 'exhaustion', where politics as usual was emptied out and replaced by new democratic possibilities. We offer here an account of exhaustion as an ethnographic category. We are particularly interested in the role accorded to exhaustion as a vacuum enabling the appearance of novel social and political roles. We develop our argument by drawing a provocative analogy with the early history of scientific experimentation, where the nature of an 'assembly' of trusted peers and its location in genteel space became constitutive of a new type of experimental knowledge. What social and epistemic figures are popular assemblies bodying forth today? ; Peer reviewed

The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, etc. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society's democratic imagination rests on a real estate and mortgage ontology. Such an imagination renders the city as a political project 'in construction': an on-going, 'building-in-progress' development, whose social rhythm is inflected by a permanent temporal and spatial suspension; a holding in abeyance characterised by the hopeful and yet fearful economy of credit. The mortgage durée of a city-in-construction delineates the contours of our political ruins, but in this ruinous circumstance, amidst the hubris, it offers also the resources and materials for critique and re-construction. ; Peer reviewed

Peer reviewed ; The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, etc. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society's democratic imagination rests on a real estate and mortgage ontology. Such an imagination renders the city as a political project 'in construction': an on-going, 'building-in-progress' development, whose social rhythm is inflected by a permanent temporal and spatial suspension; a holding in abeyance characterised by the hopeful and yet fearful economy of credit. The mortgage durée of a city-in-construction delineates the contours of our political ruins, but in this ruinous circumstance, amidst the hubris, it offers also the resources and materials for critique and re-construction.

The Occupy movement in Spain, locally known as the May 15 movement (15M), singularly developed throughout 2011 into a network of local neighborhood "popular assemblies." Over one hundred assemblies cropped up in Madrid alone. This article explores the conceptual and infrastructural work invested by the assemblies in the production of a particular experience of neighborhood (barrio). The barrio has become the centerpiece of the assemblies' political and geographical imagination. We offer here an ethnographic account of how the work of assembling is constitutive of a new experience of relationality, which assembly-goers refer to as "making neighbors." One makes neighbors through processes of deambulation and through an investment in the rhythmic and atmospheric production of space. The neighbor fares thus as an atmospheric person. Further, in this guise it has become both a model of and a model for political citizenship expressive of a right to the city. People's exploration of the question, "What is a neighbor?" offers an ethnographic case study on the invention of novel forms of social relations and political values in an urban commons—on the rise of the urban persona of the neighbor as a social-cum-political experimenter. Value, then, as an experimental form. ; Peer reviewed

Our political age is characterized by forms of description as 'big' as the world itself: talk of 'public knowledge' and 'public goods,' 'the commons' or 'global justice' create an exigency for modes of governance that leave little room for smallness itself. Rather than question the politics of adjudication between the big and the small, this book inquires instead into the cultural epistemology fueling the aggrandizement and miniaturization of description itself. Incorporating analytical frameworks from science studies, ethnography, and political and economic theory, this book charts an itinerary for an internal anthropology of theorizing. It suggests that many of the effects that social theory uses today to produce insights are the legacy of baroque epistemological tricks. In particular, the book undertakes its own trompe l'oeil as it places description at perpendicular angles to emerging forms of global public knowledge. The aesthetic 'trap' of the trompe l'oeil aims to capture knowledge, for only when knowledge is captured can it be properly released. ; Peer reviewed

This article develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the 'right to infrastructure' as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that are heretofore coming into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the article analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures are posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: regarding the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects, and; the social organisation of the 'right to infrastructure' as a political active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the 'prototype' as an emerging figure for contemporary socio-technical designs in and for social theory. ; Peer reviewed

The article explores some of the assumptions behind the current valence of the notion of trust and in particular its entanglement in discourses of social robustness, the management and reporting of (corporate) knowledge, and its underlying culture and systems of responsibility. It unfolds by contrasting classic and contemporary anthropological work on cultures of suspicion, culpability and spiritual ambiguity with the new vocabulary of capitalist corporate ethics. Finally, the argument examines the work that relationships do when moving in and out of the occult, and contrasts it with the kind of temporal work that capitalism demands from relationships to remain diaphanous. If public trust functions as the political epistemology of neoliberal society, an anthropological theory of trust ought perhaps to reaffirm instead our trust in anthropological theory and comparison. ; Peer reviewed

The article offers a critique of the proportional epistemology shaping political and economic theory about the public value of knowledge and opens up the potential for alternative descriptions afforded by ethnography. It does so by exploring one particular exemplification of the new public value of knowledge found in political calls for making Science and Society converge. Such convergence takes at least three forms: the public value of research; the economic public goodness of commercial science; and the public accountability of science as a trustworthy enterprise. I pursue this interest through an ethnography of the production of research among historians of science and philologists at Spain's National Research Council (CSIC). My concern here is to describe the epistemological economy of research at CSIC and provide an account of the terms of engagement through which researchers make sense of and relate to the social conditions of their own work. ; Peer reviewed

In 1691, when Johannes Vermeer's 'Woman in blue reading a letter' was sold at auction in Amsterdam, the catalogue noted: 'the charming light and dark suggest a splendid well-being.' The idea that well-being could be a matter of shadows and light is very distant from our twenty-first century concern with material and moral standings; the softness and suppleness of Vermeer's aesthetics, very far from our current economic and political preoccupations. In this chapter I would like to suggest that there may be, however, a sense in which well-being is still today a matter of appropriate illuminations, a matter of finding the right balance between the visible and invisible elements of social life. In thinking about the place of well-being in human life, I have come to realise some of the current deficiencies of social theory. Finding an analytical place for well-being in social theory is a twofold provocation: a realisation of the limits of our theoretical tools, and a call for an imaginative way forward. ; Peer reviewed

Knowledge is currently undergoing some remarkable institutional re-locations. Universities are re-organizing themselves in interdisciplinary schools (cf. Becher & Trowler 2001); they are also signing-up collaborative knowledge-transfer agreements with industry (Etzkowitz et al. 1998). Social scientists are seating in hospitals' ethical committees, and are getting invited as observers and co-participants in government, industrial and scientific task forces. Anthropologists, to bring the point home, are now appointed to lectureships in the anthropology of design engineering or the anthropology of organizations; they are employed as professional industrial ethnographers, and are much sought-after consultants in the advertising and marketing industries (see, for e.g. Gellner & Hirsch 2001). Traditional sites of knowledge-production, like laboratories, academic departments, research centres, are opening-up to new social partnerships and alliances (cf. Slaughter & Rhoades 2004). Knowledge, it would seem, is going social. ; Peer reviewed

This paper places in anthropological perspective some of the conceptual assumptions behind the so-called new knowledge economy. In particular, I am interested in the rise of knowledge as a global political artefact: as an object that inhabits public spheres and that is rapidly acquiring public stature itself. There are two aspects to this political economy that concern me. First is the influence of a global economic philosophy of public choice on the conceptualisation and use of knowledge as an ethical commodity. The second aspect impinges on social theory and has to do with how we imagine our own sociological intelligence when confronting an epistemic regime where 'society' is said to already know itself as the product of a knowledge distribution. The reflexive turn evokes a playful reversibility (moving in and out of knowledge and society) whose effects for social theory the paper tries to elucidate at different points in the argument. The paper, in sum, explores the place where the politics, economy and intellectual aesthetics of new knowledge cross roads. ; Peer reviewed